I was once on a scuba diving trip to the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, and one of the dive masters who knew a lot about marine life would always say, “The more you know, the more you see.” With over 1,500 species of fish, 1,000 species of mollusks and crustaceans, and…
DetailsPeople with a strong business and entrepreneurial sense are always praising the merits of focusing. They focus on their strategic priorities. They focus on the numbers, benchmarking wherever it makes sense. They focus on the company’s core values, unique selling proposition, and so on. They do so because it is the best way to optimize…
DetailsThere are a couple of situations when it makes good sense to include an interview with a sales candidate’s spouse. The first situation is when you’re seriously considering hiring a salesperson from a competitor. The salesperson may be playing you off against his current employer for a raise. Asking to include the spouse in the…
DetailsIn a world of increasing stakeholder expectations and decreasing resources, aggressive cost cutting programs have run their course. Where do you turn next? Increasing a company’s revenues and gross margins, and knowing where (and how) to reduce costs without negatively impacting customer satisfaction, employee productivity and morale, or business processes that are working effectively requires…
DetailsIn the hurly burly of meeting deadlines, doing more with less, and achieving performance goals, it is easy to forget to keep up the dialogue with each of your staff about: How they are doing vis-à-vis their performance How they are doing vis-à-vis their well-being Their continuing development and growth
DetailsPerhaps the single most important part of evaluating an organization’s culture is gaining a clear understanding of the nature, viability, and sustainability of its revenue and funding streams, and the expectations and pressures that are exerted on the organization by customers, competitors, suppliers, regulators, taxpayers, and other forces in the external environment. This article discusses…
DetailsThe research and consulting firm, BlessingWhite, is currently offering a complimentary 2 1/2 hour session, called “Impacting Engagement in 2011: The Leader’s Role,” in many major cities around the U.S. Here they reveal an advance peek at the results of their brand new global survey on employee engagement. Check out the time and location in…
DetailsIn part one I expressed my despair that companies don’t do a more thorough job of selecting salespeople. My concerns stem from my years in the sales training business where I was too often brought into a company and asked to basically train pigs to fly. They wanted to train salespeople who, at best, should…
DetailsPrior to the 20th Century, millions of people died from diseases that could have been easily cured by an antibiotic like penicillin. For years, the world’s leading bacteriologists had searched for the missing piece to this medical puzzle. Many times they were looking right at it. But they always “saw” the penicillin mold as a…
DetailsThe Institute for Corporate Productivity recently came out with four recommendations for putting in place an effective, robust process for managing and recognizing individual performance. Focusing, as is their wont, on the practices of high performing organizations, their research found that:
DetailsWhen hiring for a position as critical as sales, I’m always surprised that companies don’t take the time to test candidates better than they do. I recognize that the HR department is ill equipped to test salespeople beyond the standard personality or temperament assessment but, even then, most seem loath to use these tools. It’s…
DetailsThe most powerful force in creating (or maintaining) organizational culture in work-groups is the personality and philosophy of life of the manager who leads the work-group. Traditional approaches to managing conflict in work-groups tend to view all members of a work-group as “equal,” but the influence of the work-group manager must be more heavily weighted…
DetailsBoston Consulting Group, in conjunction with an association of people management associations worldwide, completed a comprehensive on-line + live interviews study on how they are approaching strategic human capital development for the next decade. It’s called “Creating People Advantage 2010” and worth downloading if you are concerned with the strategic element of human resources in…
DetailsOrganizational culture and theoretical entities like electrons have some important things in common. First, the actual entities themselves are in principle invisible to the naked eye so while their “reality” has often been debated and doubted, the affects they have on things that can be seen and measured are very, very real – only a…
DetailsWhen you’re actively looking for a new salesperson, not everyone who passes over your electronic threshold is a prime candidate for the job of sales professional. To eliminate obvious misfits from the pile of responses you hope to get from your recruiting efforts, you need to have a filter through which you will pass the…
Details
