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Back in our October 2016 issue, I wrote about hearing Gino Wickman, author of “Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business,” speak at the Nexstar Super Meeting in San Diego. I noted that a lot of what Wickman was saying jibed with our columnist Mike Agugliaro and with what Nexstar President and CEO Jack Tester said about having focus.
Wickman has devised what he calls the Entrepreneurial Operating System, with six components: vision, people, issues, data, process and traction.
Wickman asks if your people are all rowing in the same direction. He knows the answer: no. You have to create a vision and focus and communicate it to your people. Do you have a clear vision in writing and communicated it to everyone? Is your core business clear and do your processes and systems reflect that?
Focus, Tester told his members, lets you know what to say yes to and what to say no to. You know who you are and you pursue and accept work that fits.
I promised in October to return to the topic of Wickman’s book, so let’s talk about your employees.
That same kind of focus that helps you say no to misguided business ventures will also tell you whether an employee is right for you. First, you have to know who you are. What are your core values?
Your company’s core values are whatever you decide they should be. As you were starting your company, what did you think your company should represent? Wickman tossed out some real-world values that he’s come acrossed: excellence; strives for perfection; honesty and integrity; services the customer above all else; continuous self-improvement; opportunity based on merit; creativity; fun; fair; teamwork; passion, and what may be my personal favorite, no jerks.
You’ve probably thought about a lot of these, but never wrote them down. Don’t go overboard; whittle down your list to three to five that you think are important. Then let them simmer for 30 days and get the rest of your team to agree that your list of core values is the correct one. Then you have to explain what you mean by each one. You just can’t say “passion” — you have to define and describe it. Once you have that down, the list must be communicated to all employees.
Once you know who you are, you can measure your employees or prospective employees against your core values. Analyze yourself, your managers and your people against your core values. If you find that a lot of your people are weak in one of them, it probably shouldn’t be on your list of core values. If you’re confident in you list of core values, you can use it as a tool for quarterly performance reviews and in hiring.
Wickman has created a People Analyzer template (www.eosworldwide.com/people) that’s a scoring system to see if your employees match up with your core values. Pretty simple stuff — plus if they do, minus if they don’t and plus/minus if they do some of the time. So if your core values are Help First, Do the Right Thing, Do What You Say You Will, and someone comes up with a string of minuses, they probably shouldn’t be working for you. Every company accumulates employees who shouldn’t be there and this is an objective way to weed them out.
Anybody with a minus or plus/minus has to fix his behavior or leave. You need to see progress in 90 days.
As I promised earlier, I’ll return to Wickman’s book from time to time.
Robert P. Mader
Bob Mader is the Editorial Director for Penton's mechanical systems brands, including CONTRACTOR magazine, Contracting Business and HPAC Engineering, all of which are part of Penton’s Energy and Buildings Group. He has been with CONTRACTOR since 1984 and with Penton since 2001. His passions are helping contractors improve their businesses, saving energy and the issue of safeguarding our drinking water. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame with an A.B. in American Studies with a Communications Concentration.