Author Archives: Tom Foster

About Tom Foster

Tom Foster spends most of his time talking with managers and business owners. The conversations are about business lives and personal lives, goals, objectives and measuring performance. In short, transforming groups of people into teams working together. Sometimes we make great strides understanding this management stuff, other times it’s measured in very short inches. But in all of this conversation, there are things that we learn. This blog is that part of the conversation I can share. Often, the names are changed to protect the guilty, but this is real life inside of real companies.

No Top of Head Thinking

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I was sitting at the back, observing the meeting. Edward was struggling to get participation and when he got it, the response was ill formed, almost off topic.

I pulled Edward aside during the first break. “I can see you are a little frustrated. You ask a question and no one raises their hand. After a few seconds, you can’t stand the silence, so you answer your own question. And when someone does answer, they are talking off the top of their head.”

“Yep, that’s the way it usually goes. Kind of a dull group, don’t you think?” Edward replied.

“Not at all,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “This will take some courage and some patience, but your group will brighten immediately. Never let them talk off the top of their head. Every time you ask a question to the group, ask them to write down their response. Just one sentence or a phrase, but they have to write their response first. Now that means you will have to endure a little silence, but not more than you are enduring now, only this time it is planned silence. Ask each team member to write their response, then put down their pen, so you will know they have an idea. Then, wait.”

Edward went back into the meeting and he posed the next question to the group. He asked them to write down their response. Then he waited. Twenty seconds later, seven people were ready to participate, and their ideas were good because they were no longer talking off the top of their heads. -TF

Crabs in a Basket

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“Have you ever been crabbing?” I asked. We were discussing the negativity of Chet’s team. Every meeting, they seemed successful at shooting down everything that Chet wanted to do.

“Crabbing, you know, where you trap crabs, pull them out of the water and throw them into a basket?”

Chet looked at me a little strangely. “What’s that got to do with my team?”

“Here’s the thing, Chet. If you only have one crab in the basket, you have to really watch him, because he will crawl out of that basket lickety split. The trick is to catch some more crabs quickly. It’s amazing. With a bunch of crabs, when one starts to crawl out, all the other crabs attach to his legs and pull him back into the basket. You would think they would all try to crawl out, but that’s not what happens. Sometimes, teams are the same way.

“Here is the way I set things up. Before I describe a possible solution, I go around and have each team member describe the major benefits if we are successful at solving the problem. If I can get them to focus on the benefits, they are less likely to focus on the crab trying to crawl out of the basket.” -TF

Business Intelligence

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“It’s really tough to find out what our competition is doing. They will roll a program out that I know takes, maybe, a year to develop. And, hell, it’s been out on the street for three months before I even hear about it. How can I do a better job of keeping up?” Bud shook his head. He still had plenty of spunk, but he was temporarily demoralized.

“Bud, first of all, if you try to do it alone, you will not only fail, but you will drive yourself crazy. As the business expert Jimmy John Shark says, one set of eyes and ears cannot keep track of everything that is going on in your market. You have to recruit your other team members, perhaps some vendors, maybe even a customer or two.”

“But, I already ask around. Nobody ever seems to know anything,” Bud was getting defensive.

“Look, Bud. Is this important to you, your company, to remain competitive?” I knew the answer, so I kept going. “Create a Business Intelligence meeting. All you need to know is out there, in the media, on the radio, in rumor mills and in formal conversation. Make some assignments. Have Joe read the Wall St. Journal. Have Fred read BusinessWeek. Have Joan report on your two key vendors supplying you with raw material. Then have that meeting every two weeks for half an hour. Get everyone to summarize what they have learned in an email and send it to a central person for compilation so you can read it looking for patterns. A Business Intelligence Briefing, just like the President.” -TF

Measure the Second Day

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“So, what do you think?” asked Lenny. “How are we doing?”

“How do you measure how you are doing?” I replied.

“That’s the thing. We aren’t sure what to measure against. We got some studies of companies that are sort of like us, but the benchmarks they use seem so different. They just don’t make sense.”

“Two things,” I said. “Pick what you think is important and start measuring now.”

“What do we measure against? How do we know if we are doing okay or not?”

“Measure against yourself. So many companies chase each other’s tail around and end up back where they started. Figure out what is important to your customer and measure that. That’s all your customer cares about. What else matters?

“You, getting better, is all that matters. Measure the second day against the first day. Measure the third day against the second day. Pretty soon, you will see a trend. Before you know it, you will have one year’s worth of data. Start measuring now.” -TF

Training Magic

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Irene was so proud. She pulled me toward her office, anxious to show me the new training manual she was using out in the service bay.

Busting tires, rather, mounting tires on heavy equipment is hot, sweaty, dirty, thankless work. Done wrong, a number of things can happen and all of them are bad. Irene worked in the training department, hardly a hands-on position, yet, she was expected to create an effective training program.

Her solution. Buy six disposable cameras and have the crew shoot their own pictures of how things should be done and how they should not be done. In all, they shot close to 150 pictures and selected 80 for their training “manual.” The crew gathered around a large table and put the photos in sequence, scrawled captions on 3×5 cards and mounted everything on stiff paper. Irene had the whole collection bound into a 3-ring binder and painted the crew’s name across the cover.

I borrowed the book, with Irene’s permission, and headed for the service bay. As soon as I came through the door, a team member spotted the “manual” under my arm. I motioned an invitation and four of the crew came over. For the next ten minutes, they explained how they had put the book together, which parts were the best and which pictures they had taken.

When was the last time your team got that excited over a training manual? Total cost $160. -TF

Downward Descent

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Rafael shrugged, “Thought we were below the radar. Thought nobody was watching us, much less targeting our customers.” Things had tightened up in Rafael’s market. Indeed, they were a small player with giant competitors.

“What is your estimated market share?” I asked.

“You don’t understand, we are a niche player, probably less than one percent of the market,” retorted Rafael.

I had to be straight. Rafael was not a niche player, he was a small player. His one percent market share was feeding off the falling crumbs from larger competitors. That was fine when times were good. Answer the following question: What happens to your one percent market share, when the market shrinks three percent?

Understand this. The twelve month rate of change in US industrial production has peaked and is currently beginning a downward descent. The US economy is slowing. Is your market shrinking? Are you prepared? -TF

Treating Team Members in Color

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Simon moved quickly down the hallway. Morale was down. “I just don’t understand,” he said, “Our hotel managed a five star rating last year. I would think the staff would be proud of what they accomplished.”

“Show me around,” I insisted. “Let me look. I will tell you what I see.”

As we walked, I noticed the posh lobby and beautiful appointments of the hotel. It was truly wonderful. But then, I asked to see the work areas behind the forbidden doors that say Employees Only. That is where it hit me. The contrast was amazing; like we had been transported to a different place on earth. It was clean, but stark. Away from the warm glow in the guest areas, team members were bustling around bare cinder block walls lit by harsh fluorescents. The air was still and clammy. Team members, each, had their name scrawled on a piece of tape slapped on a gray metal locker.

It struck me that we treat our customers in color while we treat our team members in black and white.

Do the surroundings in your workplace have an impact on your productivity? Does beauty in the workplace have a positive impact? Look around your workplace. Are you treating your team members in color or black and white? -TF

Hiring is a Distraction

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Julia hesitated before she asked the obvious question. “So, you think I should become involved in the hiring process earlier?”

Julia, a division manager, had described how job openings were listed on the internet, with resumes sent to the receptionist. The receptionist followed some basic criteria to sort the resumes into two piles, in and out. Two supervisors, then, picked through the in pile. They would make a few phone calls and get some candidates to the office for interviews. If they liked them, they would kick the candidates upstairs for another round of interviews with the department managers. Only then, would Julia see the successful candidates.

Julia’s description was predictable, “I can’t believe these candidates made it this far in the process. They were awful, totally unqualified, but the best that’s out there. It’s really difficult to find good people these days.”

Julia’s process is upside down. The front end is handled by the wrong people moving candidates up the food chain. Here’s why this happens. For managers like Julia, hiring is a distraction, an annoyance to be handled quickly so she can get back to important adult stuff.

There is no higher calling for a manager than to recruit and build a strong team. If a manager did nothing else, that would be enough. -TF

Head Down Doing the Work

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The pace line was threading its way along the beach route. Our morning ritual had six bikes one behind the other holding 22 mph into a stiff headwind. I was second in line behind my favorite draft. As our speed climbed to 23, I shifted forward, watching my rpms move to 101.

Second on the paceline carries responsibility. While the lead certainly has more visibility for road hazards (cars, potholes, water), second position is the backup. The lead sometimes gets head down doing the work into the wind and fails to focus forward. Often, second position is relied upon to catch road hazards missed by the lead. Sometimes, it’s just a wake-up call to the front.

Head down doing the work can be dangerous. That’s why it takes a team. Take a look at your team. How often do things get overlooked? How often does the big picture fade away because everyone has their head down doing the work?

Sometimes, you have to look up. If you are the lead, that’s you. Make sure your second is looking, too. It takes all eyes. -TF

Why Should I Have All the Fun

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Morgan was early. I had invited another friend of mine to join us. “Shannon, the reason I invited you to lunch was to talk about performance reviews. Morgan, here, doesn’t know whether to scream or eat a banana. You have had success with your process. I wonder if might give us some insight.”

Shannon revved up. “Some success” was a bit of an understatement. First she just smiled, because she knew exactly what Morgan had been struggling with. Then she got serious.

“Look, I am not going to tell you to chuck your old system, but once you’ve tasted the Kool-Aid, you might never go back.” Morgan was listening. “We use a 360 process. I got tired of being the bad guy. So I just stopped. I enlisted the help of all the people surrounding the person. If a person’s performance stunk, everybody knew it anyway, let them tell him. Why should I have all the fun?”

Morgan was skeptical. “Yeah, but how do get people to tell the truth?”

“Well, it takes some time, doesn’t happen all at once. First, we do it writing and it’s anonymous. We talk about confidentiality and we structure it so it contains both positive and negative feedback. We let the person pick four people, then I pick four people. The group includes peers, subordinates and bosses, it is really 360 degrees.” Shannon continued to explain all the logistics, the questions and how it was put together. At the end, Morgan was willing to try.

Based on our conversations with Morgan and Shannon, we have developed a web based application that helps the manager run this system. It is called 360Tool and is currently in beta testing. If you have an interest, you can follow this link to our beta test site. www.360tool.com . The help file has a decent explanation on Shannon’s process. If you would like to be notified when the application is available, there is place where you can sign up. -TF