Less Numbers, More Story

Harry is one of our unit managers. His normally calm, diplomatic voice takes on a sudden energy as he leans across the table and says, "People seem to think that any mission will do. That's just not true."

Harry has a point. Missions have to resonate with the team or they will not motivate them. I have worked for a passionate leader and I really felt the difference. When he announced his vision for the company, he made sure we all knew where we could make a difference. We worked together and supported each other. There was a well defined goal that was just beyond our reach.

Those are all good things, but, as I look back on that experience now, I see it differently. It was not the goal that motivated us, but the story of The Little Company That Could. We saw ourselves as a small Canadian company competing for recognition with our much larger colleagues south of the border. It was the classic David and Goliath story, and we were determined to create a happy ending.

My current company's story is very much in my mind as I put together the book that will become the blueprint for our company's 2009 year. People don't traditionally look to budgets for inspiration, but I am out to change all that. Here's what I'm planning:

• Less Numbers, More Story - The budget will now include a narrative telling the reader what we are aiming to achieve. The detailed tables broken down by Cost Centre, Account and month that I need to import the budget into the accounting system will be sent to the Appendix. People don't read them anyway.
  
• Align with the Organization's Priorities - The accounting system breaks the organization down into units, but the Board sees the operations in terms of their priorities. The budget book will take all of the individual managers' goals and show how they fit into the Board's priorities.
• Support the Priorities with Graphics - I will use my Microsoft reporting tools to present the plans graphically, just like I promised. The reader will see that we are putting our money where our mouth is.
• Get More People Involved - Some people view budgeting as a black box: a mysterious process with results that are beyond their control. The budget book will have a section describing the process and talking about how budget adjustments were made. We will ask for more input from the people most affected by the budget and actively seek their buy-in.
  
• Use the Technology - Use the Financial Reporting Software rather than Excel for the Budget reports so that changes to the Budget ripple through all the reports, instead of relying on more fragile spreadsheet links. Use Navision (Microsoft Dynamics NAV) to track the original budget separately from subsequent transfers and updates, so that I can show both on financial reports.

There was an excellent demonstration of the power of a story in Drew McLellan's Marketing Minute today. It certainly inspired me.

The public may not be on the edge of their seats when this book is released, but I'm hoping that Harry will be.

Motivate Your Team

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” In how many MBA classes, inspirational business speeches and management books has this speech by American President, John F. Kennedy been touted as the perfect motivational mission? (Example 1, example 2, example 3).

The latest to cross my desk is an article by Bill Catlette and Richard Hadden called “Motivation through Mission”. Their key concept is, “People don’t perform in an inspired manner without a big time commitment to a compelling cause.”

It’s hard to argue with that, but consider this example. Let’s say you’re the head of an accounting team and looking ahead to 2009. You have the monthly grind of accounting statements and management reporting ahead of you. In addition, there are the budgeting and audit cycles. You are midway through a computer implementation that has been delayed due to problems converting the history, and you have to change the whole General Ledger to the new International Financial Reporting Standards. What is the compelling cause you need to get your people to perform in an inspired manner?

Catlette and Hadden’s response is, “Whether your team competes on the global stage or a three-unit cube farm, they will move faster, get more done, have more fun, and make more money if all hands on deck share a common sense of purpose and direction. Make it your business to see that they get it . . . really get it.”

Forgive my cynicism, but I have seen this all before. I had a client in the insurance industry where all of the rooms had large motivational posters, but the staff plodded through their jobs like zombies. There was no shortage of messaging proclaiming the common purpose. The issue was that there was no buy in from the employees below manager level.

How do you get buy in? How do you motivate someone? The first thing you have to do is pay attention to the emotional conversation in the room. To borrow from Stephen Covey, “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Start by abandoning the idea of motivating a whole team and focus on the individuals. Simply put, if you really care about each one of them, they will really care about you. If you pay attention to their agenda, they will pay attention to yours. If you are honest with them, they will eventually be honest with you. I say eventually because it may take them a while to trust you.

This conversation does not have to get too “touchy feely”. It can be limited to the job. You don’t have to take on someone’s personal problems, but you need to address their professional ones. The only way to find out what’s on their mind is to observe them and ask open ended questions. Notice when they come through for you and each other. Encourage them. Ask them what roadblocks they face.

Actually, just the feeling that someone notices and appreciates what you do can be enormously motivational. I was involved in a computer conversion where the old system was a card based “automatic” bookkeeping machine which belonged in the Smithsonian. We couldn’t convert the data. It had to be re-entered. The two women in the data entry department gamely took on this huge task and managed to convert a month’s worth of data every week until it was done. It being an Olympic year, I got some ribbon and those large chocolate coins in foil to make two gold medals, which we presented to them at a staff meeting. Afterwards, I worried that the whole thing had been a little hokey, but my boss said, “Look what they did with the ribbons.” Sure enough, both of them had pinned the medals up prominently in their workstations.

I have written before about being on a little team with big ambitions, and I have to agree with Catlette and Hadden that putting everything you’ve got behind an ambitious project (or a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal" as another consultant calls it) energizes a team. Just make sure they feel like a team first.

Passionate Employees

The president of a Halifax-based company with 17 employees writes to ask PROFIT-Xtra readers:

"My company is my baby. I'm very passionate about it, maybe even obsessed with it. It bugs me that most of my employees treat their jobs as just a job. Although they do adequate work, I don't see any passion in them. Did I hire the wrong people or should I be doing something specific to get them as excited as I am about our products and services and the future possibilities of the firm?"

My answer:

Some of the obvious ways to give employees a chance to be passionate about their jobs are employee share ownership and profit sharing plans. The Controller at a client of mine told me about how his company put in a profit sharing plan. It took a couple of years for the plan to kick in, but after they had a good year and the staff received the equivalent of 2 month’s wages in a single payment, he said the attitude in the company changed completely. All of a sudden he was getting support for his cost cutting recommendations, particularly when he reminded staff that it would go to their bonus.

Another way was suggested in a talk by Sam Allred at the Upstream Academy. He recommended that employee pay be more entrepreneurial, by being broken down into three tiers:

1. A low base salary that you get just for showing up and doing your basic job,
2. A bonus for making budget, possibly shared among a group, and, most importantly for developing passion,
3. A significant bonus for going beyond budget.

In that model the base salary typically doesn’t change. As employees gain experience, the top tiers grow. At the end of the meeting I asked Sam how that model would apply to administrative workers who typically don’t have direct budget responsibility. He thought about that for a moment and said that they play a support role, so if the person or department they support makes or exceeds their budget, they should get a piece of that as well.

At the end of the day, however, money only goes so far. Ask yourself whether you are communicating the passion you feel about your business to your employees. I once worked in a little fourteen person consulting firm. One of the owners had this dream about being recognized by the company whose software we represented by being invited into the President’s Club. It was a huge, audacious goal for a firm our size, but his enthusiasm was infectious. We were up against much larger companies from all over North America. The owner celebrated every sale. He talked about the goal at every staff meeting. He charted progress. He made sure that he dealt with any obstacles people experienced. It really felt like we were pulling together as a team. That was a fantastic time and yes, after a LOT of hard work, we finally made it.

Update: Profit Magazine chose to publish this entry here.