Accountability

November 5, 2010 By Leave a Comment

A much used word but not practiced often enough in business, accountability is the simple act of taking responsibility for your actions.

In a casual discussion with someone over a drink today, we were laughing over the phrase “success has many fathers while failure is an orphan” in the context of a program that several people claimed success for. We all know people that are apparently the brains or inspiration behind successful ventures or programs of various kinds. Rarely ever do you see people owning up to something that went wrong.

This is interesting and more than just a philosophical discussion about what is ethical or the right thing to do. My personal belief is that showing accountability in the face of unpleasant circumstances is a terrific business tactic. We’ve all faced situations where things went wrong for any number of reasons and blame starts flying around.  The norm in such a situation is for the client to pillory the vendor/agency and the agency to bad-mouth the client behind their back. The relationship is over, client moves on and has to restart, agency loses a customer and associated NPV as well as what may be their most important asset – their reputation.
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Customer Service – At What Cost?

November 3, 2010 By 2 Comments

Or, at what point do you fire your customer?

This is not meant to be a provocative or even rhetorical question. It’s a question worth pondering for anyone that is in a customer facing role in an organization, or has the power to make decisions about how the company works with their customers, prioritizes them and assigns resources for them.

I run a marketing services company where the customer (pardon the cliché) really does come first. And second and third for the most part. We live by the principle that our reputation is paramount to our success, and that our customers determine how we are perceived, while helping us pay our rent of course. This translates into a philosophy across the team to do whatever it takes, go above and beyond to satisfy our customers’ requirements, albeit unreasonable sometimes.
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Creation Myths are Just That….

November 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment

All cultures have creation myths. All. And that includes Business sub-cultures.

The problem is: The myths are JUST THAT- myths.

Let me try my hand at reciting the generic story:

A brilliant man (almost always a man as the myth goes) or MAYBE two brilliant men had an idea and an incredible urge to do something big and change the world.

They started small.

But through pluck and brilliance they innovated, sold, innovated more, and sold more.

Soon they were medium sized.

They kept going.

Then they became BIG.

They hired other charismatic men.

They did the right thing and innovated more. And more. And sold more.

They were rugged individuals. No pain no gain. Second place is the first loser. The company was their first love.

The problem is: the myth is rubbish. The Unitary Executive does NOT exist.

Innovation comes from a milieu. Not from a single mind.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t smart, forceful, amazing individuals. But let’s not let our need for positive thinking (about individuals and what they can do if they just try hard) delude us into denying the facts.

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Hanging Together

October 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment

On an incredible day over two centuries ago, the polymath Benjamin Franklin said to an assembly, “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

The date was August 2, 1776. The Occasion was the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Like many more of Franklin’s utterances, the meaning transcends time and place and has a lesson for each of us in our present contexts, even in the workplace.

Stick together or be picked off, one by one.

Most of the folks I have met rarely pay this admonition heed. Most folks make deals in their own favor, opportunistically.

But the Greats don’t. The Greats stick with their peers and defend them.

In the corporation, innovation takes place when enough people join hands and circle the wagons, protecting the “creative fires” from the fire-in-belly-dousing processes of bureaucracy. Great professionals don’t sell out innovative people and ideas to the boss, in order to look “mature” and “move up.”

So next time an executive asks you if you support an outlier employee or believe in a cool-but-whacky idea, search your soul.

Was Franklin right?

Your call.

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Owning UP

October 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

A former friend of mine challenged me recently on a peculiar issue: the difference between acceptance and desire…and the immaturity this difference brings out in weak-willed people.

Sometime ago I asked him to donate some money to a charity that is very close to my heart.  He agreed to do so.

Months went by and no donation.  I sent him an email.  No response.  Another.  No response.

I finally confronted him.  I asked him whether he meant to fulfill his obligation.  At this point, he blew up saying he wanted to decide on his own where to donate his money and that he didn’t want to pay up.  I asked him whether I held a gun to his head when soliciting the original donation.  I asked him whether or not he had, as an adult, agreed to donate the money.  No to the gun. Yes to the decision.

But he still didn’t pay up.  He left in a huff mumbling incoherently about being forced in the first place to say yes.

This is his attitude: blame others for “making” you a liar.

When you say you’ll do something, do it.  Or be upfront about your own indecision or lack of acceptance of the original terms.

Either way, be an adult and own up.

The Management lessons are clear:

  • When you commit to do something, either do it, or gracefully and analytically explain why you can’t keep your commitment.
  • Be careful in locating fault.  Even if you are browbeaten into something, once you commit you have to live with the commitment.
  • Know where you have freedom.  Some things asked of you in the corporation are metaphorically tantamount to the “gun to your head.”  Others are not.  Learn to distinguish between the two.

This stuff is hard.  But when you do it, one person benefits the most:  YOU!

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Career Development: Reinventing the Job Interview from the Interviewers Perspective

October 4, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Apparently I am thinking a lot about hiring these days! In my last post, I talked about hiring an executive assistant (happy to report Ronald is still kicking butt while I sleep, and my productivity is up over 300%) and this week I want to talk to you about another insidious time waster for marketing professionals… prospect interviews.

I was a journalism major in my undergrad years and my strength was the investigative interview so interviewing candidates has always come easy for me. I never run out of questions and I’m pretty creative about coming up with questions that get to the heart of a candidates qualifications and fit-level. My favorite moment was asking an inside sales candidate about his vision for the future. This was a $30K a year job – double with commissions – so I asked him where he thought he’d be in 5 years.

“Oh, in 5 years, I’ll be making $80K a year easy,” he said confidently.

“What does that look like,” I probed. “How is your life different with that salary?”

“Well, I’d be moved out of my parent’s house. I’d buy a mansion with 5 bedrooms, a swimming pool and a Ferrari or something like that. I’ll be living the dream.”

Living the dream on $80K in Washington DC?!?! Not a chance. If he couldn’t set realistic goals in his personal life, this guy was not going to set realistic goals on my sales team. It was not a fit. (It was, however, a good laugh!)

This week, however, I learned about a new approach to interviewing that changed my perspective. Many professions have a proficiency component to the interview process, something that makes it a little more quantitative, but with marketing that’s always been difficult, especially for junior level jobs. I’ve been content with reviewing writing samples, portfolios and relevant web sites to serve that purpose but it always comes up short and feels a lot more like art than science.

The new approach was introduced to me by Market Hardware COO Patrick Smith. Market Hardware is the web division of ServiceMagic.com, and they produce thousands of small business websites each year. That means Smith is constantly hiring. A “Getting Things Done” kind of guy, he hated the lost productivity of having candidates come in and parade through the various members of his staff losing time as each prepped for the interview, dragged out 30 to 60 minutes with the candidate, and then rehashed the candidate’s qualifications with other staff members. So he invented a solution.

He has chucked the sequential Q and A approach and opted for a more practical, speed-dating-like interview process. Candidates at Market Hardware are brought in in groups of 4 – 6, and given the ten minute “about the company” speech that makes interviewing particularly exhausting, repetitive and inefficient for interviewers together. Then he pairs each candidate with a staff member for a ten minute “date”. The staff members are asked to prepare a task for the candidate so instead of asking questions they can actually see how the candidate performs and also assess their intelligence, personality and experience.

For a Junior Market Researcher, the interview schedule might look like this:

0:00 – 0:10 – Group introduction with Executive

0:10 – 0:20 – Internet Research Observation with Staff Member 1

0:20 – 0:30 – Respond to an email (checking for speed, efficiency, grammar, and personality) with Staff Member 2

0:30 – 0:40 – Analyze the pros and cons of a 1 question poll that’s in the field with Staff Member 3

0:40 – 0:50 – Conduct a mock phone poll with an existing script with Staff Member 4 on the other end of the call

0:50 – 0:60 – Group wrap up and questions from the candidates with Executive or HR person

I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been 30 seconds into an interview and asking myself why I was going to waste 30 minutes or even an hour pretending to be considering the person for a position I knew I’d never hire them for! This system is so much more efficient and in many ways I think offers a deeper, more accurate perspective on how the candidate will perform if hired.

Hiring? Try this new interview method and let me know how it goes in the comments. I am not sure if I am willing to give up the Spanish inquisition approach just yet but this definitely got me thinking. Interviews are stuck back in the 50s and need a refresh. I think Market Hardware’s Patrick Smith is on to something and it’s a trend I’m going to keep an eye on.

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How to Get Your Own Executive Assistant. No Approval Required!

September 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

If you are like most employees that conduct market research, you’ve got too much on your plate. As we discussed in my last piece, “No One’s Going to Fund Your Sugarberry Ham Experiment” the tasks surrounding market research expand to fill time faster than housework. Market researchers have to be smarter and more focused than 80% of their colleagues in order to get half of the credit.

That’s why you need a dedicated executive assistant. It’s also why no one is going to let you hire one!

When I was working as Chief Marketing Officer of a frenetically paced 50-person start up, I had a half dozen people on my team; but I’d still catch myself cutting and pasting results into an excel spreadsheet, proofreading documents, researching other advertising opportunities, editing video, setting appointments to make upcoming trade shows more productive, and wading day-after-day through mind-numbing stacks of e-mail.

One day, near the end of a particularly difficult quarter, I realized I just wasn’t ready for an upcoming board meeting and I did something that seemed unethical, almost like cheating on a spouse. I hired an assistant to help me put my deck together, out of my own private funds. I’d dipped into my own funds to buy small rewards or meals for my team before, but I’d never imagined posting an ad on craigslist and actually hiring a market analyst (even though we had several business intelligence guys on staff!) to help me put a project together.

The fact was, there just wasn’t enough time in the day for me to get what I needed internally so I coughed up $400 and hands down it was the best Board presentation I ever made. (Thanks Tim!)

After that, however, I never ventured into the world of hiring a personal assistant again. Until this week. The fact is, there is a reason I command the hourly and salary rates I command. And there is a reason you are worth what you are worth. And if you are reading this website, I assume it’s because of your education and experience, not your ability to sort email, cut and paste phone numbers or retab an Excel spreadsheet.

What I am proposing is going to sound extreme but I can already tell it’s the best decision I’ve ever made.

For the next month, set aside $100 (presumably a relatively small fraction of your salary) for a virtual assistant.

Ronald, my assistant, is a Filipino whom I’d actually worked with as a blogger before so I know he is responsible and smart. In fact, he even lived and worked in the US and attuned to the culture. You can find yours on elance.com, craigslist, or any number of sites easily found through a Google search on the term Virtual Assistant.

Assuming you review everything, this is neither unfair to your company nor short changing yourself. You are buying more time out of the office, setting yourself up for a nice raise and/or promotion, and reducing the unpleasant, repetitive parts of your job to free your mind for the higher-order thinking you were hired to do.

Here are some of the tasks Ronald’s been working on for me this week. You’ll see it’s a mix of personal and work tasks, but to be honest, I work long days and do a bit of both in the office.

-       Email EZPass for my password, then go online to get my past 3 months toll bills (needed for an expense report I have been putting off)

-       Review the EZPass bill for tolls on certain dates, highlight them and send them back to me to submit with an expense report

-       Complete an expense report for the EZpass bills

-       Go through my Facebook account and grab the email address for everyone I have labeled as “GW Alum” – I have a college reunion coming up and I want to reach out to everyone to see who is going – I’ll have him draft that email for me next week

-       Do keyword research on a new product we are thinking of launching in Q1 2011. I’ve given him a spreadsheet with the fields and links to the sources I like to use. This alone will save me 2 hours of work, plus 2 hours of Internet surfing and the coinciding guilt.

-       Write cliff notes on 10 articles that have been sitting in a folder marked “To Read” for more than 7 days. I’ve instructed him that the cliff notes should be about 100 words each and that I prefer bullet points (no more than 10, each 25 words or less each) with a maximum of 250 words.

-       Created rules and folders for all email that is recurring – subscriptions etc. – so as to keep my inbox limited to personal email and new requests. I can review all my email newsletter and the solicitations I get from Norwegian Cruise Lines in batches once or twice a month.

With Ronald’s help, I’m already spending more time at work focusing on the higher level tasks I’m actually paid to do. I’ve left the office early for 3 days in a row, and I am producing more than ever. It’s a win-win-win – for my company, Ronald, and me.

If you are serious about being productive at work, because you want to grow in your career or just because it feels good, I recommend the investment. My bet is the $100 a month you invest now will get you far more than $300 in money or the equivalent value in free time to spend outside the office with friends and family.

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