by Diana Southall | Jun 7, 2016 | performance, planning
Most small business owners want two things from their business- a reasonable Profit for all their hard work, and the freedom to enjoy their Personal life (both in the business and outside it).
However, they often neglect the 3 other P’s that will create the Profit and Personal life they want.
To explain this concept, I created a formula:
Plan + Process + People = Profits —> your Personal life
You need to have all 3 P’s in this order:
- Planning— What are the Right Things? [the What]
- Process— What does Done Right look like? [the How]
- People — Do we have the Right People? [the Who]
Without Planning, people don’t know how what they do impacts your goals, so they are busy but not focused.
Without effective Process, you will have wasted effort, headaches and won’t deliver on your promises to customers.
Without the right People, you will be busy dealing with fires and drama, and trapped in daily effort to “manage” your people and customers.
—> You feel overworked, overwhelmed by your wish list of business improvement projects, and you feel guilty working long days instead of spending time with your friends and family.
Once you put the 3 P’s in place at your organization, you can transform into an organization with:
A Plan: when your staff know the “plan” and understand how they impact organizational goals, they work together as a purpose-driven team to improve and grow the business by delighting your customers.
Clear Process: when activities are standardized, clear roles and responsibilities are outlined, and key results are tracked to make informed decisions, this provides “autopilot” systems to run smoothly and scale easily.
Right People: when you have managers who build and coach a team of A-Players, you trust them to run the business and make decisions as you would.
This leads to your ultimate goal as a business owner:
- The level of Profit (financial security) you desire, and
- The Personal work-life balance you want … the freedom to do what you want, when you want to do it.
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Article by Diana Southall
About the author: Diana Southall is the creator of the People Plan. She helps companies that are missing out on opportunities because the owner is personally involved in every sale or client.
by Diana Southall | Apr 9, 2016 | coaching, performance
Many organizations are starting to realize that “prior job experience” is only one element that determines success in a job role. (Especially after we have seen new hires with “tons of experience” be less than stellar performers).
Since 82% of managers are in the wrong job— mid-size and large employers are looking toward other indicators to use for selection, career paths, training and development.
This has led organizational development experts to develop what is called the “competency model” process.
Competencies are a group of skills that make up a “global” trait that someone can apply to many different jobs.
- For example, someone with problem-solving competency might potentially excel as a scientist, consultant, product designer or manager.
- If they also have leadership competencies, then a career path and development to manager might be appropriate.
- If they are results oriented, then perhaps consultant would be a good match.
To hire or promote the person with the highest success potential in a new role, you have to look at the experience as the evidence of a competency strength– “related experience” alone is not enough.
The “best practices” use competency-based interview questions to identify ideal candidates during the selection process, in the evaluation of current employees for job fit and are especially helpful to craft training and development action plans.
In fact, this information is so powerful we build the People Plan model to include detailed behavior-based descriptions of 30 competencies, and include them in every aspect of our coaching model.
Click here to see <a href="http://people-plan check that.com/15-competencies/”>15 key competencies for most jobs — How will you use these?
by thepeopleplan | Nov 25, 2013 | Uncategorized
The Thanksgiving holiday (in America) is this week, and then the busy holiday season is upon us!
I personally love thanksgiving—the food, the time to spend with family, the time to reflect on gratitude and what is meaningful.
Many employers give out a thanksgiving turkey or a holiday ham, and I know many friends who appreciate this gesture. But if you have been doing this a few years, employees begin to see it as a corporate event and not a personal gesture.
I want to encourage you to also take the time at least once over the next four weeks to personally thank each of your employees.
Here are a few articles from Inc magazine to get you in the “thanking” spirit and some suggestions on how to personalize your notes:
Building a Culture of Employee Appreciation
How to Thank Your Employees in 8 Words
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
by thepeopleplan | Feb 8, 2013 | action plans, job fit
I have the spent the past few weeks having conversations with senior managers in a variety of small and mid-sized organizations, ranging in size from one with 7 employees to one with over 700.
These conversations focus on how we can work together to assist their people to help these organizations achieve 2013 goals, but often the conversation turns to how to develop the staff they have.
These managers like their staff and want to see them grow and contribute more, as well as be more connected to the organization and more fulfilled in their work. They want to retain these team members and to provide meaningful rewards.
Many managers and organizations seem to be challenged by the prospect of how to develop employees, such identifying what skills are needed and how to accomplish this when there is “no time for training.”
A recent book (Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go, Beverly Kaye and Julie Winkle Giulioni) may provide some answers, and challenges some of the myths that prevent smaller employers from focusing development efforts on their team (if they grow they will leave us, the employee is responsible for her own career, it’s about the money, development plans are for the Fortune 500 or just senior managers).
According to Kaye and Giulioni, “Career development is as important as it’s ever been (maybe more). In today’s business environment, talent is the major differentiator. And developing that talent is one of the most significant drivers of employee engagement, which in turn is the key to the business outcomes you seek: revenue, profitability, innovation, productivity, customer loyalty, quality, and cycle time reduction.”
One insight is that employee development can be accomplished with informal, brief, focused “10-minute conversations” that uncover an employee’s aspirations and goals and matches to learning opportunities.
-Diana Southall
Image courtesy of ddpavumba at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
by thepeopleplan | Aug 4, 2012 | culture, job fit, performance
I remember a Seinfeld episode where Jerry and Kramer pretended to be a traditional couple “How was your day, dear?”
Yes, they mocked this but how important are the People experiences to your day at work?
If you had a “bad day” it is often because of the people experiences you had—you had to assuage a difficult customer, a subordinate made a poor decision or behaved badly, a team member did not complete his part of the project and you had to do more work, your supervisor or co-worker was grumpy or critical, or you had to deal with petty politics.
Your day to day experiences with customers, managers and your team and the climate and culture of the office can be motivational or sapping to your energy.
Our firm’s founder Dr Jerry Newman found that social interaction was a key indicator in job satisfaction and retaining good workers in his book My Secret Life on the McJob. In fact, he found that many teenagers stayed at their fast food job even after college graduation partly based on the great camaraderie they felt at work.
A recent Gallup poll found that if someone had a “best friend at work” they reported more positive perceptions of their job, including much higher ratings of recognition, development, co-worker reliability, job importance, and achievement factors.
McDonald’s is leveraging the importance of what they call “Friends & Family” to attract employees.
According to a recent article by our firm’s founder Dr. Jerry Newman and McDonald’s Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer Richard Floersch, McDonald’s actually has very high employee perceptions of their people experiences in their job.
Reward/ Percent Who Love This About McDonald’s:
- Culture 82%
- Teamwork 80%
- People I work with 78%
Image courtesy of samuiblue at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
