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Lost In The Trunk

Lost In The Trunk

cenforce by | Apr 18, 2018 | Company Culture, Good Management, Leadership

http://intellivex.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/intellivex-history-and-product-line-card.pdf My daughter, Katy, starts cheerleading practice soon. As the lead cheerleader, she wants to wear a great outfit on the first day. She looked high and low for her favorite pair of cheer shorts, but to no avail. Bitterly disappointed, she bought another pair, but still, she wanted to find her favorites.

Then, it struck her. They might be in the trunk of her car. “My trunk is the new junk drawer,” she exclaimed! “I throw everything back there.” Sure enough, upon searching her trunk, there were her beloved shorts along with 2 blankets, a shirt that had also she “lost”, a curling iron, a pair of shoes, and some Valentine’s Day wrapping paper that she doesn’t remember buying.

Katy took a few hours to get everything back to where it was supposed to be, and life appears to have calmed for my teenage daughter.

Does Katy’s struggle sound familiar? Often, we spend an immense amount of time looking for things we already have, only to repurchase and rediscover the item along with a series of other things you had forgotten about. The same can be true for your office, talent pool and business processes.

You know when it is time to clean up when EVERY little task takes way more time than it should. You look for a document but can’t easily find it due to an unorganized filling system. You look for a colleague’s phone number, but it was not entered into your contact database. All these little tasks end up taking an inordinate amount of time; time that could be spent on business activities.

This time of year, I encourage you to shake out the rugs in your business departments, clean up job descriptions, re-organize the filing cabinets, create new habits to prevent the loss of information and start the spring with a new, ruthlessly organized…trunk. You will be glad that you did.

Don’t Use This F-word to Describe Your Work Environment

There are plenty of great words that start with the letter F that you might use to describe the people you work with and the culture within your organization. Words come to mind such as Fun, Fantastic, Fabulous, Fulfilling, Fast, Fundamental, Fantabulous, Functioning, Fitting, Fashionable, Friendly, Fortunate, Famous, Fortuitous… just to name a few. But there is one F-word that you should NEVER use to describe your work environment:

Family

That’s right. Never EVER use the word “family” to describe the people you work with.

A family is a group of people closely related by blood, and you can’t do anything about that. You can’t fire your cousin from being your cousin if he or she constantly makes poor choices and avoidable mistakes, but you can (and should) fire any person who works for you who does that. I hear it all the time:

“He told me that we were family, and then he fired me!”

“Family doesn’t fire you.”

“She lied. We weren’t family. If we were, I wouldn’t have gotten fired.”

If you are searching for a word that describes your company culture, try some of these: Tribe, Troupe, Village, Community, Group, Team… But don’t confuse your employees by using the term “family”.

Replace that family tree with an organizational chart.

You Need to Hair Your Replacement

This past weekend was homecoming for my daughter Katy, a Junior in High School. She is also a cheerleader, and somehow she is now responsible for doing everyone’s hair on the squad before the game.

Katy’s role as squad hairdresser started last year, when she created a beautiful complicated braid for her own hair. Then, all of the other girls wanted that hair style as well. Katy googled hairstyles, watched Youtube videos, and practiced on her hair (and everyone else’s) in order to be promoted to Head Hair Stylist for the Cardinal Cheer Squad.

I asked her “What are they going to do when you graduate?!”

She shot right back “Oh, I am training Jordan to do this job when I graduate.” Of course she is.

This process of having people hire and train their own replacement when they advance is exactly how successful companies grow, develop their staff and how innovation occurs. Those people who are on the front lines do research, they learn, they improve the company’s processes and they teach the next generation to do the same. I would imagine that the Cardinal Cheer Squad will have the best hair styles for years to come, thanks to Katy!

So, when you have an employee who wants to learn something new and take on a new task, let them. After all…

Hair today. Gone tomorrow.

“I Had to Sell Roosters Online”

“I Had to Sell Roosters Online”

Last week, I interviewed a woman who had previously been an Office Manager for a thriving company. She understood that her job was one with wide-ranging responsibilities that required many and various tasks. When I asked what prompted her to resign, she replied, “When I had to sell the owners’ roosters on Craigslist.”

Had this woman’s job had been at a farm working with animals, this request might not have seemed so egregious.  Once again, she was working in an office setting with many other employees, so a request like this was quite a bit outside the normal boundaries of the job and she felt taken advantage of.

This is just one example of the importance of having an accurate job description for every position. The job description helps the employee know what is expected of them, and gives them guidelines on how to be successful in the role. When an employee is asked to do something far outside the boundaries of the job, they can feel uncomfortable, uneasy, and unsure on how to proceed. This is not the way to build a productive and satisfying relationship with your employee.

I know, I know… writing a job description is boring, boring, boring! My clients tell me this regularly, and it is usually coupled with an eye roll. However, having a document that accurately describes the job can benefit both the employer and the prospective employee by laying out the tasks, responsibilities and expectations beforehand, in black and white. So if you don’t own a farm and aren’t  in the animal husbandry industry, don’t ask your employee to sell your roosters (unless you write it in the job description!)

Then when the rooster crows, everyone knows what to expect.

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

3 full-time and 2 part-time boyfriends

3 full-time and 2 part-time boyfriends

My daughter, Katy, will be 17 this fall. Recently, she was sitting around with her two BFF’s when one girl asked, “Katy, how many boyfriends do you have?” The other girl jumped in with a reply: “I know! She has 3 full-time and 2 part-time boyfriends!”

When the first girl looked puzzled, Katy replied, “Well, I get different things from each of them!” She explained that boyfriend #1 provides freedom and challenges her intellectually, boyfriend #2 brings flowers and is fiercely loyal, and boyfriend #3 is the perfect group date as his best friends are dating Katy’s best friends. As for the other two, part-time boyfriend #1 provides companionship and reliability, while part-time boyfriend #2: is convenient as she sees him every day.

My husband Randy (Katy’s father) said to her, “Katy, do not settle for someone who doesn’t meet ALL of your criteria. You shouldn’t settle, because you deserve the best of the best.”

In hiring, we often see similar situations with candidates. One will possess the experience the employer feels is vital, another will be a proven team player, yet another exudes enthusiasm. Just this past week, one of my clients exclaimed, “Beth, if we could just combine these two candidates, we’d have the perfect employee!”

Since combining two people into one is only possible in science fiction (and those stories almost always end up badly anyway), many people in this position will try to convince themselves to hire Candidate A because he or she is a BETTER fit than any of the other candidates. This path almost always ends up badly as well, except the result isn’t fiction – it’s your business reality.

If you find yourself in this situation, the better plan of action is to re-read your vision for the ideal candidate, redouble your efforts and hold out for the right fit! Remember what Randy said to Katy: “You shouldn’t settle, because you deserve the best of the best.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.