In conducting keynotes and workshops for managers and
supervisors, I’m often asked about managing difficult
employees. Here are some easy tips for exactly what to say,
and what not to say in managing difficult
employees…especially the insubordinate subordinate.

Let’s say, for example, that you have an insubordinate
subordinate. This type of difficult employee, when you meet
privately about a performance issue, defiantly remains
silent. About halfway through the performance meeting you
say to them, “So, what are your thoughts on everything
we’ve discussed so far?” If they sit there with their arms
folded, looking upset and not talking, you can document
silence. Especially if you ask the difficult employee the
question a couple of times and don’t get a response. It’s
almost like they’re looking at you as if to say, “Are we
done yet?!”

Another tip for managing difficult employees like this is
to ask the question and wait 15 seconds for a response. If
you don’t get one, ask the question a second time. Ask
calmly. Don’t let them know they’re starting to rattle your
cage and ruffle your feathers!

If you still don’t get a response from the difficult
employee, ask the question a third time. If they still
don’t respond, you can calmly reply, “You know, you’re
beginning to exhibit career limiting behavior. I’d really
like to get your feedback on everything we’ve discussed.”
Document everything.

Make sure you don’t “slip” and accidentally say, “You’re
beginning to exhibit career eliminating behavior!” You may
know in your mind that’s the direction they’re heading in,
but don’t tell them that! In managing difficult employees,
you have to be so careful with everything you say, do, and
put into writing.

Watch your tone of voice. In face-to-face communication,
tone accounts for up to 38% of what a person believes about
you. I have a friend who works from home talking with
clients all day. One afternoon when she finished a business
call, her little daughter replied, “Mommy, I like your
client voice better than your mommy voice!”

So, yes, people pick up on not just your words, but your
tone of voice. And, most importantly, your body language.

In managing difficult employees, it’s imperative to address
the issue immediately. Otherwise, the other people working
for you start to wonder why you’re not doing anything about
it. It affects team morale. It affects your credibility.
Good luck!

—————————————————-
Colleen Kettenhofen is a motivational keynote speaker on
managing people, effective leadership, difficult people and
presentation skills. She is co-author of The Masters of
Success, featured on NBC’s Today Show. Colleen has spoken
in 47 states and six countries since 1995. For free
articles, e-newsletter and video clips:
http://www.ColleenSpeaks.com Colleen is available for
keynotes and seminars.

Is your career wearing you out? Are you too tired to enjoy
your family and friends on the weekends, or what little
part of the weekend you have? Well, I have a secret to
share about the blind spot that just might have got you
there. It certainly was mine. The secret is this: Your job
is only part of your workload. You’re not tired because of
your career. You’re tired because of everything else.

This is particularly true for women. Many of us hold
ourselves up to mid-20th century ideals while working 21st
century careers.

Two years ago, I was just exhausted. Between my business,
the house, eldercare issues, and other responsibilities,
there just wasn’t any time to relax. Something had to go,
but what?

I was sick and tired of hearing from the “experts” that the
solution to my exhaustion was to just stop doing most of
what I was doing. I wasn’t doing anything that wasn’t
important. I had eliminated all that I could, including
many things I enjoy, and there was still no time for a
life. That’s when I realized that I had to start hiring
people to do things for me.

I think you should consider doing the same. It’s your life
you’re talking about. You are in your peak years, both
mentally and physically. If you’re spending your time doing
something you can pay someone $15, $20, or $40 an hour to
do, you’re not spending that time with your kids, partner,
family, or friends, or even a good book. To me this is a
waste of all your education and hard work on the job if all
it gets you is no time for the rest of your life. Will you
really look back on your deathbed and feel satisfied that
you personally pulled all of the weeds in your yard?

It wasn’t easy. Like most entrepreneurs, I love control. I
liked to pretend that I didn’t, but the truth was that I
did. All of my excuses, like “I can’t afford it” really
just came down to one thing: I was afraid to give up
control.

For some tasks, I even had an added layer of rotten
thinking: believing that if I didn’t personally handle
household responsibilities like menu planning and laundry,
I must be a pretty lame wife. What was I thinking? Old
messages still float around our heads, and once we surface
them, we have to whack them on the head until they are
dead. So I did.

My first baby step was the vet who makes house calls. Why
traumatize Bill with a car ride to the vet’s when there’s a
vet who will come to him? Not to mention that it saved me
the time getting out his carrier, driving him to the vet,
waiting, and driving him home.

Then came the bookkeeper. What a fool I was to wait so
long. I meet with her every other week to hand off bills
and receipts. She does the rest and keeps me informed. She
handles bill paying and expense and income tracking and
stays on top of all the accounts for my business, for my
mother-in-law, and for us.

We actually have a household P&L now. I think it’s a ton of
fun. Others think it’s just sick. Either way, I have more
time, and I have better focus at work, since, “Oh, crap, I
wonder if I transferred enough into the personal checking
account to cover that Key Bank automatic payment” never
floats across my brain while I’m at work. I know that
Laurie is all over it. It was heavenly to come home from
almost three weeks away and have NO bills stacked up
waiting for me. None.

It was the bookkeeper who suggested the gardener. She was
right. Kirk hates mowing, anyway, and I was so bored
pulling weeds. Now when I work in the garden, it’s the part
I enjoy, like tending to my herbs and vegetables. It’s
relaxing. It sort of reminds of…oh, what is it…it’s
like having a life!

Finally, I took the biggest step of all: I hired a personal
assistant. She handles the 1,000,000 little things like
laundry, grocery shopping, making appointments with the
plumber, meeting him at the house, and so on and so on. She
saves me a full 40 hours a month. I was pretty shocked to
realize that 10 hours out of every week had gone to
managing the household, some of them during the workweek.

I get really worked up when I hear a reasonably successful
professional say, “Oh, I can’t afford a luxury like that. I
don’t make enough.” I couldn’t either, you could say.
While it’s true that I make more money now because these
wonderful people have freed up time for me to be more
focused and productive, for the first few months, I carried
the expenses without a return (on my business line of
credit, in case you’re interested - real debt, real skin in
the game, no fooling around). I was confident that the
return would come, and would far exceed the investment. It
has.

Even for employed professionals, the return will come if
you (and your partner, if you have one) at least farm out
your most hated tasks.

For the self-employed, it’s absolutely essential to manage
your business from where you want it to be, not from where
it is now. Investment in resources that make you
successful, whether on the personal or business side, is
essential to having a profitable and sustainable business.

—————————————————-
Jennifer Selby Long, Founder and Principal of Selby Group,
provides executive coaching and organizational development
services. Jennifer’s knack is helping clients navigate the
leadership and organizational challenges triggered by
change and growth. She knows firsthand that great plans
often fail because companies don’t take into account the
human factors that come into play when implementing them.
Visit Jennifer at: http://www.selbygroup.com

Brett was in a quandary. He had been running his sales and
marketing consultancy for nearly three years - and while he
wouldn’t describe himself as successful, he had just about
managed to keep his head above water.

One of Brett’s issues however, was how to value his service
- for although he felt he was every bit as good as his
competitors, he mistakenly believed that clients bought
primarily on price.

This had led to Brett undercutting the competition - and
while initially this policy had won him a significant
number of new clients, it wasn’t long before he realised
that his modus operandi was costing him far more than he
realised.

Not only was it hard to increase prices once they have been
set, but Brett also found - much more worryingly - that the
kind of clients who bought on price alone were the kind of
clients who didn’t like paying at all.

(more…)

Management consultancies have a reputation for ripping off
their clients.  But is this always deserved?  There are
many reasons for engaging management consultants.  You may
need a particular technical skill, you may need an
objective, third party opinion, or you may have some short
term needs for expertise in change management.  There are
also lots of instances when you shouldn’t use consultants:
you’re not sure what the problem is and you want them to
tell you; you have a budget you need to expend by a certain
date; you want them to make some people redundant.  These
are not good reasons for engaging a consultancy and will
inevitably lead to disappointment.  Taking a responsible
role when contracting with consultancies will ensure this
disappointment is avoided.

First Step:  Decide whether you need a consultancy or not

To decide whether it’s appropriate to engage with a
consultancy or not, consider the following:

What is the need or problem you want to address and why do
you think this need or problem exists? Will it be solved by
this intervention or will the underlying issue still exist?
What skills are you looking for?  What value might a
consultancy bring to your business? What risks are there to
your business in using an outsourced resource?

(more…)

Generation Y (the young men and women born after 1977) are
different from other generations in many respects, from
their political views to the careers they choose (or don’t
choose).  Their presence in the workplace is truly making
an impact, causing employers to worry, fret and scratch
their heade, and asking,  “What do I do to attract the
20-something worker, and once I have them, how do I keep
them?”

When it comes to loyalty, the companies Gen Y works for are
last on their list.  These millennial leaders are
ambitious, and if you can’t find a compelling reason to
stick around, they won’t. They will either find a better
job , or they’ll move back in with mom and dad (hey…free
rent and a packed fridge is not a bad deal after all, and
moms and dads are allowing their 20-something age kids to
move back home in droves).

Many employers are labeling Gen Y workers “demanding” and
“self-serving” (not a smart move) and when you look at the
fact that over 64 million workers will exit from the
workforce by the year 2010, this puts employers in a talent
deficit dilemma.  The pools they have to dip  from are
these young men and women from ages 22-30.  So, if you want
to attract the young knowledge work, I highly recommend
that you stop calling them names and start doing what you
can to accomodate their needs, even if outrageous.

(more…)

Do you want results . . . or are you satisfied with excuses?

The barrier to irresistible growth is not the unstoppable,
uncontrollable external change, but fixed (and frequently
unexamined) ideas of how to respond to those changes.

John Kenneth Galbraith, the late economist, noted that “The
enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march
of events.”  And the tide of expected future change in our
society is now rapid and breathtaking to most — whether we
consider irresistible forces like the advent of the
Knowledge Age (with knowledge doubling in many fields
within a few years, months, or even days), the electronic
improvements in communication choices (the potential number
of ways for you to receive or send a message will continue
to grow rapidly for many more years), shifts in work
activities (from routine fulfilling of standard tasks to
Peter Drucker’s knowledge work) and stability (as a result
of down-sizing and a “free agent” work force),
demographic-driven social changes (ever older populations
in the developed countries and ever younger ones everywhere
else), weather volatility (both in temperatures and
storms), the movements of currencies and markets, social
mores of the moment (fads get shorter and shorter), or
personal styles of the young (differentiating from older
teenagers, not just from adults).

There is no doubt that today the world has become much more
complicated and interconnected. For businesses,
globalization means that the number and distance of
customers, suppliers and competitors have grown
geometrically. Such interconnectedness also means that what
affects one can quickly spread and affect all, like the
rapid expansions of computer and human viruses. These
connections mean that economic and financial adjustments,
especially in prices and currency values, travel faster and
further than before. Your irresistible growth enterprise
must be agile in adapting to these changes. I believe that
making rapid and best use of sudden changes in powerful
conditions no one can control is the key to becoming an
irresistible growth enterprise.

(more…)

Only a relative few have made significant, successful
adjustments to changing conditions from irresistible forces
(such as financial markets, weather, demographics, new
technology, and attitude shifts).    There is perhaps no
more interesting an example than Berkshire Hathaway, which
started as an owner of a failing textile mill that
eventually did go out of business due to adverse conditions.

Since then, Warren Buffett, Berkshire’s founder, has
successfully navigated the changing tides of business and
financial markets over the years to built one of the most
successful companies ever.  Unlike Microsoft, and Intel
which had relatively few important shifts in irresistible
forces, Berkshire Hathaway has weathered many by
redirecting its resources and energies into new, more
promising directions.

After having been primarily a portfolio manager of a
handful of common stocks for many years, the company has
recently shifted again to emphasize purchasing and
operating companies.  You too can learn to catch the full
benefit of today’s volatile and rapidly changing forces and
spur your enterprise on to greater and more rapid growth
than ever before.

(more…)

I recently had a conversation with a director of a major
law firm about morale among employees. It was low, and
employee retention was beginning to be an issue.

As we talked, it became apparent that while the lawyers had
access to everything that would help them perform to their
potential, the same could not be said for everyone else in
the firm. People from managers and supervisors to support
staff at all levels felt their contribution was not valued.

The problem was not money. On the contrary, these people
were paid very well, and in fact that may have become part
of the problem. Senior management felt that any unrest in
the ranks could be quieted by simply giving them more
money, and they were quite dismayed to find that was no
longer doing the trick. For them, money was the first and
only form of reward and recognition to offer employees.

Why would they think that, and why would they be surprised
to learn they were wrong?

I wonder how often they actually thought about the feelings
and attitudes of their people, and my guess is — only
when there was a problem. Of course the problem was there
all the time, and growing worse, but they just didn’t
notice.

(more…)

One of the most costly mistakes for small business owners
is making a bad hiring decision.  Losing the money spent on
recruiting, the time to interview the candidates, and the
time and cost spent on employee training are a few of the
major profit-squeezers that result from hiring mistakes.

Some entrepreneurs attempt to reduce risk by hiring family
or friends-which in most cases proves to be the worst
hiring mistake of all.  It is difficult for most people to
accept the relationship transition from family member to
employee.  Most often, those friendships will end in
resentment and disappointment.  When a veteran small
business owner tells you, “Never hire family!” you can bet
he’s learned the hard way.

With a little skill and guidance, small business owners can
learn much about potential candidates by understanding
resumes.  When reading resumes, there are three great
things to look for-and two traps to watch out for.

When reading a resume, the three things to look for are:

1.  Industry experience

You’ll make shortcuts in new employee training if your new
hire has previous experience in your industry.  You will
see a faster return on investment with your new employee
when he or she already understands what your customers
want.  Prior industry experience also means he or she may
have a business following that will result in added revenue
for your business.

(more…)

Employee morale is something that no business can ignore.
It is something that greatly impacts employee performance,
especially in a sales environment. Sales environments can,
by their very nature, be very stressful and it falls to the
managers to ensure that morale is kept up and performance
optimized. Many managers are aware of this and create
performance related incentives to their sales staff,
including bonuses, nights out or even weekends away. While
this can be a very positive way of improving employee
morale, many managers are unaware how their day to day
behaviour impacts their sales staff, thereby effectively
nullifying the positive boost the incentives create.

The reason for this is that many sales managers still use
micromanagement as what they perceive to be an effective
management tool. This is a method that just does not work.
Contrary to what the managers are attempting to do, their
micromanagement results in poor morale and disheartened
employees.

It is all too common for sales staff to be faced with
managers who will lean over their shoulder every morning to
pick apart their daily activities, frequently commenting
and criticising on the lack of sales made before bombarding
the salesperson with phrases like, “You need to make more
calls”.  Following this, salespeople are confronted with
requests for hourly updates on their activities and
criticism when they have not completed certain tasks.

(more…)