The Power of being a little bit BETTER

by Jonathan Habbershon, High Center Associate

Jay Goltz, serial entrepreneur

Great employees make a company great; they can even differentiate you from your competition.  The first part of having great employees is bringing them in.  Interviewing and following up on references are critical to determining the excellence of an employee before they even begin working for you.  According to Jay Goltz 75% of management is hiring the right person from the beginning.  Start with writing a detailed job description in order to attract the right people, advertise well and perhaps you will attract a competitor’s best employee away, have the RIGHT person interview and always check references. 

Managing great employees that are competent, work hard and are loyal is much easier than constantly trying to coach someone to learn those skills.  After an employee has been properly checked train them very well.  Create lists of all possible adverse scenarios that can happen and train your new employees on how to handle each one.  Teach employees to practice how to interact with customers before they ever interact with a customer; by doing so you are diminishing the risk of a newer employee turning away a potential client.  One bad employee can ruin the appearance of an entire organization to a customer and not only will they never come back to you but they’ll only give you bad press when your name does come up.

Despite hiring great employees there comes a time when some need to be let go.  The most productive employee in your company can be one of your worst personalities and can negatively impact the work lives of the rest of the company.  Jay Goltz made a critical point regarding nurturing environments and family businesses; you can be the most nurturing environment in business but at the end of the day that does not mean you keep employees that create hostile work environments.  This becomes especially difficult in a family business because at times that employee can be a family member.  The duty of the business owner is to protect the business and if anything you’d be doing a disservice to the rest of your work force and the company as whole by keeping the difficult employees.  Jay offered up a good test to determine if a company has any employees like that: “Is there anyone in your company that if they walked in to your office Monday morning and quit your first instinct would be to sigh in relief?”    It is Jay’s opinion that you as the business owner need to begin the process of letting that employee go.

Releasing employees is never an easy task and never fun.  There are three ways to handle a difficult employee.  You can “Fix” the issue with coaching and teamwork and hopefully they’ll respond well.  You can “Fire” the employee perhaps after a warning or two, or even after the “Fix” stage.  Firing an employee can be tough simply because you will have to pay unemployment; this is a factor to be considered but should not be a deterrent from firing someone.  Finally “Flee” is the process of encouraging an employee to look elsewhere.  Do not bully employees out the door, or make their situation uncomfortable but let them know their behavior is not going to be tolerated and perhaps they should look elsewhere.  Ultimately your focus should always be towards making your business just a little bit better and remembering that you’re only as good as your worst employee. 

 

 --adapted from serial entrepreneur and columnist Jay Goltz’s presentation to the High Center for Family Business membership and guests on March 22, 2012.  Jay can be found at www.jaygoltz.com

Five Best Family Business Tweets

by Gale Martin, Director of Marketing and Member Relations, S. Dale High Center for Family Business

Many first-rate publications Tweet their content

on Twitter, one article at a time.

Day in and day out, our High Center Twitter feed coughs up some inspired content which is then aggregated into The Family-Business Daily online broadsheet.

Here's five of my favorite content Tweets from the previous week:

• 3 Tips for Leading People Older Than You - from the Harvard Business Review. Because I help facilitate a forum for next generation family business leaders, I know this is an important topic. The workforce is aging, and family businesses are known for valuing longevity with their employees.
• Experience Gained Outside the Family Business Can Be a Plus - from Crain's Cleveland Business, which looks at issues affecting the entrepreneurial economy. 
• How I Nearly Tripled My Blog Traffic - by Ken Mueller at the Inkling Media blog. In the true spirit of social media (which is give more than you get) Ken shares some wonderful tools and what are sure to become best practices for social media marketers.
• Does Entrepreneur Education Have Value? Can It Be Taught? - by Babson College. The Executive Director of the High Center Mike McGrann, formerly a professor at Babson, absolutely concurs that it can and should be taught. That's why he teaches a New Venture Creation class at Elizabethtown College now. For senior execs who want their next generation to exhibit more of their own enterprising spirit, this is an important read.
• Entitlement on Steroids -  by Paul and David Karofsky. This is a bald-faced look at "an attitude of noblesse oblige gone awry" among next generation family business leaders.

So there you have it! Happy reading, and if you aren't following these folks on Twitter, if you don't have time for Twitter, all you need do is subscribe to The Family-Business Daily--it arrives every day in your preferred email Inbox.

Quote of the week . . .

In a world of uncertainty, our guiding philosophy is: Take Charge. If nobody knows what the future will hold, your vision of how to navigate it is as good as anyone's. The future may as well belong to you."
-- Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan, authors of The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty.

Book Pic: The Entrepreneurial Mindset

In this kind of economy, when many businesses are struggling, who has the luxury to think beyond survival tactics? In their book The Entrepreneurial Mindset (Harvard Business School Press) Rita Hunter McGrath and Ian MacMillan assert that uncertain times are the best times to revise and develop long-term strategy.

One of the book's reviewers, Peter Hupalo claims, “Successful … entrepreneurs experiment intelligently. They don’t view every business move as a do-or-die endeavor for their company. Habitual entrepreneurs focus ruthlessly upon priorities and ruthlessly weed out unprofitable endeavors. They balance current, profitable, business operations with an eye to future opportunities.”

Click here for more from Hupalo on The Entrepreneurial Mindset.