How to understand the answer to a question.

How to understand the answer to a question.

Mar 22, 2017 | Governance, Leadership, Management

I ask questions for a living.

No, I  am not a policeman, journalist, or a head-hunter, all of whom need good questioning skills, but in some regards I am a detective.

My job is to see what can be done to improve the performance of businesses, and to do that effectively I need to understand with clarity what is holding  the current performance back. Therefore I need to be able to analyse and understand the current performance through an independent  lens, a perspective  that is different to that of those who are paying me, and which leverages the experience and domain knowledge I bring to the table.

As a consultant, especially one that works in a space usually over-filled with clichés, emotion, personal prejudices and views presented as facts, the real skill is in asking the right questions, and knowing when it has been answered satisfactorily, then following up with the next one that further opens the oyster.

Asking the right question is a matter of experience, domain and technical knowledge. Knowing when it has been answered is all about being a good listener, and entirely different set of skills.

As I listen, I try and break down more than what is being said, and why it is being said, it is just as important to see what is not being said, and to be able to follow up with the question that gets to the area of discomfort, that is best left unsaid, in their minds.

So here are the things that in one way or another I do when listening, apart from observing the old adage that evolution gave us two ears and one mouth for a reason.

What is being left out. Where are the gaps, the inconsistencies, and the evasions, as they will tell you a lot about the person. An HR manager I once worked with used to spend what I initially thought was an inordinate amount of time on the sequence and timing of stated jobs in an applicants resume.   Then I realised he was just looking for the gaps, and he almost always found a few, which usually told us more about the person than they had included.

Where are the contradictions? As with gaps, contradictions can be well hidden, and are often unconscious. They are not just contradictions about timing and  ‘things’ that matter, it is more about contradictions about their personality. I had a product manager working for me a long time ago who  told anyone who was listening that his personal credo was honesty and transparency, but then took staplers and pens home from the office supplies cupboard. A little  thing perhaps, but a contradiction that told me something about him that proved useful.

Why are they telling me this, and not that? People can go on and on about ‘stuff,’ the words fill a hole in the conversation, stuff that really does not matter. Wondering why they are telling you this ‘stuff’ and not something useful or that adds to the ‘picture’ you are developing can be enlightening.  This is particularly so when you know of something that perhaps they are unaware you know, but is relevant to the conversation. I recall the lawyers adage of never asking a question of someone giving evidence without knowing the answer in advance.

What about this makes it relevant to the question? People like to talk, usually because they like to be listened to, and so can go on and on about things of limited or no relevance to the question, simply because they have the floor. Generally we are polite, so do not interrupt the flow, but it can be useful sometimes, particularly pointing out the irrelevance of the tsunami of words that just emerged.

What are the facts? There is a huge difference between facts, things that are demonstrably true, and opinion, suppositions, and the outcomes of ‘managed’ data. The last of these is often the most tricky to tell from the real story, as they purport to be facts, as evidenced by the data. It is just the data or the interpretation of the data that is dodgy.

Did they answer the question directly.  Listen to any politician talking on any night, and you will most likely hear them answer a question in a manner that bears little or no resemblance to the information being sought. Unfortunately it seems to be the standard state of public office, but in a commercial environment, I dismiss it with the contempt it deserves. To be fair, politics gets played pretty hard in many commercial environments, and so is sadly, little different.

Tone of voice. Body language and tone of voice also delivers a message. Just think of the myriad of meanings the word ‘bastard’ has in Australian vernacular, all are conveyed by the same word, with entirely different meanings dictated by tone of voice and body language.

At the end of an answer to a question, I often repeat what I have heard and understood from the answer to offer the opportunity to correct and modify my understanding as necessary. It is also a good tactic when  seeking to assess the truth of an answer.

 

 

Does ‘Know, Like, & Trust’ still hold?

Does ‘Know, Like, & Trust’ still hold?

Feb 27, 2017 | Leadership, Marketing, Sales

The only way businesses survive is to generate revenue in excess of their costs, consistently.

Common sense.

One of the oldest adages in revenue generation is that people do business with those they know like and trust.

It was correct, and to an extent it still is, but with a huge, game-changing wrinkle.

Most of us by now have done some sort of transaction electronically.

You have most likely moved to that transaction without ever meeting the person on the other side, so you certainly do not know them, and have no idea if you would like them, but you trust them to complete their side of the transaction.

One out of three now seems to be good enough?

Not really when you think about it.

In most cases there has been some interaction that you as the purchaser have undertaken that the seller knows nothing about.

You have looked at their website for technical specifications, prices, service promises, you may have downloaded some of the free stuff from their site, often to a junk email address so you do not get bothered with the following auto-marketing.  Depending on the product you may also have checked out the various product forums, and review sites, and you have compared all this to the competitive offerings.

The summary of all this is that when you get to the point of initiating a transaction, you have come to value and trust those you do not know, sufficiently to decide to do business with them.

Value and trust. Key words.

Trust is mutual and earned by performance over time, value is delivered.

The challenge now in revenue generation is therefore to reach out to those who do not know you, but who may have some problem you can solve, some irritation you can remove, and demonstrate your value to the point where they trust you sufficiently to do business with you.

A complete turnaround from the days where you did business with people you got to know like and trust while walking the golf course.

What does ‘Priority’ mean to you?

What does ‘Priority’ mean to you?

Feb 20, 2017 | Change, Leadership, Strategy

Most of us would say in answer to that question “the one most important thing”.

The thing that we just have to do first, in preference to all others.

Priority is singular.

However, in most cases I see the word used as a plural, ‘Priorities’. It seems this is a new word, spawned perhaps by our instinct to cover our bets and our management arses.

We all get what ‘Priority’ means, but how do we separate the ‘Priority’ from the ‘Priorities’.

In most management situations, we do not do that separation job adequately. We end up trying to do too much, compromising the outcomes of everything in front of us.

Pick one priority, and when done, move on.

In 1997 when Steve Jobs (don’t you get sick of examples from Apple and Jobs?) returned from involuntary exile back to Apple, the company he started was on the verge of insolvency, having just lost over a billion dollars. A year later, Apple turned a $309 million profit.

How did he do it?

He focused Apple on the priority: selling the core range of two products, the PowerMac 3 and PowerBook 3.

Most of the huge range of products were discontinued, revenue did drop, but overheads dropped even further, so they made money, and were able to reinvest in the follow up innovations that changed the world.

Italian mathematician Vilfredo Pareto coined what has become known as the 80:20 rule by observing a wide range of totally unrelated situations where 80% of something was generated by 20% of the generators. The truth of this principal was observed by pioneer management consultant Joseph Juran who popularised it as the Pareto Principal.

In 22 years of consulting and contracting, mainly to medium sized manufacturing businesses, I have only ever seen evidence that the Pareto principal holds. In some cases, it is more like 90:10, so the challenge is the same one faced by Steve Jobs.

Which 80% of what you are currently doing do you no longer do?

Never an easy question, there are always reasons for everything that is being done, but survival is often about establishing the priority, and doing just that one thing better than anyone else.

 

 

 

What makes successful people successful?

What makes successful people successful?

Feb 3, 2017 | Leadership

Success is driven by a combination of insight, common sense and hard work, not luck, knowing the right people, or having a rich father, although the last two can be a good start.

It is also a given that successful people are usually pretty smart, although pretty smart people are not always successful.

Looking at medium sized businesses  as I do day in and day out, I see a range of all of the above, and find that above all else, the characteristic that distinguishes the successful from the rest is curiosity.

Curiosity about the world around them, the workings of their own business  and those of their competitors and allies, about the drivers of change and behaviour.

Broken down further, Curiosity comes from a number of sources, and I tend to score those I work with, generally very informally, on a range of parameters, which gives me an insight to their ‘curiosity quotient’.

They do not guess.  Rather than be happy to guess, they tend to experiment find ways to form and test hypotheses about the causes of the things around them. They do not just jump to a conclusion, they employ what I learnt at school was called the ‘scientific method’, often unconsciously.  Jumping to a conclusion that offers an easy explanation delivers a seductive but almost always wrong answer, particularly when done without deep domain knowledge.

They engage with problems physically.  This probably sounds a bit mad,  but those who are curious need to see and feel a problem, engage with it physically in some way. Leading a large marketing team in a highly seasonal market, one of the ways I seemed to be able to predict those who would be successful marketers was that they were happy to get out in the peak season and pack shelves in supermarkets, talk to those supermarket employees who managed the shelves, talk to customers as they shopped, and tap into the wisdom of the part time merchandisers we had while they drove from store to store. They engaged physically with the competitive environment in which customers  and the myriad of things, often the unconscious choices that led the purchase of one of our products Vs an alternative. Somehow they could ‘smell’ the issues.

They welcome the thought that they do not know. By embracing their ignorance they are able to engage with alternatives, see things with fresh eyes, and make new hypotheses about the drivers of behaviour.

They look beyond the obvious.  The obvious explanation of some happening are often not the best, or even accurate explanation of the behaviour.

They make their own judgements. Right or wrong good people form a judgement, and are prepared and able to defend it, while taking into consideration any new or revised information that is provided, and absorb that into the views and change as necessary. They are flexible people, not tied to a set of preconceptions, while at the same time being decisive. Procrastination is not a part of the DNA.

They never assume that the past will be repeated. They consider the past to be a indicator of what might happen, not the driver, so they dig into the guts of a process, behaviour drivers, and science, to come up with the fundamentals that drive everything else. The psychology of behaviour has not changed much over the millennia, our understanding of the fundamentals has increased daily. Those with curiosity seek to sweep away the assumptions based on simple extrapolation.

They make themselves experts. Rather than relying on so called experts from elsewhere, they ensure they at least know enough to subject those so called experts to challenging and informed questions in conversations to test their expertise.

They remain focused on the issues, and are relentless in pursuit of information that informs.

They make decisions based on data rather than emotions. They seek the facts that underlie the data. Our lives are so immersed in so called data, stuff spewed out of computers that takes on a credibility of its own simply because it has been digitised, that it has acted to erode our own judgement of facts. Digital garbage is still garbage. The really curious seek the truths in the facts, not hyperbolic leaps of faith proposed by dodgy data.

 

What do employees really want?

What do employees really want?

Jan 9, 2017 | Change, Governance, Leadership

 

If I asked that question of 50 randomly selected medium sized business owners, the first answer would be something like ‘More pay’.

That would be the wrong answer.

‘More pay’ is the default when other things more important to them are missing, and there is no other reason to go to work each day. This is in Australia of course, a place where the necessities of life are covered, nobody is going to starve.

Employees want to work for a successful business, one that offers them security and a chance to learn and develop their talents and interests, as well as supplying the means to  buy the necessities of life. Nobody likes turning up not knowing if the business will be open that day, or if the receivers will be waiting for them.

When was it ever a better feeling to be on a losing team, than it was to be a part of a winning team?

Giving employees this reassurance is more than telling them that the business is profitable, although that helps. It is about taking them into your confidence as you would a trusted friend. Funny thing about trust, it needs to be earned by performance, and once earned, it is returned.

Trust given begets trust received.

Creating the environment where that trust becomes automatic and mutual takes time and effort, but success will put ‘better pay’ way down the list of employee concerns.

Following is the pathway I advise those I work with to follow:

Articulate where we are going. It is difficult to get people to buy into a journey  without telling them the destination. Try getting your young kids in the car just by ordering ‘get in the car,’ but tell them they should jump in the car, we are going to Luna Park, and you will be killed in the rush.

Paint a picture of the destination. Your kids have a mental picture of Luna park, fun by the harbour,  but your employees have no such picture of what success looks like, so paint it for  them, recognising that it is not just about the success of the business, it is about what success means for them, their colleagues, friends, customers and families.

Show them the journey. The kids know the way to Luna park, sort of depending on age, but your employees have no real idea of the journey you will share on the way, so lay it out. What sort of operating targets there will be, describe the workplace, the type of customer necessary for the success, what skills and knowledge will need to be deployed , and which ones will need to be developed, Who are your competitors, what are the expected challenges that need to be overcome, and so on.

Describe why it is important to get there. This is  not about profits and personal success, it is about what difference you are making to the community and people’s lives, a description of  the higher purpose, or the ‘Why’ of the business. It can sound a bit ‘mushy’ and new age, but when there is something that people can relate to at a gut level, the power of that is immense. Profit is an outcome of a job well done, one of the many measures of success, it should not be the primary measure of success.

WIFM. (What’s in it for me) while the objective is to engage with a higher purpose, there will always be a time where this question needs to be answered. When you have succeeded in doing the above, the answer will be  about the satisfaction of doing something useful, being valued, having control over your workplace, being a part of a community, learning and growing, and when those are satisfied, they may ask how much will be in the pay packet.

Personalised feedback. All of the above points are general, things that a leader  could and should do for the whole group of employees. However, employees are also individuals, and managing direct reports one on one is a core responsibility of leadership.  A one on one conversation can be many things, feedback on performance both positive and pointing out areas for improvement, assistance with a problem being faced, collaboratively addressing difficult problems,  advice of a personal as well as commercial nature, professional development,  and an opportunity to build a relationship of trust and respect. The meetings can take many forms, but they should be regular and formal, which means agendas and meeting notes, as well as diarised meeting times.  As a general rule, you would have these meeting with your direct reports, and encourage them to have similar meetings with their reports, indeed, coach them to do so.

When you do all that, you will build a motivated and engaged workforce, and that is a competitive advantage that is really hard to replicate. I can help with all that, having done it several times, and so know how to avoid the most of the traps.

How to easily solve the strategy jigsaw

How to easily solve the strategy jigsaw

Nov 23, 2016 | Leadership, Strategy

Imagine, your task is to complete a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle with one of your kids, but the puzzle is an old one, in a bag, so you do not have a picture of the end result to work to.

It is further complicated, as some of the pieces in the body of the picture  are also missing, some are faded beyond recognition, and others have been bent to be ‘force-fitted’ to other pieces that they were not designed to fit.

Not easy.

Building a strategy is not dissimilar.

The jigsaw is a good metaphor, because the steps to solve the jigsaw puzzle are the same as solving the strategy development puzzle.

Have an objective. Start by knowing what the end result should look like, or in the vernacular ‘start with the end in mind’. As they say, ‘without a clear destination, any road will get you there’. Without the picture of the completed jig saw, you are working in the dark.

 Find the foundation pieces. In a jigsaw they are the 4 corner pieces, in a commercial strategy they are your Customer Value Proposition, cash flow management, profit and loss account, and break even point.

Define the limits of activity. These are the sides of your jigsaw, obvious because one side is straight, and defines the edge beyond which there is nothing, but you still have to define the manner  in which they fit together. For your strategy development exercise, the side pieces are determining who your ideal customers are, how will you engage and service them, the manner in which you will be paid, what offer you will deliver them. In other words, your business model.

Functional grouping. The next step in assembling a jigsaw is to group like pieces together, Even without the picture, you can put together all those that seem similar, for example the blue of the sky, green of a field. It will take some experimentation and shuffling to get it right, but slowly, a few pieces will  start to be fitted together. Developing and executing on a strategy is again similar, but the pieces are generally functional. The manufacturing pieces all go together, as do the financial, sales, marketing, and other functional pieces, they fit together, but they also progressively fit as groups into the larger picture.

Build the whole. As the jigsaw picture emerges in front of you, it becomes possible to fit groups of similar pieces together, and you see the ranges of possibilities opening. Those 3 that you found that were blue, and fitted together, are not sky, they are the blue of the house that is emerging on the other side. Again the strategy development process is the same. You will progressively find points where groups of pieces fit together, where sales and marketing merge, the financial reporting systems  are adapted to offer performance metrics on the factory, and you measure customer retention and share of wallet.

Make it scalable. Throughout the construction of the puzzle, once you have found two pieces that fit together, that are a part of the bigger picture, you never take them apart, you move them around until you find others that similarly fit and together make the picture easier to see. In a business this process is more like the development of procedures that are repeatable and scalable. Once you know something works, don’t take the risk of breaking them up and losing a piece, make sure they stay together. Creating standard operating processes for everything that gets done regularly, so it is done the same way every time, is the commercial equivalent. Standard procedures remove variation, creating stability and predictability.

Of course, when you have the picture of the completed jigsaw in front of you, the task is 10 times, perhaps 100 times easier.

Strategy development is exactly the same. Start with the picture, define and progressively build on the foundations, then fill in the holes as you go.

Be prepared to iterate and experiment as you go, just like testing the fit of the jigsaw pieces until you find 2 that are just built for each other, then another 1, then group of several.