While these companies do a lot of things well, I’d argue that their biggest assets are their unique corporate cultures.

As a consultant, I have spent lots of time helping clients shape and build their company cultures. The culture your company creates affects everything that you do and how you do it.

Here are six tips and ideas to help you build your organizational culture.

1. Craft a mission and vision statement.

The foundation of your organizational performance should be your company’s mission and vision statement. This is a written statement that outlines what you believe in (mission) and where you are headed (vision).

Bring together a cross-functional team to create these essential documents. This will increase the likelihood that the rest of the company will buy in and support it.

2. Communicate it.

Once you have developed a clear mission and vision, it’s critically important to have a communication plan to roll it out to everyone. You can do this through group meetings, one-on-one calls and in email communications.

3. Develop behavioral standards.

Next, you must develop behavioral standards that describe how the mission and vision will be executed on in terms of behavior. If part of the mission is to be a world-class service provider, then how does that play out in terms of how your team interacts with a customer in person and on the phone? How about by email?

Many people assume team members know how to behave, but the reality is they don’t. The only way to get consistency is through written behavioral standards. The standards must be either observable, tangible or measurable.

For example, you could say: We’ll greet every customer with a smile and a hello (observable). Or you could say: This is what our final product looks like when it is done to our standard (tangible). You could also say: We will answer the phone by the third ring (measurable).

I advise my clients to create a behavioral standards committee to develop the standards. Why? Aside from getting better buy-in, you also get better ideas from people who are on the front lines every day, and they are the people who know what is really happening.

4. Implement behavioral standards training.

Once the standards are in writing, everyone needs to be trained in the new expectations. The companies I mentioned at the beginning of this article obsessively train staff on their standards. It’s how they deliver.

5. Create rewards and consequences.

If you have behavioral standards, then I hope people will follow them. But the reality is that you have to reinforce behavioral standards by rewarding people when they meet and exceed them, and by letting people know there are consequences for not meeting them. When people get rewarded for meeting or exceeding behavior standards, the news travels fast.

6. Conduct performance reviews.

If you have annual performance reviews, change them to include the mission, vision and behavioral standards. If they are not included in the annual review, then after one review cycle, all your hard work will fade away. People only pay attention to what gets measured and evaluated.

The bottom line is that you create the culture. It is up to you to build it, foster it, support it and live it. When you do, you’ll have true excellence, and you will get great results.

The post From Startup to Sensation In 6 Steps appeared first on Shawn Doyle Training.

Do you want to make sure that you’re ready for next year? Consider developing your single biggest and often most overlooked asset: the undeveloped talent of each team member. Here are ten elements to look at for developing people.

#1 — Everyone gets development- If you have a department with sixteen employees, that means that each and every employee deserves and gets individual development. Sometimes, in my training program, someone will object to this concept. “Are you suggesting that my administrative assistant should have an Individual Development Plan?“ Yes. Because if you want an administrative assistant who’s fired up, dedicated and with high morale, the proven technique for getting that kind of commitment is committing to that employees’ development.  Yet many leaders don’t ever do this.

#2 — Have an Individual Development Plan meeting.  Each year, you should schedule each employee for an Individual Development Plan meeting.  This meeting should be a conversation between you and the employee to determine their future career goals. After the discussion, the manager and employee should decide upon a specific and measurable individual Development Plan which will be rolled out over 12 months, to help the employee reach their career goals and aspirations, personally and professionally.

#3 — Individual development should not be part of your review process.  In many organizations, people in a leadership role will combine the annual performance review with an Individual Development Plan meeting. They spend fifty minutes on the review and ten minutes on IDP.  These two meetings should be and deserve separate, dedicated times.  The review is talking about what they did; the IDP is talking about what they want to do. It also shows you care and respect them and are investing in them.

#4 — It should be their responsibility.  Once the individual Development Plan meeting has occurred I believe it should be the responsibility of the employee to make sure that the IDP is rolling forward.  It is their responsibility to take the actions that were decided on for the IDP and is up to them to schedule and set up meetings with you to update you on the progress. They have to own it. It is your responsibility to make sure that they’re following up with you to track the updates, and to provide resources and work to help them achieve their goals.

#5 — Make sure there is a timeline. If the action items are not put into a specific time line in the calendar then they just will not happen. You have to prioritize and “calendarize”. If you don’t nothing happens.

#6 — You have to care. In a leadership role, it is critically essential that you actually care about the results. If you, as a leader, are not truly committed to caring about the results, your employees will be able to tell you’re not authentic and you’re literally just going through the motions.

#7 — They have to care.  When you sit down with an employee to create their Individual Development Plan they also have to care about growing and developing, and they have to be committed to the plan.  If they don’t care about the results it’s simply an empty exercise.

#8 — Don’t discount people’s dreams.  There may be an occasion where someone says during their IDP meeting,  “I would like to be the CEO.” If someone aspires to a much higher level position, you may think it is not realistic, a ridiculous idea.  But it is not up to you as a leader to squash potential.  Your role and responsibility in a leadership position is to build people up and to help them move towards their dream.

#9 — Be flexible.  It’s always important to be flexible.  There may be times when an employee decides they want to leave your department. There may be times when an employee decides that they want to leave the company.  It will be frustrating because you’ve spent time and effort developing this employee, only to have them leave.  This is where flexibility can be an asset.

#10 — They may not know what they want.  I am an executive coach for some high-level, high-powered C-level execs. Most of the time, they don’t know what they want. Don’t be surprised if an employee says, “I don’t know what I want.“  It then becomes your responsibility to be a coach and a mentor to help them decide what they want to pursue in the future.

The entire idea is to get each team member motivated and fired up about what they do currently and what they want to do in the future. Their undeveloped potential is your biggest and most openly-hidden asset.

The post Your Biggest Hidden Asset as a Leader appeared first on Shawn Doyle Training.

In managing the work of other people, one of the hardest tasks is making sure that you maximize productivity with each employee. Here however, is the problem- everything you know about employee productivity is wrong.

As a leadership expert, I find most people’s thoughts about employee productivity are based on myths and misinformation- not on solid research. To be a great leader you have to get people to be more productive, yet still keep your best people.

Here are some thoughts about employee productivity that you will find fascinating because they are so contradictory to what most people believe about employee productivity:

1. Employees will be more productive if they actually have to show up and work at our office.

In a study reported in Harvard Business Review. Nicholas Bloom and James Liang found that call center employees were significantly more effective working from home.

Productivity went up 13.5 percent and retention increased by 50 percent and workers reported a much higher level of job satisfaction.

What does this mean to you? It means that you may need to re-examine the idea that people have to show up in order to work.

There are some who disagree with this idea but the reality is they are much more productive if they can work from home.

2. The open-space office environment is productive and collaborative.

As I travel around the country, I see many organizations that have now created seating arrangements where everybody is working in one room, which is a very popular method that people are using for designing their offices.

This is supposed to encourage collaboration.

In the study done by Professor Bloom, he believes that one of the reasons why people were more productive at home is they actually had a quieter environment in which to work from.

I have always believed that the open office environment was extremely distracting very noisy and made people less productive, not more.

3. If people work from home, they will work less.

The reality is actually the opposite. The study found that people who work from home work more hours, they started earlier, they took shorter breaks and worked until the end of the day and they did not have a commute to worry about.

So even though we think that people who work from home will not work as hard the reality is they work harder.

4. It’s the younger generation who wants to work more from home.

Another interesting aspect of the research is that older workers and married people and parents found it much more appealing to work from home than the younger generation whose social lives were more connected to the office.

5. You can’t trust people to work from home.

I believe that people can be trusted to work from home if you are hiring the right people.

If you want to make sure the work is happening you can put systems and processes in place to ensure measurement of the work being done.

My experience has been the people who work from home, work harder because they love the privilege of working from home so much they don’t want to jeopardize possibly losing it

6. When people work from home it makes communication much less effective.

That’s not true because most people are not communicating face-to-face anyway, they are communicating via email or by some other electronic form of communication like a web chat. So if people are working remotely it doesn’t really matter anymore because it’s a virtual world that we live in.

One other possible solution suggested in the study is to have people working from home but on certain days, and have mandatory office days a few days a week or a few days a month. This helps people schedule meetings.

I would like you it to sit down with your management team and think about if there are options for people to work from home. This will increase productivity, increase morale and allow you to recruit better employees and save money on office space and equipment. Who knew?

This article originally appeared on Inc.

Follow Shawn Doyle on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Motiv8er

The post Is Everything You Know About Productivity Wrong? appeared first on Shawn Doyle Training.

He was a total jerk. Mr. M. was grouchy, grumpy, surly, and he treated his team with a high level of disrespect. I was “lucky” enough to be on his illustrious team. We were meeting, and I thought it was going well. Then, out of nowhere, he got angry, stated yelling and screaming, (including some words that can’t be printed) and then threw all of the files we were reviewing on the ground and stormed out of the building. I was in total shock, and I had never seen anyone act that way in a professional environment.

He returned an hour later and had calmed down. He came to my office and I was under the crazy impression that he came to apologize. That is when I learned that not all expectations get met. He looked around for a few moments, not saying a word. Finally, he said, “I know I yelled at you, Doyle,” (he always called everyone by their last name) “but I’m not apologizing. I am the way I am and that is the bottom line.” “Okay,” I replied, not even bothering to look up from my desk. “Don’t then.” He said he didn’t intend to and then walked out.

An hour later, he was back to acting human again. A few months later I left the company and they were surprised that I was leaving. I told them I wasn’t leaving the company, I was leaving Mr. M.

It is amazing that companies allow jerks to be in leadership positions. Even worse, in some business publications we see “difficult” executives lauded for their tough personalities and ability to get results. Yes, there may be results, but look more closely at some other metrics at the company. How about morale? How about turnover? Turnover is an element that can cost a company a fortune in hidden costs.

Do You Suspect You Might Be A Jerk?

If so, here are some tips and techniques for making sure that you aren’t a jerk.

How To Not Be A Jerk Tip #1

Always treat people with respect.

This means no yelling, no hostility, and no name calling. Leaders should always treat people civilly. In fact, it’s ridiculous that I have to write this tip at all. Isn’t that common sense? No, it’s not at all. In fact, I’m constantly hearing stories from people about how their boss has reached a new level of jerkiness.

I once worked for a company where all employees were called by their first names, but not managers. All managers were referred to by “Mr.” or “Mrs.”! Does that show that the company respects their employees? No.

How To Not Be A Jerk Tip #2

Create work spaces that are respectful of the employees, making them feel like coming to work.

I once was visiting a call center where employees were saying how much better the new place was than the old one. You’re probably wondering the same thing that I was – what was so bad about the old workplace? I asked and they said, during the winter, rats used to run across their feet while they were at their desk. What kind of leader allows this to happen? What message does this send?

Work places need to be clean, warm in winter and cool in summer. They can’t have peeling paint or filthy carpet. I am not saying that the office or work space needs to be the Taj Mahal, it just needs to be livable.

How To Not Be A Jerk  Tip #3

Talk to people who report to you.

Say good morning, say hello. Stop and see how things are going. Sounds insane, doesn’t it?

I once worked for a company where a senior level executive would walk into our department and breeze past five or six people. She would never say a word or do anything to otherwise acknowledge their existence. Once she left, I had my team coming to me asking, “Why can’t she just say hello? I mean, we work our butts off. What are we, invisible?” They were, of course, insulted.

I see leaders who will come into a workplace, go to their office, leave at the end of the day, and never actually speak to anyone – unless they need something. That is a very callous thing to do.

How To Not Be A Jerk Tip #4

Acknowledge and reward people’s efforts.

So many times, we take people for granted, not giving them credit or even a simple “thank you” for a job well done. Compliments are free, people! They don’t have to be put into the budget. People need, and want, feedback.

I once worked for a manager who never gave positive feedback. Finally reaching a high level of frustration, I sat down to talk and told him that it was important for me to get feedback. His response? “I am not going to give you a compliment for something you’re supposed to be doing anyway. It’s your job.” Nice. Put that one in the book of great leadership practices.

Be a good leader and give people credit for the work that they do. I once created a comprehensive one-day training program, and my boss went to present it. He prominently displayed his name on the front cover of the program. Where was my name? It wasn’t anywhere on the program. Not even in small type on the inside cover. I received no credit whatsoever. I got more credit from Visa than from my own boss.

How To Not Be A Jerk Tip #5

Be aware of people’s time and respect it.

Yes, there are emergencies that come up. There are times when people have to come in early or work late. When it’s done all the time, it becomes a grind that shows lack of appreciation.

I have heard many stories of leaders coming to someone’s office at the end of the day and saying, “Something came up, and we need to have you stay late to get it done tonight.” When the employee says that they have plans, the pressure from the boss starts. The employee feels painted into a corner and relents, again. The boss is asking at the end of the day if the employee can stay late, without notice or a “heads-up”. When this becomes common practice, it‘s incredibly disrespectful and earns a leader a fine title of “jerk”.

How To Not Be A Jerk Tip #6

Always reprimand privately.

I was at a team meeting with ten people and someone was talking about a conference they attended. The leader asked pointedly, “Why did you go to that conference?” After a game of twenty questions, the leader said, “Well that was clearly a huge waste of money and time. Don’t ever do that again.” This was all said through clenched teeth, with a raised voice and an angry look.

Two things happened at that point. First, the person being called on the carpet was quite embarrassed to be crucified in public, and second, the energy was sucked from the room, replaced by a sense of tension and negativity. Coaching and counseling should always be done in private. It should always be about the project or the behavior, not the person. It should always be calm, objective, and without emotion, unless it’s a positive one. It should never be positioned as an attack. That is what jerks do, and you aren’t a jerk, are you?

How To Not Be A Jerk Tip #7

Lastly and most importantly, try not to be the “big shot”.

I see the disease of “egotis giantitis” (giant ego syndrome) throughout corporate America. A leadership position doesn’t make you more important, better, or smarter. The position makes you a leader, and it’s high time to start acting like one.

Do You Have A Tip To Share?

If you have a tip that you’d like to share, please leave it in the comments below. Thank you!

The post How to Not be a Jerk appeared first on Shawn Doyle Training.

Or, are you confident now but want to be even more confident?

Then change your thinking!

“Thought is the original source of all wealth, all success, all material gain, all great discoveries and inventions, and of all achievement.”
-Claude Bristol

To be confident and build confidence, think about how you think.

• What do you think about every day? Every hour?
• Do you think confident thoughts or I cant thoughts?
• Do you think about positive things most of the day or negative?
• Do you think about what you don’t have or what you can have?
• Do you think about the possibility of success or failure?
• Do you think about the future or the past?

I have a business that is now exploding with growth, increasing dramatically in revenue and daily adding new clients and opportunities. Why? I think positively everyday and my actions are positive, my words and my energy are positive. The result is people are attracted to me and want to work with me. (Note: I am not an ego maniac! I swear, this is the feedback I get from most people.) So, if your thoughts are the origin of all wealth, success, discovery, invention, and confidence then you must first control your thinking.

Being confident is the foundation of all success!

The post Learning How to be Confident appeared first on Shawn Doyle Training.