Category: Employee Engagement

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Don’t End Up As The Best-Looking Horse In A Glue Factory

Your company is having financial problems. Products aren’t selling. You are not keeping up with competitors, and customers are heading out the door. What do you do? Redesign your website. Sure, there’s your top priority right there. If you change your colors to something innovative-looking and add some new content, then the rest will fall into place. With a website like that, well, people will think you’re Apple.

What you’re doing here is putting lipstick on a pig, something a lot of companies do. When performance starts failing at a business, CEOs and senior executives spend a lot of time focusing on the wrong things rather than understanding the real problems that are derailing them.

Stop Focusing On Symptoms

Most executives treat symptoms and never diagnose the underlying causes. If you were a doctor and did nothing but treat symptoms, never diagnosing core diseases, you’d be sued for malpractice. The truth is we commit malpractice all the time in business. Companies take steps to look better to themselves and the outside world. They remodel offices, write useless policies and forget about them, revamp they’re websites; and all the while their company is dying around them. They end up being the best looking horse in the glue factory.

Say, for example, a leader says, “I have a problem with morale in my company. I need ways to boost morale.” A less-than-adequate coach might say, “Have employee parties. Have a barbeque each month and hand out awards.” A real coach would ask questions like: “Give me some examples of why you think morale is bad. How is it manifesting itself? What behaviors are you seeing that make you believe morale is low? What do you think is causing those behaviors?”

Well, we find out that the company hasn’t given raises in two years and had a nasty round of layoffs. Now we’re getting somewhere. The solution isn’t a picnic. We need to look at the whole problem: people are afraid of losing their jobs. They’re insecure, worried, and, maybe even strapped for cash.

Focus On Solving Real Problems

No wonder you have a morale problem! Or rather – a morale symptom. You have to start by dealing with those problems. Communicate more about the layoffs and the company’s performance; talk about the initiatives you’ve undertaken to create more stability. That’s how you get morale back on track, not by putting more lipstick on the pig with parties or plaques.

If you’re treating the symptoms, you are letting the underlying cause grow and fester, and eventually, it will become so severe that you can’t ignore it. It’s going to force you to look at it, and it’s going to be ugly. You can save everyone some time, resources, and anxiety if you start digging now. Changing your website colors or adding new waiting room art can wait.

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Real Leaders Don’t Complain

I can’t tell you how many times I am in a coaching session with someone, and I end up spending most of the time just listening to them complain. After a while, I have to stop everything and tell them this: The true leader in any organization is the person who doesn’t complain.

No truer words were ever spoken. You may be the appointed leader, the elected leader, or even the founder of an organization, but if you are a complainer, you will never be seen by the employees and other stakeholders as the real leader of the organization. Somewhere in the organization is the person who never complains. He or she will be viewed as the true leader of the organization. The problem is, as the CEO, that person SHOULD be you!

Suck It Up

People don’t like whiners and complainers. I’m sure you don’t either. So, if you are constantly whining or complaining about things, you can imagine how others feel about you. Samuel Johnson, the noted British author, once said: “The usual fortune of complaint is to excite contempt more than pity.” Who the heck wants to be looked at with contempt?

Think about all the famous leaders who are held up to us as examples, whether they are business leaders, military leaders, or political leaders. How many of them complained? How many of them were constantly whining about things? None, that I can recall. Now think about your own organization. Who are the people who never complain or never whine about things? Aren’t those the people you respect the most? They are the natural leaders within your organization.

Time Is Precious: Don’t Waste It Complaining

Complaining is an admission of failure. It is a negative energy that disrupts the smooth operation of the organization. It reflects on you and provides you with an image to others of a miserable, unhappy, and uninspiring person. And it wastes a lot of time…People who are busy complaining aren’t busy doing what they should be doing in their jobs. The late Congresswoman, Shirley Chisholm, once said: “You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”

If you can honestly reflect on yourself, and see that you are a complainer, then you need to shift your attitude and become a doer instead. This is particularly true if you need to be a leader and inspire others. Moreover, look around your organization for the people who never complain. They are the aspiring leaders within your company, and you should keep your eye on them. They will be the people who will take your organization to the next level.

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Do Your Employees Hate To Lose More Than Love To Win?


Have you ever had an employee lose a sale, or a customer, or a negotiation, and say, “Well, I gave it my best shot.”? Although he would have enjoyed winning, he was more than willing to accept his loss because giving it his best effort was enough for him. Trust me, this guy is a loser. Everyone enjoys winning. I have never met a person who didn’t like to win, but some people are content to lose if they know they gave it their best shot. True winners – those that are highly competitive – won’t simply settle for winning. They can’t stand losing, and they will do anything rather than suffer a defeat. These highly competitive types tend to work harder, make greater sacrifices, put forth extra effort, and perform heroic actions. They are like athletes at the top of their game.

What Really Drives Athletes

When top athletes in their professions are surveyed, we find that winning isn’t what fuels their success, but instead, hating to lose is what drives them to compete at extraordinary levels. It’s no different in the corporate world. We need to staff our companies with employees who think and act like these top athletes. A culture of winning is fine, but just imagine what your company would be like if everyone there hated to lose. So you have to go beyond having a winning culture…you have to create a culture of people who hate to lose, and who would do anything rather than experience defeat. These are the people that will propel your organization to its next level of performance. When I coach CEOs about this, I make it a point to say that their company motto ought to be: “We Hate to Lose.” What else do you need to say? That’s pretty much it… Then you have to slowly weed out the people who are content to come in second, and bring in people who hate not being number one – in anything they do! These “hate to lose” people actually feel physical pain when they lose.

Creating A “Hate To Lose” Culture

A winning culture is fine for some companies, but a “hate to lose” culture will kick the crap out of that company every time. Take a good, hard mental look at your key employees, and you will know who is OK with losing, and who hates to lose. Over time, you need to build your organization around the “hate to lose” people, and get rid of the people who are OK with losing. Your culture will take a dramatic turn that will pay dividends going forward. To reinforce my point, take a look at these memorable quotes from some great athletes: – “I hate to lose more than I love to win.” (Jimmy Connors) – “I’m a competitive person. I hate to lose and competition is everything. When you lose you’re easily forgotten.” (Michael Jordan) – “Above anything else, I hate to lose.” (Jackie Robinson) – “If you’re going to play at all, you’re out to win. Baseball, board games, playing Jeopardy, I hate to lose.” (Derek Jeter) – “Boy, do I hate to lose.” (Peyton Manning)

How do you feel about losing? Are you a “hate to lose” CEO? And what about your company’s culture? How intensely do they hate to lose?

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Are You Challenging Your Management Team?

Most of us accept the concept that we improve our performance by being challenged. When people around us challenge us, most of us will rise to the challenge. We perform better, strive harder, and achieve greater things. But did you know that we also improve and become better when we challenge others?

Here is a true story that demonstrates this notion:

Give It Everything You’ve Got

Back in the late 1960’s, John Wooden, one of the all-time greatest college basketball coaches, was playing a center named Bill Walton on his team at UCLA. Walton practiced with the other team members, but there was no one on the team over 6’7’’ to really challenge him and help him improve his skills. Out of the blue, a junior college basketball coach phoned Wooden, and said he had a 6’11” player who could give Walton the opponent he needed to practice against. Wooden gave the junior college player, Swen Nater, a scholarship to UCLA just to practice against Walton. Coach Wooden told Nater that he would likely never play in a game; his role was just to play against Walton in practice, much like a sparring partner. “He told me to get good enough to challenge Walton,” said Nater. Swen did what he was told, and gave it his all, challenging Walton as hard as he could. “I really understood the concept of team basketball, not just in the games, but in the roles you play in practice,” said Nater. “No one outworked me, not even Bill. I had fun challenging Bill. I gave him everything he could handle. That was an investment on my part and it paid off.”

The Pay-Off

With Swen challenging Walton as hard as he could, playing with all of his effort, Walton became a great basketball player, one of the greatest centers to ever play the sport. He would credit a lot of his skill to the level of opposition that Swen gave him. “Bill always said that I was the best center he played against…” said Nater. The interesting part of the story is that as Swen became better at challenging Walton, he developed into a great basketball player himself. Although he never started a game at UCLA, and averaged only about 2 ½ minutes per game when he did play, Nater was a first round NBA draft pick (16th overall), and played for 11 years, setting a number of records. To this day, Nater credits his success to the time he spent challenging Bill Walton.

You see, being challenged helps us get better, but we also get better when we challenge others.

Are you challenging your management team? If you do, not only will they get better, but your game will improve as well.

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Why Are Some CEO’s Lucky, While Others Aren’t?

Have you ever wondered why some people seem so much luckier than others? We all know of the CEO or business owner who always seems to win the big sale, hire the best staff, or make money on deals that others run away from. We talk about how lucky he or she is. We also know CEOs and others who never seem to catch a break. They lose the big sale, their biggest customer cancels a contract, and their best salesperson quits to go to work for his old friend from college. We shake our heads and talk about their bad luck. So we classify people as lucky and unlucky all the time.

General George Patton once said that when waging a war, he would prefer to have a lucky general vs. an unlucky general working for him. Who wouldn’t? But this makes “luck” sound like a skill, i.e., something that can be learned or developed. Wouldn’t it be great if we could increase our luck and that of the people that work for us? Well, we can! How often have you heard someone say: “You make your own luck”?

Max Gunther, the former editor of Time magazine, did a study of the behavior of lucky people and unlucky people, and found that they exhibit distinctly different attitudes and behaviors. He even wrote a book about it, titled: The Luck Factor: Why Some People Are Luckier Than Others and How You Can Become One of Them.

Here are the major five differences that Gunther found between lucky and unlucky people:

  1. Lucky people have large friendly networks of people. The bigger that network, the more opportunities that others can bring to you. If you don’t know a lot of people, the chances of someone tossing an opportunity your way is rather slim. Stay in your office and stop connecting with people, and your opportunities will dry up.
  2. Lucky people act on hunches. When they intuitively see something as a positive opportunity, they act on it, while on the other hand, unlucky people tend to ignore or downplay their hunches, and are reluctant to act on them. It’s not enough for an opportunity to present itself. You have to act on it to take advantage of it. Lucky people do that.
  3. Lucky people are bold. Unlucky people tend to be more passive and afraid to take risk. A lucky person acts boldly (but not rashly) when presented with a good opportunity.
  4. Lucky people know when to walk away. They know when something isn’t working, and they stop wasting time or money on it. Unlucky people tend to keep drilling dry wells and throwing good money after bad, trying to recover sunk costs. Lucky people cut their losses and accept that not everything works all the time.
  5. Lucky people have a healthy sense of pessimism. They know that things can go wrong, and when they do, the lucky person accepts it, and doesn’t anguish over their loss. Unlucky people tend to agonize over losses, and become even more hesitant to try a new venture.

If we study these five traits or behaviors, we can see that people can actually learn to be lucky, or at least improve their luck, provided they have the capacity to change their behaviors.

Look at yourself and your staff. Are you a lucky person? Does your staff exhibit lucky behaviors? If the answer to either of these questions is “no,” you might want to encouraging some attitudinal shifts. Expand your network. Analyze and act on hunches that look like they might pay off. Act boldly and without fear when you sense an opportunity might pay off. If it’s not working, stop doing it and cut your losses. And last, accept that not everything works out the way you planned. But don’t let that stop you from trying again.

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Growing Pains – The Top 4 Challenges Small Businesses Face

Running a business is like rowing a boat upstream. Once you stop rowing, you start to slip backwards. When the company is growing, owners have to be rowing furiously to get the next deal, to sign the next contract, to hire the next A player. If they let go of their focus on the future, the current sweeps them back. There are always things that need to be done in order to keep moving, to ensure growth is healthy and sustainable.
As they begin to grow, small businesses face critical challenges:

#1. Managing cash flow.

Companies can be so successful that they run out of money. As they secure more contracts, make more deals, connect with more customers, they have to produce more of a product. That requires an investment – and then another and another, and those come from your cash. At the same time, they’re not collecting the rewards soon enough.

I was in a situation where I was billing millions of dollars a month for services. Quite a problem, right? But I had to make payroll and pay a lot of expenses, and it was 45-60 days before I collected that money. These are questions that all growth businesses face: How do I pay my people when I haven’t collected my receivables yet? How do I secure a line of credit? How do I run the business so that I not only have profit, I have cash? CEOs need to maintain cashflow projections so they never run out of cash. Managing growth is managing cash.

#2. Hiring the right people.

As they grow, businesses need to surround themselves with employees who can handle the change, the pace, the pressure, the scope. Finding people is hard; finding A players and attracting them to your company – that’s in a whole different ballpark of hard. Jim Collins wrote, “You absolutely must have the discipline not to hire until you find the right people.”

#3. Letting go of the people they have.

I preach to all of my clients: “Hire slow, fire fast.” No one enjoys firing people, especially if they had been there since the beginning. What happens is businesses bring in people who are good at getting things up and running. Now that the company is 2, 3, 4, or even 5 times the size it was two years ago, those people aren’t growing with the company. They actually hold it back because they have hit their level of competency.
But they’ve been here. They’re loyal. They’re nice. They’re friends. There is any number of excuses, but the bottom line is that business owners are doing themselves a disservice if they don’t let these employees go and hire those who can take them to the next level. And, they’re doing a disservice to the affected employees who know they’re not making the grade but won’t leave on their own. They won’t thank the owner for firing them now – but they may in the future when they find positions that value and utilize their strengths instead of emphasizing their weaknesses.

#4. Staying on top of technology and space.

As companies grow, they need to expand their systems and structures: more computers and equipment, updated software, additional office space. The trick is anticipating growth fairly accurately. I’ve had clients move into new office space, for instance, and within a year, they outgrew it. They were saddled with both a five-year lease and the need to rent or buy more space.

And you thought starting a business was hard! Handling growth in a business can present an even bigger challenge for owners. When a company grows, particularly if it’s growing fast, owners face one problem after another. But I’ve been in companies with growing pains and those with liquidation pains. If I had to choose, I’d take the growth pains over the liquidation pains every time.

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Do You Know How Your Employees See You?

Most CEOs think of themselves as “regular” people. Nothing special about them. So they govern their actions as if they were the same as everyone else. Well, there is a difference between you and the people that work for you…at least in their minds.

Perceptions are quite real to the people who see you in action. Their image of you is probably not what your image of yourself is, so you need to be aware of that. If you don’t understand this difference in perception, you cannot be a great CEO.

Your Perspective vs. Their Perspective

You see yourself as a typical business person, not much different than anyone else. You hang out with people like yourself, so everything seems quite “normal” to you. But look at it from the perspective of the people who work for you. They see a person who is in charge; someone who founded and built a company (or was brought in to run it). You make more money than they do. You probably drive a really nice car and wear an expensive watch. You are going to business lunches and traveling all over the USA or internationally for meetings. You are busy negotiating deals, giving speeches, attending important meetings offsite, and handing out awards and bonuses. Your signature is on their paychecks.

If you don’t think that presents a certain image to your employees, then you are blind. They have an image of a person who has put his/her stamp on the company, and of someone who is important, in charge, and successful. Most of them know they could never start a company and grow it, or do many of the things that you do so well. Believe it or not, they look up to you. They watch everything that you do, and you are setting the example for them. Don’t allow yourself to fall into complacency, believing that they see you like “one of them.” Because they don’t, no matter how much they say they do, or how much you try to be one of them.

Your influence on them is far beyond what you think it is. They will emulate you. They will worry if you seem distant or troubled. The part you play as CEO is crucial to their success. They need to know you are involved, interested, and thoughtful. Culture starts at the top, so that means that you, as the very top person in the organization, set the tone for everyone else. Don’t underestimate the impact your image has on your staff. Always be cognizant of the way they see you and act accordingly.

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Why Do You Have To Be The Smartest Guy In The Room?

One of the curses of being a CEO is that we think we know more than everyone else. Although we deny this over and over again, and we make bold statements such as “I always hire people smarter than me,” or “I surround myself with people who know more than I do,” the reality is that we don’t act that way. I have worked with dozens of CEOs who claimed they deferred to their better educated, more informed staff, yet demonstrated a disregard for their staff’s ideas by always trying to add value.

How Does One “Add Value”?

Adding value is when we take a person’s idea and try to make it better by adding our own contribution to it. We simply can’t resist making their idea even better!

Here is how it works: Your VP of marketing comes into your office with a recommendation to increase the advertising budget to include some new website ads. You look her right in the eye and say “That’s a great idea…but you know what would make it even better? Let’s do such and such….”

Basically, you just told her that her idea was crap, and that you have a better idea, or at least that’s how she sees it. How do you think she feels about herself, about the job she’s doing, and about how you see her? If you want people to stop bringing you good ideas, then crush their spirit by telling them how to make them better.

Taking A Step Back

It’s funny, but we just seem compelled to do this. We have to take every idea, concept, and recommendation, and improve upon it. Yet we brag about how we hire such smart people. If they’re so smart, why do we keep “helping” them with our input?

As a CEO, there are times when you have to keep your mouth shut, even when you really believe an idea can be improved upon. Let the person enjoy their moment. Allow them the opportunity to present something and have it stand on its own. There is plenty of time later to “tweak” it. And if you are really good at what you do, you can find ways to suggest improvements and have your staff think it was their idea. Here are a few recommendations on how to improve an idea without you directly adding your own value to it:

  • You can hold a meeting with several others and ask the group to discuss and enhance the idea.
  • You can have committees or working groups that review ideas and discuss how to implement them.
  • You can even ask the person who came up with the idea to go back and come up with two or three ways to improve it (there is always something else that can be thought of, even by the original author or inventor).

The lesson here is that your desire to add value to another person’s idea might make you feel good, but it makes the other person feel crushed. Hold back, bite your tongue, and let your people have their moment to bask in the sun. There are other opportunities to improve the idea without your “contribution.”

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The Dangers of Favortism

Favoritism! I am amazed at how many times I hear a CEO or other C-level executive claim how much they hate “suck-ups” and “ass kissers,” yet see them reward that exact behavior. EVERYONE says they hate these kinds of employees, but they are embraced and treated as favorites. How can we say one thing, yet do another?

We claim that we want independent thinkers, people who can speak their minds and express their opinions, and people who challenge us. Yet, we push those very people away, and send them a clear message that we prefer a good suck-up over a person with an opinion that differs from ours. We love to play favorites! Why do we encourage the exact behavior we ridicule?

We tend to gravitate toward subordinates who make us feel good about ourselves, seem to like us, and compliment us. We hang out with them more than other employees. We reward them more often, and with better benefits, bonuses, and promotions. We brag about them to other employees, and we are more likely to show them support and attention in public. What kind of message does this send to the other employees, particularly the ones that are more challenging to us, and disagree with us on key issues?

The more you reward a behavior, the more of it you get. If sucking up is a way to get ahead and get positive feedback, people will do more of it, and the independent thinkers who would challenge us, tend to back off and become more fawning just to stay equal with the others. We have now built a team of servile, unthinking “yes men.” Do you think that’s going to make your company more successful? Hardly!

To be a great CEO, we need to be challenged. We need to hear differing opinions so we can make informed decisions. We need people to tell us the truth, not what we want to hear. And we need to know what our subordinates actually think of us.

To become a great CEO, you need to ask this question about your subordinates:
“Do their words and/or actions contribute to my self-esteem, or do they contribute to the success of the company?” The answer will be obvious.

If your employees are spending more time flattering you than working on important issues in your company, they are really doing you a disservice. You might feel good hearing such nice things about yourself or having consensus on every issue, but it’s doing nothing to solve problems or advance the company. The more we bask in praise, the weaker we become as leaders. We need to welcome challenge in order to strengthen ourselves. Only a weak leader is afraid to hear the truth.