Sterling Performance

What does it take to be a really bad boss? David Silverman reveals all in “11 Habits of the Worst Boss I Ever Had”, a timeless collection of how to confuse, intimidate and generally exasperate employees. I don’t want to steal his thunder — it’s worth reading for yourself.

But a few jumped out because they perfectly encapsulate the right-meaning, wrong-thinking boss who inhabits a parallel universe to your own.

You know the type: nice enough, but unpredictable and unaware of your skills needs or progression. They’ll remind you to do something you’ve been doing in your sleep for months, yet expect you to handle a problem far beyond your level of expertise.

Silverman nails three particular traits of the well-intentioned boss:

1. If you don’t like it, you don’t like it. You don’t have to explain. They just need to make it better. If you give them too much direction, how will they learn?
2. Be careful not to get too wrapped up in your employee’s own goals. If you’re too supportive in helping them develop, they’ll leave you for another job. And that’s not good management.
3. Thank your employees — but only for efforts below their skill level. “Thank you for showing up today.” “Nice handwriting on that expense report.”

Possible remedies:

1. For under-directing, vague bosses, you could try repeating their woolly instructions back: ‘So that’s do more of X, less of Y, all of Z, by close of play today.’ Or email them a summary of Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey’s Situational Leadership. This essentially advises them on how to adapt their level of support and direction to the individual. It’s not subtle, but it might help.

2. Ask for an evaluation with inbuilt objectives on at least an annual basis. If needs be, create the first list of objectives yourself — if you’re expected to write your own job description, then do just that.

3. Tricky. Any suggestions?

What about you — do you have a boss who means well but gets it wrong? Or are you guilty of a few of Silverman’s management mishaps? How do you handle these situations at work?

Finding customers a little tougher to persuade? You can sell to just about anyone if you understand what motivates them. That’s the thinking behind a study covered in Contagious by M&C Saatchi, the ad agency.

M&CS’s “Reacting to Recession” breaks consumers down into eight types. If you can identify the ones that fit your business, you can tailor your offering to suit the times. Here’s how.

• Crash-dieters The largest segment at over 20 per cent of adults, they are reacting dramatically to the crunch, cutting back on all non-essentials and ‘shedding pounds’ from their weekly outgoings.
  Sales tip: This lot just aren’t buying. Better to focus on the following seven categories.
• Scrimpers These consumers want to maintain their lifestyle, so it’s about trading down, but not out — holidaying on the Isle of Wight rather than the Algarve, buying own-label brands, Primark and Aldi.
  Sales tip: Tim Duffy, M&C Saatchi’s chief executive, tells the Telegraph: “Scrimpers provide an opportunity for companies to up volume and up margin, if you can introduce the top-end products to attract them.”
• Abstainers Like the Scrimpers, they want to maintain their lifestyle, but are more likely to defer big buys, such as a new car or entertainment system, rather than simply downgrading brands.
  Sales tip: They may be persuaded by a good deal or the opportunity to buy now, pay later. Work your customer data to find a sales pitch that appeals.
• Clothcutters They don’t want to compromise on quality, so Clothcutters ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’ — that is, they might forego a new car in order to do up the kitchen or do without a summer holiday away but join a local gym with a pool.
  Sales tip: Show them what they are saving — how many months at the gym you can get for the average one-week holiday abroad. Or add value so that products work twice as hard.
• Treaters They reward their frugality — which goes against the grain — with little gifts. Lipstick purchase is used as an economic bellwether for this reason — it’s a classic low-cost luxury treat.
  Sales tip: There are opportunities here for the comfort providers — film rental and takeaway businesses that will profit from cheap nights in. Placement tactics are also worth considering: high-end, low-cost goodies such as Divine chocolate will look even more enticing against more mundane items in the Co-Op.
• Justifiers This is a big opportunity group. Happy to spend, solvent and likely to be single, they just need a good excuse. The iPhone’s launch-day buyers were classic Justifiers.
  Sales tip: What motivates justifiers are added value deals, special or limited offers and new models. Just give them a compelling reason to buy.
• Ostriches Could also be called ‘Dodos’ — ostriches are in denial and spending as if they’re living “Brewster’s Millions”. Some can afford to, but they are mostly young, carefree and unfamiliar with the concept of credit restraint.
  Sales tip: Warning! Great in the short term because they just keep on swiping the plastic, ostriches may struggle over the longer term to repay debts.
• Vultures These are your predatory opportunists. They are circling their favourite stores, making a killing on bargains, and are likely to swoop on property bargains.
  Sales tip: Don’t worry about catering to this customer. They’ll find you.

Nick and Julia (names changed) were together for seven years. When they first met Nick, who works in IT, was attracted to Julia’s bohemian lifestyle. A struggling jazz singer Julia and her free-spirited friends celebrated their freedom from the rat-race.

Once they’d moved in together, things quickly fell apart. Nick started to feel peeved with paying all the bills and regularly lending Julia her tube fare as she was broke (again). There were constant rows followed by painful long silences and the relationship ended.

So what of Nick? Since parting he hasn’t looked back. In the last 12 months he has been promoted to Head of Infrastructure and now looks after a team of six. Once the red mist had cleared it became obvious that his relationship had been holding him back.

Julia had always made him feel silly for wanting to work hard and achieve career progression. With no-one sneering over his shoulder, he had taken the plunge and asked to be promoted. Losing touch with Julia and her crowd opened up new doors, new people and new opportunities.

This is an example of the how the company we keep in our personal lives can be detrimental to our work lives.

Ok, so no one can make you behave or think in a certain way — the responsibility for  your choices lies with you. But the people we choose to allow into our lives have an impact on our views and perception of the world.

Who we choose to hang out with at work is equally important and can impact our careers and opportunities. Success in your career is influenced by who you know just as much as what you know. Like attracts like. If you are spending time with the ‘moaning and whinging’ crowd, the eternal victims who are always passed over for promotion, guess what? You’ll be next. Don’t assume those whinge sessions go unnoticed.

Take care as you pick as your mates, especially when you first join a company. Try to get to know as many people as possible and spend breaks with different groups. If someone spends the whole lunch hour complaining and full of negativity, give them a wide berth until you have a better idea of the office politics. Under no circumstances join in with the complaining to fit in. As the new person you’ll be under management’s radar.

The negative attitude will rub off on you, too. Before long a destructive work image will catch you off guard and become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Seek out positive role models in and out of work. Invite them out for lunch or catch up over a coffee. If you aren’t confident and don’t want to be direct, think of a project you are working on and invite them to share their viewpoint.

The more people you meet the luckier you’ll be in your career goals. Before you know it people will start seeking you out for all the right reasons.

Carlos Sastre won the Tour de France in Paris on Sunday. After three weeks and nearly 90 hours of racing he beat second-place Cadel Evans by just under one minute.

Sastre didn’t gain the race-lead in steady increments over the three weeks, nor did he do it as a result of having a better sprint finish or even by making a break on a flat part of the course.

No, Sastre’s victory was grounded in his decisive break along the hardest section of the 3,500km Tour.

The 13km, 1 in 10 climb to the ski resort of L’Alpe d’Huez comes at the end of a 200km stage that includes two further gruelling mountain climbs. As Sastre said about his two-minute victory over the main group of riders, or peloton, “I suffered a lot on the way to the summit …but I had to take the risk of attacking from the beginning of the Alpe d’Huez.”

In the business world we have daily evidence that the economy is taking a downturn. It is the sensible choice to hunker down, cut costs and bide your time in your own particular peloton. Then, as the economy picks up, you will be well placed to attack and grow.

Or there is an alternative strategy. Like Sastre you can pick the hardest part of the course to make your move. As your competitors focus on ‘making it through’ the fallout from the credit crunch, you have the opportunity to drive for longer-term growth and be way ahead of the competition when the economy improves.

In the past week both Amazon and McDonald’s delivered profit results that beat market expectations. My belief is that the management of these two companies, possibly unlike some of their competitors, is now focused on how they can build on their growth momentum and establish an even bigger lead in the market.

At the bottom of L’Alpe d’Huez Sastre climbed out of his saddle, cranked through the gears and rode through the pain to the summit and ultimate victory in Paris.

Where are the challenges in your business that will give you a worthwhile lead?

Photo by Celso Flores CC 2.0

Employers take note: there’s an online forum for employees to rate their company anonymously, whether they work their or not. Personnel Today’s podcast features a story (it’s about half way through, for the impatient among you) about Work Rewired.com, a website that ranks companies according to what employees say about them.

Employees rank companies on issues such as pay, training and career progression, with the RAC and Microsoft scoring well, while Boots languishes in the lower leagues.

Far from seeing it as a negative for businesses, founder Greig Harper believes the site provides HR professionals with a balanced view of the business as seen through its employee’s eyes. It’s also a valuable gauge of how the company’s perceived externally.

But what of the legal implications? As long as it’s true — or the employer cannot prove otherwise - the comments are non-defamatory.

A similarly controversial site targets doctors. Dotcommer and doctor Neil Bacon has launched a site for patients to rate their doctors — to the horror of many in the profession. The traditionally cliquey medical profession is divided as to whether this will knock the God complex out of doctors or unfairly tarnish medics in specialisms where mortality is high.

The threat of an annual MOT for doctors also divided the nation this week — the biggest question being: who will evaluate them? Something tells me a brain drain’s imminent…

(more…)

Iconic products are to become the new stars as consumers suffer from a dose of ‘celebrity fatigue’, says research from Datamonitor.

Marketers are advised that consumers are growing weary of overexposed stars such as David Beckham, whose, er, face endorses everything from Pepsi to Armani pants.

There’s also the unpredictable nature of your celebrity endorser — another Pepsi face, Britney Spears’s personal profile is said to have eclipsed that of the product she was advertising.

Consumers now want a level of interaction and accessibility that their idols don’t provide. Products such as the iPod, Threadless Ts and ‘eco-iconic’ designs allow for that interaction. But celebrities are necessarily removed — their value is, arguably, their inaccessibility.

Datamonitor’s senior analyst Richard Parker explains: “Consumers’ relationships with these celebrity-like branded products are based heavily on participation and interaction, two behaviours that are desired but rarely achieved by everyday people in their relationshiops with actual celebrity idols.”

The findings fit with the Coolbrands top 10 listing. The brand we consider coolest is the ultra-iconic Aston Martin, where the car is the star — a legacy association with James Bond affords it a useful celebrity-by-association. Among the others in the top 10, most allow the product to speak for itself.

Where celebrities are used, they are being ‘matched’ to the brand, rather than the other way around.

Even more low key, the 2008 Business Superbrands top 10 listing includes a number of classic British brands — BP, the BBC, Rolls-Royce — industry icons that, again, transcend the cult of personality.

That said, to the right of the Datamonitor story on ‘celebrity fatigue’ is news that Mick Hucknall’s appearing in Virgin Media’s star-studded campaign, Pamela Anderson’s joining Big Brother Australia, and Josh Hartnett’s going to endorse Armani fragrance. So we’re not quite exhausted yet.

Something to consider: the research could point towards a different approach to promotion. Allowing customers to get involved in creating or tailoring their product will lessen the need for traditional ‘face-led’ advertising. Co-creation models are going to lead the way, whatever the industry, according to business guru C K Prahalad, whose new book presents a template for change. More on this coming up!

Gen Y may have a better handle on cyberspace, but it’s awfully easy to get them to to blab their midemeanours with a little Twitterati trickery.

Snakes & Ladders picks up on the report by BusinessWeek in which Carnegie Mellon researchers posted two very different surveys online. One was a formal affair that promised confidentiality and was posted on a (fake) university website. The other had funny graphics and cartoons, with a devil cartoon and the header “How BAD are U?”

In the face of all this jollity, 50 per cent of respondents admitted to cheating on their taxes, while the formal site elicited the truth from just 25 per cent. Behavioural economist and the report’s co-author George Loewenstein suggests that confidentiality assurance acts as a red flag, reminding respondents that their responses could implicate them. The lighthearted and informal approach, meanwhile, blindsides them and gives them a (false, potentially) sense that it’s all in fun.

Aside from the big cautionary tale the research reveals — and the slightly sinister marketing alley it might lead someone down — there’s potential for this research to be used in recruitment and retention.

Employee surveys among Gen Y might be tailored to take a more informal approach. Is there a way a little informality could be built into recruitment, without, maybe, resorting to cartoons?

How do you stop a profligate person from over-spending? You could cut their expenses allowance or withdraw signing power. Or you could try something a little more benign — say, drawing a frown on their cheques, perhaps.

I’ve picked a facile example, but this is the idea behind a book creating a big buzz here — ‘Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness’, by University of Chicago professors Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

The basic premise is that nobody likes being ordered around, but people cannot be relied upon to act in their own best interests.

As Richard Reeves, Demos’s director, explains in his review of the book, “homo economicus”, or “Rational Economic Man”, is a myth. We are, instead, “ill-informed weak-willed and lazy”, more likely to go for instant gratification today than ‘jam tomorrow’.

So we need a little nudge in the right direction if we are to, say, put money into pension schemes. We’ll be put off by coercion — hence the idea of drawing smiley faces on a miser’s banknotes to encourage spending, or Schipol Airport’s decision to paint ‘targets’ onto men’s urinals to improve their aim and keep the floors clean.

As we are also heavily influenced by our peers, the trick is to use their behaviour to influence a decision. If you want to encourage people to consume less energy, it’s more effective to compare their use with their neighbours’ than insist they cut back.

Does it apply to business, too? Some corporate practices already have a nudge-like approach. Look at benchmarking — it uses peer performance to influence strategic decisions. Viral marketing and social-networking, too, capitalise on the power of peer persuasion.

Workplace health schemes such as those set up by BT are another source of benign intervention and it’s at policy level that there’s been most interest in Thaler and Sunstein’s theories in the UK.

Whether nudge applies to managers is another matter. Yes, it makes sense to incentivise good performance — but managers have espoused this idea for a while now.

Beyond that, there’s that tricky line between intervention and interferance. In the book, Thaler and Sunstein’s suggestion of a cooling-off period to guard against quickie marriages is overbearing. If you prevent mistake-making in business, you can thwart learning as well as the chances of accidental invention.

Paternalism is not a word well suited to the modern workplace, even in family businesses. There’s a danger of infantilising people — becoming a Mary Poppins manager. What’s more, if Thaler and Sunstein are right, the minute someone feels they are being manipulated or ‘manhandled’ into doing something, they’ll dig their heels in. Then it’ll take more than a nudge to encourage them.

Noting the effectiveness of one-word titles a la ‘Blink’, Reeves comes up with a next-seller of his own: ‘Wink: How Small Signals Transmit Big Messages’.

How about: ‘Leap: the Power of Uninformed Decisions’? or ‘Blip: the Little Mistakes That Spell Big Trouble.’

Any more one-word title suggestions?

Last week I spent a few days in the Swiss Alps. One beautifully sunny and clear afternoon I sat outside a mountain chalet amid the distant sound of cowbells and watched a Red Kite (the bird, that is) soar and circle above some meadows. After five minutes or so it swooped down to catch some prey, before flying off into the trees to eat its lunch.

The critical point for the Red Kite is deciding when to swoop and when to continue soaring. She is constantly looking out for prey and, once she has identified her potential victim, she must calculate her chances of a successful attack. Only then will she act.

This got me thinking about different types of decision-makers. I’ve identified three.

1. The Driver. This leader says “yes” to virtually every new opportunity that comes along. He has boundless energy but can tire out his team and, when the big opportunity finally arrives, the organisation can be too stretched to exploit it.
2. The Analyst. This manager wants absolute certainty before taking action and exasperates his team with the constant need for further information and the development and evaluation of more and more options.
3. The Red Kite. The Red Kite decision-maker understands that nothing is certain in today’s complex world and that she cannot consume precious resources chasing every opportunity.

Equally, she also knows that when there is a big opportunity that her organisation is capable of exploiting she must act. Self-confidence and the honest ability to trust your judgement are the hallmarks of this manager.

Perhaps the quintessential Red Kite leader is Steve Jobs. When he returned to Apple in the late 1990s he closed down several high-profile development projects and stated that his strategy was simply to “wait for the next big thing.”

As he continued to check progress in his own business against emerging developments in adjacent markets, he ultimately identified the potential of iTunes and the iPod. Apple has exploited the momentum gained to drive further developments such as the iPhone, as well as growing its Mac business

“Waiting for the next big thing” is the essence of the Red Kite leader. So is acting decisively once you have identified it. Being a Red Kite requires judgement, confidence in that judgement and a willingness to take prudent risk.

Are you a Red Kite decision-maker?

Photo by Alistair Duncan, CC 2.0 

Garth’s World offers some tips on making it through the summer sales drought.

1. Plan ahead and be ahead of targets already. (That last bit’s a joke, btw.)
2. Pipeline development. Which companies should you be doing business with? Go beyond your usual prospects.
3. Farm your client base. Add value with cross- or up-selling, longer-term revenue earners and other relationship-building sales options. Use your imagination.
4. Conduct your internal campaign. “Spend extra time in the CEO’s office listening to him blather on about his latest shiny object idea.” Talk to your colleagues in tech and business development. Make yourself popular inside the business.
5. And don’t call your prospects on holiday…. Desperation doesn’t sell.