How do you assess the value of an individual job?
How do you assess the value of an individual employee?
What makes you valuable to the job market?
What makes you valuable to a specific company?
How does value correlate to salary? Or does it?
Continue reading The 3 components of value for an IT/Software Development employee
“I can’t find a job”
“I have a great Job”
“I’ve been let go from my job”
“I hate my job”
“I need a job”
“I was laid off from my job”
“I lost my job”
“I didn’t get the job”
We have all heard these statements and more like them regarding that thing we all love to hate, a job.
A job can provide the income and benefits we all need. A job provides a sense pf pride when we do well. And it provides a sense of identity for what we do. All of the are good things.
And many times we look for security in a job. But, in reality, those who are ‘let go’ understand that there is no security in a job. What feels like a great secure job one minute can quickly be eliminated by corporate changes or economic events.
So why are jobs at their core really no security at all?
Job by definition means “someone else”.
If you have a job someone else is paying you. Someone else is managing you. Someone else is setting the agenda. Someone else is deciding the larger issues of employment. Someone else is taking the risk to provide goods and services to the market place. Someone else is in control.
Someone else.
Not you.
Granted, you can quit. However, if you still need a job, you are in the same boat as before, relying on someone else.
Certainly you benefit as a byproduct of doing a good job through salary, bonuses and other benefits. If you do well you can get promoted to a new job.
However, you are not the purpose of the job. You are the doer of the job. And if you don’t do it, someone else will. We are all replaceable.
A job is an equation that has to be balanced. It goes something like this:
(Real Value you deliver to the company) > X * (Your total cost to the company)
Where rarely X is 1. Many times it is much greater.
If a salesperson simply makes their equivalent salary in sales for the company they won’t be around long.
If that equation fails to balance then you may be invited to attend work elsewhere.
So if you can’t trust a company to provide job security then where does it come from?
Well, it comes from you.
Employment security is derived from your inate abilities, skills and attitudes that are valuable to any employer. Those are the things inside you that will get you another job.
What are they?
Ultimately we are the stewards of our own selves. One of the best job related investments you can make is in yourself.
Invest in your training, self improvement and growth.
As William Earnest Henley said in the classic poem Invictus:
You are the captain of your self and you are responsible to do those things to grow and improve. The world won’t do it for you.
In this, you take steps toward building your own security.
So captain, where are you sailing?
Leadership is a set of highly integrated skills that, in many ways, are better learned in real life on the job than in other types of educational scenarios.
Here are some simple ways to augment your leadership training I have found to be effective in my career. Their only real cost time and attention.
Coaching a team helps you practice preparing, planning, communicating and making decisions in real time.
When my son was younger I coached his youth soccer teams for several years, even though I was not a soccer player in my own athletic pursuits. I had to schedule practice, communicate with parents and players, actually train, evaluate and coach the players to improvement and manage games.
I learned to communicate more simply and cleary and repeatedly – all of which are key skills for any level of leadership.
I learned to train our players in routine and I learned to use fun and competition to encourage effort. These concepts also apply directly to coaching your employees.
I am not a green thumb. Growing plants for me is not easy. I have to be persistent. However, I have noticed that growing plants can instill habits that serve well in leading organizations.
Plants require a certain consistency in checking and care. Plants require observation, diagnosis and corrective action.
When plants are cared for you are rewarded with food or beautiful flowers or greenery.
Plants are a lot like organizations. Organizations need constant care and feeding. They also sometimes need observation, diagnosis and corrective action. I have a row of plants on my office credenza which are constant reminders to me of the care and attention needed for organizational health.
Working with kids are great ways to practice your communication and your ability to think and plan ahead.
Managing a room of small children makes you think ahead and plan. You will become better at anticipation and acting to head off issues and problems.
Teaching kids also forces you to communicate clearly and repeatedly to make your message clear and understood.
Kids also ask very direct and penetrating questions much like employees or customers. You get to practice forming clear, concise answers in a low risk environment.
When you teach kids you also get to deal with those times of kids are acting out or causing problems. Dealing with these situations in real time trains you on to think, act and reason quickly to regain control of the situation.
Watching kids grow and learn and develop is also very rewarding. Much in the same way an organization grows and achieves goals and objectives.
Teaching kids is amazing practice for leading an organization.
The best leadership is lived out by serving your organization. Practice service, meeting the needs of others.
Serving forces focus on another, specifically meeting their needs. It’s so easy to get so self absorbed as to be of little use to the people around us. Service puts the pause button on our self focus and invites us to focus on others for a time.
Service helps build your generosity muscles, giving time, emotion, experience, encouragement or resources for the good and help of others.
And, as you serve, especially if you are working with those less fortunate than you, it builds your own sense of gratitude.
As an organizational leader the qualities of service, focus on others, generosity and gratitude are key to building your people and building their trust in you as a leader.
Have a time of daily reflection where you can quietly, calmly think about the events of the day and your reaction to them.
What went right? What went wrong?
What could I have reacted better to?
How could I have handled that situation better?
Was my work today in line with my character, plan and goals?
What did I learn today that will change what I do tomorrow?
This type of reflection builds a feedback loop for continuous improvement and better planning for tomorrow.
I have found these ways helpful in my leadership development, when I was willing and humble enough to learn the lessons these environments were trying to teach me.
What are your simple ways to improve leadership capability?
“You’re fired.”
“We are letting you go.”
“You are being transitioned.”
“You’re being furloughed.”
“We are laying you off.”
“We’re going in a different direction.”
“We aren’t renewing your contract.”
It doesn’t matter how its said. It always means the same thing.
Your job with that employer is over.
Your paycheck stops. Your benefits are over. Your daily routine changes. You have to leave fellow employees you have become close with. Your future becomes uncertain. Your financial situation may be put in distress. You may feel emotionally traumatized. Your focus is suddenly and violently redirected. And you have to deal with a range of emotions.
And at the end of the day the reason is almost meaningless unless you did something wrong.
When you are let go, here are things you can do to cope and start moving on.
It is easy to become fearful or worse, angry and bitter, when you are terminated. When this happened to me a few years back, I immediately imagined losing our house, not being able to send my kids to college, not being able to buy food etc. You can easily go to a dark place very quickly.
However, those emotions are counter-productive to your progress.
Remind yourself of your talents, characteristics, experience and knowledge that you have gained.
You got the job in the first place. You have proven you can learn and grow. And you can do it again.
Let that boost your confidence as you begin the process to re-group and find a new job.
When bad circumstances happen to us we need to return to our true foundation, our faith in God.
Remind your self with scripture that God has a plan for each of us and a job change, even un-planned, can be a part of a greater process for your development and growth. God can use trying times to deeping your faith and lead you to even better circumstances and personal growth.
Renew your committment to prayer, scripture reading and engaging with your church community. In doing so you will find encouragment and motivation to move ahead.
When this happened to me, my family was unbelievably supportive. We all sat down and talked through what had happened. Even with the kids. I involved them all in the process of reacting to and beginning to move on to something else.
My family helped me process what had happened. They talked to me. They helped me brainstorm ideas. They helped me with new contacts for potential jobs. They encouraged me. They prayed for me.
If you, because of fear, embarrassment or anger, shut off your family from participating in the process you are eliminating a strong source of support and encouragement.
In today’s environment, the importance of your network cannot be overstated. It is most likely that your next job will come, directly or indirectly through your network.
You should always be building your network. And when you are let go from your job, lean on your network. Inform them.
I recommend you send individualized messages to people in your network. Ask them if they know of any opening or any one in their network who may know of any openings.
The day it was announced that I was let go, I notified 61 people in my network individually that night. I received lots of support and numerous leads which I immediately started following up. And that immediate effort got my mind off of the negatives of the situation and it got my transition off to a good start.
Resist making network wide posts. These are easier and may invoke sympathy from your connections but do less for you than individualized direct messages and conversations where you can reconnect with people you know and get advice and leads.
Its easy to spend a lot of time focusing on what happened and why and try to assess blame. It can be cathartic to work through that for a time. However, only thinking back will not prepare you for the future.
Decide to discipline your mind to leave the past behind and to focus on your future. Learn what you need to and laser focus on your activities needed to move you forward.
You now have a new opportunity.
You have a chance for a clean slate, a start over in a new job or even a new career if you so choose. Focus on that. Pour your energy and effort into that. Your new future awaits.
Make sure you monitor what you read and listen to.
Focus on content that helps you move forward.
It is easy, especially during difficult times to succumb to allowing too much negativity to influence and further drag you down.
When I was let go, I watched very little news media. The last thing I needed was to be reminded of how high the unemployment numbers were. Most of the news is negative anyway and it won’t help your frame of mind.
Focus your content consumption on leads, connections, industry information for your area, skill building, motivation and renewal.
Take time to read some of the books on your reading list to grow your knowledge or skill set.
Take some online courses on Udemy, Coursera or LinkedIn Learning to brush up on or gain a new skill.
Find a meet up in your area that has subjects of interest.
All of these types of content will help you, and make you more informed for the next interview you have.
When this happened to me I started tracking my own stats like a baseball player would.
I made a spreadsheet and tracked the number of emails/messages, phone calls, resumes submitted, jobs applied for and recruiters I had engaged with. These numbers became my job search KPI’s. I was tracking the activities that I know would eventually result in me finding a new job.
Having my own personal job search KPI numbers I could update and review each day motivated me to keep going, to keep making the calls and sending the emails etc.
Putting effort into these activities will help you re-focus and transition after the jolt of being let go.
Put all your effort into that. The momentum of this effort will help you deal somewhat with the pain and frustration of the situation.
Look forward and embrace a better future.
Note: Observant readers will notice I actually have seven ways not six. Well, I edited this post after I published it and didn’t want to change the title. So you get one for free. Who doesn’t like a free bonus?
Starting a company is hard. Growing it is harder. A lot conspires against a business that makes growth hard.
However, some of the main reasons for business difficulty are self-induced.
Here are 7 avoidable ways that a growing startup can turn into a shrinking shutdown.
Every product has a life-cycle.
Every product has an end date.
Markets move along.
Customer needs evolve.
Competitors improve.
Regulations change.
Disruptive ideas challenge the way things are done.
Keeping your product the “same old same old” in a dynamic market environment is like leaving the milk out overnight. It spoils and nobody wants it. Customer interest wains. Sales dwindle. Revenue decreases.
Certainly, you can extend the life of a product by adding new features and making customer requested changes. But, astute owners understand no matter how good your product is now, or how much market share it commands, you should be planning for its decline.
Companies that create a market leading product become susceptible to ‘market arrogance’. In your own little microcosm of success, you ridicule new entrants to the market, dismiss competitors, and ignore potential disruptors.
During my time with Motorola, market arrogance (among other things) led to ignoring the move digital cellular. Motorola was the analog cellular king and didn’t believe digital had a future. Nokia did and became a market leader in a few short years. Motorola eventually recovered for a time with the introduction of the RAZR but later declined due to missteps in the smartphone category.
Market arrogance blinds you to the very thing that will unseat you.
Wise market leaders understand that humility and a little paranoia are 2 keys to inoculate a company against market arrogance.
Your strategy is the high-level plan to achieve corporate goals. It is the activity that maps direction to vision.
Companies who choose to ignore strategy are abandoning achievement and giving up on goals. They are adrift.
Leaders who ignore strategy have abdicated their responsibility.
Companies who ignore strategy can only hope for random results at best. The more likely result is consistent decline.
Perceptive business leaders know that strategy sharpens focus, provides direction and helps align the organization for achievement.
Hand in hand with strategy is the vision.
Vision is the destination, strategy is the map to get there.
When a company abandons its vision, the purpose degrades to simply making money. We all need money to live. However, as author Dan Pink writes in his book Drive, money in and of itself, is not a sustaining motivator, especially in today’s culture.
Smart owners understand the vision has to be re-communicated regularly, refreshed as needed and it has to be the driving motivator for the organization.
The most important asset of any business is the employees who show up everyday and do their job. You don’t see this asset listed on any balance sheet. But without them, the company won’t be able to operate.
Employee development is the way to care for that asset. It is the way the company invests in its future. It is a long play for your employee base.
Abandoning development is akin to saying ‘there is no future here’.
Intelligent owners know that investment in employees through training and development pays dividends back to the company in many ways.
In today’s business environment, customers expect a dialog.
Many customers have a lot to say and can provide excellent feedback regarding your products or services. Customers whose feedback is heard and understood can be wonderful advocates for your company. However, if customers feel ignored they will migrate to your competitors.
Companies that engage customers and value feedback gain insight to markets that is otherwise unavailable. Companies that ignore customer feedback miss important clues as to where the market may be going.
Adroit leaders know that customer engagement builds loyalty, advocacy, and improves results.
Thinking the same means you and your organization have stopped learning.
Same thinking is stale thinking. Same thinking blocks insight and dampens learning. Same thinking is fragile. Same thinking won’t allow you to continue to grow and succeed.
One of the only truly sustainable competitive advantages is an organization that can learn and learn fast and apply what they learn in the marketplace.
Great leaders know that both success and failure should lead to learning. And learning changes thinking.
It was the first tech conference I had attended in years. And waiting this long to attend a technical conference was a mistake.
Last week I had the opportunity to attend the ITRoadmap conference put on in Fort Worth, Tx. by the fine folks at IDG.
I enjoyed a well-paced day of keynotes, panel sessions, vendor presentations and tutorials.
I had breakfast and lunch with very interesting groups of people and discussed relevant current issues and found out how they are dealing with them.
I even ran across 2 guys who live very near me that I had never met before.
I spent time discussing culture issues with one of the panelists on the “Best IT places to work” panel. He gave me some great ideas regarding culture and employee practices to improve engagement and retention.
I left the day refreshed, better informed and motivated.
So here are my 5 reasons you should attend a conference near you.
As an IT and software development director, it was enjoyable and informative to meet the same type of people who work in my geographical market and get to know them and their business.
I increased my network, made new friends and learned new things about some of our local businesses.
It was good to hear how those folks are dealing with some of the same problems I have to deal with. I walked away with new ideas.
The tutorial sessions and vendor presentations were well done and educational.
I learned something new in every session I attended.
I walked away with new techniques to try, new tools to investigate and new acquaintances to further my reach.
I made connections to people and businesses that will help me in the future as well.
I learned about some new tools from Dyn that can help us with product delivery to our customers.
I came away with new DevOps strategies from Irwin Lazar, Vice President of Nemertea Research.
Dean Shroll of Sophos gave an interesting and scary talk about ransomware and the current threat landscape.
And I met some folks who work very close to me that I can continue to develop friendships and learn from.
Here are just 3 small examples of the talks and tutorials that were given.
Derek Hulitzky provided a talk with 3 short case studies of companies that have made profound digital transformations their business.
Mikel Steadman, Director of Sales and Solutions Engineering at Dyn gave a fascinating talk regarding doing business on the internet and provided some perspective on the recent DDoS that Dyn suffered.
Nicole O. Fontayne, Vice President, Chief Information Officer for DART described how they deal with the enormous IT complexity of a metro area transit system.
We learned about the trends in hiring, retention, IoT and cloud migration and scaling, DevOps, Security and tons of others.
And yeah, you can also find folks who have businesses that need people like you. It can be a recruiting (or hiring) bonanza depending on what you are looking for.
It was so worth missing a day of work and the pains that come with that to attend the IT Roadmap conference. It was a great benefit to me and I will sign up as soon as registration starts next year.
So go and find a good conference near you and attend, and participate. You will be glad you did.
Bad leadership can be highly inspirational. It inspires anger, mutiny, frustration, confusion, abandonment, resentment or just plain old apathy. All of which, negatively affect your business.
Use the 6 Ps below to see if you have any of the highly inspirational traits. And find out alternative mindsets for change.
When leaders patronize their team they are sending an implicit message that they don’t believe the team knows what they are doing. It is a message of superiority on the part of the leader. It’s saying “I’m smarter than all of you”.
Patronizing your team chokes the flow of ideas and communication. No one likes being spoken to in this way. It makes you feel like a child and generates resentment. Do this long enough and folks will stop ‘having your back’. That can expose the leader’s blind spots in public and sometimes embarrassing ways.
Smart leaders will use tone, words and body language that encourages dialog and ideas.
A close relative of the “Patronizer” is the pontificator. A pontificator expresses themselves in such a way as to convey that they are always right. And usually, they do it in an overly long-winded dialog. They may allow conversation and listen to other ideas. But at the end of the discussion they make it clear through their speeches that they are the ones who are correct.
This too, is a habit that limits real communication. It makes people zone out. It encourages your team to go through the motions. It undermines team effectiveness. Why bother fighting for a great idea when you have to be brow beaten with long winded diatribes about why your idea is not as good as the pontificator’s idea? People will give up.
Observant leaders will carefully structure their words. You as the leader may be right. If so, then communicate clearly why. Succinctly list reasons or constraints that eliminate other ideas or courses of action. Invite dialog. Explore counter arguments. You may well be right. Or you way well learn something new.
Leaders with nothing substantive to say often resort to platitudes. These statements are worn out cliche’s that have little or no value in the business context in which they are said. They are said so much they are meaningless.
Phrases such as “It is what it is“, or “You never know what might happen” are worthless. Jeff Haden has more great ones in this article.
Resorting to platitudes during a time when real debate, discussion, and collaboration is needed on hard issues will evaporate the confidence of your team in you as a leader.
Effective leaders don’t waste others time with meaningless phrases that serve only to derail substantive discussions. They speak clearly and concisely directly to issues, allowing their team to fully participate.
So what happens when you don’t get what you want?
Maybe the software release is going to be late. Maybe you didn’t get the contract. Maybe marketing rejected your ideas on the new website. Maybe the CEO rejected your product plan.
Do you react in anger? Do you throw a fit? Do you lash out in rage on unsuspecting subordinates when they had nothing to do with the issue?
If you react like this, you are a petulant leader. Think of a three-year-old not getting the toy they want, falling down kicking and screaming. Yeah, you’re an adult version of that.
Having a public negative reaction undermines confidence in your leadership and will cause employees think twice before bringing bad news to you. The bad leadership behavior clogs up the communication pipeline.
Good leaders understand that things don’t always go your way. They react professionally and use these times as learning opportunities. They focus on what improvements they can make when bad things occur.
The pretender always seems to have done great things…somewhere else. They can regale you with stories of great business prowess from yesteryear. They are always they one who saved the day, rescued the sale, figured out the bug. They always have accomplishments that no one else has heard of. Pretenders spend more time in the neighborhood of make believe than they do making people believe in whatever they are doing.
The pretender knows the jargon but comes up short on execution and results. Excuses yes, accomplishments, not really. Pretenders are impressive at first glance but with any probing, you see quickly how shallow they are. And pretenders are highly skilled at pointing the finger of blame somewhere else. They wear Teflon jackets.
Fred Brooks said it well in The Mythical Man Month:
“In practice, actual (as opposed to formal) authority is acquired from the very momentum of accomplishment”
Pretenders may have titular authority, but true influence comes from results. Eventually, the pretenders have to move over for those who actually get things done.
Authentic leaders inspire more devotion because their words and actions reconcile.
These are the leaders that will choke every last cent out of an organization. No toilet paper is cheap enough. No coffee is too watery tasting. No office supply cabinet is too bare for their tastes. Spending the tiniest amount of money, even on absolute necessities, is like pulling wisdom teeth without anesthesia.
Certainly, keeping a judicious eye on expenses is prudent and desirable. But if getting you to spend any money is harder than prying food from the hands of a starving man you are misguided. If you cling to every cent and are so maniacal about costs that you won’t buy sugar packets for the coffee machine you are missing the bigger picture.
There is a balance between expense control and putting out a few bucks to improve the business or treat the employees from time to time.
Balanced leaders know a little spent here and there can go a long way to adding fun, improving morale and generally making people enjoy the environment more. All of which are shown to improve productivity and engagement. Happy employees are proven to take care of customers far more effectively than their sad sack counterparts.
If any of these behavioral attributes ring true for you, the first step to change is admitting you have a problem. If you have leadership tendencies from this list know you can change your habits. These traits may not in singular cases cause you big problems but they all subtly undermine your leadership and effectiveness if the behavior is engaged in on a regular basis.
If you are an employee and see these attributes consistently in your leader or leadership team then it may be time to polish up that LinkedIn profile.
Maybe this was what Grandma was talking about with the admonishment to “mind your P’s and Q’s”.
In the post-apocalyptic setting of The Walking Dead , zombies are everywhere preying on surviving humans for food. The Wikipedia article describes them as “…mindless shells driven solely by instinct”.
Did you realize that small businesses can become just like those zombies. The following four symptoms could mean that your business is literally the walking D.E.A.D.
Is your strategy missing or abandoned? Is your business is just doing the same thing year after year in spite of market signals and internal metrics telling you that’s not working? Are you neglecting to act on customer feedback? Are you learning about your customers or market as the result of learning from experiments?
If any of these questions sound like the reality of your business then you are directionless.
The market is moving around you, its going in a direction. Your customers are being afforded more options, they are moving in a direction. Unless you have direction you can’t move, learn, adapt or advance as a business. And if you don’t advance you will be left behind, customers will migrate to your competitors.
The normal battles of small business fatigue the fittest among us. However, when the normal skirmishes are punctuated by more catastrophic events such as big sales declines, layoffs, product launch failures and the like, it can leave your team exhausted.
When you repeatedly expend large physical, mental and emotional efforts with no payoff, reward, progress or recovery it decimates your strength, will and energy. Exhaustion amplifies negative momentum, making it that much harder to begin new things or attack old problems.
Exhaustion leads to apathy. You are so tired you just don’t care. Apathetic employees are more likely to make mistakes, miss opportunities and ignore customers. Apathetic leaders will ignore issues, frustrate employees and abdicate their responsibilities.
Apathy invites bad customer experiences, neglected processes and procedures, lower morale and lower revenue and profit.
When customers sense apathy in an organization they will stampede for the exits and be easily seduced by your more caring competitors.
Customer complaints are up 32%, yet you are picking out new chairs for the conference room. Sales for last month were down 18% following a 4 month trends, yet you are insisting on changing the fonts in your brochures. Your biggest account just cancelled, yet you want to attend a seminar on how color affects the mood in the office. Are you more focused on choosing the new pens to hand out at conferences than you are focused on the fact that your marketing signups are down 31% year over year?
These are not contrived examples, they are real. I have seen them.
Distraction will always result in solving the wrong problem, missing the point, and ultimately missing key market or customer signals. Distraction can be deadly for a business.
In The Walking Dead, the objective is to survive by killing the zombies.
However, if your business is D.E.A.D. you don’t need to kill it.
There are ways you can revive a D.E.A.D. small business. Look for those in the next post.
Excellence separates us from average. Excellence separates winners and losers, those who get the prize and those who go home empty handed. Excellence attracts. Excellence is aspirational. Excellence motivates. Excellence influences. Excellence rewards. But how do we live excellence in our service, work, family and other interactions?
Notice: The following contains some statements taken from the Christian faith. If that causes you problems, well, you have been warned.
I had the privilege to speak with a small group of Christian leaders recently. I shared this 5 element framework with them that will help implement excellence at the point of decision and action.
The framework is formed by the letters in the word “EXCEL”, and no this is not referring to the popular spreadsheet from Microsoft.
The first letter in ‘EXCEL’ is ‘E’ and stands for Effort.
Excellence at anything requires effort. Excellence without effort is like a golfer without golf clubs or a fisherman without a pole or a football player without a ball. You can’t even begin to play the game without the fundamental starting equipment. Effort is the fundamental starting equipment of the excellence game.
In our society we are surrounded by the allures of convenience. Don’t be seduced into thinking excellence can come from little or no effort because it can’t. Olympic champions don’t come from the couch potato ranks. There are no short cuts. No pills, no three minute workouts, no get excellence quick schemes. Effort for excellence can’t be borrowed or subscribed to as a service. You must put in the effort needed to excel at a given task. Many times that really not much more than the effort required to do something halfway. But the end result of that little extra effort can be amazing.
In every task you do, put in the effort to do it correctly and completely. Let excellent results in everything you do be your calling card.
The second letter in ‘EXCEL’ is ‘X’. It stands for eXamine.
Excellence invites measurement and comparison. Excellence separates and divides. The very definition of the root word excel implies comparison. Examine your life. What’s going right? What’s going wrong? Where is God leading? Where are the needs in your life/family? What are you ignoring that needs attention? What needs more effort? What needs to change? What do you need to stop doing? These are all the questions of examination.
The pursuit of excellence demands we examine ourselves and implement changes where results are less than desired. Examination is the only way to get the necessary feedback to improve.
Embrace the changes you need to make that help you pursue excellence in your lives and work. It’s part of our growth and maturity. If we aren’t examining ourselves and growing how can we expect those who follow us to grow?
The third letter in ‘EXCEL’ is ‘C’ and that stands for Christ.
As a Christian, I believe that Jesus provided our ultimate example for excellence. He gave us our template for love, life, interactions, service, sacrifice, care and work.
Jesus’ initial command to his disciples was “Follow me”. That explicit command is one to look to Him as example and do as He did, to love, serve and help others. By living a life based on those attributes we can more effectively serve, give, love, impact and make the world a better place. But it must be genuine. People can spot a phony pretty quickly. Your showing of these attributes cannot be to manipulate, they must be to serve.
As leaders, we should be able to do the same thing with those who follow us. We should be able to say “follow me”. Watch and emulate what I do. We can only do this honestly if we are pursing excellence in all we do.
The fourth letter in ‘EXCEL’ is ‘E’ and that stands for Engage.
Can you imagine Denny Hamlin texting friends during pivotal laps of the Daytona 500? Can you imagine Von Miller, Super Bowl 50 MVP, waving to the crowd while rushing the passer on a key 3rd down and goal play? Can you imagine Jordan Spieth snapping a selfie while putting the final 18th at Augusta? Of course not. That is ridiculous. The loss of attention would have resulted in defeat.
We are all horrible multi-taskers. When we try to do something without really engaging we are just ‘going through the motions’ or ‘mailing it in’. That communicates loudly that you don’t really care. People know when you ‘aren’t there’, especially your family and close friends. Anything you do with half attention or half engagement usually results in mistakes, miscommunication, misunderstandings, poor results and do-overs. Or worse.
Excellence demands engagement. Attention is the currency of engagement. This is your full mental presence and focus. Enthusiastic engagement, your full attention, will influence and motivate people when you interact with them. Energetic engagement is contagious to those searching for what you have. Engagement is a gift to those you interact with. Be engaged with your family, church, work and personal pursuits. Be all there.
The last letter in ‘EXCEL’ is ‘L’. This stands for Love.
Love should be the true motivation of our actions and the foundation of our excellence as we serve those around us. The Apostle Paul in the New Testament reminds us that love is “the most excellent way”. Remember that true love is a choice, an act of the will to act to benefit another even at the expense of self. Our world today is desperate to see authentic love from leaders, businesses and those in government and education. This is also true for customers, employees, families, friends and others you come into contact with.
Those are the 5 pillars of excellence: EXCEL – Effort, eXamine, Christ, Engage, Love.
To excel as leaders takes all of them. Daily, project by project, task by task, encounter by encounter, relationship by relationship.
Applying the 5 pillars of ‘EXCEL’ will help every decision and the subsequent actions be done with excellence.
The dependence of small business on IT systems and the people who run them increases continuously. Whether the accounting systems, corporate web site, inventory system, the online shopping cart, marketing automation, email servers, the customer management system, internal database servers, manufacturing automation servers and the like. The list goes on and on. Without those IT systems, business grinds to a halt. And without the people that maintain them, you risk business grinding to a halt if something goes awry. IT systems have loads of risk vectors. Hackers, Malware, viruses, ransomware, hardware and software failures and the like.
However those don’t create the biggest risk a small business owner has with respect to IT.
The biggest IT risk a small business owner faces is being unprepared for the loss of a (or the) key IT person or key software developer.
Examples of the key person(s):
Losing any of these types can be hard on a small business. If your business has several of these people in one person then you are at a HUGE risk if that person walks.
What can you do to mitigate the impact if that key person is gone?
Here are 9 steps that can help when that happens.
Make sure that the existing staff has backups of key system configurations saved in a known location. Firewalls, key routers, switches, IP addresses of networks and servers and other company configuration setup should be saved in a known and agreed to place that the owner knows about and understands how to access. This should be also documented.
It is wise to use a corporate password locker such as 1Password or Lastpass. Key system passwords should be stored here with the master password to the locker available to the owner.
Simple block diagrams should be in a known location that diagram key systems, how they are connected, where they are located etc. This will enable the owner to help locate systems in case an issue arises and will help them direct new personnel or vendors when repairs or service is needed.
A list of all 3rd party vendors that are used by the IT / Development teams should be kept in a known place. Contact information for the account representative, as well as services provided and key contract or agreement details.
The locations of on-site backups of systems should also be documented. Additionally off-site backup locations and / or vendors should be detailed in the 3rd party vendor section.
The owner should know the processes used to get IT and development work done, including how to deploy system updates for key servers, web sites and online apps. If for no other reason than to train the replacement employee.
If your company uses automated monitoring such as Icinga or similar, then the owner or replacement personnel need to be added to the notification list.
A documented set of job descriptions will help in the hiring process after the key person leaves. This will give the owner more detail on what the key person does, and the attributes and skills needed in a replacement employee.
The steps, logins and other necessaries required for making site or system updates to key systems need to accessible and understood so that another employees or the owner could execute them or show them to a contractor in a pinch. You may think this is far fetched but if something happens you want to be able to update content and code if needed.
As part of your on-going training and planning it would also benefit the company to conduct a risk and vulnerability assessment so that key risks are known and can be planned for. Additionally, transitions can be planned for as well with succession planning as part of leadership/career development and key employees being cross trained regularly. Finally, the owner should audit these areas periodically to validate readiness and expose weaknesses.
The above 9 steps won’t eliminate the pain of losing a key employee but they will enable the business to move along and speed the on-boarding process of the replacement. The wise small business owner will do well to track and keep up with these areas.
