Tag Archives: teams

Why Replacing a Good Employee Will Cost you $65,510

2 July 2014

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“Oh no! I didn’t know you were leaving, too.”

When a friend left his job, his coworker made the surprise comment that he was about to leave the company as well. What seemed like a few minor problems on the team soon snowballed into a costly mass exodus.

Employee retention is one of the most overlooked aspects of managing your team…right until you start losing good employees. It costs much more than you might expect to replace them. I was curious myself just how much it could cost and the surprising results are below.

Note: All salaries are assumed to be $100,000, which is $40/hr assuming you work 50 hours a week for 50 weeks a year. Adjust the numbers accordingly if anyone costs more or less for you.

The Costs of Sourcing a Hire:

Unless you’re a really hot company, it’s unlikely that great people are beating down your door to fill open roles. And even if you are well known, the best people probably aren’t refreshing your jobs page for an opening. You have to go find them.

You can source candidates a ton of different ways, but they all cost money either in the form of payment to another company or in time invested by one of your employees.

Sourcing CostsWith just a few attempts at sourcing some good hires, between third party costs and labor in your company, sourcing costs can easily reach over $26,000. The scariest thing is, you haven’t even interviewed any of these candidates yet!

The Costs of Interviewing a Hire:

Now that you have a full funnel of candidates kickstarted, you start the dreaded interview process. You’ve got to filter through all the LinkedIn profiles, social accounts, resumes, and cover letters to find those gems who will then navigate your hiring process.

Here the costs are a bit more hidden. It’s all about lost time for various team members. What other great work could your team be doing instead of working on candidate hiring? Every minute spent hiring is a lost dollar invested in your business.

Assuming you have a clear funnel where you only have to look at 120 resumes, only have a third of them make a phone screen, a quarter of those make it to in person interviews, and you prep 3 offers, interviewing costs you over $5,000. For some specialized roles it could be significantly higher if you have many more interviews and phone screens.

The Cost of Onboarding a New Hire:

Congratulations! You found the candidate you’ve been looking for. Now you need to onboard them so they become a productive, integrated member of your team. Again, you have hidden costs. Now, you have losses both in how productive a new hire is versus a veteran on your team, and your team training them (an important investment, but also a significant time sink for your team).

When you hire an employee, there’s often some kind of bonus you need to give them. It might be a salary bump, moving costs, or something else to sweeten the offer. It’s part of the cost of doing business. When you combine that with your costs as they start on your team and get up to speed, onboarding can cost you over $10,000.

Of course, we’re assuming your hire works out, which unfortunately, it won’t always. You can go ahead and double these costs and many of the ones in earlier sections if you have to go back to the drawing board on another candidate.

The Cost of Lost Productivity:

While your team member has departed, the show must go on. The rest of your team has to cover for them, whether that means writing their code, calling their leads, or finishing their reports. As much as you’d like to think the rest of the team can just make up for them, if the hire really was good, that’s impossible. Lost ProductivityWhen someone leaves, team members are distracted. Those that were close to them in particular will be less focused and productive. They’ll probably grab beers with their friend before they leave, when they otherwise may have worked late.

Meanwhile, if you push your team to cover for them, the stress and extra hours can affect their physical and mental health, which will lead to vacation and sick days. If hiring drags on, you’ll probably hire a consultant or freelancer to cover which could easily exceed $100 an hour for their work.

All of this combines to lead to a Productivity loss cost of over $24,000.

So let’s add this up…

Total Costs

Ouch! Replacing even a single team member is expensive! Wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper to retain all your good people?

What can you do?

Next time a good employee asks for a raise, investment in equipment to help them on their job, or a morale boosting opportunity is presented, consider the cost of losing them before saying, “we have no budget for this.”

If your manager is blocking you from helping your team, remind them what you’re asking for is a lot less than the $65,000 cost to replace a lost member of your team (let alone the cost of multiple losses!).

While free lunches, ping pong tables, extra vacation days, and other perks are a nice bonus, they aren’t what keep people at a company. Even raises only satisfy people for a short period of time.

What really retains teams is managing people well.

This comes by having discussions with them about their personal growth & goals, company and self-improvement, and recognizing the things that are important to them personally.

I know that’s easier said then done. You have a million things on your plate as a leader and what little time you can spare has to be maximized. And it probably isn’t right now.

You have notes on people all over the place. One on ones are sporadically effective, because you may not always be prepared for the next one. Goals are a great idea in theory, but they’re buried in your HR app you can’t stand.  There must be a better way.

Get LighthouseThat’s why I started Lighthouse. It helps you stay on top of what matters quickly and efficiently for each of your people. It’s designed with managers like you in mind, because I’m a manager myself.

If you want to be the manager people love to work for & save the costs of replacing people, sign up at GetLighthouse.com.

10 Common Ways to Lose Good Employees

11 June 2014

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“I’m leaving. My last day is next Friday.”

I still remember the surprise when one of my old coworkers announced that to the company. He was one of the longest tenured members of the team and seemed content on the job. Little did I know he had a number of motivations for wanting to make a change that may have been avoidable.

The competition for talent is always high, and especially now you can’t afford to lose a good employee. Even the most loyal members of your team have breaking points that will make them want to look for a new job. And worst of all, when employees leave, it often happens in waves, meaning that you lose more than just one person at a time.

People leave bad managers, not jobs, which means as a manager, you have the power to prevent many of these losses to your team. Avoiding these pitfalls will put you well on your way to retaining your team.

Commons Ways to Lose Good Employees

1) Don’t Follow Through

I’ve written about this a number of times before and it bears repeating: not following through with commitments to your team will quickly build resentment. That resentment will lead to complaining amongst team members behind your back and a lot of frustration and distrust that can hamstring your team’s productivity.

What to do instead: Use a to do list or other system to track your commitments to your team to make sure nothing slips. If there’s something that prevents you from following through that’s beyond your control, be transparent with your team and help them understand why you couldn’t do it.

2) Don’t have 1 on 1s with them

If you’re not having 1 on 1s with your team, you don’t know what they’re really thinking. 1 on 1s are a huge opportunity to have a private line of communication with each of your reports. You can learn tons of different things based on the questions you ask in a 1 on 1, and fix a lot of problems before they blow up. There’s a reason Ben Horowitz was willing to fire a manager for not having 1 on 1s.

What to do instead: You may think you don’t have time to have 1 on 1s, but what you really don’t have time for is to lose your best people and have to go through the hiring process and covering for lost staff again. Get started having 1 on 1s at least once a month (ideally more) and use an app like Lighthouse to help you stay on top of them.

3) Ignore Their Ideas

Are your employees trying to tell you something? Do they see a problem you don’t? Do they have ideas to improve the way they work or a system around them? This is a gold mine of ways to make your company better and make your team happier. Yet, many ignore this and see people instead get frustrated by a lack of change in areas they think are important.

What to do instead: Use part of your 1 on 1 time to ask questions about ideas they have to improve the company, the team, and their own work environment. Take action when you can on those suggestions and explain why some things may not be possible right now.

4) Don’t Treat Them Like Adults

Do you trust your team? If you can’t trust them you may not have the right team. Good people, especially those with long tenures, expect some transparency into what is going on outside of the team. They also want to be trusted with their work instead of being micromanaged.

What to do instead: Trust, but verify. Give people the independence to do their job, but hold them accountable to the results you agreed upon. Trust them with information they want to know and make sure they’re keeping anything private you asked them to.

5) Under Compensate Them

Are you paying anyone well below market rate? Have some of your team grown in their roles and are now significantly outperforming their compensation? Have you moved a team member to a more expensive city without properly increasing their salary for cost of living? Any of these, as well as disparities in equity can lead to a lot of resentment. It can also tempt people to see what they’re worth elsewhere and by the time they have an offer, it’s too late.

What to do instead: Plan ahead for managing people’s compensation, especially for people taking on more responsibility. Your budget may be tight, but if you make incremental improvements you won’t wake up a few years down the line searching for a massive amount of money to adjust someone’s salary who has one foot out the door.

6) Don’t Praise, Recognize or Reward Good Work

Do you reinforce the good work done by your team? Do you tell them specifically why the work was great? If you don’t recognize good work, your team will not be as motivated to repeat those efforts again.  Mary Kay Ash, of the founder of Mary Kay cosmetics, put it best when she said:

“There are 2 things people want more than sex and money: recognition & praise.”          – Mary Kay Ash

What to do instead:  Take time to recognize people for great work. If it’s really awesome, recognize it in front of their peers. Also give them specific reinforcement over email and in 1 on 1s. As long as you are specific why you’re giving them praise, it will be well received.

7) Keep Bad Employees

Nothing frustrates good employees like working with bad ones. Bad team members make it harder for everyone else to get their work done, slow down progress, and lower the bar for the quality of work a team outputs. Bad team members can quickly turn a strong work environment into a toxic one either by their own work or due to how the team reacts negatively to them.

What to do instead: If you can, fire them. Your team will breathe a sigh of relief and you’ll find your team is more productive without them. If you can’t fire them, try to minimize how they impact others by putting them on work that they don’t affect as many people on the team.

8) Don’t Align Their Work with Their Goals

Do you know what the goals of your team members are? Does their work put them in line to accomplish those goals? Are they growing? If an employee isn’t achieving their goals, they will feel stifled and likely grow bored with their job. When a person’s job doesn’t help them achieve their goals, they’ll be motivated to look elsewhere to reach them.

What to do instead: Have conversations about goals in your 1 on 1s. Work to align parts of their job with these goals and make them feel like there’s a plan to help them achieve them over time. Apps like Lighthouse can help you manage and remember these.

9) Embarrass Them in Front of Their Peers

This may seem like an obvious one you would never do nor allow in your company, but it might have happened without you realizing. Ever casually call someone out across the office over a mistake or to make a joke?

I had a boss who wanted to prove that everyone (except me) cheated in school and proceeded to try to ask everyone around the office if they cheated. I think it was meant to be funny, but I remember how uncomfortable I felt then. Whatever it is, it can seem innocent, but even things you think are light-hearted can hurt people no matter what face they put on publicly.

What to do instead: Don’t be the one to do these sorts of things and shut down anyone you see doing it as well. If you’re treating your team like adults, then embarrassing peers is a childish behavior you should not tolerate. If it does happen, apologize and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

10) Don’t Help Them Make Progress Regularly

The feeling of progress is crucial to people’s satisfaction. They need to feel like they’re progressing on their work and that their work matters to the company’s bigger picture. When people aren’t making progress, they start to burn out. Nothing is more devastating to a great employee than burn out. It saps them of their abilities to be a productive, skilled team member.

What to do instead: Make sure team members have projects that are broken into small enough chunks that they can regularly make progress on them. Check in with them on their goals to make sure they’re making progress on them. Read more about progress on teams here.

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These are all hard lessons to learn, but the good news is that usually people leave for more than one reason. That means an occasional slip up will be forgiven, while breaking many of these will have your team looking elsewhere for work.

What are the behaviors you’ve seen cause good people to leave?

Get LighthouseWant help keeping your team motivated and turning down recruiting emails from friends and recruiters? Lighthouse was designed from the ground up with a workflow to help you follow the best practices of great managers.

Learn more and sign up at GetLighthouse.com

10 Critical Mistakes You Could Be Making in Your 1 on 1s

5 June 2014

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One on ones are a crucial part of good management practices, but just because you have regular one on ones with your team doesn’t mean you’re making the most of them. You could even be doing serious damage to your relationship with your team if you don’t do them correctly.

As a manager, your job is to amplify your team to allow them all to perform more efficiently and effectively. Your 1 on 1s with them are your best weapon to raise performance and address issues. However, making these crucial mistakes below can damage your relationship with your employee and prevent you from discovering the kinds of things that will fix problems, raise morale, and motivate team members. Hopefully you aren’t doing many of them, but if you are, there’s no time like the present to turn it all around.

Critical Mistakes You Could Be Making in 1 on 1s

1) Not following through

If you’re talking about ideas, problems, or things important to your report in your one on one, but then nothing is ever done about what you talk about, you’re making a lethal mistake. The effectiveness of one on ones is based on trust, and that comes from following up and following through on what you discuss.

When you lose the trust of your report, they will shut you out and won’t share feedback, ideas, or problems with you. They will feel there is no reason to waste effort talking about things that will never happen and they’ll resent you for it. This is the path straight to losing a team member.

What to do about it: End your one on ones by specifically setting what you and your report’s tasks are because of what you have discussed in the meeting. When you take action on something important they brought up, let them know and thank them for bringing it up.

2) Canceling one on ones

One on ones are the one meeting your report has that’s all about them. The rest are all about what the company wants and needs. When you cancel their one on one, you may think it’s ok, and they’ll probably even say it’s ok if you ask, but it’s not. They will resent you for not treating the conversation about them as important.

It will also break your rhythm of these meetings regularly covering important topics and addressing them; if you go a month without having a one on one, so much may build up that you’ll miss covering something important.

What to do about it: Book your one on ones on your calendar for a consistent time you know you can stick to. If you absolutely can’t make a one on one, then reschedule it for as soon as you can after the cancellation rather than not having it at all.

3) Turning them into status updates

One of the most common things I’ve heard as I talk to people about management is how often a significant portion of the meeting is spent giving a status update of their projects. Nobody wants to have more meetings than necessary, but by putting a status update into a one on one, you’re squeezing time spent on the most important subject of one on ones: your team member.

What to do about it: Have a separate meeting to do status updates or consider using an app like idonethis to stay up to date on what people are accomplishing without having to talk about it in one on ones.

4) Not preparing

Yes, one on ones are all about your report. And yes, they should be bringing things to talk about in the meeting. However, assuming you don’t need to prepare at all for the discussion is a big mistake. Context switching to the meeting can be difficult if you’ve been working on other things and like it or not, your report can tell when you’re really ready for the meeting. Not preparing also makes you miss out on great coaching and feedback opportunities.

What to do about it: Save a few notes and to do items from each meeting. Review them before your next meeting and bring a couple questions for the one on one with you.

5) Not talking about their goals

It’s easy to spend all your time focused on short term issues in your one on ones, but what will make people happiest is when they’re making progress on their long term goals while working at your company. You are unlikely to find out what those goals are unless you talk about them and there is no other time as ideal as the privacy of a one on one to explore their big life goals.

What to do about it: Every month or two, revisit questions about their goals and what you can do to help them make progress on them.  Keep these goals written somewhere you can easily reference, like Lighthouse, so you can take action on them when opportunities arise.

6) Not asking tough questions

It’s easy to get into a rut with one on ones and thus only cover a fraction of the topics that you could. Your one on one time is an amazing opportunity to get insights on many things including: improving the company, feedback on being a better manager for them, feedback and coaching them, improving morale in the company, managing goals and uncovering team issues. Don’t waste it only talking about a fraction of those things.

What to do about it: Rotate through the topics on this list of questions for one on ones and always follow through so your report knows they can really talk to you about anything.

7) Not having them at the right frequency

When someone is brand new to your team, it’s important to have one on ones often so you can build rapport and trust quickly. Also, if every one on one is running long, you may want to have your one on ones more often with them.

On the other hand, if you’re doing them weekly and finding often the meetings aren’t yielding much to talk about even as you cover all the tough questions, then backing off to biweekly or monthly may make sense. This will happen especially with colleagues you’ve worked with or known for a long time.

What to do about it: Challenge yourself to look hard at what’s happening in the one on ones. Are you covering everything you should? Do you know them well enough to detect a problem early without a 1 on 1? If so, you may be able to have them less often. If not, you may want them more often.

8) Not holding them accountable

You’re not having one on ones to play psychologist. You are having them to address issues, understand your team members, and hear what they want. Both of you should have takeaways from each one to make sure you’re both making progress in the areas you agree are important. Letting them slip by with not being actionable in your discussions or not taking care of the action items you discuss, is wasting the time of both of you.

What to do about it: End every one on one by asking them what you can hold them accountable to before your next one on one. Circle back in the next meeting to make sure things are getting done. You should notice an increase in satisfaction that comes with a sense of progress from completing agreed upon takeaways.

9) Not being present in meetings

Have you ever caught yourself zoning out, checking your phone, or looking at email when you’re supposed to be listening to them? Just like canceling a meeting hurts them, not giving them your undivided attention will as well.  You may be able to get away with it in a big meeting (though that’s not good either), but this is a one on one, so you are the center of the other person’s attention. You aren’t as sneaky or as good at multi-tasking as you think.

What to do about it: If your computer in the meeting is too tempting, leave it at your desk. Do the same for your phone if you have to. Many managers use Moleskin notebooks for these meetings since all you can do is jot notes, not the million other distractions we have today. They then transfer them to their note taking app later.

10) Thinking you don’t need a 1 on 1, too

I know. You’re busy, and your manager is even busier. And that’s all the more reason for you to touch base in a 1 on 1 for yourself, too. Some of those subjects you’re covering with your team in their one on ones will need to bubble up to your manager, who can also help you in many of the same ways you have been helping your team.

Just because you’ve gotten a promotion to manager doesn’t mean your career is set. Continuing to learn where you can improve and talking about your goals is all the more important when you are trying to lead a team of others.

What to do about it: Share with your manager the positive results you’re getting from the one on ones you’re having with your team and tell him you want to do the same. Results will grab their attention and convince them of the value.

What mistakes have you made in 1 on 1s? How have you improved them?

Get LighthouseWant to have great 1 on 1s with your team? Lighthouse helps you have great 1 on 1s by helping you follow best practices, always be prepared, and follow through on what you discuss. Your team will love you for it.

Learn more and sign up at GetLighthouse.com

21 Reasons You Should Start Having One on Ones with Your Team

21 May 2014

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“I don’t have time.”

“My team is fine.”

“I have too many reports.”

“I don’t want to mix personal and professional discussions.”

“We’re all adults here that can handle their own problems.”

“The meetings don’t scale and we only do scalable things here.”

There are a lot of excuses why you might not be doing 1 on 1s with your team. And while they may seem like good reasons, there are a lot more reasons why you should be doing them. If you’re a hold out or skeptic of 1 on 1s, or trying to convince someone to do 1 on 1s, here’s a set of reasons they’re a key weapon in a great manager’s arsenal.

21 Reasons You Should Have 1 on 1s with Your Team

1) Follow veteran leaders who swear by them.

Ben Horowitz, VC at A16Z and former CEO of Opsware (acquired by HP for $1.6Bn), considered it a fireable offense for any manager that did not hold regular 1 on 1s. Andy Grove, founder & CEO of Intel and legendary leadership author also advocates for them.

2) Give timely feedback and constructive criticism.

Are you doing annual reviews? Even if you’ve accelerated them to quarterly, it’s still not timely enough to discuss performance improvement. Think you can do it ad hoc? When was the last time you really made time to give that feedback? Chances are you thought of it, then got distracted by 37 other things and didn’t want to schedule a meeting just for that. The great thing about 1 on 1s is that this can be just a small part of the meeting that’s all about the team member.

3) Get private feedback.

It’s often hard to get feedback as a manager even though you know there are places you could improve. Not everyone wants to write out feedback on forms.  In 1 on 1s where you’ve built rapport and trust, you have the perfect channel for the candid feedback that will help you improve, too.

4) Float your ideas before they’re fully baked.

Thinking about a new initiative and want unfiltered feedback before you invest a lot of time in it? A 1 on 1 is the perfect place for your semi-baked ideas you think may have an impact. Using 1 on 1s for this can be a great way to build trust that this is a place they can be vulnerable as well and not feel like you need a 50 slide powerpoint ready before getting feedback from your team on an idea.

5) Make time to talk about their career consistently.

Everyone has career aspirations. They will want to grow and try new things. If you don’t have the conversations with your people about this growth, they’ll look for growth opportunities outside your company. Without one on ones, these conversations often get lost in the shuffle and only surface during annual reviews which are quickly forgotten and never acted on.

6) Fix problems when they’re small.

Are you constantly fighting fires and dealing with issues once they’ve exploded? Then you need 1 on 1s. These meetings will help you catch these issues early on, whether between two coworkers or a problem discovered in a process in the company. You still have to follow through on what you hear, but knowing about the problem when it’s small makes it much easier to address than when you have to triage later.

7) Show you care.

You’re making a major statement to your team when you set aside time for them regularly to talk about them. Do not underestimate the impact that showing you care and that they’re important will have on morale, commitment, and trust in you as a leader.

8) Coach & develop your people.

In the middle of a busy meeting is no time to coach one person about something they need to learn, but a one on one is a perfect time for that. As the saying goes:

  • CFO asks CEO: “What happens if we invest in developing our people & then they leave us?”
  • CEO: “What happens if we don’t, and they stay?”

You can’t afford to not grow your people and one on ones are a key place to discuss and plan your team member’s development.

9) Learn empathy for them.

Everyone on your team is different. They come from different backgrounds and experiences. If they’re struggling with something outside work, it rarely can avoid impacting their work. You can give them tough love and they’ll resent you, or you can help and show empathy and they’ll appreciate you.

10) Get forgiven for your mistakes.

We all make mistakes. When a friend or trusted colleague makes a mistake, we are much more likely to forgive them. As a manager, you’re going to make mistakes and the more trust and rapport you have with your team, the more likely they will understand and forgive you.  You build that trust and rapport by having your own empathy for them, which comes from one on ones.

11) Make them feel heard.

Every employee has a unique perspective of how the company operates. Valuing everyone’s insights as to what they’re seeing not only helps you with getting more signal on important issues, but makes them feel like a valued part of the company. Especially as a company or department grows, people can feel marginalized and lost. One one ones are an opportunity to make sure you don’t miss out on what they have to say.

12) Avoid surprise departures.

If someone is thinking about leaving the company, the warning signs will come up in 1 on 1s. If you don’t have 1 on 1s, it will be much easier to feel like you’re not missing anything. Most lost employees can be saved if you address what’s bothering them, which is generally a discussion for 1 on 1s; most people won’t come to you with a series of complaints out of the blue.

13) Learn what drives your team.

Not everyone is motivated by the same things. Outside of sales teams, money is rarely the largest long term driver for people. The more you get to know your people in 1 on 1s, the more you’ll know how to motivate each person uniquely.

14) Create a safe space for their ideas.

Just like you can float ideas to your people, 1 on 1s can be a great place for your reports to share with you loosely formed ideas they have. Often a brief discussion in a 1 on 1 can help encourage them to prepare it to present to the team or understand why it’s not a good idea right now. Either way, they need a safe place to spare them making 50 slides on an idea to feel like they can share it.

15) Give them control of a meeting for once.

If you’re in a very hierarchical organization, lower level employees can feel powerless. One on ones give them that one time per week that they feel in control. It gives them the freedom to talk about whatever is most important to them without having to try to fight for time on your busy calendar ad hoc.

16) Relieve boredom or stagnation on your team.

Many employees, especially in Generation Y, are constantly looking for new ways to grow and learn. If they spend too much time with the same role and responsibilities, they can become bored and feel like they’ve plateaued. You can either milk them for their experience until they leave for a new company, or have a regular conversation about it in 1 on 1s and possibly help them get into a new role in the company.

17) Break up your day.

One on ones are a change of pace from other meetings. These meetings aren’t about deadlines and decision making; they’re about your employee and what’s important to them. That can be a breath of fresh air in a hectic day of meetings, powerpoint decks, and fighting for Inbox Zero.

18) Have an excuse to get outside the office.

It’s often helpful to get outside the conference room for these meetings, as it helps further establish the context switch from being all about what the company needs to what your report needs. If the weather permits, going for a walk can be refreshing.  Aaron Sorkin, Mark Zuckerberg, and Arianna Huffington are well known for walking meetings, so why not give them a try?

19) Have the conversations you never get around to.

How many times does a thought cross your mind that you should talk to someone about? Maybe it’s something you know you should do in person, so you don’t send an email. Then a week goes by and you realize you never took the time to have that conversation and now the problem has gotten worse. One on ones are a great time to talk about those topics and by having them regularly, these topics will never build up too much.

20) Be more consistent with your team.

Are you treating your team equally? Do you fairly divide your attention or does the squeaky wheel get the grease? No matter how hard you try, there’s a good chance you’re investing more time in some people than others. By giving everyone a set amount of your time to focus on them in a 1 on 1, you can ensure no one is getting completely lost in the shuffle.

21) Have a happy, motivated team.

In the end, all of these reasons are just small pieces of what it’s really all about: getting the most out of your team and developing your people. One on ones are a big part of making sure you do all the little things that add up to creating a happy, motivated team.

(Bonus) Do it right the second time.

Maybe you tried 1 on 1s before and they didn’t work for you. Were you consistent in holding them? Did you follow through on issues they brought up? Did you give them a real chance? You have to follow through on what you hear and give a few months to really build trust to tackle big issues in 1 on 1s.  They’re too important not to give them another chance.

Can you really fit all of this in a one on one?!?!?

No, you can’t cover all of this in a single one on one. And without one on ones, it’s highly doubtful you can ever hope to cover all of those important things. However, over time, you can cover all of these areas in regular one on ones.

It’s never too late to start. As the old Chinese proverb says:

“The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is today.”

There are many competing demands of your attention as a manager, many of which pay off faster than the long term investment in your people. One on ones are a tremendous tool and an essential part of being an effective manager.

Convinced to start or try again? Learn how to start having effective 1 on 1s here.

And if you want training for yourself and a group of managers to have great 1 on 1s, sign up here.

What Viktor Frankl can teach us about managing teams

2 May 2014

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Viktor Frankl is a psychologist, author, and Holocaust survivor. In his seminal book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he advocates for everyone to find their meaning of life. This is no small task for anyone, let alone helping someone else discover it, but it is the most important thing anyone can find if they want to be happy and successful.

Frankl’s 3 ways to discover your meaning are:

  1. Creating a work or doing a deed.
  2. By experiencing something or encountering someone.
  3. By the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.

As a manager and leader, you have people working for you who are giving almost half of their waking life towards your company. Fortunately, many of those tasks can fit into Frankl’s 3 ways.  To keep them motivated and engaged, you must find ways to align their meaning with the company. With a little work, this can be achieved.

How to align your employee’s work & meaning

1) Give them ownership

Have you ever been given a task that someone had everything spelled out to a T how to do it? How motivated were you to work on that? If it was something important to you, it likely felt very stifling to not be able to do it how you saw fit.  Don’t do that to your employees. Give them the opportunity to use their skills to accomplish tasks in the way they choose.

2) Help them see the big picture

People join companies for many reasons, and a company’s core mission is often one of them.  Once they’re settled in their job and the day to day grind, it can become easy to lose sight of that mission that attracted them in the first place. Don’t let that happen! Repeating yourself as a leader is very important, especially if it’s reinforcing the core mission.

3) Connect the company mission to their tasks

Having everyone on your team understanding the company’s core mission is important. Tying their specific job to that mission is just as important. When someone feels like what they do really matters and they can see the impact, you create a powerful, motivating feedback loop. And if you manage someone in a low level job and don’t think you can tie their work to what matters, you should watch this.

4) Listen to their personal goals

It’s not all about the company. Your employees have hopes and dreams of their own. The more you can align those dreams with their work and show them how the company furthers their goals, the more motivated they will be. Humans have a natural urge to work on things bigger than themselves and a company is an amazing vehicle for this if you seize the opportunity.

What about the suffering?

Yes, Frankl believes suffering in life is not only inevitable, but essential. It is during times of suffering that we grow the most.  If you’ve ever worked long hours on a project, you can empathize with how major challenges can help you grow tremendously. Often, you work those hours because you were motivated in some way, likely one or even all 4 of the above reasons.

Frankl loved a particular quote by Nietzsche that captures it well:

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

It is when people lose their why that they can no longer endure the how that they are facing. At work, long hours or a project they’re struggling with can wear them down without the above alignment. When this happens, everyone loses as they will start looking for other jobs and their work output will rapidly decline.

Are you giving your team the whys they need?

Get LighthouseWant to help your team to find their meaning and reach their goals? Then sign up for Lighthouse, the app to help you be a better manager and we can help you stay on top of your team’s growth and career goals.

Learn more at GetLighthouse.com

The most important word for motivating your team

29 April 2014

6 Comments

Progress. It’s a word that has driven man for generations to grow, develop, learn, and reach for the stars (sometimes even literally). It often feels stale and disheartening when progress isn’t being made.  There’s a reason that Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson have all invested in space travel; NASA stopped making progress and they were all inspired to push to advance mankind to space.

For us mere mortals, progress may not be measured on a societal scale, but we all still have goals. These goals are what drive us and motivate us to get up in the morning. As a manager, you are not only accountable to your own goals, but that of everyone on your team.

Do each of your team members make regular progress on their goals? Do projects drag on for months, or do they see results of the fruit of their labors on a regular basis? Whether you’re in sales, marketing, engineering, design or support, progress is hugely important to the mental well being of every team member.

The stakes for progress on your team couldn’t be higher. Engineers that don’t ship product for months have a high propensity for burn out.  Employees in any department will become frustrated and seek challenges at new companies if they feel like they’re no longer growing, learning, and working on things they’re excited about.

As a manager, you need to help your team make progress: Ship. Close deals. Get wins. See results.

But how do you reliably do this? How do you get out in front of potential disaster?

How to ensure your team members are making regular progress

1) Remove Blockers

Few things are as frustrating as feeling like you can’t get your work done because of someone else. Waiting for decisions or dealing with someone who is a bottleneck in a work flow can quickly stall out even the most talented person’s ability to make progress.

As a manager, you can often be the cause of those blockers. Diffuse that source of frustration for your team as much as you can. A great lesson I learned from Jonathan Kay, CEO of Apptopia, is to regularly ask everyone on your team, “Am I blocking you?” and then follow through on anything they ask for you to help them with right away.

When you meet with your team, always ask them if they’re being blocked in any way. The more you can help remove the blockers (even when you’re not directly responsible), the more your team will be able to get done and feel productive.

2) Empower Your Team

Are you a dictator that rules with an iron fist, making every little decision for your team? Or do you delegate effectively to your team, trusting them to make decisions on their own in their areas of expertise?

As a manager, there are too many decisions to make to micromanage everyone. You become much more scalable (and less likely to block them), when you let your team make the little decisions in their jobs. You also are then empowering them to have ownership over their work and focused on accountability to you on the results.

Work with your team to set the goals and expectations, but trust them to do the work you hired them in the best way they see fit. If you can’t trust them to do so, you need to hire people you can trust.

3) Align goals

Every person has different motivations and interests. If you understand what their goals are, you can help them get on the right projects with the right responsibilities. When someone’s work is aligned with their personal and professional goals, you will see them operate at their highest possible performance level.

As a manager, you need to regularly talk about each team member’s goals and interests. Not only will they differ person to person, but they will also change over time. Yee Lee, VP of Engineering at TaskRabbit, reminds himself to check with every member of the engineering team at least every 3 months to see if their long term goals have changed (they often do for many reasons). This ensures that everyone is making progress on their goals and the company keeps everyone aligned with what their asked to do on the job.

4) Watch for warning signs

Every big problem started out as a small one. The more you can identify problems when they’re small, the more likely you are to avoid having to constantly triage major issues that will take up all the time you don’t have.

When projects are making less progress or dragging on, you can often tell based on a shift in morale. Look for signs that people are not as engaged in a project or seem to be growing in frustration. What seems small to you on the outside may be a big issue brewing for those on the inside on a project.

The best early warning is your one on ones. When you ask them how something is going one on one, they’re more likely to be candid than in a group and you can also dig a little deeper by asking revealing questions such as, “What’s the most frustrating part of our project you’re working on now?” Whatever you hear, act on it appropriately and you will not only diffuse the situation, but build trust in your team that they can bring important issues to you no matter the size.

5) Take no one for granted

It’s easy to think that someone who crushes it at their job will want to keep doing it forever. Unfortunately, times and motivations change for everyone and, if you’re not careful, you will lose people when those motivations shift.

You need a strong communication channel to keep your best people. If they trust you, they will tell you.  Joe Stump, co-founder of Sprintly, had a great engineer who told Joe that he wanted to try something new (in his case, marketing). As much as Joe hated losing an engineer, he hated losing a talented team member even more, so Joe worked with the engineer to shift to a growth hacking role they were excited to do and the company needed.

As a manager, it’s easy to spend all your time on weaker team members or people that need the most mentorship. Don’t forget to check in on even your best talents or you may find out when it’s too late. This is why you should do one on ones with *everyone* on your team.

Your people are motivated by one word: Progress.  Are you helping them get there?

Get LighthouseGreat managers help their team make progress on their work, their career goals, and fix problems while they’re small.

If you’re looking for help making *progress* on these things, then give Lighthouse a try. It keeps you organized and helps you follow the best practices of great leaders. Learn more at GetLighthouse.com

Founders: You don’t own your employees

14 April 2013

12 Comments

[Ed. note: This is in response to a post by David Hauser entitled, “The Startup Side Project Bubble” which you can read here: http://buff.ly/10Lw9ek]

So many founders forget something simple: You do not own your employees.

They are human beings with their own passions, interests and lives. You have a vision of a reality you want to create. After much labor and hard work to get it off the ground, either funding or your own revenue allows you to hire help. Those people are choosing to devote a significant portion of their lives to your cause to help make it possible. Take a moment to appreciate that. 

In David’s post he argues that employees having side projects is bad for them and his business. This is so backwards.

First, telling someone what they should and shouldn’t do in their free time is a tremendous insult to them and their personal judgment.  It’s also incredibly short-sighted.

You want employees with side projects.

Especially for the creators at a startup (ie- the people that design and build your product), there is tremendous benefit to them having side projects. A few of those benefits are:

  • Experimentation. An outlet to experiment with new technologies before suggesting the company use them; no amount of research compares to having used a new framework and being able to provide first person accounts of the tradeoffs.
  • Independence. A place where they can make all the decisions (for better and worse) versus the negotiations that often happen in a company. You can also call this their creative release.
  • Mastery. The ability to further hone skills in a self-directed fashion, getting them to the 10,000 hours to mastery faster than standard work hours alone would provide.
  • Relief. Providing some variety in their life’s work can help avoid the burnout that comes from only working on one thing for too long.
  • Focus. Motivating them to get their work done efficiently because they don’t have every hour of the day to work on it. The saying goes, “If you want something done, ask a busy person” for a reason.
  • Contribute. The ability to help the greater tech community through contributions to open source projects, which wouldn’t exist without many people having side projects.
  • Network. They’ll often work with people outside their day job on these side projects, which will grow their learning and network. It might even provide the next recruit when you need more help at your startup.

And I’m sure there are others.

Great employees are a package deal.

In the early days of a startup, you want athletes, which are often entrepreneurs themselves.  Later, you want specialists who have deep expertise in their skills. By their nature the same skills you value each day in either group’s work for you also lends itself to having these side projects: In early employees that means a breadth of knowledge, while later, the depth of knowledge that comes from side projects is what makes many great later stage startup employees.

I would not be running product at KISSmetrics if I had only put my head down and worked on my past jobs (I wouldn’t even be in tech now most likely…I have a degree in Electrical Engineering). The skills that are core to my job came from side projects like Greenhorn Connect, taking the time to learn new skills in my free time and reading voraciously. Every founder wants to hire people with passion for their craft and a wide range or depth of skills.  This is a package deal.

“Why don’t you quit your job already?”

Taking a step back and looking at David’s argument, it seems centered around the idea that if an employee has a side project, they should quit their job immediately and start a company. While they should definitely quit their job if they’re ready to make a run at it as a business, they may not do that right away because of a few reasons:

  • Funding. They lack the personal funds and see the foolishness in fundraising when they don’t even know whether an idea has legs whatsoever.  Not all side projects have clear paths to revenue/bootstrapping either.
  • Motivation. Many side projects are for fun and passion. Sometimes those become businesses worthy of full time attention, but usually they are just an enjoyable thing to do with only part of their time.
  • Stability. Depending on what else is happening in their life, it may not be the time to start a company. If they’re getting married, just moved to a new city or a close family member is on their deathbed, they may not want the upheaval of launching a startup on top of that.

None of these reasons prevent a person from being a valuable contributor to your startup. In fact, someone may work for your company and add tremendous value you’d otherwise never receive.

This is a seller’s market.

If you have hard to find skills like design, product management or engineering, it’s a great time to be a startup employee. Companies must compete for you. With salaries skyrocketing, it takes more than money to attract talent. Having a good culture, treating people well and supporting them as individuals become important factors as well.

David’s views may work for him, but I caution other founders from adopting his cynical attitude towards those with side projects. The potential gains far outweigh any losses in hours David seems so concerned with and run the risk of turning off potential great team members.