Employee Engagement – Are Your Employees Emotionally Starving To Death?

October 3, 2012 by · Leave a Comment


If you want to improve employee engagement, you must take the first step. (RT @stopthevanilla: RT @stopthevanilla: Employee Engagement – Are Your Employees Emotionally Starving To Death?

Most companies suck at providing specific programs to create a culture for employee engagement. No wonder less than 25% of all employees are dissatisfied with their job. Is any wonder that over 50% of your workforce in any given month goes onto job boards to see if the grass is greener somewhere else.

Barry Deutsch

IMPACT Hiring Solutions

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/blog

See on www.therainmakergroupinc.com

Filed Under: Uncategorized ·

How Leaders Are Creating Engagement In Today’s Workplaces

September 25, 2012 by · Leave a Comment


If there’s one topic that continues to persist in the minds and radars of most leaders today, it’s the issue of employee engagement.

Why do some many leaders, executive, CEOs, and HR professionals struggle with creating executable programs around engagement?

Barry Deutsch

IMPACT Hiring Solutions

http://www.impacthiringsolutions.com/blog

See on www.tanveernaseer.com

Filed Under: Uncategorized ·

Bullied By the Boss ~ scary statistics

September 23, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

The Daily Mail reported on new evidence in The Lancet that being bossed around at work could raise the risk of employees having a heart attack by a quarter.

Have you ever been bullied by a boss? Ever feel like you’re back in High School being screamed at by your coach. You’re too old for this crap! Why do you put up with it? How can CEOs and executives tolerate this behavior? What does it say for your culture and values of the way you treat people?

Barry Deutsch

IMPACT Hiring Solutions

See on bulliedbythebossblog.blogspot.fr

Filed Under: Uncategorized ·

Employee Recognition: Giving Praise Is NOT Optional

September 19, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

Giving Praise for a Great Job Well Done

Many employers believe it’s unnecessary to reward employees for a job they are getting paid to do, but what employers need to understand is that materialistic reward systems are not at all the same as recognizing employees …

 

This is exactly what I talk about in my speaker program on You’re The Person I WANT To Keep: Employee Motivation and Engagement. You must praise people when they do an exceptional job – when they knock the ball out of the ballpark. Yet, praise – recognition for doing an exception job above and beyond the call of duty – is frequently not mentioned, paraded in front of peers, or given an appropriate round of applause.

And that’s a complete turn-off to your best performers. They’ll start leaving over time when required praise is not given.

When was the last time you gave your employees praise for an exceptional job well done?

Do you keep a list of every major accomplishment for the entire organization day by day – whether the accomplishment was by a team or an individual? If you don’t know who is making great impact in your organization, how can you praise? If you don’t praise, how can you expect your employees to be satisfied, motivated, turned on, and engaged?

Starting tomorrow, begin making a list everytime someone in your organization EXCEEDS expectations (I guess this means you need to start defining expectations). Within minutes of hearing of this extraordinary achievement, some executive should be patting that individual on the back and giving sincere and heart-felt praise. This tiny, almost trivial activity will generate a cultural revolution within your organization. Try it for a few months and see if it doesn’t dramatically improve employee satisfaction, performance, and engagement.

Barry Deutsch

Read the full article on www.presentaplaque.com for the details for giving praise as a key component of a non-monetary reward and recognition system.

Filed Under: employee satisfaction, retaining top talent · Tagged: , , , , ,

View the Video of the Top Ten Hiring Mistakes

March 26, 2012 by · 1 Comment

Top Ten Hiring Mistakes - Hiring Errors

On our Hire and Retain Top Talent Blog, we recently posted a video of our Research Project titled The Top Ten Mistakes in Hiring. You can download a copy of the Executive Summary of the Top Ten Hiring Mistakes Research Project by clicking here. The blog post with the video of the Top Ten Mistakes in Hiring can be found by clicking here.

In the video we identify which of the 5 components of our Success Factor Methodology can be used to overcome each of the Top Ten Hiring Mistakes.

We teach the Success Factor Methodology in our popular workshop “You’re NOT the Person I Hired” which is named after our best-selling book by the same title. You can download a digital version of our book on raising hiring accuracy and eliminating hiring mistakes by clicking here.

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: hiring top talent · Tagged: , ,

Don’t Use LinkedIn – Funny and Sad at the Same Time

February 25, 2012 by · 2 Comments

ostrich with it's head buried in the sand

Mic Johnson wrote a funny blog article titled “20 Reasons Why Your Business Should NOT be on LinkedIn.” I almost fell out of my chair laughing and then realized he had nailed it –  most companies are resisting or ignoring using new tools, such as LinkedIn. It is the number one business networking and referral tool in existence. It just keeps building in importance.

Are you being a ostrich when it comes to using LinkedIn?

This resistance unfortunately allows your competitors to gain a strategic advantage over you in attracting talent, sales, marketing, lead generation and nurturing, and customer service. These tools are here to stay and the more effective and efficient companies are implementing them through-out their business. The real interesting element of social media is that it levels the playing field for entrepreneurial companies and small businesses to do things that traditionally only a large company with lots of resources could do in the past. Now you can achieve comparable results quicker and easier.

I reprint below the 20 funny reasons why you shouldn’t be on LinkedIn (Mic did a great job in pulling these together):

1. You will take a cold call over a warm, or even hot, call every day of the week. 

2. You think business can only be done face-to-face even though relationship building (isn’t that what business is all about?) happens every single day online. 

3. You believe that you (and your employees) 30% complete profile with no summary, no picture and zero recommendations doesn’t reflect poorly on you or your business.

4. You don’t have time to spend a couple of hours on LinkedIn each week to research prospects because you are too busy doing the same sales techniques you’ve used your entire career. 

5. You don’t want to participate in forums that make you or your business look like subject matter experts in your industry.

6. You don’t want to read blog articles and stories from people in your professional network that may help you or your business.

7. You don’t want to take the time to give recommendations to people that you’ve worked with throughout your career that are awesome because there isn’t anything in it for you.

8. When customers or prospects search for you on LinkedIn, you want to make sure they can’t find you. And if they do, you want to make sure that your personal profile and company page don’t tell them anything of value. 

9. You know for a fact that none of the 150 million people on LinkedIn are your customers or prospects.

10. You know that LinkedIn is adding 2 people every second (up from 1 person a second a year ago) but those people probably won’t ever want to buy anything anyway. 

11. You don’t want to share your personal and professional brand with people because that would be bragging. Even though they want to know. Everyone knows that, in business, it’s always better to not give people what they want.

12. You don’t want to know more about people that you are doing business with or would like to do business with.

13. You believe, with all of your heart, that there is no value in keeping up with what is going on in your professional network (such as new business deals, new hires, new products and services, etc.).

14. You have all the business you will ever need and aren’t interested in generating more.

15. You prefer to limit your prospecting and sales activity to the two networking groups you belong to and the five coffees and lunches you try to set up each week.

16. You don’t see any value in updating your LinkedIn status regularly to tell your professional network about things that may help them. 

17. You think tools like LinkedIn aren’t fundamentally changing the way business is done.

18. You don’t want your employees spending time on a tool that can help enhance your brand, your reach, and open up the lines of communication. 

19. You don’t want to find talented people to work for you or get recommendations from people that they are connected to on LinkedIn. A two-page resume and a 1-hour interview give you all you need to make a $50,000 decision. 

20. You think you’ve done your job on LinkedIn by having an “ok” profile “just so you’re out there” and see nothing wrong with having a LinkedIn inbox full of invitations and messages you haven’t responded to.

 

Here’s my personal example of what LinkedIn has meant to me: LinkedIn has allowed me to expand my executive search practice to new clients by at least 30% over the last 3 years, during tough economic times, and at the same time reduce my costs of conducting a search by 50%. This means I can offer my clients better service, at a substantially reduced fee, while my profit increases, and my efficiency improves at a geometric rate. There are thousands of these examples for every imaginable type of business.

After you laugh or cry when you read these 20 reasons of why you shouldn’t be on LinkedIn, I’d like to consider when you’re going to put a plan in place to integrate the tool in the day-to-day aspects of doing business – in almost every function in your company. One of the greatest ROIs can come from recruiting better talent. Start there, and then expand it into sales, marketing, customer service, and employee engagement.

What’s your biggest hurdle/roadblock in not doing this immediately?

To read Mic’s full article, please click the link below:

20 Reasons Why Your Business Should NOT be on LinkedIn

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: social media ·

Can You Handle Being on Stage as a Leader?

February 12, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

Great Leadership Blog

Beth Armknecht Miller is a Vistage Chair in Atlanta who provides a great role model of leveraging social media to create a personal brand around being a Vistage Chair. She does a great job using social media tools to amplify her message as a Vistage Chair in her community. One of the blogs I follow is the Great Leadership Blog by Dan McCarthy. I stumbled across this guest blog post by Beth on that blog titled “Don’t Let the Pebbles Cover the Rocks“.

Beth talked about the importance of not letting the urgent overwhelm the important in this article. If you’ll remember the writings of Steven Covey in the Seven Habits of Effective People, this was one of the key downfalls of most individuals – they let the urgent dictate their lives.

My focus was on a particularly interesting comment Beth made in her blog article that stuck in my mind. Many of you know that I coach High School Girls Basketball. We just finished our league season. The comment Beth made me reflect back over the last 6 months on my personal leadership, my ability to “control” my emotions and the other coaches I’ve observed in 100s of high school basketball games since the beginning of September. We have 3 levels in our program and each level has played over 50 games each. I announce all of our boys games for home games at our High School. Plus I run a youth club team with over 100 kids. That’s observing a lot of games. Here’s the comment Beth made about leadership:

And finally, having the skill to manage your emotions in times of the urgent is critical to leadership success. Many leaders forget that they are “on stage”. Their employees are always looking to them for emotional and behavioral cues. So when something or someone becomes that pebble, you need to kick up your level of emotional intelligence. Step back and think before you react.

 

I realized that the girls who played for me looked to me for guidance, inspiration, and focus. The lessons I’ve learned from coaching have helped me in my personal business, executive search practice, and in coaching my clients to be more effective in retaining top talent.

Observations:

Very few basketball coaches have good control of their emotions and are able to effectively communicate with their teams. Their style is measured in extremes – from pure joy to outright anger. They talk about being ethical and value-based in their style out one side of their mouth, and out the other side swear at their players, abuse the referees, and trash talk the opponents. I have to ask myself what type of contradiction that sets up in the minds of young student-athletes. Perhaps, it prepares them for a lifetime of abusive and terrible bosses. Is there a significant difference in this aberrant behavior by coaches of high school girls vs. CEOs at entrepreneurial companies.

I may sometimes wonder if the girls on my team are paying any attention to what I am saying or doing during practices or games. I then realize they are focused on me with laser attention – every action, word, verbal or non-verbal comment is absorbed, analyzed, digested, and filed away for future use. I create a very open team environment where my girls can feel free to say anything they want without the feeling of retribution for being open. I am reminded of being on stage for them when I hear things like:

Why is that other coach yelling at his team?

Coach Barry – don’t forget to breath

Can you believe what that coach just said to the referee? How about that parent behind us who just yelled that comment – isn’t that inappropriate?

Coach Barry – when you sit down on the bench we feel you’ve given up on us.

My coaching peers frequently ask me why I don’t yell at the referees when I am upset about their calls. I tell them that the referees are doing their best job and sometimes they make mistakes under difficult situations and pressure. I ask them how they would feel if I yelled at them every time they made a mistake.

Top talent will not put up with a boss who cannot control their emotions. Members of a sports team will stop working hard when they don’t trust or believe in their coach. Employees are no different. If you’re going to be a “nut-case” and not coach/manage from a values-based approach all the time, then you should just forget about ever retaining top talent.

One of the top 3 reasons top talent decides to leave is that they lose their trust in you as THEIR leader. Not being able to control your emotions and not being able to “walk the talk” of your values is one of the fastest methods to lose good people. How many of your managers and executives have no clue how to manage with values and control their emotional state? Are they capable of learning? Should you send them to charm school? OR is it time to move on and hire better managers. You managerial and supervisors will dictate the caliber of team that delivers the front line of your service. If you’ve got “BAD” managers in those roles, you’ll never achieve long term continual success since they will only be able to hire and retain average and mediocre candidates who can’t find a job elsewhere.

Have you ever played on a team for a coach who couldn’t control their emotions – have you ever worked in an environment where the CEO or manager couldn’t control their emotions? What did you do about it?

My experience is that the entire culture/style/values of the team, group, department, or organization is set by the coach or leader? Do you have managers in your organization contributing to dysfunction?

If you would like to read the full article, click the link below:

Don’t let the Pebbles Cover the Rocks

 

Barry Deutsch

 

 

 

If you would like to read the full article, click the link below:

Don’t Let the Pebbles Cover the Rocks

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: culture, leadership best practices, retaining top talent · Tagged: , , , , ,

Why do most companies keep recreating the wheel?

January 25, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

Wordpress Content Management System

I had an interesting conversation at a presentation yesterday at one of my clients where we were working on performance management improvement. The topic of knowledge sharing came up. Various managers, staff, and field techs keep coming across similar problems and resolutions, yet it doesn’t get shared. I’m curious how other organizations “institutionalize” or “formalize” knowledge sharing beyond the weekly/monthly group meeting. How does this information get stored as part of the organization’s history?

An easy recommendation I’ve making to my clients to immediately start down this path is to just starting using a Content Management System internally like a blog – such as WordPress – to collect, store, and circulate knowledge. Easy to use and set-up and every person within minutes can learn how to add information.

Anyone else have experience with companies using a structured approach to knowledge sharing without spending thousands of dollars on expensive software?

I find in many of my entrepreneurial clients, those in the 50-150 person range, have no formal tool to collect knowledge and share it with other employees, new employees, and customers. Everybody is an isolated silo. Even though three of our staff have faced this same exact issue before, let’s allow the new guy to stumble through it again, recreating the wheel, and making the same mistakes we know will happen.

This sounds so dysfunctional that information is not shared other than the occasional “lunch-n-learn”, staff meetings, or the rare group training (in which we forget 90 percent of what we’ve heard and learned within 48 hours).

I am recommending to all my clients that have a workforce and client base with the following needs that they immediately implement putting wordpress on their website and using it both internally as a knowledge base, and externally, as a marketing engagement tool for clients:

  • Success stories to share with all employees and clients
  • Problems and their resolution
  • Feedback on projects
  • Updates for clients on projects
  • Client understanding of your solutions
  • Case studies
  • Technical Training and Updates
  • Product Information and Updates
  • Project Collaboration
  • Sales Call Reporting – beyond the information in your CRM system
  • Field Tech/Customer Call Reporting – beyond the information in your CRM system
  • Company Newsletter
  • Self-paced on-line training

 

The list is endless when you start including downloads for video, audio, mobile updates from the field off ipads and smartphones. Layer on top of the internal value you get: Imagine the ability to interact real time, improve communications, and engage at a deep level with your existing and potential customers.

There are other more rigorous and expensive solutions. WordPress could be the least expensive (it’s free – and quickest method to implement a knowledge base immediately) You always have the option to scale it up and transfer the content to another system in the future. Your IT professionals can quickly master how to support the software and your staff can be easily trained. You can also outsource the support of your wordpress installation to an expert, for a very low monthly fee (this is my approach).

I can’t think of an easier solution to get a knowledge base up and running within days, and start to see the immediate impact.

I am conducting a research project for companies interested in launching a knowledge base that can be used internally and externally for marketing. I will take the first 10 companies to raise their hand and I’ll walk them step-by-step through the launch and management of their knowledge base using WordPress. I will do this on a complimentary basis to form the foundation for my research project. Shoot me a note if you’re interested in being part of the initial research group.

This new service and direction comes from our observation that one of the greatest challenges in most companies in building high performance teams and organizations is a lack of knowledge sharing among the management team in how to do it. Training is one element of the solution (most managers and executives don’t have equal training), and the other primary failure point is a lack of sharing of specific past experiences and “details”on how to do it.

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: employee peformance, leadership best practices · Tagged: , ,

Do You Challenge Your Sales Team To Keep it Fresh?

January 16, 2012 by · Leave a Comment

The Sales Archaeologist Blog

Frank Belzer wrote an interesting challenge in one of his older posts that I stumbled back upon in my archive for sales management. After having been in the executive search field for more than 25 years, one of the things I’m very proud of is a constantly evolving understanding of hiring top talent and sharing that with our clients. We’ve never been stuck in the same approach the vast majority of recruiters use:

  • We have a better rolodex
  • We’re experts in this field
  • We have lots of candidates in our database

That was the mantra 25 years ago and it’s tired and worn out today. Most managers and executives get weary of hearing recruiters pitch the same old story over and over.

 

History provides us with many examples of change and of methods becoming outdated. When the Greek armies conquered the world in 300BC under Alexander the Macedonian Phalanx was cutting edge technology. Five hundred years later at the battle of Cynoscephalae – it was not. The new Roman formation was more mobile and was able to outflank and crush the Greek Army.

Last week I had an opportunity to do a lot of sales training, far more than normal and it was pretty clear to me that so many times as sales professionals we revert back to old methods that although comfortable, often allow the prospects to outflank us resulting in a lack of clarity or a lost deal.

Chances are if you have been using the same methods for too long a few things have happened.

prospects are wise to your strategy – they are in control
you are just going through the motions – no passion
the method you are using is a combination of softened styles that cater to your weaknesses

Part of staying sharp and successful as a sales person involves looking for new ways to say things, new methods to reach people, new questions to ask and just continuing to grow and develop. If the Macedonians had done that at Cynoscephalae then the formation and methods that the Roman army faced would have been quite different as perhaps would have been the outcome.

 

When you interview sales candidates or sales managers, do you probe for how they keep their stories, pitches, turnarounds, handling of objections, and presentations fresh and interesting? If you look at your own sales organization, how much do you challenge that group to be fresh, have latest information, and provide a “differentiated” set of data to your clients? Or are your sales candidates still pretending like it’s 1970 and what worked then will work now?

To read Frank Belzer’s full article, click the link below:

How Fresh is Your Sales Methodology?

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: sales management · Tagged: , , , , ,

LinkedIn Offers Powerful Tools for your Sales Team

January 12, 2012 by · 1 Comment

LinkedIn for Sales

Are you training your sales professionals in how to use the advanced features of LinkedIn for marketing, introductions, and relationship building? If not, are you potentially ignoring a tool that could dramatically leverage your time and effort? If you have not gone down this path yet, what’s holding you back?

Here’s a few ideas:

  • Does everyone in your company have a LinkedIn Account?
  • Has each person input their entire contact list to check who they know is already on LinkedIn?
  • Have your sales professionals used their own contact list and that of everyone in the company to identify potential buyers at target companies who already know someone in your company – through which a warm introduction could be obtained?
  • Do your sales people use the profile manager and tagging to sort, manage, email, and nurture potential contacts?
  • Do your sales professionals all have impressive profiles fully filled out and an extensive LinkedIn Company Page?
  • Are your sales professionals using the advanced features of LinkedIn, such as blogging, presentations, video, reading lists, and others to engage with potential clients?
  • Have you brought in or hired a LinkedIn Sales Trainer to teach and train your team?
  • Have you sent your sales people to online e-courses/webinars to learn how to adapt LinkedIn to their unique selling approach?

Do you have a precise plan of how to bring your entire sales team up to speed on using LinkedIn to improve sales?

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: sales management, social media · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,
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