Do You Lack Credibility?

A manager who lacks credibility is like the pied piper without his flute--that is no credibility equals no ability to manage. Have you felt like your employees stopped listening to you? Have you ever sensed that when you directed a task or set the goals for your department that your employees when about their jobs in the same old way? The problem could be that you have lost (if you ever had) credibility.

Credibility is all the rage right now, but there is a reason. All of the management tips that you can gather may not bring you credibility, and without it, all of the other great management techniques are useless. Employees will not hear what you have to say if they don't believe in you.

So, how does a manager gain credibility? Here are ten C's of tried and true suggestions.

1. Confidence - be sure about your abilities and your employees' abilities to get things done
2. Consistency - don't change your mind unless absolutely necessary
3. Communication - let your staff know as much as you can as soon as you can
4. Completion - do what you promise
5. Composure - if you have to get upset, talk with another manager privately
6. Collaborate - use a team approach whenever possible
7. Compliment - positive words build people up
8. Clarity - accurately describe tasks and expectations
9. Confront - both your own employees and others when necessary to achieve results
10. Connect - with your employees by listening to them, hear them out, only then respond

Following this list of ten items will get you far in gaining credibility with your employees. Try them out, see what happens. Believe me. They'll work.

Tips for Choosing a Board For a Start-Up

Are you in the start up phase of a company? Have you chosen your board or begun expanding your board?

Chances are you began with yourself, perhaps a partner or two, and then as you got a little bigger you added a couple of friends that new something about financing the business or how to read financial statements.

Now, you are growing. You are looking for additional investors. You need a board that looks like...well...a board. You need investors to be confident that your company will manage their money (because it is still their money) well.

Who do you choose? Where do you go? What characteristics do you look for?

Here are a couple of characteristics you should look for:

• knowlege of your industry
• previous work with a start up or growing company
• objective enough to give you honest feedback
• financially saavy
• strategic thinker

If each board member has at least four of the five characteristics mentioned above, you'll have a board that will not only impress investors, it will also impress you.

Getting past the PseudoTeam

One of the most frustrating experiences in work settings is to find yourself in a room filled with people who are playing nice. While pleasant to the point of bland, these groups are deathly dull and bring little productivity to the enterprise.

What to do?

Recognize that team formation is as much a strategic initiative as anything else you do in your enterprise. Sometimes it makes sense to craft a team carefully, at other times it is better to let a skilled facilitator drive the process and get to a desired result. Both models are legitimate strategies, but assuming that facilitation or team-building is always necessary is illegitimate.

Building Bonds of Intimacy
If the team will be staying together for an extended project or leadership task, it makes sense to spend some time up front building relationships and fostering trust. Teams that collaborate on longer projects will inevitably go through periods of internal conflict, external pressures and unanticipated challenges. More than strategy or facilitation, the bonds between team members will sustain them through the tough times.

Significant Life Roles
Most of us have been through some type of team-awareness exercise where we completed an inventory (think DISC, Meyers-Briggs, etc.) and then shared our results with the team. This can lead to months and years of labeling and stale jokes. Significant life roles has the upside of personal disclosure, without the generic labeling of pre-packaged inventories.

Here's a simple, 30-minute exercise called "Significant Life Roles" that you can use to build team familiarity and disclose personal values:

1. Have team members identify 5-9 roles that they play, ie: father, executive, volunteer, etc. Write each role on an index card, then order the cards from most important to less important.

2. Based on prompts from the facilitator, reveal your roles from less important to more important. The facilitator can prompt discussion of each role with questions such as, "Discuss your strengths in playing this role." or "How would you feel if you had to stop playing this role." “When did you start playing this role?” “What have you learned as you mature in this role?” As team members reveal their roles and discuss them, you learn a lot about their identity, values and self-concept.

3. Before revealing the final role, have the team predict what they think the most significant role will be for everyone else in the team. This exercise gets quickly to some significant and sometimes dramatic personal revelations and bonding.

Tips for a Winning Business Plan

Are you an entrepreneur? Do you have a great idea for a business? Do you need funding? Well either now or later, you need a business plan. The purpose of a business plan is to put your thoughts and ideas into a coherent whole with goals and strategies and numbers in order so that you can follow the plan (or at least know when you aren't following it) and so that angels, venture capitalists or other investors can see where you are headed and have an idea of what their investment might yield. No investor with any sense would invest in a business that doesn't have a plan.

Here are 8 tips for writing a great business plan:

1. Get your management group involved
2. Assign tasks
3. Set a schedule of completion for each part and the final product
4. Remember that a business plan is always a work in progress, don't assume it will be perfect the first time.
5. Follow an established template. (You can find a good one in New Venture Creation by Jeffry A. Timmons.) This is not a creative writing project.
6. Be honest about your strengths as well as weaknesses and potential challenges. If you don't think of them, investors will.
7. Give realistic projections of the economics of the business. Investors will know if you are being optimistic and discount your projected financials accordingly.
8. Make the offer clear. Nothing is worse than a sales presentation without an offer. The investor wants to know what you expect and are willing to give.

This isn't everything you need to know about writing a business plan, but if you follow these eight, your plan should be clear, realistic, sales oriented, and if you really have a business that has a strong value proposition, will attract investors.

Too Many Measurements, So Little Time

Do you work for a company that has a million metrics? Do you measure just about everything that comes out of a department? It can be machined parts per hour. It can be invoices paid on time. It can be return on marketing dollars spent. At some point, does the amount of time and energy spent tracking, reporting and analyzing these numbers drive you mad?

Don't get me wrong. Metrics are important, but some companies go crazy. They measure things and they don't know why they measure them. Sometimes it is because there was a top down decision to set up metrics. Department managers chose the things that were easiest to measure.

Sometimes there was a corporate consultant who encouraged metrics. So they set up some standard set of metrics that everyone uses.

The bottom line is that many of us like metrics because they appear to be objective. They are numbers after all.

However, many companies have a problem. It isn't that companies ought not measure themselves. The problem is that the measures must be chosen carefully so that they don't lead to suboptimization for the whole. A company is a system--a closed system. This means that what one department does affects others. If the manufacturing department meets its quota for costs and production, but the sales department doesn't, the company experiences two problems, even though the metrics only show one problem. The metrics will show that the sales department met its goals, but the company experiences additional negative cash flow by over producing product. Sure, the cost per unit is lower. The number of units forecast was produced, and one time no less. At the same time more labor hours were expended in manufacturing than necessary, more warehouse space and labor is required, and yet the company may have no ability to sell the product.

There are, of course, ways to deal with this, and many companies have figured it out. The moral of the story is to choose metrics carefully and limit them to what contributes to the corporate goals. Make sure they don't conflict or lead to suboptimal managerial decisions. Use fewer rather than more to start, but if you want to know if your metric tracking is working, look at one metric above all--cash flow.

Customer Satisfaction or Customer Loyalty

Sometimes people ask me how they can know what their customer satisfaction level is.

I answer, "Forget about customer satisfaction. You need to know about customer loyalty."

Loyalty versus satisfaction. There is a big difference. A customer might be satisfied with your service. The customer comes in for a specific need. You satisfy the need with adequate service and a good price in a respectable facility. However, what did you do to WOW the customer. What did you do that tells the customer, "I want you back?"

This is important because research suggests that true loyalty is present only in those customers who claim to be extremely satisfied with your service.

If someone is satisfied or moderately satisfied, that really means they are willing to shop around if the price is right or if they have a coupon or if there hear something good from a friend.

On the other hand, those customers who are extremely satisfied are more important than your sales and marketing department. They are the ones who rave about you. They are the ones that when approached by a friend don't change to their friend's store or provider. They convince their friends to come to YOU.

The moral of the story is to give up on satisfying customers. Find ways to create loyalty.