No Nonsense Retention: Painless Strategies To Retain Your Best People by Jeff Kortes Why are some organizations able to retain their best people while others struggle with above average turnover? Jeff Kortes presents the key components of retention in a practical, ‘no nonsense’ book that is easy to read and entertaining. Whether you are in an office, factory or on a construction site, the principles presented will improve your retention and enable you to save your organization thousands of dollars due to lost productivity, poor quality and customer service issues. You will learn: How to avoid the dreaded meeting where you have to say, “We are letting you go because you just aren’t a good fit.” Money isn’t the answer to retention. Size of the organization does not matter. Practical ideas you can use immediately to improve retention. Why good employees leave your organization, and how to stop it. It’s the “little” things that matter and what they are. How to build a comprehensive strategy (or game plan) for your department, facility or entire organization that improves retention. What poor retention is costing you. Retention is going to be the most important factor in the survival of companies in the next 15 years. Changing demographics will leave a shortage of workers that will become critical. Only those organizations that are able to retain their best people will be able to compete and survive in the future. Kortes’ andecdotes, common sense tips and ‘no nonsense notes’ make the book easy to follow and remember. The techniques you will learn are nothing fancy. However, when performed together, your department, plant or organization will be transformed into a sophisticated retention machine that will be the envy of your fellow managers or competitors. You will find yourself wondering why you didn’t use these techniques in the past and immediately become a believer in No Nonsense Retention…Painless Strategies to Retain Your Best People.

It’s doesn’t have to be all bad. There’s good turnover and bad turnover.

Firing a non-performer is good turnover. When a top performer leaves to go elsewhere and leaves your organization with a huge void, that’s bad turnover. It can affect the performance of the whole organization.

If you are going to maximize your organization’s performance you have to make a conscious, binding top-down management decision and commitment to develop a no nonsense approach to retention. The following are several must-do actions items for retaining the high-value human assets you’ve worked so hard to acquire:

1. Start at the top! Assess your supervisory and management team! Seventy percent of the people say that the worst thing about their job is the boss. Find out what’s wrong and fix it! Identify the prima donnas and micromanaging control freaks, the whiners, complainers, and blamers. Get them basic supervisory training and improve their performance continuously. If you are the boss, take ownership!
2. Clean Up the House! Identify the non-performers. Identify the poor managers and supervisors. If they do not respond to training and show significant improvement, remove them from an influential role and replace them with someone that does what is truly desired and required for the role and position they are in.
3. Manage Visibly! Get out of the ivory tower. Begin each day by walking around. Stroll around the floor several times a day. Meet the customers, talk with employees, visit with the supervisors, greet the vendors, help the delivery trucks load and unload. Get out of your office. Let people know you are there and that you care. The point here is that you set lead by example. If they like you they are less likely to leave you. Visibility drives retention.
4. Care About Your People! If you don’t really care about your people, your business is doomed. Caring is the reason why people stay. Get to know your people. Learn what each person likes and enjoys. Listen to them and learn about their interests, families, and hobbies. Protect your people from harm and from others in your organization. People are loyal to those who care about them and care for them.
5. Keep your door open 80% of the time. Let your people know you are accessible to them. Avoid telling people to make an appointment or come back later. Make sure the time you do spend with your people is quality time.
6. Focus on Employee Assistance Actively. Sit down with the other managers in your organization and identify the problems that are faced by people in your workforce. Develop innovative ideas and deploy specific new plans to provide employees with more flexibility in their work, support for their common needs, and help for dealing with personal issues that impact their life.
7. Treat Everyone with Respect Always! Every leader and manager and supervisor must set the standard that respectful behavior and sincere open appreciation are expected with no exceptions! Investigate and take immediate action for all non-respectful behavior incidents. Have the managers and supervisors bring food to be shared on a regular basis! Break bread with your people regularly instead of forcing people to eat baloney.
8. Ask Your People What They Want! Sit down with your people and ask them what they want out of their work. Identify what they want to grow, to develop greater control, autonomy and responsibility for the work they do for you. Help them achieve these goals specifically and incrementally. Meaningful engagement in their own future drives commitment and loyalty.
9. Tell Your People What You Want of Them! Be specific and be clear but make sure you explain what you expect of them. Give them the tools, support and the time they need to get the work done. If they do not meet your expectations, bring them in and talk with them and find out what it will take to get them on track.
10. Fire the Slugs. Hold your people accountable for their performance. If they don’t solve the problem, then terminate them with respect and dignity. Your good performers will love you.

About the Author

Jeff Kortes is known as the ‘No Nonsense Guy.’ He is the President of Human Asset Management LLC, a human resource consulting firm specializing in executive search and leadership training. He has trained hundreds of first-line supervisors, managers, and executives during his career. His approach to training is no-nonsense, and practical.

Jeff is also a member of the National Speakers Association and a regular speaker on the topics of retention, recruiting and leadership. For more information, visit www.SlugProofYourTeam.com.

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5. Management Would be Easy if You Didn’t Have to Deal with People, part 1 of 3

Faster Cheaper Better: The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done by Lisa W. Hershman and Dr. Michael Hammer   Based on more than a decade of research to understand the nuts and bolts of how work gets done at companies in every imaginable business – from oil refineries to software developers, factories, retailers, and hospitals – Faster Cheaper Better shows how to harness the amazing power of end-to-end processes to become more profitable and competitive. Michael Hammer and Lisa Hershman provide the tools for focusing on work that creates real value for customers, including: How to get people to move from ‘worm’s-eye view’ of thier jobs to a ‘bird’s-eye view’ – to understand what the company really does and the role they have in achieving results. How to start measuring the factors that are most critical to the success of the business and identify the metrics that express them. How the new job of process owner can tie together the separate silos that characterize the traditional organization to change the way work is done and how people relate to one another. How to create a cadre of professionals at every level – people who focus not just on limited tasks but the overall outcome and ensure that the company gets and keeps happy customers. Faster Cheaper Better provides the pragmatic program for change that will endure; change that enables you to prosper in good times and bad.

“I don’t know what time I’ll be home,” he shouted to his wife as he bolted out the door, jumped into his car, and sped to the plant.

Jerry was on guard duty at the gate and greeted Bob warmly. He was accustomed to Bob showing up at all hours of the day and night. Bob went straight to the shipping dock. Sure enough, the box was sitting there ready to go, and it didn’t contain the wiring diagram. It took Bob an hour to track down a copy of the diagram, put it in the box, and reseal it for shipment. He got home at midnight.

That’s the kind of thing Bob does all the time. And the bosses recognize his devotion and applaud it often. He’s gotten raises and been promoted, and he’s been named Employee of the Month five times in the past two years. Many of his co- workers now emulate Bob and give an extra measure, too.

No doubt about it, Bob’s a great guy. Trouble is, his company’s approach to getting work done is a raging disaster.

Bob is forced to be a hero because he’s a loyal and ambitious employee struggling to overcome his company’s chaotic processes for getting things done. He gets lots of credit for making the fix to save the customer, but he’s constantly creating dramatic work-arounds because the existing processes create problems that shouldn’t exist. Worse still, Bob’s behavior and the accolades he receives simply reinforce the notion that everyone should work around the system. No one seems to grasp that if the system were fixed, there would be no need for heroes like Bob.

There are lots of companies like Bob’s, fragmented and inefficient. They survive despite themselves only because people like Bob are constantly fixing things. It may take thirty days to fill a customer order, but only three of those days involve real work. The rest of the time people are arguing about who’s responsible for some part of the order or the order is languishing in someone’s in- box.

For well over a century managers have achieved increasing productivity on ever larger scales by dividing and subdividing work into smaller and smaller units. The modern corporation that has evolved as a result consists of many specialized functional departments, such as sales, engineering, marketing, manufacturing, operations, and finance. The people who work in a given department all focus on the same departmental goal— advertising promotes sales, shipping moves the product, procurement buys the parts— and they report to the executive in charge of their department, who measures their performance and rewards or penalizes them according to the department’s own metrics.

Most companies get metrics all wrong. They allow each department to determine what it wants to measure. And because you get what you measure, each department gets a different and often uncoordinated result.

There is an alternative to the fragmented work process, and it allows us to be faster, cheaper, and better. It isn’t easy and it won’t happen overnight, but for those who master it the results are astounding.

The only way to survive in this ever-changing, expanding, globalizing economy is to continually adapt. Often this requires examining our processes from a macro-level. Getting a 50,000-foot picture of our operations illustrates outdated, cumbersome, inefficient processes. Rather than a series of discrete steps, work becomes an end- to- end continuum. People no longer focus entirely on their own jobs with no notion of how their work affects their colleagues’ ability to do their jobs or even the customer. Instead, they are thinking about the whole and not the parts, about outcomes instead of activities, about the collective rather than the individual.

About the Authors

Michael Hammer was a bold and revolutionary thinker, the coauthor of Reengineering the Corporation, the most important business book of the 1990s. Named to Time magazine’s first list of the twenty-five most influential Americans, the business world lost one of its rare geniuses when he passed away in September of 2008. Dr. Hammer was also the author of The Agenda: What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade as well as articles in the Harvard Business Review, The Economist, MIT Sloan Management and other publications. To read Michael’s complete biography, click here.

Lisa W. Hershman is the Chief Executive Officer of Hammer and Company. She is a seasoned business professional and author, who brings a wealth of real-world experience and an innovative style to her position at Hammer and Company. Lisa is the co-author of the business guide Faster Cheaper Better: The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done (rated 8 out of 10 by Inc. Magazine) and an inspirational and sought-after speaker and conference moderator/leader both in the United States and internationally. She is a regular contributor to BusinessWeek and her columns have appeared in Forbes.com and Foxnews.com. She has appeared as a business expert on Fox Business News, the Jim Bohannon Show, the Ron Insana Show, and other nationally syndicated business radio programs.

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Organizations live and die by the decisions of executives and managers and the actions of employees. Therefore, individuals must be held accountable for their work that both helps and hinders goal achievement if the organization expects to thrive. This accountability can only happen, however, if the decisions/actions and associated results are visible. Data transparency helps create this visibility.

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5. Organizational Accountability – Pillars of Accountability

While this is clearly not the case, managing by fact does imply that executives and managers leading accountable organizations strive to eliminate the subjectivity and raw opinion that is sometimes injected into the decision-making process; grounding decisions on a more tangible, objective foundation.

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Performance = Results + Behaviors

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About the Reference

The Welch Way is a weekly BusinessWeek column and podcast authored by former GE CEO Jack Welch and his wife, the former editor of the Harvard Business Review, Suzy Welch. These articles cover a wide range of business and career topics offering readers the insights of one of America’s most respected Chief Executives.

Benefits of Using this Reference

Mr. and Mrs. Welch have both achieved unparalleled personal and business success and share their life’s lessons in an actionable way each week within their column. StrategyDriven contributors find great value in The Welch Way not only because it contains step-by-step methods to deal with today’s business and career challenges but because the topics addressed often focus on those areas important to organization’s aspiring to become more strategy driven. Below are just a few of the specific articles we recommend listed by StrategyDriven topic:

Strategic Planning

• State Your Business
• Employee Polls: A Vote In Favor

Organizational Accountability

• The Blame Game
• Lay Off the Layers
• The Right Way to Say Goodbye
• The Hiring Batting Average
• The Smarter They Are…
• The Case for 20, 70, 10
• How to be a Talent Magnet
• Hiring Wrong? And Right

Diversity and Inclusion

• Generation Y’s Bad Rap
• Keeping Your People Pumped
• Breaking Through the Bias

Many of the best practice recommendations found on the StrategyDriven website compliment the actions prescribed in The Welch Way, making this column a StrategyDriven recommended read.

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† Available only to those living within the United States after the first monthly membership payment is received. Name and address information required. Books typically valued from $14.95 – $29.95 USD. Book value is not guaranteed.

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1. Recommended Resource – The Accountable Organization
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3. Recommended Resource – Manager Tools
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5. Recommended Resource – Managing the Nonprofit Organization

StrategyDriven Contributors

Building an accountable organization can be a long and arduous task; renovating an entitlement organization even more difficult. During this construction project, many able builders will be lost, the victims of a harsh environment that naturally exists between the competent who seek the rightfully earned rewards of performance-based accountability and the low performers struggling to hold on to their positions of power and the accompanying easy life organizational indifference and years of clock-punching bestowed upon them.

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1. Organizational Accountability – Increase Opportunities with Accountability
2. Organizational Accountability – Introduction
3. Organizational Accountability – Evaluating Organizational Culture
4. Strategic Planning Best Practice 7 – Shared Accountability
5. Resource Management Best Practice 1 – Attract the Best with Accountability

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Relate Articles:

1. Organizational Accountability – Evaluating Organizational Culture
2. Organizational Accountability – Introduction
3. Resource Management Best Practice 1 – Attract the Best with Accountability
4. Strategic Planning Best Practice 7 – Shared Accountability
5. Recommended Resource – The Accountable Organization

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1. Organizational Accountability – Introduction
2. Resource Management Best Practice 1 – Attract the Best with Accountability
3. Strategic Planning Best Practice 7 – Shared Accountability
4. New Model Released – Strategic Organizational Alignment
5. Recommended Resource – The Accountable Organization

Organizational accountability exists when all members of the workforce individually and collectively act to consequentially promote the timely accomplishment of the organization’s mission. Examined more closely, this means that:

• all members of the workforce: Includes executives, managers, and individual contributors. Executives and managers are responsible for holding their subordinates accountable for the effective and efficient conduct of activities supporting mission achievement. Subordinates, through their actions, set an example by which positive pressure is applied to their peers and seniors for greater accountability.

• individually act: Enough individuals throughout the organization must act accountably in order to achieve the critical mass necessary for the existence of an accountable organization. Some individuals, such as the chief executive officer, must exhibit and reinforce accountable behaviors for the organization to be truly accountable.

• collectively act: Often, groups of executives, managers, or individual contributors make and execute the organization’s decisions. Under these circumstances, it is critical that the group act in accordance with the organization’s values to accomplish its mission and avoid easy outs and the tendency to fall into a mode of group think.

• consequentially promote: Accountability cannot exist without both positive and negative consequences. To consequentially promote the organization’s mission implies that individuals and groups will not only act in ways that seek to accomplish the mission but will recognize and reward those who do so exceptionally and appropriately act to minimize behaviors less supportive of the organization’s goals.

• timely accomplishment of the organization’s mission: For accountability to exist, one must know what is to be accomplished and within what time frame. No one can be accountable for accomplishing an undetermined goal for there is no basis against which to measure their accomplishments. Likewise, a goal that is not bound by time can never be considered to be incomplete or have insufficient progress because the individual or group working toward such a goal has an infinite amount of time to reach it.

Focus of the Organizational Accountability Topic

Articles in this topic area explore the key attributes of accountable organizations and why many executives and managers intentionally or unconsciously avoid raising their organization’s accountability. We identify the programs, processes, and actions that can be taken to help promote increased accountability. Finally, we’ll examine the many benefits that accompany higher levels of organizational accountability and why accountable organizations realize them while others don’t. The following articles, podcasts, documents, and resources cover those topics critical to establishing a highly accountable organizational culture.

Articles

Principles

• Pillars of Accountability    [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
• Fundamental Accountability Drivers    [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
• Performance = Results + Behaviors    [StrategyDriven Premium Content]

Best Practices

• Best Practice – Attract the Best with Accountability    [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
• Increase Opportunities with Accountability    [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
• Evaluating Organizational Culture    [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
• Best Practice – Fact-Based Management    [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
• Best Practice – Data Transparency    [StrategyDriven Premium Content]
• Best Practice – Shared Accountability    [StrategyDriven Premium Content]

Resources

Books

• The Accountable Organization by John Marchica
• The Welch Way by Jack and Suzy Welch

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† Available only to those living within the United States after the first monthly membership payment is received. Name and address information required. Books typically valued from $14.95 – $29.95 USD. Book value is not guaranteed.

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About the Reference

The Accountable Organization: Reclaiming Integrity, Restoring Trust by John Marchica illustrates how executives and managers can build a corporate culture based on integrity, accountability, and trust. Mr. Marchica provides practical methods for building a principled organizational culture through planning, communication, leadership, conflict resolution, and risk taking.

Benefits of Using this Reference

Highly accountable organizations realize several strategic advantages, including the ability to attract and retain the best talent and to more readily recognize and seize upon emerging business opportunities, because of their more engaging and productive work environment. While these rewards are substantial, many executives and managers will not embark on the journey of creating an accountable organization because attaining and maintaining high levels of accountability is extremely difficult.

StrategyDriven contributors believe there exists an interrelationship between an organization’s strategic planning and tactical execution and its level of accountability. We like The Accountable Organization because it illustrates this relationship and provides methods for leveraging planning and execution to build a culture of accountability. Many of the best practice recommendations found on the StrategyDriven website elaborate on the actions recommended in The Accountable Organization; making this book a StrategyDriven recommended read.

FREE StrategyDriven Trial Membership Start your FREE trial membership* and receive: FULL ACCESS to StrategyDriven’s premium content for 14 days FREE COPY of a StrategyDriven Expert Contributor book† EVALUATE how StrategyDriven gives you a competitive advantage

* Free 14 day trial included with a monthly membership registration. A monthly recurring subscription of $9.95 will begin after the initial 14 day trial period. Memberships can be cancelled at any time. Premium Member access will continue until the free/paid subscription expires.

† Available only to those living within the United States after the first monthly membership payment is received. Name and address information required. Books typically valued from $14.95 – $29.95 USD. Book value is not guaranteed.

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