Jul/090
10 Steps to Improving the Effectiveness of Your Team Meetings
Everyone has heard the funny stories or have seen spoofs on NBC’s The Office…
You know… those lame team meetings and brainstorming sessions.
Team meetings are an absolute essential part of the success of an organization, if and only if, they are effective.
Otherwise, they can be one of the biggest and most ineffectual drains on your store resources.
To help you make your meetings a little more effective, I have compiled a list of meeting “must-haves”.
10 Steps to Improving the Effectiveness of Team Meetings
Appoint a discussion facilitator
Make sure there is someone overseeing the entire discussion. Otherwise, you will have an absolute free-for-all. If no one is in charge, then everyone is in charge, and that leads to chaos.
Agree to the objective of the discussion
When your team enters a meeting it is helpful to have extreme clarity on your objective. Not only do you have to know what you want to accomplish, but you have to be able to tell your team in eight words or less so they can follow.
Decide on the decision making mechanism
Choose how you will reach your final decision before you get to decision time. If there is going to be a vote, good, let them know first. If you are getting feedback and opinions so that you yourself can make the decision, good, let them know ahead of time. If your team puts in a bunch of feedback with certain expectations in advance, and that is flipped on them, they will frustrated and ignored.
Insist that everyone contributes
Team meetings are just that, team meetings. The power of your store resides in the collective whole, or the combined brainpower of your team. There may be some members of your team that have great ideas but they’re just not as loud or outgoing as others. The job of the facilitator is to make sure that everyone is contributing.
Capture all relevant information
If you write ideas down as they come to you, you won’t miss a thing. Many a team member has come up with great ideas, only to lose them because the moment of genius was never captured.
Be creative
When you enter a discussion on a certain topic, remember to be creative and free. Some of the best ideas come when you think completely outside of the norm. Genius has never been copied from the “same-old, same-old” so encourage your members to be bold. Being creative means there are no bad ideas.
Be critical
Make sure that you promote healthy argument in your team meetings. Nothing ever gets accomplished and you never grow if you’re surrounded by yes-men. If your team member’s ideas are good enough, then they should be able to defend them.
Review your discussion to date
At the start of every meeting, review past discussions if your topic is an ongoing one. Some members may have missed the last meeting and often times a quick refresher can spark instant creativity.
Apply decision making process to what you know
Now is the time to take all of the ideas, thoughts, and data, and put them through the ringer of your decision making process. Pair down all of the ideas into bullet points that are simple, clear, and direct. That way the final product will be easier to achieve.
Review, confirm, and adapt the decision
After you have reached the decision, open it up to review and constructive criticism. Once the ideas have made through confirm them and put an action plan into place for speedy implementation.
Now stir, cool, and eat:)
I hope this list has given you some good tips and ideas. Happy meetings!
Josh Long
Jun/090
Listen and Succeed
It’s amazing how the best answers to problems can come from those who are the closest to your daily operations…your employees.
With their ear to the street, they may actually know more than you in their personal piece of the business. (scary thought huh?)
One of the most important things you can do as the leader of your store is to make full use of the experience and resources that fall under your roof.
All of the solutions to your challenges already exist… they’re locked in the heads of your team members.
Next time a member of your team comes up to you and suggests that you try putting an item in some premium space or they suggest putting a combination dinner special together, listen to them. Try it out.
Your team will take personal pride and satisfaction from seeing their ideas put into place. The more your team has a say in the store, the more engaged they will feel and the more they will contribute.
If you engage them in the conversation, you will see a shift from people asking you stupid questions to them offering you great suggestions. Of course not all of the ideas will be great, but you will have a nice pot of them to choose from.
Once they see you care and listen, they will give you idea after idea on how to make the store better and make your very own paychecks go up.
May/090
Your Secret Power… May Even Be Secret To You
Is it possible…
…that no matter how hard you work…
…no matter how many years go by…
… that your parents still never tell you that they’re proud of you?
How are you feeling now? Happy? Sad? Tired? Unappreciated? Unfulfilled?
The truth is, we all like to feel recognized and fulfilled for what we do.
Don’t you?
Your employees, your work-related children, need the same “good job” and “thank you” from you…
…even if they won’t admit it.
From a young age, we have a need in our hearts to feel appreciated, to contribute, and to feel a sense of accomplishment.
You possess the power to fulfill this need in your team members. You possess a power, that if used and practiced properly, can lead you to becoming the best leader they have ever known.
To illustrate this power to you, I’ve created a concept.
This concept is called “The Moment of Impact”.
Let me explain…
Imagine you’re in line at the gas station… the person in front of you turns to speak to you…
They either compliment you… or they tell you you’re being obnoxious and to get the heck out of their personal space…
…in one single moment… that person has the power to change your whole day… for better… or for worse.
That one single moment… that one second of instance… is the moment of impact.
Have you ever been cut off in traffic? What did that do to your mood the rest of the day?
It’s like a small pebble that can ripple out into an eternal lifetime… for better… or for worse.
Imagine you were cut off in traffic. You get home, obviously ticked off, your little girl then comes up to you, with a drink in her hand, begging to sit on your lap.
As she’s trying to get up, the glass tips, sending Kool Aid all over you. You’re are already mad from the moron that cut you off, so you blow up at your daughter. Your wife (or husband) then comes in and decides that they have had enough of your attitude and the way you yell at your daughter. Next thing you know, you are in a two week argument.
The driver that cut you off threw a pebble in your pond that rippled through the rest of your life.
Extreme I know…but…
Know that one small moment of impact, over the lifetime of a person… could be the difference between a happy and successful life… or a dark, dismal existence.
Now think back on your own life… were there not moments you remember in your childhood, high school, or career?
Did you not have your own “Moments of Impact”?
Think about the effects. Think about the power those moments have over your life.
Imagine that power…
Now realize, understand, that you create those moments of impact in the lives of your employees.
You harness the power to impact thousands of moments in the life of your team members… after all… who sees them more than you? Not their family, not their children, not their spouse… you!
You harness power that will ripple through lifetimes… for better… or for worse.
Imagine you recognize someone…
They are positively effected… they’re happy… they positively effect everyone they come in contact with… they’re happier at home… their children grow up to be great… their children’s children grow up to be great.
Now imagine you don’t recognize them…
They leave work unappreciated, unfulfilled, dismal… they pull out a negative pebble that tears and ripples through everyone they come in contact with…
Your team members need you to positively impact them in their moments of impact… they need someone that will recognize them… recognize them for who they are and who they hope to become… openly… honestly… proudly.
Make a positive difference,
Josh Long
Mar/090
Get More Done, Have More Fun – Part 2
Have you ever noticed the difference between an Olympic sprinter and a marathon runner?
The sprinters are pound for pound, some of the most in-shape athletes around. They are lean, muscular, and quick. They have muscles that I didn’t even know existed.
Marathon runners on the other hand look skinny and malnourished, like walking toothpicks.
Why is that?
Well, sprinters train hard and they run hard. They exert an enormous amount of energy and then they rest. Marathon runners continuously run at an even keel pace. If your life were an athlete, would it look like a sprinter or a marathon runner?
Is your life malnourished and moping along at a boring and steady pace? Or are you fully engaged like a sprinter, muscular and fit?
Now you and I both know that life is a marathon, but did you know that you could be much happier, feel better, and have more energy if you lived your life in mini-sprints?
Our bodies aren’t designed to live the way most of us currently live right now. We aren’t supposed to run at 50% one hundred percent of the time.
When we work, work at 100%. When we relax, relax at 100%.
This is where we get things confused. Do you find yourself thinking about work at night when you should be sleeping? Do you find yourself sluggish and nodding off at work?
Well this happens to us when we aren’t fully focused in what it is that we are doing. Many times we have way too much on our plates and we don’t have a predetermined plan for getting any of it done. We just do it as it comes to us.
Well imagine if we nailed down the 3 major things that we have to do each day, before the day even started. In reality, 3 things is more than we’re getting done now, but we like to lie to ourselves and say “we’re soooo busy”. It’s actually a good thing in our society to say we’re slammed.
Your district manager walks up to you and asks, “how are things going?” Your response of course is, “busy man, runnin’ around like a chicken with its head cut off.”
“Keep up the good work!”, they reply.
Imagine the next time they ask you that same question. Only this time you reply, “Well, I’ve never felt more relaxed in my life. The store is running smoothly and I’m getting so much done that I actually have free time at the end of the day to add to our customer experience.”
Then what happens? Your boss thinks you’re lazy!
There is something terribly wrong with this picture. We are all becoming masters of appearing busy, but are getting nothing done.
So hopefully this has sparked some ideas to help you with your life. Remember to focus your time. Instead of doing fifty things at once, try to focus on one thing fully, and get it done with the best of your ability.
Multi-tasking is evil and is just another word for doing everything and nothing at the same time.
Remember to relax as much as you work, so that when you are working, you can give it all you’ve got. Work hard and focused for an hour and a half, and then take a nice walk or something to wind down. Do this for thirty minutes and get fully focused for another hour and a half.
Stir and repeat, cool then eat?
Mar/090
Recognition can get you more for less
You don’t have to watch the news to know unemployment is on the rise to an all-time high. A down economy means that your store, at some point soon, will be forced to do more with less.
But how is this going to work when we are already overworking ourselves?
This answer is fairly simple…engage the best members of your staff at a level they have never seen before, allowing your store to produce double the effort with less people.
In tough times stores tend to put engaging and rewarding on the back burner. They never consider the damages they are inflicting by playing it safe. Engaged employees dramatically improve any company’s performance. On the flip side, disengaged employees do much more damage than just the work they don’t do.
Disengaged employees can actually be like a poison running through your store. They require more of your energy to keep them motivated to work and they drain your good staff members by complaining and spreading pessimism.
As managers, we have a tendency to encourage and reward people that we feel need the extra push. Why aren’t we rewarding and encouraging the people we don’t have to encourage all of the time? What about those great employees that can motivate themselves and that consistently outperform their colleagues?
Let’s admit to ourselves that we have the following categories of employees:
Stars – people that perform day after day, at full potential, and that don’t need a daily pep talk.
Roller coasters – people that you never know how they’re going to perform day-to-day. Some days they’re genius, other days they’re “Dilbert”. You have to motivate them every other day because you know they “have it in them”.
Polly paycheck – people that are clearly only there for a paycheck. They do the bare minimum and throw a fit if asked to go the extra mile for anything.
Oxygen stealers – people that could care less about anything. Yeah, they want a paycheck, but they wouldn’t be heartbroken if they didn’t have a job with you. They just want to go home and play video games.
Okay, so this may seem a little silly, but is it?
Imagine having a store full of stars. Imagine a world where you have piece of mind and you don’t have to use your energy motivating the same people over and over again. You can focus only on making your store, and the customer’s experience, better and better.
At this point you may be saying to yourself, “yeah that sounds great and all, but I can’t afford to have only stars”.
My reply to that goes something like this.
Every manager has turnover already built into their business plan. Start now and get rid of the oxygen stealers and the Polly paychecks. They do more harm than good.
As far as stars go, there are stars everywhere, you just have to be on the lookout. Good people are looking for more than just money. The number one thing people look for in their jobs is a sense of contribution.
People just want to work for a person that will listen to them and that will let them contribute their ideas. Also, they want to be rewarded for their contributions with a token of your appreciation.
The more stars that you bring into your store, the more “non-stars” will be headed out. It just requires a recruiting effort on your part.
Focus on the stars you already have and engage them to get involved. Ask them how they operate if they were in your shoes. Ask them what they would do to make the customer experience better.
The final step of this whole process is to use your recognition program to its fullest potential. This will require you to fully endorse and support the effort, making it an integral part of the store’s culture and tying it directly to the store’s goals and values.
When the program is truly embedded into the day-to-day workings of a company, recognition can literally turn a company inside out, for the better.
Establish clear objectives and ways to measure performance, and then reward that performance as it contributes to the company goals and mission. With a greater insight into how employees regard recognition and the company values, a manager can then manipulate the social structure of their store to better achieve goals and cultivate an atmosphere of stars.
Til next time,
Josh Long
... your program boosts morale, not only for the person getting the actual recognition, but also for the rest of the employees because they see that the company values their contribution."
- Louie Muniz
FedEx Home Delivery #3327
...this incentive program is the most efficient and user friendly I have ever used and for the first time in 30 years I have kept our employee of the month recognition up to date, every month without fail for the last year. Keep sending the fax as a reminder this has truly been helpful."
-Steve Wessman
Chevys Fresh Mex
-Scott Stegall
Chili's Grill & Bar
-Virginia Trentacosta
Century 21 Properties Plus
-Norman Spiesky
Corner Bakery Cafe
-Becky Ketelaar Olive Garden
