Jaluch Limited

Bookbinders unravelled…

I do like it when I’m pondering what to blog about and then the very topic rears up and slaps me across the face!!

It happened that way last week. I got on a train to London. The trip was to take 90 minutes. So I could work I sat at a table. At the table opposite were two guys who were already talking. One older guy did the talking. The younger one did most of the listening, but posed a few questions along the way.

Was it me or did the voice of the older guy go up a notch as I sat down? I think it might have done. Perhaps he wanted to impress me with his knowledge and status in life. Who knows! The younger guy was far more discreet though, at least the whole carriage didn’t hear what he had to say….

I got the impression the younger one had just joined the company into a sales role and that the trip that day was part of his induction.

It’s not a great idea though is it to actually do an induction on the train. Particularly if you are in sales!! What was he thinking? Have you any idea how much company information can be discussed in 90 minutes when essentially one person is doing a brain dump of everything in his head!

They clearly worked for a key player in the book binding industry, and whilst trying to crack on with my own work what I inadvertently overheard was:

• Annual sales last year in the Eurozone
• Annual sales last year in the UK plus year on year change
• Annual sales UK last year from their two major customers plus names of those customers
• Profit margins
• Negotiating margins on proposals
• Internal process for initiating pricing for proposals
• Challenges in different sectors – including international challenges
• Key competitors
• What some competitors do better or more cost efficiently than them
• Recent projects carried out for clients and comments on the pricing/profitability of those
• Credit terms for international companies and how those weren’t conducive to good customer relations given that they were at times far too harsh and mistrusting
• Key clients
• Add on sales opportunities
• Clients they would like to have but don’t yet have
• Key decision makers in those clients they would like to have and what they are like and why they are blocking entry to them
• Format of internal sales meetings
• Different individuals within their own business and what they add (or don’t add)

I could go on!

My question to you today of course is:

If you could identify one person in your business who would so carelessly spill your company information, who would it be?

Oh… and if you want to send me your best guess as to which global book binding business last week revealed all, please do so.

And finally, why not take this opportunity just to remind your staff of their obligations in respect of confidentiality? Just a quick resend to staff of your policy and a covering email won’t take long. But it could save you a whole heap of hassle!

It’s easy to sit back and do nothing… but is that good for business?

As the turbulence for business continues, how often do we sit back and ask ourselves whether our business leaders, actually have the foresight, vision, strategic thinking etc required to know where the future lies for organisational success.

But if you are feeling that perhaps some of your leaders don’t, take some comfort, for they are in esteemed company……….

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
Charles H. Duell, Director of US Patent Office, 1899

"Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote."
Grover Cleveland, 1905

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?"
Harry M. Warner, Warner Bros Pictures, 1927

"There is no likelihood man can ever tap the power of the atom."
Robert Miliham, Nobel Prize in Physics, 1923

"Heavier than air flying machines are impossible."
Lord Kelvin, President, Royal Society, 1895

"The horse is here today, but the automobile is only a novelty - a fad."
President of Michigan Savings Bank advising against investing in the Ford Motor Company

"Video won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."
Daryl F. Zanuck, 20th Century Fox, commenting on television in 1946

"What use could the company make of an electric toy?"
Western Union, when it turned down rights to the telephone in 1878

So do any of these particularly amuse or astound you? Hindsight is of course very easy, but are there any things you can do right now to ensure your current leaders don’t make similar mistakes?

I’m sure you have ideas of your own but here are four of mine…..

• Risk assess your directors – who has a closed mind, who doesn’t listen to suggestions, who lacks vision, who mocks those who come up with creative ideas. Who is as a result posing a business risk by inhibiting future success?
• Support – do the ideas people in your business have support or are they usually laughed out of town by those who rely on past precedent for future business success? What can you do to change this?
• Team balance – do you have at least one if not two innovators or creative thinkers on your board or in your senior team? Perhaps over the coming year you need to change the balance of skills and strengths?
• Dinosaur hunt – Is it time to identify and deal with those one or two directors or senior managers who actively hold back change? You might love these people but can you really afford to employ even one dinosaur when life is changing so fast?

Want to bounce any ideas past me…..you know where I am and I always say ‘yes’ to a coffee!!

If the Christmas and New Year break didn’t fully refresh you after a hard 2011 managing some difficult staff issues, here are my top tips for surviving 2012….

• Eat more spinach – for this year you will need plenty of stamina and good health. Its more of the rollercoaster so ready yourself…
• Don’t neglect your own development so book yourself onto a coaching or mentoring skills course as these could well be two of the really valuable soft skills of the future
• Stop telling yourself that Twitter and LinkedIn aren’t relevant to you – get over it and get yourself signed up and start learning how to use them
• Take up yoga for relaxation or pilates for inner strength – or both depending on who exactly you have in your team!
• Re-read the books ‘Who Moved my Cheese’, ‘Fish’ and ‘Feel the Fear but Do It Anyway’ so you have plenty of ideas and information to support your wobbly or disengaged employees whenever the rollercoaster hits the down slope
• And finally, write the ten commandments of managing staff on your arm so you never lose focus:

1. I will stop and listen when people want my attention – but no more than twice a day!
2. I will remember the paperwork even though it is probably the most boring part of my job
3. I will slow down and remember that others do not move at 100mph as I do
4. I will not ‘put up and shut up’ when an employee is misbehaving just because I’m afraid of being sued for something
5. I will not forget that you can get immense job satisfaction from developing people so will try to do more of this
6. I will remember that most employees are not motivated by muffins on a Friday or doughnuts on my birthday
7. I will continually remind myself I am not superman/superwoman and I need to have energy left over for 2013
8. I promise not to lose my rag and sack someone on the spot as I know that could result in me losing the shirt off my back
9. I will remember that once upon a time I was just an employee too so will try to manage my expectations accordingly and not expect my staff to work 25 hours a day and know things that only Albert Einstein would have known
10. I will be brave and tackle my underperformers who cause me stress and promise Jaluch not to leave this to a Friday afternoon at 4pm

Got a few of your own to add to my list of 10? Would love to hear from you!

Have a great 2012 and keep smiling….

Everywhere I go I hear directors asking what they can do to make their employees more responsible at work. To get them to see what needs to be done over and above each individual task - and then, as it needs to be done, to just get on and do it.

But how do you get staff and managers to demonstrate individual responsibility when in the world at large we are all so often, treated like children with so much around us being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator? For, if you treat someone often enough like a child, then surely they will in time act and think like a child?

So which of these have you seen recently?

• Sign above the hot tap that says ‘this water is hot’
• Sign above the entry door that says ‘emergency exit’
• Notice on your packet of peanuts saying ‘may contain nuts’

Duh – do they think we are going to run into a closed office with no window if a fire breaks out whilst we happen to be standing near the front door? Of course not! For those of us close to it we are going to run (walk?) right through that front door, not even stopping to wave at the sign of the green man that says ‘this way please’!

I was also staggered to hear someone in a public toilets recently loudly complaining to her friend that the hot water was hot and someone really should have put a sign up to say so. Surely any adult using a hot tap would know that ‘hot’ comes in a whole variety of temperatures and the most sensible thing always is to test the water before plunging your whole hand right in. Or is it me who is mad??

You can’t blame the businesses though, as its usually down to our crazy health and safety or insurance culture or companies’ utter terror of being sued for ‘something or other’. And don’t get me wrong, I am not knocking sensible instructions or sensible signage – just instruction and signage overkill!

My 12 year old recently was making pancakes. I left him to get on with mixing up the pancake mixture and in glee he brought me his laptop to show me the instructions he had found on the internet (which even he thought were silly) “Sieve the flour and salt into a mixing bowl. Make a small hollow in the centre of the mixture and drop in the egg (but not the shell)” NOT THE SHELL? Killjoys! I reckon that leaving the shell out could ruin the whole pancake experience?!

You might though argue that for an inexperienced cook a recipe that includes beginner information such as ‘leave out the shell’ is beneficial. My argument though would be that if you always provide all of the answers and make sure that everything is presented in a foolproof way, no one is ever going to learn from experience or learn to think for themselves – and surely that is a very dangerous way to go.

Last year I tweeted about some 999 calls from Japan that used examples of adults failing to show individual responsibility such as ‘my ice cream is melting what should I do’ and ‘my hat has blown off in the wind, will you come and get it back for me’. And last Christmas many of us will have read in the press of the woman dialling 999 to report the theft of her snowman (presumably expecting the police to use their precious resources in locating it for her). Is this the way we want to go in the UK or is it time to stop so much dumbing down and start providing the instructions required which then enable people to learn and think for themselves a little?

All of this prompts me to wonder whether a half day course on Understanding and Developing Individual Responsibility at Work would be of value… what do you think?

Just this week I read about a £200K a year stripper from Stringfellows seeking to take an unfair dismissal claim against her employer. It seems her first hurdle has been to establish that her status was employed rather than self employed. If she succeeds in this, she will then be able to pursue her claim.
 
I wonder how many other strippers and other entertainers Stringfellows and all the other London clubs have on their books who are deemed by their employer to be self employed, but who in fact the courts might view (either now or in the future) as employed. The phrase 'can of worms' comes to mind!
 
But this often isn't about employers just taking advantage over poor disadvantaged individuals. Often the employee themsleves chooses to operate on a self employed basis. It can be a status 'thing 'for some to say they are self employed, for others it is more a tax 'thing' and for others their approach to work might be driven by a desire to have control over their own working hours and career giving them flexibility they might not have if they were employed.
 
That said, I can acknowledge that sometimes the arrangement is in place simply to the benefit of one of the parties!
 
But even when self employment suits both parties, what should employers be doing to protect themselves? For if I could have a tenner for every time I have seen a great working relationship turn sour over something and become a not so great relationship, I would be very rich indeed!!
 
So how to protect yourself as an employer:

1. Stop assuming that employment law is logical or fair. Its often not and the goalposts can move more often than you have time to have cups of tea in the day. You cannot afford to sit back and assume that your employment law knowledge of yesterday is still relevant today.
2. Stop thinking that common sense will prevail. Common sense, for example regarding what was discussed and agreed between the parties at the start of the arrangement, will probably not even come into the discussions if someone pursues a tribunal claim against you (and in doing that seeks to demonstrate that they have in fact been employed rather than self employed).
3. Know what your position is. You need to know who you pay regularly who isn't on an employment contract and understand what, if any, exposure you have from that. You need to know amongst your suppliers who in fact is operating effectively as a sole trader with you being their only customer. You need to know what tax and NI and other liabilities you could be accruing if any - or all - of your self employed people pursue you in a tribunal.
4. Challenge the status quo. And finally, you need to know that it can be in your interests to challenge the status quo. You might have operated this way for years, but is it sensible any more to operate this way or has the exposure to a tribunal claim grown too great?

 
I don't know what exposure Stringfellows has as a result of this claim. But I do know the legal costs to fight it will be huge and on top of any exposure to compensation, if she does establish both employed status and unfair dismissal, there could well be exposure to a tax and NI investigation if that is kicked off as a result of publicity around the tribunal claim. So not great.
 
So who do you have kicking around on a self employed basis who, in time, to come could give you untold grief??

In recent weeks, during various training sessions, discussions have turned to how to successfully give staff the feedback they won't necessarily want to hear.

I am sure that many of you know the 'sandwich' technique for giving feedback - some call it the 'burger' - anyway, in essence, its about giving some positive feedback at the start and end of your discussion, with the negative or 'constructive' feedback sandwiched in the middle to make it somewhat more palatable!

The sandwich technique is a great technique but all too often its not enough when dealing with tough cookies, and we probably need to develop a 'brick' technique to follow it!!

After using the sandwich technique, what we tend to find is that whilst our treasured and dearly beloved employee has heard our positive feedback, their ears seem to have slammed shut during the bit that wasn't so palatable. And if you probed them on this a few days later, it would appear they have genuinely convinced themselves they never actually heard it at all!! (Occasionally of course a totally different response emerges - that of the roaring lion who insists everyone else is to blame! - but we'll deal with them another day)

Sometimes I think I ought to have some training in psychology so I could do my job better! But I don't, so I have to use my logic and common sense... so...

I think that what I increasingly see is that some (many?) staff are not at all accustomed to any negative feedback at all. Perhaps they went through school with 'softly softly' teachers who praised up the good and skimmed over the not so good and then progressed through the first stages of their career with 'softly, softly' managers in 'softly, softly' organisations so, by the time they get to you, heaven forbid should you decide it is time to highlight a few areas of concern.

Its partly a cultural thing therefore, we have largely throughout the UK become very soft and non confrontational in management style. Also, managers are often extraordinarily fearful of falling foul of employment legislation which doesn't help when encouraging them to tackle issues. Added to which, and this is a 'biggie', our society is not big on honest feedback, we prefer to tip toe around issues for fear of confrontation so, when you get to the point when honest feedback is essential due to performance being affected, you actually have an Everest to climb in terms of giving the person feedback and getting them to see that its not a personal attack and something akin to the end of the world.

No wonder their ears slam shut. Its a shock thing!!

You might say 'softly, softly' is a good thing. But from my perspective I see companies putting up with nuisance individuals for months or even years longer than they should because of 'softly, softly'. Once I even came across someone who had been passed from department to department for 16 years until such point as their most recent manager asked me if I could help her tackle the issues that had been left untackled for so long! 16 years! 16 years of living with someone who was rude and aggressive to others! Totally unnecessary.

I also see staff welfare (i.e. not upsetting said member of staff by giving essential feedback) being put ahead of customer needs and business quality issues. Are your staff more important than your customers? Its an interesting question and the phenomenal number of managers who answer 'yes, staff are my primary responsibility' just highlights to me how so few managers really understand essential commercial issues within the business. Not much incentive then to tackle the difficult stuff and upset team harmony!

But I digress... as I often do!

In a nutshell, all I wanted to highlight today is that giving staff critical feedback that they won't want to hear is a dying art. Managers aren't accustomed to giving it and staff often elect not to hear it when in fact it is given. You might think 'softly softly' works well for you in which case, that is fine with me! But if you feel that 'softly, softly' is at times hindering your organisation, then perhaps 2012 is the year to revisit your core values, as those relate to staff management, and rethink your organisational/management culture in respect of the people culture. Another activity might be to set performance objectives for each manager relating to appropriate and successful staff management of those in their team.

You might also, to support these activities, consider whether training is needed for your directors and managers in

1. employment law - to raise their confidence to deal with issues,
2. giving critical feedback - to improve their skills in this area and
3. addressing tough and sensitive issues in performance reviews and ongoing performance management discussions - to ensure that after tough issues are raised initially, they are then progressed until such point as the necessary change in behaviour is achieved

Then the next time feedback is given and the ears have 'slammed shut' your managers will have greater confidence and know how to deal with the situation.

If any of this is of interest to you and you would like to discuss it more, or if you would like to find out about any Jaluch training or seminars, please do This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it -with me.