A short story from real life at a shoe shop

I picked Margaret up with her groceries last night, and she told me the good news she had just gotten a 10% pay rise, from the 1st of Oct, she was very happy and I was for her but this got me to thinking about her Boss and well here are some my thoughts on "John"

John is a case study for any wanna be leader of people, the case study of how not to do it he has broken most of my cardinal rules for man management and a few others beside, and his company lets him get on with it. He meets the targets and has 26 years under his belt with the same company, he has had that shop for 3 years so it will soon be time for a move on, that is the life expectancy of a shop manager and it is the same for a fast and rising manager in most businesses these days (Move before you become stale and they find you out).

There are a few points we could talk about from even that, but I need to press on to what I wanted to say, John's inability to deal with his staff and his reluctance to address the salary issue previously cost the company 10% for shop floor staff and more for the supervisor, if he had addressed the issue earlier when it was raised he could have gotten away with 5%, the money was there for the increase and he would not have not gotten in to the trouble he is in now.
The previous week he had told the staff there was no money for a rise, he had spoken to the area manager and that was the feedback, his assistant manager happened to be letting off steam at the area manager the next week, about John and how the staff were looking for new jobs and they would be in a real mess coming up to there most profitable period, where they needed the staff to work a lot of overtime, and with John's / companies attitude to salary and conditions she did not see how they were going to hit there revenue targets for the shop.

So this week John is mister nice guy and the staff has a salary increase, will this correct the problems probably not , we all know Maslow's theory and how this will help for a short time but the problem will come back.


So lesson for today, look after the staff, and don't pinch on the pennies it may cause you to spend pounds.


Slainte
Gordon

The "m" word

"So you can see I do have a day job guys"

I picked this up from a friend Tal Newhart...it makes for a good read and is spot on

Genghis Kahn was always trying new ways to capture new ground. This is one reason he created an empire on a scale never seen before, or since. He would try something new and unexpected and this would throw off his enemy. After all, it was new!

But, like any manager that is pushing the envelope, he knew there would be some failures. He would make mistakes (the "M" word). The key was that he encouraged discourse about them. He was not so wrapped up in his own superiority that he wouldn’t listen. Like any great General, or CEO, Khan actively removed impediments to the truth reaching him. Great leaders know they don’t know it all. Their greatness comes, in part, from creating open, sharing environments. They know it takes more than best practices—everybody wants to talk about those. A true leader ensures he knows about the organization's “worst practices” as well. If you can’t see it…you can’t fix it.

So you have to ask yourself: “If I am aware of a mistake, what do I do? If one of my team makes a mistake what will they expect my reaction will be when I find out? And, typically, how do I find out?” Genghis Khan and his chief orloks, Subedei and Jebe (an orlok was a marshal) would sit around the smoky yurt (not much wood on the steppes so they burned dung) and talk about what tactics worked that day and what didn’t (although appearing chaotic Mongol tactics were precisely engineered in advance). Occasional failure was an accepted cost of moving forward. Not admitting a mistake had occurred meant someone in the vast organization might make it again and they knew that was counterproductive. So admitting to a mistake was the important, group oriented thing to do. Mistakes are always costly in some way—but you get a refund by learning from them. And sometimes a big bonus…

One advantage of scrutinizing seemingly minor mistakes is because they can be precursors to disasters. Big organizational disasters, and Khan had only a few, almost always have inflection points somewhere in the event stream leading to the catastrophe. It doesn’t take much to imagine Khan and his orloks sitting around studying each mistake so it didn’t lead to the next bigger one, which would in turn cause another, etc. Soon you have Enron or New Coke when somebody could easily have broken the chain. Big, sprawling mistakes don’t just happen. They evolve.

You can’t have your people hiding problems. You need to ask yourself: do people around you in your organization hide the bad news from you? If so, why? What are they afraid of? Is it you personally, or the corporate culture?

Finally, Khan knew that, as the leader (and this applies to any manager), it was imperative that he admit when he made a mistake. If he didn’t, who would? Khan knew a fish smells from the head first.

Think about it

Slainte

Gordon