Growth and Turnaround | Vital Growth Consulting Group

March 21, 2018

MeToo and Core Values

The MeToo movement has raised awareness about the widespread prevalence of sexual assault and harassment. It is not surprising that many organizations have had to contend with complaints about inappropriate behavior within their walls.

One example of how to resolve the problems raised by complaints of sexual assault and harassment is being set by Nike. Specifically, in a leaked internal memo, Nike has outlined significant changes in roles and organizational structure due to “behavior occurring within our organization that do[es] not reflect our core values of inclusivity, respect, and empowerment.”

We can quibble with the specifics of how Nike has reacted to the internal complaints they received but we think they are doing a good job of living up to the values they post “on the wall.” We all know people and organizations that give lip service to their values. The true character of an individual or an organization is demonstrated in tests like complaints of inappropriate behavior by employees at all levels of an organization — including the best performers.

Let us know if you would like help clarifying your core values whether they’re being tested or not.

February 19, 2018

KPIs for Alignment

This week’s email contains thoughts on improving alignment by using KPIs.

One of the most challenging aspects of running a business is getting people pulling in the same direction. In other words, getting them aligned.

The challenge is in translating organizational priorities into day-to-day behavior in the trenches. There is lots of room for interpretation in the translation even when people agree, in principle, with the priorities. Or, “the devil is in the details.”

A well designed KPI can be immensely helpful in reducing translation interpretation error by bringing a level of clarity to expectations. If you are clear about what you expect and have a way to measure performance vis-a-vis that expectation (a KPI), the person or people doing the work can be clear about what is expected of them.

Designing a KPI is part science and part art. Ideally, they measure the right thing at the right time for your particular business circumstance — keeping your and everyone else’s eye on the “right ball.”

We’ve come up with the following guidelines for designing KPIs in case you choose to give them a try.

A KPI should define what success is (it should answer the question, “when/how do I know that I’ve been successful?”).
KPIs can be “complete or not” but generally are better if they include more detail (e.g., “upgrade delivered and adopted by X customers a quarter” might be a clearer measure of success than “upgrade delivered”).
KPIs generally are also better if they measure continuous results (reflecting ongoing effort). That said, simplicity vs. complexity is important to balance. Have fun, be creative, come up with ways of celebrating KPIs that are consistently met!
A KPI should be “Key” and have a clear business purpose (e.g., so that visiting eight customers a month might be better if the KPI included four of those eight visit leading to a renewal or expansion of business). Too many KPIs or KPIs that are not focused on meaningful business results will definitely impair focus and alignment.
A KPI should be actionable by the person being measured (that is, they can act to affect the KPI).
KPIs should be evaluated regularly for utility (business purpose, actionability, etc.). It is completely normal that they are revised and refined as time goes on.
KPIs can also be categorized by whether they are forward-looking (predictive — like, for example, sales inquiries) or lagging (retrospective — like booked revenue). Although a longer discussion, a balance between forward-looking and retrospective KPIs produces the best business outcomes if the KPIs measure the “right things at the right time.”

Let us know if you have questions or want some help putting KPIs into play.

November 10, 2017

Assessing Team Health and Leadership Effectiveness

We’re excited to introduce two new tools for assessing team health and leadership effectiveness. These tools are proprietary to Vital Growth Consulting Group LLC and not available elsewhere.

The first is our Organizational and Relationship Intelligence Survey. It is a unique 360-degree feedback tool with the feature of multiple leaders being rated at the same time. Simply put, this tool identifies who on a team has to most work to do to improve their interaction with other members of the team. Or, even more simply, this tool identifies who’s holding a team hostage with their attitude and behavior.

The second is our Cohesiveness Rating System for teams. This tool takes photos during a team meeting (around a table–see photo below) and, using a Microsoft Emotion API, detects individual’s emotions and the level of emotional agreement among team members. Leaders of teams can use this tool to assess the level of cohesiveness of a team as well as the overall emotional tone of any meeting the tool is used in.

We have used the Organizational and Relationship Survey tool in multiple organizations during the past year. We often combine it with a Team Emotional Health survey based on the work of Patrick Lencioni (of Five Dysfunctions of a Team fame).

In contrast, the Cohesiveness Rating System is fresh out of the lab and ready for trials.

For a limited time, we are willing to implement both the tools featured in this email message at your organization at no cost. In particular, we are looking for organizations willing to participate in the fine-tuning and development of our Cohesiveness Rating System for teams. Please contact us if you have an interest in using one or both of these tools in your organization. Thanks for the consideration in any event.

As always, let us know if you have questions.

February 22, 2017

The Challenge of Real Change

As consultants, we are often asked to work on change. Whether it’s changing a process or an organization’s culture, we expect and often get resistance.

Sometimes we are able to overcome this resistance. Sometimes we are not.

When we are not, it’s usually not for intellectual or rational reasons. We can and do make the logical case for the change we suggest. Indeed, we rarely reach an impasse where we are told that what we suggest does not make sense. But, change being okay at an EMOTIONAL LEVEL is another matter.

Emotion is the challenge of real change. It may take the form of feeling uncomfortable with a new process. Like being asked, starting tomorrow, to drive on the right side of the street, à la England. It can also take the form of feeling fearful about the unknown, summed up by the idiom, “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.”

All strategies for overcoming emotion based resistance start with recognizing and accepting that is what is going on. Once recognized, it’s possible to start soothing the emotions and reducing their contribution to resistance. For example, an emotion calming strategy might be to investigate the experience of others who have already implemented a given change — hoping for reassurance. Another emotional calming strategy might be to use mindfulness (or meditation) to help avoid the tendency we all have to “catastrophize” or start thinking about worst case outcomes.

Whatever strategy fits you best, it’s much easier to employ, if you recognize you’re tackling the foremost challenge to real change, emotion.

Please let us know if we can help…

November 22, 2016

Everyone Needs a Coach

Perhaps you already believe a coach can help you. Perhaps you know it. In this brief video [https://youtu.be/XLF90uwII1k] Bill Gates and Eric Schmidt of Microsoft and Google fame, respectively, make a pitch for hiring a coach. It’s a brief video (< 90 seconds) and it makes the important point that no matter how good at your job you are, you cannot objectively assess your own behavior–like a trained coach can. Perhaps watching the video will push you to take the step of hiring a coach. If so, give us a call. We think you’ll be glad you did.

Happy Thanksgiving,

Vital Growth Consulting Group

December 17, 2015

Lack of Turnover Hurts Your Business – Including Your Family Business

Turnover is hard. It’s painful. It means change and loss. It is the inconsistent with the sentiment of rewarding loyalty and hard work with loyalty and longevity.

Advocating for turnover flies in the face of advocating for building trust and predictability–at least superficially. It’s akin to advocating to burn a forest with all the dangers of a forest fire.

There is a reason why it sometimes makes sense to start a forest fire, however. After such a planned fire, old growth is cleared and new growth emerges.

Turnover in a business, including a family business, can have the same effect. It can lead to new responsibilities for those that remain. It often opens the doors to new ideas and ways of doing things. New employees often bring high levels of energy and engagement and their enthusiasm can be contagious.

Perhaps most importantly, adding people from the outside can add their “different” experience to the mix. There is nothing quite like inside knowledge about how other organizations do things when figuring out how to improve. The perspective such a new employee brings is often missing when turnover is low.

We’re not quite ready to say something like, “15% of your management staff should turnover every year” or that, “anyone who’s approaching their 20th anniversary should be let go.” We are saying that there is a price to pay for low turnover and that the occasional planned “burn” has tangible benefits.

November 18, 2015

Employee Engagement (Including Millennials)

During the past several months, multiple clients and peers have raised the “millennial issue.” This issue can be summarized by the question: how do you engage employees born after 1980 (and before ~2000)?

A quick check of Gallup’s Employee Engagement webpage indicates that overall employee engagement is only around 32% and so it seems, the question of how to engage millennials might be broadened to how to engage employees of all ages?

There is clear research supporting the hypothesis that both local leaders (managers) and senior leaders (executives) have a role in the level of employee engagement of an organization. That is, the attitudes of both managers and executives at an organization directly influence the level of employee engagement.

In the organizations that we work with, it is more common than not to hear that the employees would “do anything” for the owner. The loyalty that the owner creates is vulnerable on two fronts: the attitude of the local manager (that may undermine even the strongest owner loyalty) and the withdrawal of the owner (as he/she gradually or suddenly prepares to leave the company in someone else’s hands).

Fortunately, there is a solution that addresses vulnerability on both fronts. That solution is to develop executives and local managers in the art of leadership and, specifically, “Primal Leadership,” as described in the book, Primal Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, Richard E. Boyatzis and Annie McKee.

Although it is beyond the scope of this piece to go into any detail about Primal Leadership, it is worth noting that in Harvard Business Review, the authors stated: “A leader’s premier task—we would even say his primal task—is emotional leadership. A leader needs to make sure that not only is he regularly in an optimistic, authentic, high-energy mood, but also that, through his chosen actions, his followers feel and act that way, too [employee engagement]. Managing for financial results [performance], then, begins with the leader managing his inner life so that the right emotional and behavioral chain reaction occurs.”

Developing leaders at all levels to be “Primal Leaders” is THE PATH to improved performance, financial results, employee engagement and successful owner exits.

With millennials in the workforce, perhaps primal leadership is more important than ever.

Contact us if you have questions, feedback or want some assistance developing your leaders/increasing employee engagement.

October 19, 2015

Hiring for Emotional Intelligence

We’ve all seen bright and technically competent people fail in managerial/leadership roles because of poor or non-existent people skills. The study of this phenomena finds that success in a leadership role is strongly correlated with above average people skills or what has come to be known as, high emotional intelligence. Indeed, at the top levels of any organization, where most people are bright and technically competent, the only variable that reliably predicts success is emotional intelligence (not book smarts or “expertise”).

The trouble is, hiring decisions are often made on the basis of cognitive ability (smarts) and technical expertise (competence). If you are hiring for a mid-level technical role, an emphasis on smarts and competence is fine. But, if you are hiring a future manager or executive, you had better be evaluating the candidate’s emotional intelligence. If you don’t, you miss a read on the most important predictor of their success.

How do you assess emotional intelligence and the leadership potential of a candidate? You focus on their self-awareness, their ability to manage their feelings, their awareness of the feelings of others AND their history of managing their relationships with others.

Ask about times when they were frustrated or angry. Why did they feel that way? What did they do about it? Ask about conflict with others. Did they deal with it or ignore it? How did they resolve the conflict if they did? What did they think about how the other person felt (the one who they had conflict with)? What did they say/do to move beyond the conflict? How do they approach motivating others? What is their primary leadership style (the way they approach the task of getting others working)?

This is just a sample of the questions you might use to assess for emotional intelligence. The idea is to evaluate how the person navigates the emotional world of self and others.

Ignoring how the person navigates this emotional world leaves you at a huge disadvantage when the time comes to judge how the candidate will lead or manage others.

September 16, 2015September 16, 2015

Backroom Politics

It is normal to seek support from those around us who are more likely to agree than disagree. This is the desire that fuels most backroom politics or those meetings among well-meaning but like-minded people. We all want to hear more cheers than boos when it comes to our ideas and plans.

The trouble is, vigorous debate is productive. It results in better ideas and better plans almost without exception. It is not what happens in backrooms where support and freedom from debate are what people look for.

What this means for your organization is that you should be alarmed when people don’t embrace vigorous debate and take refuge among those most likely to see things the way they do. Taking refuge reduces the quality of debate, makes for poorer ideas and planning and can be destructive if agendas hatched in backrooms (I like to say, “in the dark”) start to collide with other agendas (agendas arrived at through vigorous debate or in other backrooms).

So, fight the very human tendency to avoid vigorous debate and discourage backroom politics. Your organization’s ideas, plans and ultimately execution will be better for it.

March 3, 2015

Why is it Always About You?: A Threat to Organizational Health

In her book, Why is is Always About You?, Sandy Hotchkiss talks about how certain people put their needs above everyone else’s and ultimately abuse their power. Although we have not spoken with her about it, we expect she would agree with the statement that these same people undermine organizational health and are prime contributors to organizational ill-health and its symptoms: poor morale, poor alignment, poor execution, poor retention and the like.

So, what is it about these people that make them toxic to organizational health? Mostly, it’s about their need to see themselves as powerful and what they do to protect their power–whether they have real power, like a CEO or Senior Executive, or little power, like a first time supervisor. Whatever their level in the organization, their need for power is likely to show up in one or more of the following behaviors.

Please note: These behaviors are based on the book, Why is it Always About You? They may be conscious behaviors but more often are unconscious or something people don’t realize they are doing in the moment.

A Tendency to Scapegoat – These individuals don’t tolerate failure well and blame is consistently shifted to others. This can appear as extreme defensiveness or a failure to acknowledge mistakes.

Work/Life Imbalance – These individuals often directly or indirectly ask others to go “above and beyond” to ensure their own success. That people are often willing to sacrifice their own work/life balance to serve a leader is something these individuals will all too eagerly exploit.

Importance of Admiration – The need for admiration for these individuals will manifest in a couple of ways: always needing to be the one with the final word, with the best idea/plan OR dejection when there are setbacks or challenges to his or her ideas and plans. It is the intensity of emotion that is the telltale sign of the importance of admiration: success brings intense joy while setbacks bring intense self-doubt.

Unusual Levels of Unprofessional Behavior – Unprofessional behavior like blurring the boundary between one’s personal and professional life or expressing emotions intensely, varies in degree from very minor to extreme. A red flag should go up when you feel too much personal information is being asked for or when there are frequent and unpredictable strong outbursts of emotions. Both of these “unprofessional” behaviors are signs of trouble that inevitably undermine healthy interaction and boundary setting in a workplace.

At Vital Growth we work hard to help organizations maximize their organizational health. We know improving organizational health is a huge competitive advantage for any business. Sometimes it’s a matter of making a team more functional. Sometimes its a matter of finding out and working with a power abusing individual who is eroding organizational health in his or her department or throughout the organization.

Give us a call if you think you’ve got a power monger in your workplace. We can coach you through your choices.