There has been lots of talk over the last ten years about Gen Y in the workplace.  Lots of complaints etc., but Gen Y sure seems to be coming up to stride now…

I’m curious though, what do you think about Baby Boomers.  How are they doing at work ?  Love your thoughts on how they are doing, and where they need to improve…

Don’t underestimate the power of just hanging out with your employees. But you’ve got to just hang–don’t turn it into a business talk!  Also, spend time with people who aren’t your favorites.  If you only hang out with the favorites, then you’ll continue to build walls within your teams that they see, but you don’t. And that isn’t good for you or your company.

When you’re just spending time chatting casually with employees, you’ll see that they like that you’re hanging out with them in an unstructured way.  They’ll start to open up to you as a person, and this will go a long way for your business and building the culture you want. Think of it like a dinner party: if you had a group of friends over for dinner, you’d chat with each of them and ensure they were having fun.  Do the same at the office.

Close to thirty years ago, Tom Peters wrote the book, In Search of Excellence, and in it he introduced us to an acronym called “MBWA.”  MBWA stands for “Management By Walking Around.”  This doesn’t mean interrupting people while they are trying to focus.  However, it does mean spending time with all the employees near or at their workspaces in casual interaction. The more time you spend doing MBWA, the more you will truly learn about what’s really going on in your company, and the more the teams will respond to you as a leader.

If you have a huge company and don’t physically have time to hang out with everyone, take a different path out of the office at the end of the day.  Wander between different rows of workstations or past different work areas just chat to people or say hi quickly.  You will notice the energy rise.

The role of leadership is to align, support and enable teams to do the work they were hired to do.

Leadership’s role is not to follow up or “hold people accountable.”  When the right people are hired and the right plans are in place, people can execute and leadership can support them.

Leadership ensures that people are working on projects and tasks that are aligned with the rest of the goals of the company.

They ensure that team members have the commitment or emotional support to do their part in the process.  Leadership can assess if skill development is necessary on any of the individual sub-steps, in any of the projects, well in advance because they know what everyone is working on.

In addition, leadership can ensure that the proper bandwidth and resources—money, people, time, supplies and more–are available to complete the outlined projects. They can focus on alignment and ensuring that all the projects being worked on are the right ones to drive the overall company goals.

Dr. Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard, authors of One Minute Manager, developed a model in the 1960s that’s still used today in the best-run companies on the planet, and it’s called “Situational Leadership.”  When companies have tightly reverse-engineered their plans, they can spend time effectively leading their people.  Situational leadership involves the leader giving the correct balance of either skill development or emotional support to help their subordinates perform at optimal levels.  Being able to slow down and give the proper amount of skill development to their team on an ongoing basis is critical.

Most top performers work for really average companies.

Your job is to find the amazing people that work somewhere else and get them to work for you.

Don’t make a habit of recruiting and hiring unemployed people.  Find the go-getters that have jobs right now!

On the day Intrawest Ski Resorts were acquired by Fortress, I was on the phone to all the top people at the company telling them I wanted to hire everyone good because it was going to implode.

I eventually hired five of their key people over the next three months because I knew that these people had already been working for a high performance organization. I just went out and got them. It was as easy as that.

Getting the right people can be easy if you’re willing to make it happen.  I often see entrepreneurs struggle because they don’t know how to seek out exceptional people or they don’t work hard enough searching for the gems.

My grandfather, Cam Shortts, who recently died at 96, taught me how to hire great people. He owned a hunting and fishing resort in Northern Ontario called Lift-The-Latch Lodge, and he’d take me duck hunting as a teenager.

Grandpa always knew exactly what kinds of ducks he wanted before we set out to hunt: blue-winged teals, mallards, wood ducks and canvas backs. He also knew what kind he didn’t want: fish ducks. Before we set out on any hunting expedition, he made it clear what his goals were, and that our reward was only as worthwhile as the ducks we’d selected.

Recruiting the right people is just like duck hunting: you must have a crystal clear picture in your mind of exactly what you’re looking for, and good aim.

You also need to be sure that all new hires will truly impress every person they interact with, whether it’s customers, strategic partners, vendors, the media, or the public at large.

So know exactly who you want to hire, go find them, and shoot them out of the sky.

I once had a mentor who asked me, “Do you have any of the wrong people in your company?”  And I said, “Yeah I’ve got one guy.”

He said, “How long have you known he’s the wrong person?”

“I’ve known for about six months,” I said.

“Why haven’t you let him go?”  He asked.

“Because I like him, because he’s been really good for the last couple of years. Because I really like him and he really cares.”

“Well why do you want to let him go then?”

And I replied, “Well he’s an emotional roller coaster…”

I had all these reasons why we needed to let him go and my mentor looked at me and said, “I need you to tell me the date that you’re going to fire him.”

“OK, I’ll let him go by Friday.”  This was a Tuesday morning.  We were at Denny’s on Broadway.

He said, “So you’ll let him go by Friday?”

And I said, “Yeah, Friday.”

Then he said, “That’s not good enough.”

I said, “OK, I’ll let him go Wednesday.”  Then he just stared at me, and said, “Chicken!”

And I said, “OK, I’ll let him go today.”

“Good. What time?”

This was 7.30 in the morning on a Tuesday. I’ve moved the firing from Friday to the very same day and he wants to know what time?!  So I said, “I’ll do it by noon.”

My mentor said, “Good. Call me at 12.05pm and I’ll be there for you, but you make damn sure you’re there for him. You make sure when you’re getting this person off your bus that you respect him, and his integrity. You treat him like a person, you mentor him to help him grow in his next career. You have an obligation to him because six months ago is when you should have let him go and for the last six months you’ve been stealing from him.  You’ve taken six months of this kid’s life because he didn’t want to quit because of you.  He wanted to be there to be loyal to you, and because you were too chicken to let him go six months ago when you should have, you’ve taken six months of his life. So you make sure that you’re there for him.”

That was some of the hardest-hitting and best learning I’ve ever had in business.  Hard to hear, easier to execute.

We both cried when I had to let him go that day.

I actually drove back to the office that day and I walked into the office and put my briefcase down and said, “Can I grab you?”  I hadn’t even sat down, but my mind was finally committed to do the right thing for the company and for him. I received emails and Facebook messages from the guy I let go even five or six years after it happened, “Hope you’re well. How are the kids? How’s Australia?”

The moral of this story is that you simply must get the wrong people out of your organization in the right way in order to build a very powerful culture.  If you remove people from your organization in the wrong way, you’ll destroy your culture.

I once traveled to Boston with a colleague to hire for a position. After three intense days of back-to-back interviews, we ended up flying home empty-handed. We interviewed sixteen candidates, in multiple interview rounds. We combed through close to 150 resumes. Still, we walked away because we just didn’t find the right person.

There are 300 million people living in the United States and 35 million in Canada.  The right people exist for every role. You just have to keep looking. Trust your gut, too.  When your gut says, ‘no’ don’t let yourself keep trying to make it say ‘yes.’

Patience is a virtue when you’re hiring. Be willing to wait for the right person.

Most “A” players aren’t out there looking either, so you might just have to shake the tree a few more times…

Attracting the right people is crucial to becoming a cultural magnet. When you have great people who are over the top positive about your company, you’re on the fast track to creating a powerful culture and a successful business.

But you’ve got to get the right people on your bus and the wrong people off. This is especially true when it comes to cultivating the right culture in your workplace. One bad apple will actually spoil the whole bunch.

At times you may not have to get them off the bus so much as you may need to move them into a better seat.  Once you put them in the right position, if it’s the right person in the right seat, you’ll see the energy level increase, too.

Whenever I discuss culture and getting the right people, I almost always think of the time when I was president of Barter Business Exchange. At that point in time, I had a “Director of First Impressions,” which in typical business settings would be a receptionist or office manager. But since this wasn’t a typical business setting, and I didn’t want a receptionist–I wanted someone who would knock the socks off of any customers, suppliers or employees with positive energy as soon as they walked in the front door. Our Director of First Impressions, Tina Etchart, did just that.  She nailed the first impression every time with her smile, awesome tone and great energy.  What first impression are you setting right at the front door? As the saying goes, “you never get a second chance to create a first impression.” Remember that.

When Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were starting Apple they knew exactly what they were looking for in their employees. They hired people who wanted to challenge the status quo. They hired people who wanted to empower the human race. They weren’t about making computers.  Steve Jobs wanted to put a dent in the universe.  And he hired people who could help them achieve that goal.

Hire people who are passionate about their work. Hire people that have deep passions outside of work. And how do you know you’re creating the right energy? Prospective employees will say things like, “I just want in,” and “You’re the ONLY company I want to work for.”

A business owner recently told me they couldn’t hire any great employees because there weren’t any to hire in his city.

I said, “It’s not a tight labor force, there’s just a whole bunch of crappy companies to work for.

There are a ton of great employees–they just don’t want to work for you. It’s an easy market to find great employees when you’re a great employer.  Get your vision out there so everybody knows what you’re building.”

That’s when it gets easy.

At the beginning of every interview give a copy of your Painted Picture to each prospective employee.

If they apply by email, have an auto-reply set up that responds, “Thanks for applying to work for us.  Please read our Painted Picture below.  It explains what our company will look and feel like three years from now.  If this sounds like the kind of company you want to help build, please reply to this email with ‘interview me’ in the subject line.”

Before you interview people, your Painted Picture will attract the right people and repel the wrong people.

A few years ago, I read a book called The Dream Manager by Matthew Kelly, and it blew me away.

The general premise that I took away from this four hour business-changing read is that if you care more about your employees’ personal goals than the company work they are doing, they’ll go through brick walls for you to build your company.

Sounds odd, but focusing on employees’ dreams will change them forever, and they’ll associate that positive feeling with your company.

How to Use Dreams

One easy, fun and impactful system you can put in place is called the “101 Dream Goals.”  Give each employee thirty minutes and have them write as many things they can think of that:

· They’d like to buy

· They’d like to do

· They want to learn

· They want to try for the first time

· Personal goals they want to achieve

· Sights they want to see

· Places they want to go

I then coach and mentor CEO’s to start spending time every day or every week helping them to make their dreams happen, one by one.  Many of them won’t involve any time or money either. Employees will begin to feel a huge connection with you as you help them to achieve their personal goals with nothing expected in return.  When employees see the company really caring about them as people with dreams, some pretty awesome cultural stuff starts to happen. That’s why in my CEO coaching I talk about Employees personal dreams so often.

Three of my employees had student debt and they felt like they were being crushed by it.  They had no family support showing them how to get out of it and it never would have come up had they not written “get out of debt” on their list of goals.  I asked the three of them if they were OK with me getting them all together to help them out.  All expressed interest in meeting up.  We set up a dinner club – I was buying – and for a few months we met to review budgets that included debt repayment, investing and spending plans I’d put each of them on.  Within six months, all were either out of debt or substantially on their way to getting out of debt.  Two had started companies.  All three were investing, and two were actually using my stockbroker as an adviser.  All were thrilled.

Another one of my employees had on his list that he wanted to watch our national hockey league team, the Vancouver Canucks, have a pre-game practice and then sit behind the bench to watch the actual game.  For him it seemed like an unattainable goal. I made one call to Mike Johnson, the Assistant Coach from the Vancouver Canucks, who not only made it all happen, but a few of the players took Geoff out for drinks after the game.  And yeah, he’d go through brick walls for me now, too.

When you really care for your employees like the family you say that you are, that means caring for them personally and not just talking to them about what has to get done to build your company.

One of my favorite lines at the office used to be, “great day–take the rest of it off.’  I used to tease people with that and say it at 6pm.  I’d also say it to people at 10:30 am and blow them away.

Tell people to go home and relax once in a while.

We all know that as entrepreneurs we duck out of the office for our little stress breaks.  Let your team take some once in a while, too.

And if you really like your employees as much as you say you do, let them take the same amount of vacations, as you’d want.  Most employees feel that five weeks’ paid vacation (including their sick days) in addition to the statutory government holidays is about right.

Let them take it.

They won’t quit.  They won’t come into work sick.  And we all know the most productive time at the office is the day before vacation.

So give people time off.

To be sure they take this time off, force them to or they lose it.  The idea is to recharge your batteries regularly and not stockpile the time and have a meltdown.  As a business coach and mentor, I advise CEO’s to give their employees five weeks’ time, however, make them take all five weeks of time during the calendar year.