Posts Tagged ‘Coaching’

Today I am launching my new web site under the new company name of Greve Consulting, formerly known as Metreks.  The focus of my practice is to help companies develop their returns management, aka reverse logistics capabilities.  Viewers will find a lot of useful information on returns including the Reverse Logistics Podcast, which will feature industry leaders from the world of reverse logistics, and my blog which is packed with articles and information to help service providers, manufacturers, retailers, and liquidators make more money.

Register to get the blogs sent to your desktop automatically or save www.GreveConsulting.com as a favorite on your browser.  Your comments, questions, suggestions and feedback are encouraged.  I will use your feedback to improve the value delivered from the site.

Check in from time to time to see what is new.  For example, you might want to check out The Cost of Doing Nothing.  This is a form you can fill out to find out how much opportunity you and your company have in developing your reverse logistics capabilities.

Whether you call it returns management or reverse logistics, it’s all about improving returns and maximizing profits.  I hope you enjoy the new site and get a lot of value out of GreveConsulting.com.

As the old song says, “People are people where ever they are.” Seems the Good Lord wired the vast majority of folks with a fairly keen sense of right and wrong, along with an innate ability to tell when they’ve been lied to by others.

Your workforce is no different. Employees will figure out who to trust really fast. They know when somebody is being sincere or if they are just feeding them a line. That is why the number one rule in labor relations is “DON’T LIE”. Always tell the truth.

A big mistake many managers make, however, is to adopt the line from the Jack Nicholas, Tom Cruse movie “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!” Leaders sometime think that employees can’t deal with reality or that they will make bad assumptions so they tell them something different than the truth. Big mistake.

The manager that does this doesn’t think of it as a lie or manipulative but their employees do and their perception is reality. The leader who gets tagged as somebody that can’t be trusted will struggle working with the team from that point on.

Along with telling the truth, supervisors and managers have to be sincere. They have to say what they mean and mean what they say. It is a leaders ability to convey sincerity that determines their ability to inspire and lead their team. Often young managers will “rally” the troops around working hard to hit a number for the good of the cause but their delivery is so insincere that the team walks away jaded and resentful. The response is often a skeptical workforces who ends up wasting time speculating about what is really going on, as opposed to focusing on the task at hand.

Once an employee begins to question your motives, they start losing trust in what you do and say. There are a few rules to remember to avoid losing the trust of your team:

1. Treat people like you would want to be treated
2. Never lie to your team
3. Be sincere in all your dealings with people that you supervise
4. Treat your people like adults
5. Your actions will speak louder than your words so walk the talk at all times

If your leadership team lives by these five guidelines, you will have an organization that is built on trust and communicates in a healthy manner.  This doesn’t mean everyone will always agree or that you will never have conflicts.  You will.  These tough issues, however, will be much easier to deal with if your people trust what you are saying and believe that you really do care.

Always, sincerely, tell the truth.

There is a lot of debate about the value of tweeting, facebook, and building online networks like on Linked In. For the most part, all the successful online networking sites have two things in common. First, the successful ones are free. The paid one are failing and cannot get traction.

The second thing all online networking groups share is that without a complementary personal network, it’s hard to get any tangible benefit from it. Businesses grow through relationships and contacts. You must “press the flesh”. That’s why if you haven’t been networking, you may be working hard, but not smart.

Advertising, cold-calling, and direct mail are ways to grow your business and this is true for online networking also. The old saying is true: It’s not what you know, but who you know. The smaller the business the MORE important networking is to your growth. To effectively network, you have to work at it but you have to do so with a purpose.   Check out the Networking Goals below curtesy of FranNet.

Networking Goals

If you aim for nothing, you’ll probably get nothing. Set your networking goals early and revisit them often to see if they’re still working for you.  Don’t be afraid to modify, revise, or scrap one if it just isn’t the right one.  Here are some to get you started:

• Connect with other business owners for advice, tips, ideas, and support

• Create a solid and reliable network of suppliers

• Access a wider client base

• Build confidence in yourself and your business

• Learn about your industry, trends, and changes

After you have established your networking goals, the next step is determining how to effectively execute on them.  That means figuring out what tools are at your disposal. Once you’ve tapped into the local networks, THEN you can reach out to them online and link up or follow them on Twitter.

My personal method for networking is what I call my 1-2-3 Networking strategy and it is something I focus on every week.  My weekly strategy is:

1. Attend one networking event a week
2. Meet at least two new people that could positively impact my business
3. Go to breakfast, coffee, lunch, drinks, or dinner with somebody from my business network each week.

This strategy has been developed over the last two years and has resulted in new customers, development of valuable alliances, and has enabled me to pick up many best practices and ideas that help me make more money.  After all, growing your business and making more money is the ultimate goal of networking.

You better watch out, you better not cry.

You better watch out I’m telling you why.

OSHA’s coming to inspect you…………someday………soon

When the Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, took over the helm at the Department of Labor she famously declared “OSHA’s back in the enforcement business.”  David Michaels is now the new Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health and the question is “what should employers expect?”

In September of this year, Acting Assistant Secretary of Labor for Occupational Safety and Health, Jordan Barab said “Under the new administration, OSHA is heading back to the original intent of the OSH Act. We’re back in the enforcement business and we’re back in the standards-writing business.” The fact is that OSHA has become much more aggressive in issuing citations, increasing the characterization of the citations issued, as well as introducing recommendations for higher penalties.

What sould employers expect as Michaels takes over?

• A more agressive OSHA
• More citations issues by inspectors
• Citations that are more serious with bigger penalties
• Aggressive use of various enforcement tools.  For example, employers with multiple locations and who are part of larger corporate families should expect that OSHA will attempt to use its Enhanced Enforcement Program to attempt to issue more significant citations and penalties.

Given Mr. Michaels’s background, it would also not be surprising if OSHA were to increase the number of inspections that involve industrial hygiene and health issues with the corresponding increase in the number of citations based on health standards. Health-based programs such as respiratory protection, chemical hazard communication, and bloodborne pathogens will likely be targeted. There have also been indications that OSHA will increase its efforts to investigate and issue “ergonomics” citations and OSHA may attempt to promulgate an ergonomics standard.

Internal and outside audits of OSHA compliance can be an effective way of measuring current performance and ensuring sustained compliance in the future. Management commitment to OSHA compliance, an effective and up-to-date safety and health program, employee training, and audit trails that prove proper equipment is being provided and maintained are critical in this increased enforcement environment.

Employers should not only look to existing OSHA standards, but also consider industry standards and injury trends. Employers should also consider the role of safety committees as part of an overall compliance program and ensure that committee action or inaction is not increasing potential OSHA liabilities.

With the growing “OSHA Threat” out there, companies should ensure programs are in place to ensure they are in compliance and can show a real effort toward providing a safe working environment for their workforce.  Company executives should increase efforts to create an effective safety and health program that can withstand OSHA’s new and aggressive enforcement tactics. A critical part of this training should be training management in what to do when an OSHA inspector shows up at the door for an inspection.

The degree to which your leadership team excels at the three key leadership principles below, will determine whether labor relations in your organization are good or ill.

The three key principles to leadership and labor relations are:

1. Treat people like you want to be treated.
2. People don’t care how much you know, they want to know how much you care.
3. Treat all your people in a fair, firm, and consistent manner.

Organizations that live these three principles are easy to spot.  They are the winners.  Their customers are more satisfied.  Their employees are more productive, happier, and never leave.  They are the ones who drive innovation and their numbers are better in every way than their competition.  They achieve all of this because they live these principles from the board room to the shop floor and they don’t tolerate those who do not live these principles.

If I only had ten minutes to teach a room full of new supervisors anything, I would focus on these guiding principles.  If a leader understands and lives by these three tenents, they will perform optomally their entire career, regardless of the situations they may face.

I’ve found there are three critical elements that exist in order to have an effective executive coach that helps you achieve the personal growth you are after.

First, you and your coach need to jointly determine what behavior is occurring that needs to be changed. Sounds odd but at the end of the day, you hire a coach to help you identify and figure out how to change the way you act in a specific, common, set of repeating situations.

This can be nearly impossible for an individual to identify themselves. A good coach will walk you through your past troubling situations and ask the hard questions that will help you take the blinders off and face facts. Many times, this is a first time experience. It can be the “blinding flash of the obvious”.

The next critical component is for you and your coach to have defined time of engagement. You are not hiring a coach for life. You are not their new annuity that keeps on giving. Defining the length of time will ensure you both are focused and are working toward a specific goal to be “delivered” by a specific time. A good benchmark would be 12 weeks. If you can’t achieve your goals with an executive coach in 12 weeks, you have the wrong coach.

The last point is your coaching sessions must be done in person, off site, and without interruptions. Sounds tough and anti technology but executives today actually can detach themselves from their important jobs for couple of hours once a week. You know you do this anyway so stop complaining. Think of it like going to the gym for leadership development once a week for three months.

Meeting in person is critical as well. If you have a coach who wants to “phone it in”, get a new coach. Studies have shown that you only communicate 30% verbally. The other 70% is body language of some type. Your coach must see the other 70% to understand what is really going on in your world. Without meeting face to face, your coach is only getting 30% of the story and, just like in English class in high school, only reading 30% of the story can only result in failure.

Executive coaching can enable a leader to achieve things they never thought possible. However, there are a lot of pretenders that will lead you down a path that results in you wasting time and money and ending up right where you started. You need structure and focus to get the return on your executive coaching dollar.

If you are interested in an executive coach for yourself or someone on your staff, ensure you have the correct expectations.

First, a good executive coach will lead you through a discovery process where you identify the issues, honestly look at the behaviors, environments, and outcomes. Then your coach will walk you through a self discovery process where you will figure out the answer.

If you expect your coach to tell you the answer, you either have a poor coach or you will be uneasy a process where you ask questions only to be asked more questions by your coach.

A good coach teaches you to think. They don’t hand out answers.

Second, your coach is an experienced business executive, not a marriage counselor, or shrink. If you have personal issues, see an expert, not an executive coach.

A good executive coach will keep everything focused on your business and avoid personal issues.

Third, you should have a coach that is independent and can be trusted with everything.

I had a coach once that I opened up to only to have him tell my boss everything. The relationship was permanently damaged between my boss and I,  and the coach and I never met again. Trust is a must have for executive coaches.

Finally, your coach may listen, suggest, and share his life stories, however, a good executive coach will NOT do your job or take the next step for you. If you have a coach that wants to talk to your boss for you, get a different coach. If you have a coach who wants to help write the plan for you, get a new coach.

A good coach will insist you do the work. How else will you learn and learning is point.