Tucker Shares Lessons Learned

Robert Tucker is an innovation expert and a keen observer of the movers and shakers in today's challenging marketplace.  In this blog post he shares another valuable lesson.

Several years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported on an unusual cost-cutting move by electronics retailer Circuit City. The chain abruptly fired their top-producing veteran salespeople and replaced them with lower-wage new hires. When Circuit City went bankrupt last year, you had to wonder if decisions like that were at least partly to blame.

Meanwhile in Minnesota, retailer Best Buy took a different approach. They began to focus on creating a deeper dialogue with the firm's 160,000 employees spread out amongst 1150 stores across the United States and China, Mexico, England and a growing number of countries.

Best Buy began experimenting with social networking technologies centered upon the company's intranet site. They started conducting weekly online polls of employees. They set up wikis for people with common interests to brainstorm together. They invited senior managers to participate in agenda-free town hall meetings. And they established a "listening chair" where employees survey other employees on such questions as "do you think the Geek Squad uniform needs updating?"

When they started listening in earnest, employee turnover stood at 81 percent a year. Three years on, it had dropped to 60 percent. Last year, it was down to 49 percent.

All of this hyper-listening didn't just happen. And it wasn't something decreed by senior management.

Jennifer Rock was a mid-level marketing manager when she became aware of what lack of communication was costing her company. Highly analytical and a self-described "type A" person, she noticed that stores with higher than average employee engagement levels and lower than average turnover rates tended to be stores that outperformed the others in sales growth and sales per employee. But merely noticing a problem doesn't do any good.

To her credit, Jennifer took action. She created a new position for herself, director of Intranet and Dialogue.

Next she and her team developed a clear mission: to use every low or no cost means possible to help Best Buy become extraordinary at communicating with employees-not just at them. And to connect employees with information and with each other as well, all with the goal of helping the business succeed by helping the individual employee succeed.

If you've attended one of my keynotes lately or participated in my new "Innovation is Everybody's Business" in-house workshop, you have heard me rave about what Jennifer Rock and her team have accomplished. You heard me extol this group of quiet revolutionaries for their innovativeness in seeing a problem, and stepping up to the challenge of solving it using every trick in the innovator's toolkit. And you no doubt heard me point out that developing one's Innovation Skills may be the smartest career move you'll ever make, especially if you want to become indispensable.

And you may have heard me say that Jennifer Rock represents the future of the Innovation Movement.

When I visited with Jennifer recently in Minneapolis, I asked her why would any company, especially a quarterly-results obsessed American company, give a hoot about listening to its employees, especially now? Why would they add headcount (Jen's team has climbed to 8 people) when competitors were busy chopping heads?

Jen's unflinching response: Because she and her Intranet and Dialogue Team sold senior management on the bottom-line benefits of listening to employees. "Our success boils down to the interaction between one customer and one employee," Jennifer said. "Is that employee happy and productive and informed and excited? We need to know that employee's state of mind better than anyone else in the company."

Though we are loathe to admit it, the Global Economic Crisis disrupted the Innovation Movement as more and more firms went into survival mode. Anew survey conducted by Chuck Frey of InnovationTools.com suggests that most initiatives are in a holding pattern at best, and there is little enthusiasm for broad-based, enterprise-wide initiatives. CEOs and senior executives admit they are just too distracted with more immediate issues. But meanwhile, they are suddenly, desperately in need of more people like Jennifer Rock. As John Draper, senior VP marketing for Mead Consumer Products told me, "I need people to be less risk adverse, I need them to rattle the cage, challenge what we do and look for new ways to do things."

Jennifer and her team realized the impact of what their team was doing when company leaders decided to reduce the employee discount. "The move set off a firestorm with employees," Jennifer recalled. "On the Watercooler [online forum] hundreds and hundreds of employees talked about what this discount meant to them, and what it meant to customers, since employees could try out products and recommend them to customers. People wrote in to suggest other ways the company could save money without touching the employee discount." And company leaders changed their mind and rescinded their decision.

"They said to us, 'The next time you see a groundswell like this and we are unaware of what's happening, you have our permission to kick down our door. Don't even knock. We need to know.' And that's when we thought, 'Wow, we are adding value, we are making a difference.'"

Jen said she will remember that day for as long as she lives.

Robert Tucker is available to help your audience understand, develop, and implement innovative ideas. To learn more about him, check out his speaker page on this website.

The True Value of Talent Management

"Everything, then, must be assessed in money; for this enables men always to exchange their services, and so makes society possible." ~ Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Even though Aristotle made this point over 2000 years ago, it couldn't ring more true today. Almost everything involved in transactions today are based on a price and assessed in money.

What about Talent Management?

Beyond salary and sales, there are many important aspects of talent management that are often not tied to the bottom line. Yet, "dollarizing" the value of talent management initiatives is vital to bottom-line analysis. Whether you are placing a value or cost on your current status, or calculating the ROI of your next talent

management strategy, metrics that assess the monetary value will help you see the true effect on the bottom-line.

Bottom Line Statistics

Knowing the bottom line results of talent challenges will help you implement strategies with a proven ROI that you can see on your balance sheet. Find out how much you already know by asking yourself questions like:

• What is disengagement costing the bottom line?
• What was the ROI on your last training? What can be expected of future training?
• How are your team-building initiatives impacting your bottom line?
• What was the cost of your last bad hire?
• What is your overall turnover percentage? How is it related to tenure?

In a study on over three million employees, Gallup found that over 70% of Americans who go to work are not engaged. This means businesses may be operating at significantly less than full capacity, a loss that could cost millions a year.

• What is employee disengagement costing your company? Several thousands, millions, more?
• How can you calculate this cost?
• How does it compare to the investment of a proactive approach to increasing engagement?

With tightening budgets and a focus on cost-saving strategies, businesses worldwide are making drastic labor cuts. But is that always the right move? A recent study analyzed the savings resulting from changes in general and administrative functions and found that 75% of the savings came from strategies focused on restructuring and redesigning, while only 25% was from reducing.

• Would you, too, save three times as much on your bottom line by investing in your people and processes?
• Is the slash and burn approach actually costing you more?
• What would the ROI be if you restructured and redesigned your workforce?

As business associates who want to make a difference in the bottom line, we might find advice in Aristotle's quote by remembering to assess, in money, the value of talent management initiatives so we know its true worth. How else can we place fair value on the investment in people? After all, they are a company's biggest asset.

Anita Sirianni is a wonderful, high-energy speaker and sales trainer. Her programs are dynamic, popular, and high impact. To check her availability for your next event, please give Jane a call or send us an email.

Insights on Leadership from the Top Down

Susan Annunzio is the president and CEO of the Center for High Performance and an international strategic advisor to senior leadership teams. Her powerful messages about team leadership, managing success, and creating ethical corporate cultures resonate with executives and managers across the country. Late last year, Susan wrote a compelling article for Chief Executive maagazine. Below are some excerpts from that article:

During more than 20 years of working with top leaders at a wide range of companies, I have observed that what goes on in the C-suite sends shock waves throughout the organization. Behaviors that originate with the CEO and his direct reports filter down, where they are repeated and magnified. And just as business failures can be traced back to the conduct of the leadership team, so can business success. High-performing leadership teams breed high-performance companies . . .

The best leadership teams naturally and often unconsciously learn from one another. In their 2008 book, Senior Leadership Teams, authors Ruth Wage man, Debra Nunes, James Burrus and J. Richard Hackman reported on their research into what is required for leadership teams to perform superbly. Based on data from120 teams around the world, the authors found, "The best teams are continually being coached-and are coaching themselves -to evolve, learn and grow. They learn from their leader, each other, and their experiences."

Hard times are a fertile breeding ground for fear-based behavior. During such times, leaders often obsess about what they have to lose, rather than think rationally about what steps they need to take to win. In contrast, high-performing leadership teams commit to proactive, fact-based decision-making rather than reactive, emotion-driven decision- making. They balance the needs of the short and the long term.

As reporters continue to dissect what went wrong with the world's financial system, publishing books such as Street Fighters: The Last 72 hours of Bear Stearns, the Toughest Firm on Wall Street; Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P.Morgan was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe and Dumb Money: How our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, readers will learn a great deal about the confluence of greed, hubris, lax regulation and bad luck that led to the global financial meltdown. But readers would do well to learn another lesson: The outcome might have been different had the senior leadership teams of the felled companies welcomed dissent and debate, upheld values such as honesty and decency, and paid attention to the people within their own companies who saw the dangers ahead.

Call Jane at 703.243.1620 if you'd like to have Susan address your organization on high-performance leadership.

Speaker, Healthcare Advocate, and Patriot Receives Honor

One of the luminaries in the Esparza Speakers cadre of outstanding speakers, is Betsy McCaughey. In addition to speaking before a wide variety of audiences, Betsy is the founder/chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, and a tireless advocate for patients rights, medical excellence and personal liberty. She is also a Constitutional historian, published author, popular pundit on various radio and TV talk shows, and an adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute.

This Sunday, Valentine's Day, Betsy will not only keynote an event for the Queens Village Republican Club, in Queens, New York, but that organization - the oldest Republican club in the country - will present her with American Freedom Award.

A former Lt. Governor of New York, Betsy stays on the front lines of the ongoing fight for safety in our healthcare system and patient rights. She is also committed to exposing the dangers of federal health bills. Betsy is one of the few individuals to immediately read through the thousands of page of proposed legislation that comprised the House and Senate healthcare bills in late 2009. She was seen in a variety of venues, as well as TV and radio, explaining in plain talk the impact that these bills would have on our country's healthcare system, as well as our Constitutional rights and the pocketbooks of American citizens.

Congratulations, Betsy!

A Little Good News ...

Most of us are acutely aware that 2009 was a tough year for anyone involved in the meetings industry. When the economy took a nosedive in late 20089, few of us were shocked to see organizations limit the number and scope of events that were to be conducted the following year.

But this time it wasn't just an economic slump . . . at the same time, leaders in organizations across the county decided to reject long-standing practices to conduct winter meetings in warmer climes, reward employees with special destinations for must-attend meetings, or expect people to get on plane for anything as mundane as training. After all, the media were shining bright spotlights on companies that took "bailout" money but continued to hold meetings at luxury resorts. No one worried about work for the employees at high-end hotels or the success of various vendors serving the meeting industry-it was far more important to be P.C. and not appear extravagant.

But it appears that things will be different in 2010.

A recent survey conducted by Meeting Professional International and American Express indicates the number of events, the length of those events, and the anticipated attendance are all on the rise. (Good news, Speakers!) However, the same survey also tells us that tight budgets and limited staff will mean that meeting planners and conference organizers in 2010 will need to stretch every possible resource available to them.

So budgets will continue to be strained for the foreseeable future, but at least there should be a few more opportunities for speakers to address meeting attendees or training program registrants over the same period. And I'll just bet that, like me, you'll take all the good news that we can get!