I was talking with a client about her community years ago and the environment of people she surrounded herself with.  Her response was “Oh, you mean crabs in a bucket.”  I’d never heard this before.  Apparently, if a crab is placed in a bucket alone, it can easily crawl out.  But if you place it in a bucket with other crabs, they will each pull down anyone attempting to rise above them – thereby keeping all the crabs stuck in the bucket.  Here’s Wikipedia’s description of the crab mentality.

How about you?  Are you living in a bucket of crabs – pulling down anyone who tries to get ahead of you or being pulled down if you start to make some headway towards your goals?  For me, it’s not always obvious.

Camoflauge Crabs

Sometimes the crabs in the bucket are well meaning and trying to be helpful.  They’re helping you figure something out, but the end result is that you’re both stuck in inertia.  Or they want to protect you, so they discourage you from taking risks where you might get hurt.

A Ladder Out of the Bucket

The easiest way to get a ladder out of the bucket is by surrounding yourself with people who are already outside the bucket.  People who are outside of the bucket think differently and have a different world view.  They see possibility where those in the bucket only see walls.  They’ve done it, so they aren’t stuck thinking about if it can be done.  And they want to be associating with others who are outside the bucket.

New Crabs in Your Life?

Is it time to surround yourself with some new crabs?  Maybe some successful and free crabs instead of those stuck in the bucket?

Photo by: Wonderlane

Fire those team members who are not performing, and who are not a fit for your company.

I was working with a client a number of years ago, and we came up with a saying when she was lamenting how much frustration some of her team members were causing her: “The Clinic is Closed.” If you have the wrong people on the bus (to use Jim Collins’s parlance), they will be a constant drain on your company.  Does this sound familiar: instead of spending your time away from work enjoying yourself and your loved ones, you are complaining about how Employee X didn’t deliver yet again, or how much gossip and discord Employee Y is sowing?

Watch the video of this post here:

How do I Know

Some signals that a bad apple has sneaked onto the team:

- He is regularly pulling in the wrong direction

- His work is not up to par

- He is not culturally a fit with the organization’s values

If you feel like you’re running a clinic, or a psych ward, or babysitting, take a look and see if you’ve got a team of A players or if you have some D players running around.

It’s Not Me – It’s You

A part of that responsibility lies with you, the business owner.  To attract great people, build a great company.  To get great employees, be a great manager.  If the regard you set for your team is so low, your employees will fall to your expectations.  People respond as you’re going to treat them.

But in my experience, while there’s improvement you could make as the owner, the major problem is just that you don’t have “A” players on your team.  If you don’t have A players, you’re not going to get great results.  And change is challenging.  I’ve never seen an employee – in the hundreds of companies I’ve worked with over the years – change from a D player to an A player.

One More Chance

I’ve also never ever had a business owner say, “wow, I should have given that person one more chance.”  It is always the other way around.  “I held on to that person for too long” because I was worried about replacing them, or because I was nervous about hurting his feelings, or because I felt bad.  And in every case, after the person has been let go, and his future has been freed – life gets better.  Guess what?  Everyone else on the team already knows who is and isn’t pulling his weight.  It affects the entire company.  It’s hard to keep A players around when they not only see your time and energy wasted on low performers, but their time and energy also.  A Players want to be on the playing field with other A players.  And if that’s not your company, they’ll find a company where they’re playing the same level game.

So the motto today: the clinic is closed!

Photo by: Demi-Brooke

I had dinner the other night with a friend who works at American Express.  She loves American Express, and she’s having a great time working there.  One of the things I learned from her that night that surprised me is an initiative that she mentioned to go virtual.  I don’t know the scope or the details, but she mentioned this is a project they are working on.  Apparently, the company has run the numbers and discovered the amount of resources wasted by having physical space for all their staff.  While viritual offices have been a tool for small businesses and start-ups to keep expenses low while they bootstrap their growth (as discussed here) or as a corporate philosophy like 37signals’ founder Jason Fried talks about here.  However, this was the first I’d hear of a Fortune 500 company investigating this opportunity.

Watch the video of this post here:

The Virtual Office Trend

A couple of years ago, I was talking to someone who works in the media about this trend.  Just think about this from an environmental perspective and from a cost perspective: think of how much space isn’t used for large portions of each day.  Homes aren’t used during the day while people are in the office working, and offices aren’t used for 40+ hours per week while people are at home.

The studies that have been done show that people working from home are more productive and creative in their own environments.  The benefits are discussed in this article from Aon Consulting.  And, in a very interesting self exploration, Inc. discusses their own process of going virtual here.  “We have been told by entrepreneurs, academics, and consultants that getting rid of the office and working remotely can make a company more productive, better for the planet, and cheaper to run.”

The Virtual Roadblock

So why aren’t we all working virtually?  The downside is the challenge of measuring what’s being produced.  The challenge is – for businesses large and small – that most people don’t know how to measure output – they only know how to measure input.  Whether you’re a business owner or a manager, what do you measure?  What I often see my clients measure is how many hours per day someone’s sitting in a seat.  Like my new clients, you probably don’t know if 6 of that employee’s hours are spent on FaceBook, or texting, or IMing.

The Secret: Measuring Output

You’ve got to learn how to measure and manage output.  How do you assess, for a specific position or area of responsibility, what the deliverables are?  What do you need to get out of that role?  If you’re just looking to have a seat filled – you could do that with a stuffed animal.  That’s not creating value for your business or company.

Critical Variables of Output

Some ideas to get you started include (these will vary greatly based on your business and the position):

-          Outgoing calls to clients or prospects

-          Sales numbers

-          Project timelines and milestones

-          Cases completed

-          Client comments

-          Successful client implementations

-          Profit margin per project

-          Customer service issues closed

-          Volume of data entry completed

What matters most to your business should be what’s measured, whether you go virtual or not.

What are some of the areas that you measure, and what’s preventing your company from going virtual?

Photo Titled “Bored at Work” by John McStravick

We’ve all heard and read about the power of positive thinking.

But how does that balance with the fact that people are more motivated to avoid pain than to move towards pleasure?

Growth versus Contentment

I think that the most successful and happy lives are led in the balance of growth and contentment.  If the scale is off balance towards the growth side, you exist in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction.  A few steps further and you’re in misery, hating your life, your family, your business, your team, or some combination thereof.

If your scale is tilted too far on the contentment side, you end up in apathy.  Growth and change are usually uncomfortable.  They require you to push outside of your comfort zone.  I believe forward movement is a key element in people feeling fulfilled with their lives.

Is it better to react from a place of happiness than a place of misery?  The Law of attraction suggests that you get more of what you put out into the universe.  Positive thinking suggests that positive thoughts create positive results.

Motivated by Misery

However when people feel stuck, trapped, or extremely frustrated by their present situation or circumstances, that is often the time that they’re willing to take the massive action required to make a change.  I’ve definitely seen that in my own life.  Some of the biggest and most successful changes I’ve made in my life, or periods of growth I’ve created for myself, have come from extreme dissatisfaction.  While I was confident in my ability to take the new path, and had some idea of where I was going, the dissatisfaction gave me the power and motivation to push through my comfort zone and do what was necessary.

Formula for CHANGE

Which brings us to the formula for change, sometimes called Gleicher’s Formula.

From Wikipedia:

D x V x F > R

Three factors must be present for meaningful organizational change to take place. These factors are:
D = Dissatisfaction with how things are now;
V = Vision of what is possible;
F = First, concrete steps that can be taken towards the vision.

If the product of these three factors is greater than
R = Resistance,

Then change is possible. Because D, V, and F are multiplied, if any one is absent or low, then the product will be low and therefore not capable of overcoming the resistance.

While their application was organizational change, I think the same reasoning can also be applied to you as an individual.

And You?

Maybe you’re not uncomfortable enough in your current situation?  Maybe you’re still too comfortable in your discomfort.  Or maybe you’re absolutely miserable, but lack a vision for what is possible.  Or maybe what you’re lacking are the first steps on this new course.

Are positivity and a rosy vision of the future more important in motivating and affecting actual change?  Or are agitation and misery the key to creating a life of your dreams?  And since life is a journey, how much of it do you have to spend in misery to keep growing effectively?

What you think?  What’s been the most important factor in major positive changes in your life?  Dissatisfaction?  Or vision?

Photo by: Jeremy Mates

If you’ve done work to improve your selling skills, you might have come across the expression “SWSWSWMO.”  Or Some Will, Some Won’t, So What, Move on!  Dealing with sales rejection is something every business owner has to face – and many have to coach your sales teams through it also.

So what’s the answer – BALANCE.

Learn from Each Lost Sale

Every time you lose a sale, there is something to learn: an opportunity to improve and save you time and make you more money in the future.  Let’s look as some possible learnings:

- Your Prospect was Not Qualified

All great sales people with high closing rates got there because of the skills they’ve developed in pre-qualifying.  Great sales people don’t have time to waste on the wrong opportunities.  As with many things in sales, it is a bit of an art, and a bit of a skill.  Prequalifying means you get as much information as possible to stack the deck in your favor.  These items include assessing budget/money, wants and needs, decision making, and timing.  Great salespeople don’t waste time with the wrong prospects.

- Did You Ask So They Felt Heard

Questioning is an important part of the sales process.  It helps you ascertain the prospect’s needs and explain how your product or service fills that want.  Questioning also shows your prospect that you understand her.  Being understand is a basic human desire.  If a prospect doesn’t feel like you “get” her, she’s not going to buy from you.

- There Wasn’t a Match or Win-Win

While improving your selling skills so that you can sell ice to Eskimos can be profitable in the short term (and working on your skills is always valuable), the long term health of your company will be determined by creating great value and experiences for your customers.  That can only happen if you have the right customers and create a win-win scenario with them.  If your product or service isn’t a great fit for them, don’t sell it to them.  You might have a short term gain, but it won’t pay off in the long term.

MOVE ON

While you want to pause enough to pick up any learnings to improve your selling skills, you don’t want to get stuck in the past or in the ones you lose.  Remember, the best time to make a sale is on the heels of another sale.

What other things have you learned from lost sales?

Photo By: Pete Simon

Do you own a business that you love, and you’re proud of, and is successful — but sometimes makes you crazy?  Or maybe the picture is a little less rosy.  Maybe your business isn’t where you want it to be, and you’re a bit burned out and struggle to find the energy to turn it around.

You are not alone.

Love Lost

Many business owners have businesses that they have fallen out of love with.  It could be because:

– The business is not producing the results you expected.

– You love your business and what you do, but have been doing it for so long it’s gotten stale.

– The business is more work and/or more frustration than you want.

– Your life as a business owner isn’t what you expected.

– There is values misalignment or drama amongst your team that makes you not want to go to work.

If you find yourself relating to any of the above, and it’s more than just a one-off bad day every once in a great while, what do you do?  TAKE ACTION!  Here are some ideas to get you moving.

1. Quit

In Seth Godin’s The Dip, he explains how often successful people quit.  The saying “Quitters never prosper” is nonsense.  Winners quit all the time — they just quit the right things at the right time.  Of course, the trick is determining when is the right time to quit.  How do you know whether you are:

– In a dip that is a part of every learning and growing process that you must push through to get to the next level?

– Or if you are in a dead end or have fallen off a cliff and need to close shop and forge a whole new path for yourself?

One way to gain some insight is to project out the current path that your business is on and see where you end up.  Another resource is to call on fellow business owners of similar businesses or at least similarly sized businesses, or business consultants, to get an outside perspective.

2. Fire C and D Team Members

I often tell my clients that the fastest way to change their businesses is to make changes in their team.  However most business owners fire underperforming or nonperforming employees too late.  They tend to make excuses for them and give them warnings and extra chances — while under estimating how much their business and the rest of their team are suffering.  If you’re a business owner who loves your business and still has a passion for helping your customers in whatever way you do but hates going to work, nine times out of 10 it is a team alignment and values issue.

The clinic is closed.  (There’s probably an entire blog post right there.)  You are in business to provide a great product and/or service for your customers, to create job opportunities in your community, to provide a return to the investors and owners, to create wealth for yourself, and hopefully to leave your legacy.  You are doing a disservice to everyone mentioned above when you keep around team members who are not A players.

3. Revisit Your Vision

When I hear that undercurrent of frustration and pointlessness in a clients’ voice, many times it is because they are drowning in minutia.  They have been sucked into firefighting and have forgotten what really matters to them about their business in the first place.  Revisiting your vision at this time is vital.  Ask yourself the big questions:

– What am I looking to achieve with my life?

– Where do I want my business to be in 20 years?  In 100 years?

– What impact is my business having on the lives of others?

4. Fire Yourself

Maybe the problem is that you’re in the wrong position in the business.  When you started the business, you wore all the hats.  You were everything from the CEO to the director of sales to the bookkeeper to the administrative assistant.  However, as the company’s grown, you are still wearing hats that don’t fit.  Sometimes, that might mean giving up even the CEO chair.  Stacey Bendet, founder and designer for alice + olivia, did just that so that she could stay focused on being a great designer and get someone with the right skill set to professionally manage her company.  Craig Newmark is another famous example of a founder of a very successful company (Craigslist) who hired someone else to run his company.

However, you might be the perfect person to continue to run the business – but you’re stifling your company’s growth by not surrounding yourself with an all-star senior management team.  Stay the CEO, but hire a VP of sales to manage your sales team.  Or a CMO to run your company’s marketing department.  The challenge is (1) choosing someone better than you for the position (without ego or jealousy sabotaging the process or the hire), and (2) trusting this new leader you’ve hired and letting go of the reins to let her take over.

5. Get Help

(Subtle shameless plug to follow.)  Find someone, like an advisor, a consultant, a coach, a mentor, or a board member, who will help you navigate the murky waters you find yourself in.  It should be someone who is trustworthy, experienced, and capable.  This person or group of people can help you decide which of the above strategies would be most appropriate given your circumstances and can support you in implementing the actions to create the needed change.

An Ounce of Prevention…

When you feel yourself losing energy, passion, and/or enthusiasm, act fast and dramatically.  Unfortunately, burnout is a slippery slope, and the further down that you fall, the harder to climb back out.  In fact, you’d be best served by following these five pointers on an ongoing basis and not waiting until you’re in crisis mode.

What else has worked for you or your colleagues to get you back from the brink?

Photo by Lightmatter

Whether you’re at the stage in your business where you are still having to work long hours or you have reached the point where your business is set up so working only a few hours will keep the engine running and growing, you want to make the most of your time.  Time is a completely non-renewable resource — once it’s gone, it’s gone.  Here are five tips to help you make the most of your time.  Choose at least one, and implement it today.

1.  Do not multitask

Hopefully by now everyone has heard this advice — but are you following it?  In David Allen’s Getting Things Done, he teaches that there is no such thing as multitasking, just a rapid refocusing of attention.  That refocusing takes time, effort, and energy.  That refocusing decreases our productivity.  The BBC describes a research study where individuals multitasking suffered a greater drop in IQ than those individuals on marijuana.  Christine Rosen, in her article “The Myth of Multitasking,” explains the rise of the phenomena and the mounting evidence against its effectiveness.

To do any major task effectively requires focus.  While you might be able to put out minor fires and keep up with your administrative tasks, you cannot advance your company without a chunk of time to invest your full attention.

2.  Checking e-mail at specific times only

Sometimes I think e-mail was designed to fill Stephen Covey’s Urgent-Not Important quadrant (as discussed in his best-selling book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People).  If you don’t manage your e-mail, it WILL manage you.  The first and simplest rule to follow is to turn off any incoming e-mail notifications and only check your e-mail at specific times during the day.  If you have an important project that requires thought and focus, do that first thing in the morning — BEFORE checking e-mail.

3.  Close your door

While you may be working in an environment where you don’t have a literal door to close, the important thing is to prevent your staff’s fires from driving your day.  You need to set boundaries so that you don’t end up spending your whole day doing your staff’s work.  Especially in open office environments, it is very easy for business owners to encourage mental laziness.  Whenever one of your staff has a question, he just jumps up and asks it.

As you do with e-mails, schedule and batch this task.  Create “office hours” to answer any questions that your staff might have.  Train them to solve their own problems unless they are at a complete impasse.

4.  Schedule realistically

It takes observation and experience to know how long tasks take.  As we discussed in the REWORK analysis on their criticism of planning, people overestimate how much they can get done in a given period of time.  With tracking and practice, you can become proficient in estimating how long tasks take.  Then you must become realistic in your scheduling.  I understand your product launch is behind schedule and that you don’t have another two weeks to wait; but, if the remaining tasks take two weeks, don’t set yourself up for frustration and failure by only allocating one week.

5.  Create a daily Top 5 task list

In the effectiveness classic How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie tells the story of a consultant who creates tremendous value in a company simply by making them list the top five priorities for each day before their day begins.  How much time do you spend each day choosing and planning what you will achieve that day?  This one habit alone will move you from the reactive state to the proactive one.

Make a Change

The only way to get different results is to take some different actions.  Which of the five ideas listed here do you practice and how do they work for you?  Which new one will you take on?

Photo by: Meddy Garnet

Some people plan too much.  Some not enough.  Here you’ll learn to plan just right.

Last week, we discussed the advice of the new business book REWORK (affiliate link to buy here) by 37signals to not plan.  This week, we’ll look at the right level of planning for entrepreneurs and small business owners — by looking at the original articles that 37signals’ blog was quoting and by reviewing what’s worked and what hasn’t for other clients in the past.

McGrath and McMillan’s Interview

Far from telling you not to plan in today’s rapidly changing world, these Ivy professors, in discussing their new book Discovery- driven Growth, espouse building learning and doing into the planning process.  Or, maybe more accurately, recommend learning as the main pillar of the planning process and recommend doing as early as possible in as small and low risk away as possible to begin to gather more and more information to enable better decision making.

MacMillan’s Steps in “Not Planning”

In the interview quoted by “Matt” in his blog, Professor MacMillan actually gives a rather lengthy planning process.  It includes:

1. Set a firm target of what you’d like to accomplish
2. Ask the following:
   1. What is the scope of what needs to be done?
   2. How much physically must happen?
   3. If I want to make x dollars, how much must I sell to get there?
   4. What are the activities I must undertake to deliver this plan?
   5. How will people know I have an offereing?
   6. How will people search for that offering?
   7. How will they be able to buy what I’m doing?
   8. What processes must be in place for them to be able to receive whatever I’m delivering?
   9. How are they going to use it?
   10. How do I need to service it?
   11. Document the assumptions and begin testing the offering and the assumptions at checkpoints
   12. Creatively invest only as you learn

How to Plan Around the Planning Fallacy

In Yudkowsky’s post, he references a very small research study showing that people overestimate how much they can get done in a given time period – or, more accurately, when they will finish a project.  I am not at all surprised by this finding.  When I work with clients to teach them planning and to improve their workflow, they are usually starting from a point of pretty low performance.  Because of their lack of experience and practice in planning, they don’t know how long things take.  They do not have a sense of time.

So while “Matt” of 37signals recommends throwing out planning, Yudkowsky mentions a technique to improve your estimation skills.  He suggests taking an outside in approach (or big picture view) instead of an inside-out approach (or detail/task level orientation).  Instead of listing all the tasks and figuring out timing from the bottom up, recall similar “sized” tasks or projects and estimate the time to completion based on that past experience.  This method tends to give a much more realistic answer.  One reason is that people underestimate how long individual tasks take, forget certain tasks, and don’t factor in sick days and other administrative time and overhead.

Practice Makes Perfect

What is not mentioned in either of these articles is the idea that with practice, you can actually improve.  Planning is a skill that can be learned.  The more you plan, the better you become at planning.  Most people are bad at estimating how long tasks take and how many and which tasks are required for a project because they haven’t done project planning in the past.

The process to get better is similar to that of other skills:

-          Learn the skill – either through training or trial and error

-          Execute/practice the skill

-          Analyze your results

-          Repeat

To speed the process, you could hire a professional consultant or coach with expertise in the area.

The Balance between Planning (Analyzing) and Doing (Executing)

The problem with most small business owners I know isn’t that they plan too much – it’s that they don’t plan enough.  Or they spend their planning and analyzing time on the wrong things.  Of course analysis paralysis is a potential issue – especially for perfectionists.  But jumping into a new business line or product or service without some basis forethought is irresponsible.  Do you need a 40 page plan?  Probably not.  But you need the basics:

1. A sound financial model
2. A basic marketing plan – are there customers?  How are you going to find them and attract them?
3. A vision of your end goal

As Jack Canfield likes to say – you can get from New York to San Francisco with only seeing a few hundred yards in front of your car.  However, it’s important to know you want to go to San Francisco not Los Angeles.  Going fast in the wrong direction isn’t helpful.

Find the Balance

If you’re lost – you don’t know what you’re doing, where you’re going, or why you’re doing it – you could probably benefit from some more planning.  If you don’t have a lot of movement, but a lot on paper or on your computer’s mindmaps – you probably need to do some more executing.

A smart level of planning will pay major dividends in time, money, and happiness.

Photo Credit: Jason Rogers

Since the release of the best-selling book REWORK by 37signals, I’ve had several clients excitedly tell me that they don’t need to plan.  They already weren’t planning (in ways, to their peril), and they were excited to hear that they didn’t need to start.  I’m always open to learning new things so I decided to investigate this advice.  My understanding is that the book is a repackaging of their blog “Signal vs. Noise.”  In searching the blog, I found two articles from last year about planning:

The only plan is learn as you go (May 5, 2009), and

The planning fallacy (June 12, 2009).

Let’s look at these two articles in more detail.

The only plan is to learn as you go

In this article, the author argues that plans are only guesses that the only plan you should be making is on improvising.  He quotes Rita Gunther McGrath from Columbia University and Ian McMillan, the Wharton professor on innovation and entrepreneurship (and someone I had while I was at school there), and cites an interview on Knowledge@Wharton with these professors and authors.  After reading the blog post and the entire interviews, I do not see how the author of this post could have arrived at the conclusions that he did unless he only read the introduction to the article and the first few questions and answers of the interview.  More details on McMillan’s definition of “non-planning” in Part 2 of this post.

The planning fallacy

Here the author quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog post called the Planning Fallacy.  Again he picks and chooses from the original article (which is itself a summary of other people’s research) to make his point.  The experiments quoted here show that people are overly optimistic in their assessments of how long it takes to complete projects and tasks.  And while Yudkowsky’s article concludes with suggestions to overcome the planning fallacy and to improve your ability to make time projections, “Matt” advises you to skip the “messy planning stage.”

How they get so far off

Like many traditional journalists and religious fundamentalists, Matt found quotes to support his beliefs.  Unarguably 37signals is an impressively successful company and maybe this “no planning” philosophy works for them.  But because of their success and their marketing skills, they are now in a place to influence others with their thoughts and ideas.  When those ideas are drawn from the miscontextualizations of the derivatives of other people’s work, be careful.

To be continued:

NEXT WEEK:  Smart planning.  We’ll revisit the interview with McGrath and McMillan and the article by Yudkowsky to see how we as business owners and entrepreneurs we can become more successful using planning in a smart effective way.

I work with business owners every day.  Some of them are in places that they never wanted to be.  They are doing things that they never wanted to do.

I’m not in the Gary Vee camp that says you have to be 110% passionately in love with everything you do every second of the day.  I’m a really happy person, and I love my life.  I am blessed in so many ways.  I am much more in Covey’s camp that says that everyone has to do thing things they don’t like at times.  Part of success is discipline.  And often a part of discipline is doing stuff you don’t naturally want to do.  Covey talks about how discipline brings freedom (the discipline to practice the piano gives you the freedom to play beautiful music).  If you’ve set your life up well, the time spent doing things you aren’t excited about is minimal.  If you’re really spiritually mature, you can be happy in the face of a wide range of circumstances – even bad or unpleasant ones.

But life isn’t a trial run.  Too often, I see clients get focused on the fires that are right in front of them and ignore the fact that they’re on a ship going someplace they don’t want to end up.  In Covey’s discussion of Habit 2 – “Begin with the End in Mind” he says:

“It’s incredibly easy to get caught up in an activity trap, in the busy-ness of life, to work harder and harder at climbing the ladder of sucess only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall.”

STOP!

Is your ladder leaning against the wrong building? Where do you want to end up?  If you project out your current business (who you’re working with, who you’re helping, the type of work you do day-to-day), is it a journey you are excited about taking?  If everything goes swimmingly, do you want the business you’re building?  Or have you been so busy running as fast as you can that you didn’t even know you were going someplace you don’t want to be.

Photo by: Pavel Tcholakov