The 8020Info Water Cooler

Back to Newsletter Archive

The 8020Info Water Cooler
Issue #93 - Vol. 6 No. 13
19 September, 2006

1. Top Ten Signs Of Employee Addiction

One of the toughest things to spot is an employee who may be in active addiction. On the Coachville web site, Diana Robinson notes that encouragement from an employer can be a powerful prompt to the employee to obtain proper treatment and she offers these signs to watch for:

Frequent absences or lateness, especially on Monday.

Often leaves early on the day a paycheque is received.

Without any apparent explanation, the employee's productivity varies greatly between periods of being appropriately effective and periods of extreme ineffectiveness.

Borrows funds from colleagues, is tardy about paying back, and often has financial problems.

Evasive or over-generalizes during conversations about weekend activities.

Does not mix people from his or her personal life with business life. Does not include a significant other or family members in employee activities where they would be welcome, such as picnics, Christmas parties and weddings.

The employee has grandiose and unrealistic ideas that do not relate to his or her life.

Has more personal crises and difficulties than most people.

Has frequent mood swings and often appears below par in early morning.

If after-work activities with colleagues include drinking, the employee drinks more, faster, than others. May also leave and return without explanation.

2. Five Top Traits Of The Best Salespeople Top

Entrepreneur columnist Barry Farber likes to ask managers to name their three top salespeople and then after interviewing those reps he also talks to their customers. From that research, he developed a list of the top five traits found in the best business-to-business salespeople:

Focusing on the customer: In the words of one customer, "a good rep approaches the sale from what you need to get your business going. They'll often help you by showing examples of what other people have done to be successful. They're not after a quick sale; they want a long-term relationship."

Following through: The best salespeople get back to customers right away, even if it is only to tell them they are working on an answer and will contact them later. In particular, customers notice when you are highly accessible before a sale and then suddenly not available after.

Having the right knowledge: Salespeople need to know what they're talking about -- and it has to be the knowledge customers need to improve their own businesses.

Understanding customers' problems: The best salespeople know how to fulfill customers' needs, solve their problems, and help them achieve their goals.

Going above and beyond: They go out of their way to lend a helping hand. They will do what it takes to meet their customers' needs.

None of that is surprising. But the interconnections between the five traits and the focus on the customer throughout are a reminder that being a top salesperson is not complicated -- it does requires dedication and discipline.

3. Improving Your Hiring Interviews With Flow    Top

A study of 5,247 managers who hired over 20,000 people found that 46 per cent of new employees will fail within 18 months while only 19 per cent will achieve unequivocal success. Consultant Mark Murphy observes in Executive Excellence the reason is invariably a lapse in interpersonal skills rather than technical skills.

To better gauge those interpersonal skills, he suggests improving the flow of conversation in your hiring interviews. "You can't bully a candidate into revealing themselves; they've got to offer the information willingly," he notes. That requires developing rapport and not jumping from topic to topic.

Start with non-threatening queries (such as, what could your previous company have done to be an even better place to work?) to moderately probing ones (what was the most difficult criticism you had to accept?) to intense queries (when I talk to your boss there, what will s/he say were your weaknesses?)

4. P is For Panache In Marketing    Top

The 4Ps of marketing are product, price, place and promotion. But on MarketingProfs.com, consultant Rickey Gold adds a fifth: Panache. By that, he means something extra -- an edge. "Call it flair or spirit -- charisma or energy. It's what makes people want to listen to what you have to say. Or see what you have to sell," he writes. That might be a unique product, merchandising flair, or a particularly engaging salesperson or catchy promotion. It might come from any stage -- or every stage -- of dealing with the customer. Panache works with the other 4Ps to make you stand out.

5. Zingers    Top

Schedule your worries. Set a time during the week -- or every day -- when you can consider your worries. That reminds you those concerns have some validity, but by putting them on your worry list takes them away from your mind the rest of the time.
(Source: How To Put More Time In Your Life, via Productivity Goal blog)

Close to 40 per cent of managers have fired an employee for theft, according to a CareerBuilder.com survey. The most common purloined items were office supplies (15 per cent), money (14 per cent), and merchandise (11 per cent).
(Source: Inc.com)

Re-watching the film Cool Hand Luke recently, consultant George Torok saw Luke as a bold, anti-authority entrepreneur without two crucial elements we all need for success: He lacked a clear goal and as a result had no plan to follow, just loafing and being carried from event to event. We also can learn from another mistake Luke alludes to in his classic line at the end of the film: "What we have is a failure to communicate."
(Source: Business in Motion blog)

A survey of executives found that 31.7 per cent of men felt women had to be exceptional to succeed in business today while 69.4 per cent of women felt that way. br>(Source: Harvard Business Review)

You can find out whether your web site is in Google's index, when it was last updated, and any potential indexing problems at http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/sitestatus
(Source: Lifehacker.com)

6. Q & A with 8020Info    Top

Question: What core concepts from the project management field might help improve operations in our small office?

8020Info's CEO Rob Wood responds:

Project management is a specialty involving many skills and practices, but we have all managed simple projects in our daily work. It quickly becomes more complicated, however, when projects increase in scope, get more complicated and involve more players, stakeholders and accountabilities. Then it's a good time to use some of project management's tools and approaches.

For smaller organizations that don't need experts or sophisticated software, it's often useful to look at three general components of project management -- definition, planning and management.

Initially, a project should be well defined: What are the objectives, scope of work and constraints on time, budget and other resources? Which internal and external players have a stake in the project? What are the risks to be managed?

The second type of project management effort involves planning. Start with identifying key success factors as well as the measures of success. Next comes the task of breaking the project down into a detailed workplan of specific activities, who will carry them out by when, and estimating timelines across concurrent and sequential activities as well as mapping all their interdependencies.

This can be painstaking work, but it allows you to identify "float" (the amount of time an activity can fall behind schedule before delaying the overall project) as well as the critical path of activities to be closely managed. (You may find network diagrams quite helpful with this task.)

Finally there are all of the tasks involved in executing the project -- monitoring progress and managing the project. Leadership and communications skills are essential to the project manager's success, especially when many of the players don't report to you.

If you face more complex projects, you will be glad to know there are many excellent resources, courses and experts in project management available to help. (For Eastern Ontario, see http://www.pmiovoc.org/.)

7. News From Our Water Cooler    Top

Many of our readers are particularly interested in improving their marketing communications and branding strategy. If you are one, you will be interested to know we are preparing a compilation of the best marketing items from the past 90 editions of the 8020Info Water Cooler. If you would like to receive a complimentary copy, please let us know by e-mail at contactus@8020info.com.

8. Closing Thought    Top

"The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser -- in case you thought optimism was dead."
-- Robert Brault