This is Part 5 of a 6 part series on transformation leadership.  In part 1 of this series, I laid out five great New Year’s resolutions for Executives in 2013.  In this post, I offer some practical suggestions for Resolution #4: Finish What You Start.

When you fail to finish, you start to fail

I was visiting my mother over the holidays and we were looking at an afghan that I crocheted for her when I was in college.  As she was remarking once again on how beautiful it was and how much work went into it, I felt compelled to tell her the truth.  The actual crocheting time was only a few weeks.  The total project time, however, was nearly four years.  My original plan was to give her the afghan for Christmas my freshman year in college.  But, I did not finish it in time.  So, I set it aside, thinking it would make a great mother’s day gift.  And then it was a birthday gift.  And then it was Christmas again.  And so on.  Until I finally gave it to her for Christmas my senior year in college.

And while I am confessing, I will confess one more thing.  It is the only afghan project I ever finished.  I currently have three other projects in various stages of completion — at least two of them more than 10 years in the making.

I am sure that most of us have unfinished projects at home.  Maybe its the baby book you started for your first child.  Perhaps it is the old Chevy parked in your yard that you intend to restore one day.  Or maybe its the oil painting you started in a summer art class, that now sits in your closet gathering dust.  I know people who build new houses with the intention of finishing the trim themselves, yet the trim remains undone in the basement or utility room.  And nearly all of us have a list of “honey do” projects that “honey don’t” get done.

And we don’t really sweat these unfinished projects.  After all, the unfinished baby book is far less important than raising your son or daughter to be a good man or woman.  Someone else will buy your old Chevy as a project car. Most visitors to your home are unlikely to notice the missing trim in your utility room.  And, unless the project on the “honey do” list involves a working toilet, most of theses projects are simply not “mission critical” for your family.

But unfinished transformation initiatives in your business are another matter entirely. When you fail to finish, you are failing your customers, you are failing your employees, and you are failing your shareholders and owners.  And when you fail to finish several transformations in succession, your employees begin to see every new initiative as the “transformation du jour”.  They will happily play lip service to it in public and then equally happily ignore it in practice. Not only do you not gain the performance improvements that you intended with the transformation, you may soon find yourself falling further behind your competitors who have been more successful at finishing what they start.

Here are some things you can do to breathe new life in your important transformation initiatives in 2013.

Renew Your Commitment

If making the transformation is important to you and your business, then people need to see and hear you make it important.  If it has been more than a year since you started down the path of transformation, it may be time to renew your commitment.  One great way to communicate to your employees that you are still committed to the change process is to hold a 2013 Kick-Off event to celebrate successes and recognize the champions of the transformation.

Do something fun, like have an ice cream social in the cafeteria with you and your management team dishing up the ice cream.  Hand out promotional items that emphasize the message of the transformation, such as a coffee mug.  Or, if money is an issue, create certificates hand-signed by you to present to employees who have shown real leadership in moving the transformation forward.  To be honest,  it isn’t so important what you do — as long as you personally and publicly participate in whatever the activity might be.

Actively Monitor the Progress

One of the biggest contributors to stalled transformations is that they are “delegated” away from the executive suite, sometimes two or three levels below the executive management team.  If you want your transformation to be successful, you need to have an executive champion who sits at the table on an equal basis with the rest of the executive management team. In the most successful transformations, the CEO or President serves as the executive champion.

Once you have a suitable champion, you also need to include the transformation as an agenda topic at every management or staff meeting.  While it is important to have separate, formal progress reviews on a periodic basis, there is no substitute for sustaining an ongoing conversation about the progress of the transformation.  And the conversation needs to be very open and honest.  Encourage your managers to report both successes and failures.  Talk about the barriers that stand in the way of achieving your vision.  And work together to come up with solutions to get things moving forward again.

Finally, one of the most powerful ways for an executive to demonstrate  his or her commitment to the change process is to engage your employees in informal discussions by simply walking around and talking about it every day.  But instead of asking the usual, general question “how are things going”, ask a very specific question about the transformation process.  Are they seeing any improvements?  Are their ideas being heard?  What can be done to make it more effective?  The first few times, you may be deafened by the silence.  But once you make this part of your daily routine, you will open up a constructive dialogue that can help you and your management team keep the transformation moving forward.

Hold People Accountable

A few years ago, I worked with a company that had made a significant investment in developing an information system that would track and report overall equipment efficiency for every production line.  Two years after the system was installed, I visited one of the plants to see if the solution had actually resulted in improved efficiencies.  Sadly, it had not.  Why?  It turns out that overall equipment efficiency was not one of the metrics used to measure the performance of the plants or the plant managers.  Duh!

Every transformation initiative is justified on the basis of some kind of improvement in your organization’s performance.  A lean manufacturing initiative should result in reduced costs or more throughput.  A customer service initiative should result in improved customer satisfaction ratings or measures.  A quality improvement initiative should result in fewer rejects, repairs, and returns.  The fastest way to drive these initiatives forward is to measure the changes in performance and hold people accountable for the results.

Take a look at the performance measures you use for your managers and employees.  Are the measures you are using tied to the company you want to be after the transformation?  Or are they tied to the company you have been, reinforcing old and unproductive behaviors?  If the latter, then make 2013 the year that you bring your performance measures in line with your vision.  And if changing performance measures doesn’t change the behaviors of your managers and employees — then maybe it is time to change the people and replace them with people who are on board with the transformation vision.

Find a New Way to “Finish”

Transformation initiatives often take several years to move through all the stages from initiation to complete transformation.  And they seldom look exactly like the original vision when they are complete.  When a transformation process stalls out, it may be necessary to change some of the elements to make it work better for your organization.  If formal process mapping is too sophisticated or detailed for your organization to embrace, develop a more practical approach that your employees will use.  If you started off collecting so much data your employees no longer have time to look at any of it, then simplify your approach and focus on the top two or three metrics.

Remember my afghan story?  In fact, it took me so long to get around to “finishing” it, I was  unable to match the yellow yarn that I was using when I started the project.  What my mother always thought was a carefully planned use of blue, white, and yellows, was really the fortunate accident of having to adjust my plan in order to finish the afghan.  While different from my original vision, the result was actually more creative and more beautiful.

By finishing what you started in your transformation initiative, I am betting you will be pleasantly surprised at how much better and more successful your organization has become than you originally envisioned.

This is Part 4 of a 6 part series on transformation leadership.  In part 1 of this series, I laid out five great New Year’s resolutions for Executives in 2013.  In this post, I offer some practical suggestions for Resolution #3: Treat your employees with more respect in 2013.

Why Employees Deserve Our Respect

A very close friend of mine works for a large, well-known and well-respected food manufacturer.  The company pays quite well, has a good benefits package, and would generally be considered a great place to work. And right on their website, they state their vision that employees who feel valued are more likely to be fully engaged in our success.

Except my friend happens to work for the “boss from hell”.  You know the kind I am talking about.  He’s the one who belittles your ideas for improvements — and then one week later presents them as his own ideas.  He’s the one who is very quick to criticize, even when you have nothing to do with the problem, and very slow to praise, even when you are the one who saved the day.  And he’s the one who won’t approve your vacation requests because you are “too valuable” to be allowed to take time off.

All of these behaviors are not only disrespectful, they are bordering on abusive. And they certainly don’t represent a sense of “valuing” employees.

Employees who do not feel valued are less likely to put 100% of themselves into the job.  They make mistakes.  They have accidents. They arrive late and they leave early. They are surly to their co-workers — and to customers.   And, ultimately, they impact your bottom line by raising your costs and damaging your company’s reputation.  Yes, there is the occasional “bad actor”  - the employee who will do all these things even with the best boss in the world.  But if you have a lot of these “bad actors” in your company, I will submit that you have a more serious and systemic management problem.

While customers are our reason for being, employees are the reason we continue to exist and to grow.  They are the ones who interact with our customers through sales and customer service activities.  They are the ones who interact with our suppliers, through purchasing and finance.  They are the ones who have to work together to produce our products or deliver our services.  In short, unless you are a one-person company, you need your employees to be successful.

Without productive and engaged employees, we cannot provide our customers with the best products and services at a fair price. But it takes more than a good pay scale, decent benefits, and some nicely worded sentiments on the company’s web page.  It takes the heart felt commitment of every executive, manager, supervisor, and team leader in the company to provide the leadership that these valuable resources deserve.

So what can you do in 2013 to treat your employees with more respect?

Complete performance reviews on time — and with purpose.

Here is a simple “True or False” question to ask yourself.

Performance management is the single most important activity that any supervisor or manager should do.

If you answered “True”, you can skip this rest of this section.  You are already among the few leaders who understand the true importance of effectively and purposefully managing the performance of your people. But if you thought of even one thing that you think is more important and answered “False”, read on.

As a consultant, educator, and business development professional, I have had the opportunity to learn how organizations of all sizes approach managing the performance of their employees.  One of the sad truths I have learned is that employees nearly always place a higher value on the performance review than their supervisors and managers.  Some of the problems employees report include:

• Reviews are not completed on time, if at all.  Smaller organizations are particularly prone to this.  I have worked with some companies where employees have not received a performance review for  years.
• Reviews are arbitrary and vague. Employees in companies of all sizes frequently complain that their supervisors do not provide them with feedback that is specific and actionable.  As a result, employees do not know what they need to do to improve their performance.
• Reviews contain big surprises.  Employees frequently report that they received no feedback or coaching during the year, only to be blindsided during the annual review with major performance deficiencies.

For their part, managers and supervisors also report frustration with the performance review process.  They may view the annual performance review as an administrative task that takes time away from “more important” work.  They are frustrated by the paperwork.  They have not been trained to complete performance reviews properly or conduct face-to-face performance reviews.  They are ill-prepared to provide coaching and counseling to employees to help them improve performance on an ongoing basis.

If any of these observations sound like they came from your employees or management team, then 2013 might be the year to tackle your performance management system.  Take a look at whether your performance review process is designed to develop the behaviors you need to achieve your vision.  Then provide your entire team with the tools and training they need to successfully manage the performance of your employees.

Make training and development a priority.

One of the objectives of any good performance management system should be to identify skills and knowledge that an employee needs to be more successful in their job and advance in their careers.  Performance review forms usually contain a section for supervisors to list up to three training or development activities for each employee.  Yet, only the best managed companies actually use this information to prepare consolidated training plans and budgets for the coming year.  Instead, most companies leave it up to the employee and their supervisor to find — and fund — the specific training.

So how can a company make training and development a priority?  Certainly, setting up a training budget — and protecting it — is an important first step.  But instead of treating training as a discretionary budget item that can be reduced or eliminated at will, treat it as a mandatory budget item — just like health benefits or retirement funds.

Another important step is to set aside time for each employee to participate in training.  One company I worked for early in my career set aside 3 weeks every year for every employee.  While 3 weeks may be too much for most companies to absorb in today’s business environment, why not start with 3 days?  Make a commitment to your employees that you will provide them with a minimum of 3 days each year to develop the skills or acquire the knowledge you need them to have to be more successful.

Finally, hold yourself and your management team accountable for making sure that each employee receives the training and development that is identified each year.  Make it part of THEIR performance review (and yours) to provide the training and development opportunities that your employees need.

By elevating the importance of training and development of your employees, you will be showing your employees how much you value them.  When you do it with purpose, you will see a real and meaningful improvement in your organization’s overall performance.

Honor commitments for time-off and vacation requests.

We all need time off to relax and recharge our batteries, from the top of the organization to the very bottom.  One of the perks of being an executive is to have even more time off than our entry-level employees.  And most executives make sure they take every day that is due.  Yet, while we enjoy 4 or 5 weeks of time off each year, we may have employees who only have 5 or 10 days each year.  So why do companies make it so difficult for employees to schedule these few days off when they need it?

When we fail to approve a request for time-off that is submitted well in advance or when we cancel an approved request at the last minute, we are telling employees that our needs are more important than theirs.  Instead of communicating that they are valuable to us, we are communicating that we do not value them or their families.

Yes, there are times that we need to ask an employee to reschedule a vacation.  There may be a critically important project to complete or a game-changing proposal to submit.  But these should be the exception and not the rule.  And paying an employee for unused vacation time isn’t the answer, either.  An employee who is burned out is less motivated and less productive, regardless of how much we pay them.

As we begin 2013, examine your organization’s practices for scheduling time off.  Are you taking a balanced approach or are you treating some employees more favorably than others?  Is canceling or rescheduling time-off the exception or the rule?  If you do have to ask an employee to cancel or change a vacation, are you reimbursing them for non-refundable costs or are you shifting the financial burden to them?

Just like honoring your commitments to training and development, honoring your commitments for time-off requests demonstrates to your employees that you respect and value their contributions to your success.

Make the tough decisions to remove the “bad actors”.

I started this blog with a story about the “boss from hell”.  It turns out that this boss is one of the exceptions and not the rule at this particular company.  It is widely known in the organization that he does not treat his employees with respect, that he takes credit for ideas that are not his own, and that he takes advantage of his best performers by denying time-off and training requests while rewarding the poor performers by approving these requests.  So why does he still have his job?

As an executive, one of the best decisions you can make for your entire team is to remove the “bad actors”.  Whether it is an employee who simply is not performing or a manager who refuses to conform to your principles, leaving these “bad actors”  in place is demoralizing to everyone who needs to cover for their shortcomings.  If you have been putting this off because it is difficult, do not put it off any longer.  You are likely spending far too much time and energy on managing these people and the consequences of their actions at the expense of the people who can actually help you achieve your vision.

Celebrate your employees’ successes.

One of the easiest — and costless — things you can do to show your employees more respect is to simply thank them for the work that they do.  Certainly, you can and should have more formal means of celebrating success, such as raises, performance bonuses, and other recognition programs.  But a simple thank you from the “big boss” on an ordinary work day can often produce the most extraordinary results.

You can start your resolution to treat your employees with more respect as soon as you are done reading this blog.  Just walk the halls of your facility or pick up the phone to call remote employees with no purpose other than to shake a hand and say thank you.  You will make their day — and they, in turn, will help make your year the best it can be.

This is Part 3 of a 6 part series on transformation leadership.  In Part 1 of this series, I laid out five great New Year’s resolutions for Executives for 2013.  In this post, I offer some practical suggestions for Resolution #2: Treat your customers with more respect in 2013.

Why Customers Deserve Our Respect

I once worked with an entrepreneur who maintained a pretty simple accounting system.  He had one folder called “Money In” and a second folder called “Money Out”.  Each month, he entered all the “money in” and “money out” into an Excel spreadsheet.  When the “money out” exceeded the “money in”, he didn’t immediately start looking for ways to cut costs.  Instead, he jumped all over ways to find more customers and new orders.  While he may have been naïve in his accounting practices, he did understand something that everyone in business should understand but often forgets.  Without customers, the business cannot thrive and grow.  Without customers, there are no revenues to cover the costs.  Without customers, there simply is no business.

Despite this simple truth, some business leaders consistently and repeatedly treat customers – and prospective customers — with disrespect.  They will exaggerate product or service claims just to land a new customer.  They will propose a project with one set of resources and replace them with less qualified personnel once they receive the order.  They will take short-cuts on a project and then submit a change request to deliver the original scope.  They will fail to respond to a customer request or concern in a timely fashion – if at all.  And then they will wonder why the customer walks away from the relationship.

Now, I am not saying that there aren’t bad customers.  There are.  There are customers who try to take advantage of small businesses by pressuring them into rate reductions.  There are customers who pay late.  There are customers who will use every tactic available to avoid approving a legitimate change request.  But while the customer may not always be right, they are always the customer.  They provide the revenues that cover our costs.  They are our reason for being.  For that reason alone, they deserve our respect – even if we don’t like them much.

Here are four things you can do in 2013 to treat your customers with more respect.

Be truthful with your customers.

Being truthful begins early in the marketing and sales cycle.  Take a look at your website and your marketing and sales materials.  Are all of your claims true or have you exaggerated a bit to claim a stronger presence in a market or technology than your company deserves?  Or perhaps they were true when you created the material, but something has changed to make them less true today.  For example, maybe you have changed the product design to make it more affordable to produce, but now the product is less reliable or more prone to breakage.

If you are a service organization, take a look at your proposal process.  When is the last time you updated the boilerplate that you use in your proposals?  Does it still reflect your company and your capabilities?  Perhaps you no longer have some of the technology skills you used to feature due to employee turnover or changes in your strategic direction.

If you are chasing business outside of your traditional markets, do you truly have the capacity to deliver on your proposal commitments?  Or are you assuming you can figure it out after you get the order?  You may be able to get the first order by incorporating a few little “white lies” in the proposal, but you are unlikely to keep the customer after the first engagement once the truth is revealed.

Being truthful is the first step in treating your customers with more respect. And your customers will respond by treating you and your company with more respect.

Perform as if you will never get another change request.

In my first post, I posed a question similar to this:

Have you ever hurried through a project in order to meet a deadline, taking shortcuts that you knew you would have to fix later?

 If you answered yes, you would not be alone.  Service companies, like management consultants, engineering firms, and system integrators, all face a similar set of challenges in providing services to customers.  The best of these service companies will approach each project with the idea that that the project should be completed on time and under budget with few or no change requests.  The worst will view each project as an opportunity to make a windfall profit by taking advantage of every opportunity to submit a change request.  Most fall in the middle, taking the high road when they can, and the low road when they must.  Unfortunately, the low road seldom leads to a follow-on order.  So what can you do in 2013 to take the high road more often?

The first challenge is getting a scope document that is clearly defined and understood by both the customer and the service provider.  The service company that prefers the low road is perfectly happy with a loosely defined scope.  It gives them the opportunity to interpret the requirements in such a way that they can underbid the competitors and then underperform the work.  The high road requires a great deal of communication with the customer prior to signing the contracts.  Or, in the case of a formal request for proposal (RFP) where the communication is limited, the proposer will need to clearly define the assumptions and limitations of the proposal to provide the necessary definition and tie it to the pricing. Since the high road requires more time and applied intelligence on the part of the proposer, it is tempting to take short-cuts during the proposal process.  Since these shortcuts can lead to dead-ends and detours during the project that can be very costly to both the customer and the service provider, you may want to revamp your proposal process in 2013 to place more emphasis on scope definition.

The second challenge is to staff the project with resources that are capable of performing the work in accordance with the schedule.  Sadly, the timing of project awards seldom matches the availability of the resources that need to be assigned to the project.  Service providers often face the challenge of either pulling resources off another project or acquiring new or contracted employees to fill gaps in order to fully staff a new project.  The low road alternative is to either substitute less qualified employees or delay the staffing on the project and try to compress the later part of the schedule.  Such substitutions and delays on the front end of a project are rarely recovered without convincing the customer to accept less scope or delaying the end date of the project.  You may want to review your staff allocation process and see if you can develop an approach that reduces the number of times you need to assign different resources to a new project or delay a project schedule.

The third challenge is to maintain the kind of project plans and controls that can detect and correct problems before they become change requests.  Companies that routinely and consistently deliver projects on time and on budget have well established and disciplined project management processes.  If you have not already invested in developing these processes and training your team to use them, 2013 might be the year to start.

Build your customer service processes around your customers’ needs, not yours.

To truly understand this concept, think about your own needs as a customer who has a question about a product or service.  Do you prefer to speak to a live human being or use an automated system to get help on your phone bill?  When you speak to a person, do you prefer that they be in the same time zone, speaking the same language?  How long are you willing to stay on hold?  How long do you want to wait for someone to get back to you with an answer?  How many phone calls are you willing to make before you give up?

Your customers probably want most of the same things you do.  They want to be able to reach a person who can resolve the problem quickly and with no more than one phone transfer.  They want a resolution to their issue within minutes or hours – not days or weeks.  They want to speak to someone who is knowledgeable about their company or application.  They don’t want to get into a debate about whose fault it is.  They want you to be respectful of their time.

Now take a truly objective look at your customer service processes and systems.  Were they designed with the needs of the customer in mind?  Or where they designed to suit your current staffing availability and culture?  Are your customer service representatives treating your customers with respect?  Or are they rude and impatient?  If you use a customer feedback form, is it simple enough that most customers will complete it?  Or is it so complex, that you only get feedback from the very unhappy?

Customer service processes that focus more on your needs than your customers can do more harm to your company’s reputation than good.   Take some time in 2013 to review your customer service policies and systems and make the changes needed to create a customer experience that is second to none.

Thank your customers for their business

I am sure that most of you reading this blog use a standard “Thank you for your business” at the bottom of proposals, correspondence, and invoices.  Or, you may send an annual “thank you” card at the holidays.  And this may be sufficient for most product companies or standard services like insurance.  But if you are a service company or a company that sells big-ticket items to other businesses, you may want to go further – especially if you are pursuing follow-on business with that customer.

Products or services that are big ticket or that have long selling cycles usually require the participation of a lot of people within the customer organization, beyond those that you work with directly to deliver the project.  Procurement, accounting, engineering, facilities management, and many other organizations may be involved in planning and implementing a large capital investment.  Recognizing their support and contributions directly or to their management can go a long way towards earning their support for future orders.

Pick up the phone and call the people who helped your company be successful and say thanks.  Send an email to their supervisor or manager with your thanks for their participation and support.  Post a recommendation for that person on LinkedIn — it may be far more valuable to their career than a free lunch or a golf outing.  Or schedule a meeting with the CEO or other executive sponsor with no purpose other than to say “thank you”.

With a simple “thank you”, you can demonstrate your respect for your customer and your appreciation for their business.