Adding value is a key differentiator to creating maximum long term business success. So many businesses only know how to raise prices, cut costs, reduce services, give more work to fewer employees and ignore the customer. They are often mediocre or worse and they may not even know or care why. You can no longer be special, you have to be spectacular! Adding value can be accomplished in many ways and it starts with believing you can do and be more.
The successful companies of tomorrow are the ones that create and design new stuff today. Design and development of new products and services is very hard to duplicate. It takes time, effort and money to patiently create new things. If you don’t do it your competitor or a start up might. Classic examples in history include Eastman Kodak, Sears and Blockbuster. Companies that focus on the marketplace of today and fail to anticipate the future may go away if they don’t take the time necessary to invent tomorrow.
Former Apple evangelist, Guy Kawasaki, was telling a story at a Portland Business Journal breakfast several years ago. He said you can drive by car from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington, roughly a three hour drive, in either a Ford Taurus or a BMW. Now both cars will get you there reliably and safely, yet one car will deliver a far different driving experience than the other. Providing great experiences for employees and customers can raise the fun meter for companies that want to attract and retain better talent and also charge a higher price point. It doesn’t matter if you are Motel 6 or Ritz Carlton, creating great experiences can happen in any market segment. All it takes creativity and thoughtfulness to make memorable, emotional and romantic experiences happen.
Great leaders are people serving people serving people. Effective leadership isn’t about having employees serve the people above them. It is about leaders serving the people beneath them and treating them so well that they will in turn treat their customers in the same fashion. Incredible leaders ask and don’t tell, have thoughtful two-way conversations, are vulnerable, fail often and are not afraid admit it, are caring, have integrity, utilize influence over power and have a sense of how to keep their ego in check.
Organizational culture has been described as being similar to the water in an aquarium. It is where all the fish, in that particular tank, swim. It can include things like espoused values, beliefs, behaviors, rules, norms, morals, artifacts, assumptions and may even have it’s own language. Every company has one, yet many don’t take the time or make the effort to define it and make it the best that it can be. Having a unhealthy or dysfunctional culture can be harmful to business, employees and ultimately the customer. Companies like Zappos and Southwest Airlines are known for their unique cultures, that make them fun and joyful places to work.
Organizations that offer great opportunities, experiences, employee development, advancement, perks and have a fabulous culture attract the best and brightest talent. Companies should view themselves the way sports teams or theatre companies do and audition to hire only the people that fit the best. People don’t want to be only a number, they want to be treated and valued like partners. They want to be consulted and listened to. They want to contribute with input and make a difference in outcome. So many organizations ignore and treat their people poorly, yet they don’t realize how much better things can be, for everybody!
How We Do What We Do:
At ExecuFeed our secret sauce is our ability to reduce friction and increase alignment inside organizations by gathering extremely useful information that is nearly impossible for internal people to gather. Employees are more than willing to share this information with outsiders in exchange for anonymity and confidentiality. Employees dearly want things to change for the better (and so do leaders), but won’t risk the chance for retribution or consequences from sharing what they know. The quickest way to increase harmony and decrease dysfunction in the workplace is to bring in a skilled outsider who can facilitate issues and act as a liaison between people or groups of people. Strife inside an organization is like drag on an airplane, it keeps things from climbing or flying smoothly and is very expensive with a negative return on investment (ROI) if it goes on too long.
Soft skills, also know as people skills, are the behaviors, capabilities and competencies we have and use when we interact with other individuals or groups. They allow us to communicate, navigate our environment, work with others and achieve goals by complementing our own personal set of hard skills (say like accounting or computer programming). Some examples of soft skills include things like listening, manners, etiquette, adaptability, negotiation, ethics, morals, kindness, empathy, patience, accountability and collaboration.
Our soft skills can be very difficult to track and self correct. Without video footage (instant replay) of our interactions they are hard to reproduce for correction in the future. Unlike taking golf or tennis lessons, the instructor can see how we swing a club or racquet and suggest corrections live in real time. ExecuFeed shadows leaders real time, live, in their own workplace environs to give real time feedback and suggestions to improve their soft skills. The leader manages their content (the what) while the coach manages the process (the how).
Process consultation is about having insights into, and understanding the psychological and social dynamics of interaction within organizations, groups and among individuals. It consists of activities designed to increase group awareness and understanding, so that the members of the group or organization can take steps to improve the way that its members work together. We shadow and observe group interactions during normal workflow and in meetings. We then provide feedback to help them increase their perception to identify attitudes and behaviors that help or hinder their effectiveness and success. Edgar H. Schein is the pioneer of this important field.
Human beings have 5 senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste). Communication and experiences often are strong in one or two senses, and may well ignore some of the others. We help enhance and balance products, services and experiences to take advantage of multiple senses. Human beings also have preferred senses that they favor. Sometimes a person will not connect with product, service, experience or communication because it doesn’t reach their favored or primary modality.
Every professional or Olympic athlete, or professional sports team, has a coach or team of coaches to help them perform at the very highest levels. Finding that extra 1/10th of 1% may mean the difference between winning and loosing, or having the gold or silver medal. If you are in the game at all, why not perform and compete at your absolute best? The same thing should apply in the highly competitive world of business. Leaders and teams should all experience the tremendous value of having a coach! At the end of the day the gold medal goes to the one with the best results and profitability! Executive coaching, done right, is of tremendous value.
All coaching processes are not the same. We utilize the Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching process to help successful people make positive lasting change in leadership behavior. One unique feature of this process is that results are not measured by the leader or the coach, but by the people who work for and around the leader. Marshall’s process helps executives overcome limiting beliefs and behaviors on their way to building stronger, more effective, relationships with the most critical people, the one’s they spend the most time with. One difference between this process and others is that the coach is a facilitator not an expert. It doesn’t matter what industry the leader works in, as we facilitate relationships with the leader and his or her people, no matter what industry they are in.
Facilitated off site meetings, or corporate retreats, are an excellent way for executive teams to do some very important, high quality and impactful work without the distractions and interruptions of being in the office. Based in Central Oregon, we have a fabulous location for teams to do serious work and have serious play as well. Our flavor of retreats are not boondoggles where money is spent with little organizational value returned.
ExecuFeed instills key values:
Anyone who has ever started a business believes that their idea or product will be wildly successful and perhaps even change the world. Yet in the back of their mind the fear they may have and risk they take is worth the reward, so they move forward anyway. Mountain climbers who attempt to climb Mt. Everest are well aware that they may not make it to the top. Excitement and fun come from taking on risk and new challenges, whether they end up being successful or not. Sometimes businesses and work get boring, old and stale. It is important for leaders to remind themselves each day, that work is an adventure for them and their employees. They need to keep things interesting and moving forward. Effective and successful work and workplaces are vibrant, colorful and alive!
The grandfather of modern management, Peter F. Drucker is quoted as saying “the purpose of an organization is to enable common men (& women) to do uncommon things.” Truth be known, it is very difficult to accomplish anything alone. Even a sole proprietor relies on suppliers and customers to make a living, without having any employees. Because people need people to make enterprise work, it is very important to continuously establish, build and cultivate relationships with people. How many times have you been to a networking event where you met somebody and either threw their business card into a pile or perhaps even entered their information into your address book, but did nothing after that? That is an opportunity lost and time wasted. It is more difficult and time consuming to find new customers than to serve current customers. Yet, some time should be invested in that very thing. Companies often ignore and mistreat current customers in favor of treating new customers like royalty. The logic of this is counter intuitive. Why not treat both equally, or even better yet, offer perks to current customers that new customers are not yet eligible for. The bottom line is that connections and relationships are critical to a successful business and leaders need to be cognizant of it.
Imagine two different workplaces. One is where people get along, they like to work together, collaborate with each other, solve problems together and work through conflicts as a team. They are all collectively vested in making the world a better place with their products or services while having a good time doing it. Now, compare that to a company where there is tension, friction, backbiting, backstabbing, and throwing team mates under the bus. The people don’t like each other, they compete with each other and management is punitive. Which company would you like to work for? The truth of the matter is that when people get along, creativity and productivity skyrocket! Unfortunately the latter workplace is more common than the former. Which of the two is your company more like?
Some of the greatest ideas for improving something cost very little or even nothing to implement. One caveat to this is that you may have to spend money to find the idea or suggestion in the first place, although this can also cost very little or nothing. Often some little thing can add tremendous value to your product or service. There is an airline that does something unique. About an hour before landing on a long flight, the flight attendants go through the cabin to ask passengers if they would like to have their eye glasses cleaned. This is a service that can differentiate your airline from the rest. Not rocket science, yet easy to do if your company has a culture and attitude of being one step above and one step ahead.
I never met a leader (or any person for that matter) who couldn’t get better at something. I have never found a company that couldn’t improve a product, service or internal process. Perfection is either impossible or temporary. Once you believe you have arrived at the mirage of perfection, the bar will always move forward. To see this live, just go out onto most any highway on a hot summer day. It looks like there is a lake out there, yet once you get there, the illusion of water has moved forward. Nothing lasts forever and that includes success. It is important to constantly develop and improve your products, services, ideas and people that make up your organization. If you believe you have arrived at an oasis, the mirage of permanent success, you might cease to work as hard as you once did. You might get lazy and complacent. That leaves an open door for competitors to move into your space and capture your market share. That could well be the beginning of a decline or the end. Stay fit, work hard and keep up the pace moving forward.
The starting point to getting better at something (or make anything better) is to find out what it is that needs to improve. By asking for feedback, the people who know can tell you how to make it better. Once the feedback is gathered and evaluated, ideas can be implemented by way of effective follow-through. A second round of feedback gathering, follow-up, can assist in determining if the implemented follow-through was effective or not. Lastly, by asking for feedforward one can gather suggestions for the future that may improve something, or even create something new. This process can apply to any product, service, process or behavior. We call this the F-4 model, affectionately named after a historic fighter jet.
The F-4 Phantom II was built by McDonnell-Douglas (now Boeing) in the 1960’s. It was the only aircraft used by both the U.S. Navy Blue Angles and U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds aerobatic demonstration squadrons. Wikipedia
Any successful enterprise was founded and built on hard work, frustration, trial and error, long hours and towels full of sweat. Sometimes with too much success, things can get comfortable and complacent and the hard work can begin to diminish. It is critical to keep your business effective and efficient. With hard work comes more opportunity and success. With efficiency comes more time to spend growing and expanding that opportunity and success. The concept of work hard – work smart is something every leadership team should consider on a systematic regular basis.