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More on Leadership Deficits – The Test

September 23, 2014 Uncategorized No comments

Take No Prisoners is a free weekly memo from Scott Wintrip that explores how Radical Accountability prospers companies and changes lives. Instead of taking people hostage with outdated, heavy-handed, and ineffective methods of management, measurement, and motivation, Radical Accountability focuses on creating an unwavering responsibility for getting done what matters most.

Last week’s message on this topic received lots of acknowledgements as to the extent of this problem and requests for more on the topic.

Here are seven more questions, plus the original three, which will allow you to begin to measure the Leadership Deficit in your company. Double-check your answers. Many people report that some of their responses are what should be happening, not what’s really going on currently.

THE LEADERSHIP DEFICIT TEST

Do leaders unwavering…
1. hold people to the set standards or
2. justify when they do not?

Are managers…
1. regularly improving, evolving, and changing best practices or
2. allowing current processes to continue as the way business gets done?

Do leaders…
1. work to lessen the amount of multi-tasking being done or
2. promote multi-tasking?

Are the managers in your company…
1. consistently decisive in their decision-making or
2. more inclined to ponder things before taking action?

Do your leaders…
1. encourage and embrace mistakes or
2. focus on avoiding missteps and problems?

When listening to managers, do they tend to…
1. speak succinctly, often using metaphors and examples, or
2. talk in detail, explaining their points with precision?

Do leaders in your company…
1. regularly schedule and facilitate practice opportunities or
2. approach practice, if it ever happens, as an occasional event?

Do leaders spend more time…
1. creating roles or
2. filling open seats?

Are managers spending more time…
1. managing people or
2. the numbers?

Do leaders consistently…
1. anticipate or
2. react to production issues?

Tally up the number of “B” responses and multiply by 10. This number represents the percentage gap in the efficacy of your leaders and leadership function. By addressing each, making the “A” answer in each question the desired state, you’ll close this gap, effectively removing the deficit which is costing more than just money.

This Week’s Radical Accountability Activating Action: Take and score the test. Pick one area for improvement and start working, this week, on closing that gap.

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Closing the Leadership Deficit

September 17, 2014 Uncategorized No comments

Getting from here to a more profitable there isn’t just about charting the right course; it requires bridging the gaps. In many organizations, the biggest cracks are caused or widened by the leadership team.

Case in point is a very reputable staffing firm that has yet to live up to it’s full potential. Customers love them, candidates adore them, and they have the satisfaction scores to prove it. Yet, this company has yet to break through their self-imposed glass ceiling which keeps growth well below their market potential. What’s lacking is a leadership team that drives business versus reacting to the market, creates opportunities versus constantly solving problems, and innovates versus perpetuating the status quo. This deficit in leadership is all that’s keeping this outstanding firm from being more dominant and more profitable.

How big is the Leadership Deficit in your company? To get started, here are three of the critical areas to assess and address:

1. Do leaders spend more time creating roles or filling open seats?
One sure sign that there’s a Leadership Deficit is in the hiring being done by operational and sales leaders. Filling seats is a backwards looking exercise that maintains the status quo, while creating new roles demonstrates that these managers are looking ahead, creating and seizing opportunities ahead of your competitors.

2. Are managers spending more time managing people or numbers?
The numbers never lie, but there’re a terrible way to manage a company. Numbers should be used as just one indicator that informs leaders on how to manage, versus burying their heads in data that keeps them isolated from people. Managers need to spend hours more with their direct reports instead of just reading reports that never provide a complete picture.

3. Do leaders anticipate or react to production issues?
Poor results don’t just happen, yet, too many of today’s managers are consistently waiting too long to address the causes. The better leaders are watching for the slightest change in the pulse of the team and paying careful attention to the nuances in each individual from day to day. This active form of leadership is allowing them to avert problems and seize opportunities, propelling these companies to have better cultures and more consistent, positive results.

Plans are great, but the failure to have a plan that closes the Leadership Deficit makes achieving those plans difficult, if not impossible. These final months of the year are a great time to plan for a different and better outcome, and there’s no better place to start than planning for better leadership.

This Week’s Radical Accountability Activating Action: Identify which of the three areas needs the most attention and take action this week to begin to close the deficit in that area.

Follow me on Twitter! You can find me here: https://twitter.com/ScottWintrip
Every day I provide pithy pieces of advice and wisdom. Join the growing crowd who read these gems every day.

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Check out my podcast series called Simply Scott on iTunes.

If you’d like to reach me, email: scott@ScottWintrip.com or call my direct line: (727) 502-9182

Visit my web site: https://www.WintripConsultingGroup.com

Who’s the Next Contestant?

September 15, 2014 Uncategorized No comments

Scott's Monday Morning Message Like a game show where it’s anyone’s guess who’s going to win, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to predict which companies are going to buy next. At any moment in time, only 3% of companies are buying from a staffing or recruitment firm. During that same moment, another 6% are shopping, comparing candidates, prices, or contracts.

Unless you have only one customer, no one is smart enough to accurately predict, all of the time, who’s going to give the next “yes.” That’s why achieving greater or faster growth for many branches, business units, and companies in our business is as simple as expanding the pool of contenders.

Who’s the next winning contestant in this game for talent? Actually, the better question is:

Is your sales team talking with enough of the right, qualified entrants?

Priming The Collaborative Pump

August 27, 2014 Uncategorized No comments

Companies fall into one of three categories when it comes to collaboration:

It rarely happens.
It often happens.
It almost always happens.

In all three cases, there’s always room for improvement. The process visual below will help you find that improvement.

To get started, here are some definitions of the three elements required for a sustainable collaborative culture:

Mutually Assured Recognition: The efforts and contributions of all parties are recognized by all of the parties.
Public Displays of Affection: While PDA wasn’t okay when growing up, it’s vital in growing a more collaborative culture. Frequent, varied, and appropriate methods of showing gratitude is optimal.
Collaborative Primers: Just like priming a pump to churn water out of a well, collaboration often needs a nudge to get flowing. Leaders can do this through requests, formal and informal programs, and actively participating in the collaborative effort.

The numbers in the diagram represent what happens when an element is missing.

To use this as a diagnostic:

Look for which of three elements are missing, and add them in.
Assess which are being used sporadically and take steps to ensure they’re used more often.
Determine which of the numbers is the most accurate label for what’s going on to identify the missing or inconsistently used elements.

For example, if collaboration is happening, but there is clear evidence that some people aren’t aware of it (Collaborative Blindness), the element that’s not being used often enough, if at all, is PDA.

This Week’s Radical Accountability Activating Action: Use one of the three diagnostic methods to begin to enhance the level of collaboration in your team or within your entire company.

Follow me on Twitter! You can find me here: https://twitter.com/ScottWintrip
Every day I provide pithy pieces of advice and wisdom. Join the growing crowd who read these gems every day.

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If you’d like to reach me, email: scott@ScottWintrip.com or call my direct line: (727) 502-9182

Visit my web site: https://www.WintripConsultingGroup.com

Sustainable Action Plans

August 20, 2014 Uncategorized No comments

As a leader, one of your primary functions is to define the strategic direction of the company (what you are going to accomplish). The designing of how that result is going to happen is not your job as a leader, as this is the responsibility of your team. This is how you simply and sustainably generate buy-in as they create the action plan. You don’t just turn them loose to do this as you’ll need to ensure that the plan they create has the highest likelihood of achieving the desired outcome while also honoring your culture and values. So, you’ll be coaching your team through a four-step process:

1. Assess the current status and the desired end results
Accomplishment of any goal starts with honestly assessing current benchmarks, where you want them to be (the goals), and by when. With these beginning and end points in mind, along with a clear timeline for completion, creating a plan of action is easier to generate and implement.

2. Create a step-by-step roadmap
With clarity on the starting and ending points, charting a course is straightforward, just like planning a trip from one destination to another. You can guide your team backwards from the achievement of the desired strategic outcome or forward towards the goals in a step-by-step process. It’s a simple conversation of, “What will you do next? And what about after that? And after that?” If you start at the end and work backwards you’ll ask, “What will need to happen to generate that outcome? And what must happen before that? And before that?”

3. Plan daily and weekly actions
Since the achievement of long-term goals happens over a period of time, the steps of the roadmap must be distilled down into manageable quantities of work. Your next step in coaching is to guide everyone in planning daily and weekly measurable actions. This way, you’ll both know if they are on track, ahead, or behind, and be able to make adjustments, accordingly.

4. Follow-up for progress
Coaching without commitment is just another conversation, so this final step in action planning is to ensure that accountabilities are met, adjustments are made, as needed, and support is provided along the way. Weekly one-on-ones are an ideal way to do this.

A director of a regional staffing firm headquartered in New Jersey recently implemented this approach and is finding that productivity is much higher as a result. “Everyone is clear on where we are going, what’s expected, and how we are going to achieve our goals. Our branch managers and employees are all on the same page, and both new and tenured employees are making faster progress than we have in the past.”

This Week’s Radical Accountability Activating Action: Pick a project and use the four-step process. This could be as small as something that will take a few days or as large as a year-end goal.

Follow me on Twitter! You can find me here: https://twitter.com/ScottWintrip
Every day I provide pithy pieces of advice and wisdom. Join the growing crowd who read these gems every day.

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If you’d like to reach me, email: scott@ScottWintrip.com or call my direct line: (727) 502-9182

Visit my web site: https://www.WintripConsultingGroup.com

Buy from Your Own Company

August 12, 2014 Uncategorized No comments

Would you buy from a company like yours? When put to the test, many leaders have had to say “no.”

Without spending a dime, you can act like a buyer of your firm’s services. Watch closely how your salespeople sell, service staff provide service, operations staff operate, and recruiters recruit and then, ask yourself: “Would I want to be treated like that?”

Most leaders, when they set aside their natural biases, openly admit that the experience delivered by many on their team could benefit from improvement. Leaders who guide their teams to create experiences that even they themselves would want to be a part of are creating the most profitable and sustainable companies.

This Week’s Radical Accountability Activating Action: Shop your own company or have a trusted outsider do this for you, sharing the experience with you every step of the way. Use this information to create a better outcome for your customers.

Four Steps to Better Client and Candidate Satisfaction
Want to be seen as truly different and better than your competitors? Here’s how to immediately differentiate your firm… Read more

Follow me on Twitter! You can find me here: https://twitter.com/ScottWintrip
Every day I provide pithy pieces of advice and wisdom. Join the growing crowd who read these gems every day.

You may subscribe and encourage others to subscribe by clicking here.

Check out my podcast series called Simply Scott on iTunes.

If you’d like to reach me, email: scott@ScottWintrip.com or call my direct line: (727) 502-9182

Visit my web site: https://www.WintripConsultingGroup.com

Selling is Simple…So Why is it So Hard?

August 11, 2014 Uncategorized No comments

Scott's Monday Morning Message More people fail than succeed at selling staffing and recruitment services. One element that raises the level of difficulty is that we sell the only product on the market that can change its mind. The bigger, underlying issue, however, is not the product but the approach to selling itself.

Buyers, be they candidates buying into opportunities or hiring managers acquiring the services of the talent we represent, always believe themselves but only sometimes believe those who sell. Yet, most people who sell to these buyers attempt to convince them to buy.

By letting the better salespeople sell and the better closers close, which are always the clients and candidates, sales and margins quickly increase, as does the reputation of our industry. This simple approach simply requires facilitating conversations that allow these buyers to do all the convincing that they need what you have to offer.

Knowing this, why would we sell any other way, unless making things hard on ourselves is the real, ultimate goal.

____________________

Four Steps to Better Client and Candidate Satisfaction

Want to be seen as truly different and better than your competitors? Here’s how to immediately differentiate your firm… Read more

Nimble Leadership

June 18, 2014 Uncategorized No comments

During a conference I spoke at last week, I met two types of leaders: those whose businesses were experiencing accelerated growth and the rest whose companies seemed to be stuck in neutral, going nowhere fast. The key difference in the leaders of these firms is decision making. Without exception, the leaders whose firms are growing fastest have leaders who think more nimbly and act more swiftly.

When making decisions, people strive to get them right. Never have I met a competent leader who purposely attempted to make the wrong choice. We each do our best when making up our minds.

Thinking and deciding are straight forward unless we complicate them with over-analysis or under-utilization of our cognitive abilities. Radical Accountability for decisions provides us with a four-step approach for eliminating these human tendencies:

Stop…any task or activity that has nothing to do with the decision at hand. Distracted decision making is just as dangerous as distracted driving.

Breathe…and feed the brain with oxygen. Just a few breaths enriches the intellect, slows down any nervous energy, reduces emotional reactions, and increases presence and use of all of your faculties.

Think…about the desired outcome. When dealing with an area outside your expertise, think about whose input on that outcome would help, and ask for their experience and wisdom. Using others’ insights and your own intellect, make a choice that is the most efficient and effective way to create the desired outcome.

Act…immediately once a decision has been made.

Even if you later learn that a different decision is a better one, you can never fault yourself when you make decisions with Radical Accountability. You always have the option and ability to take any decision and adjust it to make it right.

This Week’s Radical Accountability Activating Action: Become a more nimble leader by using Stop, Breathe, Think, and Act as your method for all decisions from now on.

This Week on GAIN: Learn about the five barriers to success. You’ll also receive access to a process for removing these hurdles, allowing you to engage in more nimble leadership. Access GAIN now.

Follow me on Twitter! You can find me here: https://twitter.com/ScottWintrip
Every day I provide pithy pieces of advice and wisdom. Join the growing crowd who read these gems every day.

You may subscribe and encourage others to subscribe by clicking here.

Check out my podcast series called Simply Scott on iTunes.

If you’d like to reach me, email: scott@ScottWintrip.com or call my direct line: (727) 502-9182

Visit my web site: https://www.WintripConsultingGroup.com

Make Price Scalable, Never Negotiable

June 16, 2014 Uncategorized No comments

Scott's Monday Morning Message A terrible choice made by many in staffing and recruiting has been in negotiating fees and bill rates, with divulging proprietary information, such as markups, coming in a close second. Some people say “the horse is already out of the barn,” insinuating we’re stuck with these issues as a permanent condition. Last time I checked, the only permanent condition in life is death.

A growing number of companies are having tremendous success in scaling price, a far better solution for all parties. If a customer wants to pay less, the value they receive scales down proportionality. Those that want more pay for that value.

Never, ever, should any firm in our business simply lower price without removing value. Doing so sends a clear message to buyers that fees and bill rates are always inflated, since firms can simply change the digits without impacting the level of service. Bottom lines aren’t the only thing to suffer as credibility takes a hit every time this occurs.

What’s also highly encouraging is that price, more and more often, never comes up for those who provide buyers with multiple options. A basic level of service that gets the job done is offered at a fair price, with escalating value options being provided at an escalating price. Buyers still get a “deal” as they elect what they receive and spend.

Savvy leaders who require their teams to always scale, never negotiate, have watched those horses go back in the barn all on their own. For those who choose to continue dickering over price, good luck in dealing with the crap from rampaging stallions.

____________________

This Week on GAIN: Learn about the five barriers to success. You’ll also receive access to a process for removing these hurdles, allowing you to more rapidly increase margins and gain market share. Access GAIN now

The Value Blueprint

June 6, 2014 Uncategorized No comments

Adding more value, a key element of the Innovation Equation, is as simple as following a blueprint to build it into your existing services. Below is a picture of the process. Here are a few comments to help you get started:

Quality Component of Your Service
Delivering more value is never about fixing what’s broken or subpar; it’s about leveraging what you already do well. For example, a recent client in my Executive Advisor program picked their onboarding process to add value to since they already do it well, and customers had indicated a desire for more value in this area.
ABC’s and Customer-Driven Benefits
Following the new ABC’s of selling—Always Be Collaborating—is the way to understand what would be valuable to buyers. The aforementioned client asked Launching Questions (you can learn more about this in my video on Authentic Selling in Scott Wintrip On Demand) that brought to light that a number of customers were struggling with onboarding and were open to more help on this.
Mutually Assured Improvements
Just like mutually assured destruction has kept countries from launching nuclear weapons at one another, Mutually Assured Improvements keeps change sustainable and viable for both parties. My client made sure that the added-value to onboarding was easy to use for the customer and easy to deliver on their end.
Speed
Improvements don’t matter if you don’t get them to buyers in a timely way. My client built a quick delivery system into the process for communicating this additional value, signing people up for it, and then delivering that additional service.

In this instance, this company has added margin dollars for very little time and effort, all because they followed the Value Blueprint.

What will you build into your services that will benefit your customers? Follow the Value Blueprint and find out.

Uncategorized

More on Leadership Deficits – The Test

Closing the Leadership Deficit

Who’s the Next Contestant?

Priming The Collaborative Pump

Sustainable Action Plans

Buy from Your Own Company

Selling is Simple…So Why is it So Hard?

Nimble Leadership

Make Price Scalable, Never Negotiable

The Value Blueprint

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