What would YOU do?

There's no shortage of fascinating leaders in my little hometown of Naples, Florida. Indeed, I've heard it said that Naples is to CEOs what Beverly Hills is to movie stars, with more retired and current business leaders per capita than anywhere else on earth.

One more reason for a business author to love this place.

I've befriended quite a number of these folks, and it's always interesting to hear their stories. That goes double for my friend Phil. Phil deserves his own book, but... not today. Today, I just want to share a tale from his early career, from way back when Phil was only the third full-time employee of Capital Cities.

Phil was a workhorse, a child of the Great Depression with a family of his own to support. He was enterprising, filming his own productions on the side as he began his career with CapCities.

Phil's boss, Frank, knew talent when he saw it, and he wanted to harness Phil's energy, drive, and talent. It irked him a bit that Phil had his own projects after work - it meant that Frank wasn't getting all of this young man's talent.

Night after night, as Phil left the station at 5 on the dot to rush off to his own gigs, Frank would remark, "There goes the Hasta La Vista Production Company." It was all in good fun; just a word to let Phil know he was noticed and he'd be missed.

Phil continued demonstrating his value around the station each day, and the company was growing. So finally, Frank made a decision. He asked Phil into his office and said point-blank: "I want all of your energy, not just 9-5. No more Hasta La Vista Productions. If you commit to CapCities, I'm going to commit to you. You're going to help me run this place, and we're going to be huge. Never doubt that."

Frank let that settle in. Then he stuck out his hand, and Phil knew what it meant if he shook. He was committing to Frank and to CapCities.

Phil shook Frank's hand, and never looked back. Through the next three decades, CapCities flourished, until the day in 1985 that "the minnow ate the whale:" yes, little Capital Cities from the tiny backwater market of Albany, NY bought the entire ABC empire. Phil served as the President of ABC Entertainment until it was bought by Disney in 1996. He was the highest-paid executive in TV during his career, and his payout from the purchase was... well, I'm not allowed to share the amount, but it's an awful lot of money. An awful lot!

Here's where this story ties in with a post I wrote a short while ago.

1. Leaders, do you recognize talent among your staff when you see it? The kind of talent your company needs if it is going to swallow the whales of your industry at some point in the future?

2. When you do recognize said talent, do you have the mechanism in place to elevate them to positions of leadership commensurate to their abilities - and on a schedule that they can accept?

Your worth as a leader is tied directly, inextricably, to your answers to those two questions.

Make Your Company a H.I.T. (Video)

My buddy Jose helped me set up a YouTube channel and showed me the ropes on editing a two-minute clip, just to get my feet wet in another medium.

Are your expectations set quite low enough yet? Okay, here's the tip of a future iceberg:

Make Your Company a H.I.T.

Tell me what you think!

The Third Way Out

There is always a third way.

Say you're a manager, and the most productive member of your staff asks you to support her as she seeks a promotion.

* What is best for your company?

* What is best for this employee?

* What is best for you as team leader?

Let me simplify that last one for you: What is best for you as team leader right now, this quarter and next, trying to hit your numbers and run a successful team?

I think we all know the answer to these questions. You don't want to lose her. Doing so will make your job harder. You'll have an opening where before you had a star. You'll have to go through the arduous process of recruiting, hiring, and training - even if you replace this star with an even more talented performer in the long run, right now and for the next 6-18 months, you'll be operating at a talent deficit as that person ramps up.

So here's what you can do:

* Say yes, and take your lumps in order to support your company and your staffer. Long term this will reflect very well upon you and help you in your own career, I'm certain. Short term, you're in for some pain.

* Say no, and sit on this person as long as you can. In the short term, your numbers and your own job performance will continue to thrive.

Those are the options most managers will see. Yes or no. We live in a binary world. Next topic.

...Only here's the thing. Your employee has options as well. Here are her choices when you say no to her request for support.

* Take her lumps and bide her time until a future date, when you do support her move.

* Seek a lateral move within your company, so that she can get out from under a boss who's holding her back against her best interests.

* Update her resume and start looking for a new employer where she can exercise the skills she has sharpened since joining your team. And remember, it isn't 2009 anymore. The job market is warming up - in some sectors, it has already heated up considerably.

One more consideration, and this is the most important to me anyway: Manager, what will your boss think of all this? Or her boss? Or the CEO?

Remember my earlier question, What is best for your company? That is where the CEO is coming from. And let me tell you something. If your CEO is half as savvy as he needs to be to keep his job, he isn't going to look with favor upon one of his managers keeping his top talent from rising to serve the company more effectively.

Just sayin.

As always, your comments are vital to me as I continue to develop my own thoughts on this topic.

When Events Trump Commentary

I love to hate this story. You will, too:

Ryanair crew locks toilets, shuts off lights, leaves passengers on runway in the wrong country ...and maybe they had it coming (at least in a way).

http://www.christophevanbael.com/ryanair-crew-locks-toilets-turns-out-lights-and-leaves-plane-as-passengers-stage-sit-in/

The True Test of a Leader

The number one test of a leader is, can he recognize talent hiding right in front of him?

The second test: what does he do about it?

Finding raw or slumbering talent, elevating it; harnessing it: that is the true test of a leader.

How are you doing as a leader?

*****

Coming soon - the story of one such slumbering talent, and how he helped create one of the most successful companies of the past sixty years.

CEOs: Are You A Dodo?

To all my CEO friends out there, present and future:

Dodo birds are extinct, and for a very good reason. They failed to change with their environment. Don't be a dodo.

Click this link to read a fantastic article from Harvard Business Review on the perils that business leaders face when they don't have a strategy to manage their own personal social media presence.

Leaders, try to keep this in mind: if you don't have any use for Social Media at present, that doesn't mean that Social doesn't have use for you. ...And do you really want to get "used" by a cyber world that you don't understand, respect, or have any control over? (Hint: if you don't respect SM today, you will learn to - possibly at your peril - very soon indeed.)

The Social Media revolution isn't coming: it's already upon us. Don't get left in the 20th Century with the passenger pigeon and the dot matrix printer.

From the article:

It’s no secret that social media—global, open, transparent, non-hierarchical, interactive, and real time—are changing consumer behavior and workplace expectations. As a result, the best businesses are creating comprehensive strategies in this area to support their goals. However, my research on the organizational implications of social media and consulting work with dozens of companies in America, Europe, and Asia suggest that it is taking longer for corporate leaders to consider what the new paradigm means for them personally.

Enjoy!

Fear Kills

CEOs: look around at the people in your organization and answer me this: how fearful are they?

On a scale of professional courage, with Terrified at 1 and Reckless at 5, where do most of your people fall? Are they 4, Brave? Are they 2, Timid?

Leaders often tell me, "I wish my people were more entrepreneurial!" It makes me wonder. If you're a leader, ask yourself this: how committed are you to your people really, truly taking risks and sometimes (often?) falling flat on their faces? What happens to them when they do get it wrong?

In its infancy, Jet Blue faced a powerful test of its culture. In theory, in training, in branding, CEO David Neeleman told his staff and the world, my people have the latitude to make grown-up decisions on the spot in order to serve our customers.

Sure enough, not long into operations, one of its planes was grounded by weather in another city, and an entire flight full of passengers was in danger of being bumped. No worries, though! Taking his training at face-value, a ticket agent solved this potential brand-basher the best way he could think of. He walked down the counter to his competition and bought tickets on the next flight for every one of his passengers. To the tune of $160,000.

Stop right there. What would your company do if one of its front-line employees made a decision on his own to spend $160,000 of your company's funds? Seriously. I think we all know the answer.

...But here's what his JetBlue supervisors did: nothing. And here's what Neeleman did when he found out: he teased the agent. That's it. He just gulped, and laughed, and made a joke of it.

It turns out, there was an empty JetBlue plane right at his airport. If the agent had been a bit more resourceful collecting information before he acted, he could have found this out and saved his company five or six times his annual salary. But he didn't. He was on the spot and he did his best. Big oops. So JetBlue turned it into a teachable moment.

What did it teach? Well, for one, collect more information. Call up the ladder if you have to, even if it's after most supervisors' work hours. That's the easy part.

The more complex, and much more important, lessons this taught? One, JetBlue would not let its customers down. It would go to heroic lengths to do right by them.

And two, JetBlue would not let its people down. It would not leave them out to dry if they made a less-than-stellar choice. Instead, it would stand by them; maybe the CEO would razz you if you made a costly error, but your job would never be in jeopardy for sticking your neck out and trying to do your best.

Let's compare this example with something I heard from another front line employee at a different company just this week. We'll call her Sandra. And for context, this particular worker is the number one performer in her entire organization, of over one hundred people who perform her role.

"I don't post much on our internal blog. You can't be too careful, you know."

You can't be too careful. Hmn. Of what? Of expressing your opinion? To your coworkers? Really?

Let's leave it here for now. I want you to think long and hard about Sandra's words. About where she's coming from. And about what your own folks are saying, and thinking, and doing, and not doing, at your firm every day. About the type of talent you're attracting, and growing, and keeping, and driving away.

Fear kills.

Your comments are very important to me.

*****

For a related post on the dangers of negative emotions at work, read What's Really Dragging Your Business Down.

Social Media? What's the Point?

Last Tuesday, I wrote on the four stages of Social Media. The fourth, most mature, stage is "build" - as in, build a community. That's where the payoff is. Building a community is the entire point of Social, beginning and end of story. Let me explain:

Social Media can be a ton of fun or a tremendous time-sink, depending on your perspective. If you're a Facebook addict like so many of my friends, you probably think Social is all about keeping in touch with your college buddies and relatives from back home, and you love it. If you're an employer, you probably think of Farmville and Mafia Wars and lost productivity, and you can't wait for it to go away. (Good luck with that.)

No wonder many business leaders are afraid and/or disdainful of Social Media! Seriously, as a former employer, I get that loud and clear.

But if Farmville is where you're coming from, you're missing out - not on the fun, perhaps, but absolutely on the opportunity. Because Social Media is what marketing and public relations have evolved into. SM takes the static, one-way corporate "brain dump" of the 20th Century and flips it on its head!

Ask any CEO in the last sixty years, you'll hear the same thing: word of mouth is the holy grail of business. "We've got to get our customers excited about our product - so excited they go out and brag about us to their friends! So excited they drag those friends into our store/bank/amusement park/self-storage facility to experience us for themselves!"

This is exactly the point of Social Media! Done right, SM allows a company to build customer allegiance by engaging those customers as equals in a two-way discussion of global proportions! It's advertising on steroids, but it's much better than advertising, because we humans are inured to the endless onslaught of ads by now - we're pretty much immune to anything Madison Avenue can possibly throw at us. "Oh, that message is from the company. Why would I trust it?" people say - and rightly so.

Before Social, one person could tell some friends - maybe ten, if she were really enthused. Maybe two of that ten would end up checking the company out. Yikes, even snails hope for faster results than that!

Today? One customer can easily tell ten thousand by taking one minute to Tweet. Add a link to that Tweet, and it can go viral in an instant.

The question isn't, will your brand experience Social Media? The only question is, will your brand be co-leader in that ongoing, never-ending discussion?

Welcome to this exciting new century! As I share along this blog's masthead, the rules of business have already changed. Have you changed along with them? Or are you being left behind?

*****

This weekend, I started playing with this analogy:

Social Media is to traditional advertising what ______ is to _______.

Can you help me? The best I've come up with so far is this: Social Media is to traditional advertising what a jet ski is to water wings (you know, those little floaties babies wear on their arms). I'm pretty certain you can do better. Help me out?

What Social Media Needs to Work

Here's a quick list of the four things any company's Social Media efforts need in order to succeed:

1. Champion

2. Buy-In

3. Strategy

4. Alignment

1. Before any Social Media initiative is even considered, it is absolutely essential that a company assign the right leader to be its internal champion. This champion will require the skills and personality to use soft power (aka persuasion) to sell the idea of Social to your company's stakeholders. Build coalitions of support or watch this new growth wither through apathy, isolation, or outright resistance.

Remember to clearly articulate at every step along the way: "What's in it for them?" No matter how team-oriented your colleagues are, they're still people, and people look at life from their own perspective. Sell them on how Social will serve their individual goals and your job will be infinitely easier.

Business is always about the Leader. Social Media is no exception.

2. Any successful Social Media effort requires the support of the CEO. That doesn't mean it has to be his or her top priority - probably far from it! But when the top dog makes clear his own buy-in of the necessity of Social, the rest of the company will much more easily accept it as well. Even if the Social Champion is a bit removed from the CEO on the org chart, everyone must be clear that Social is a direction the company is taking, and that the Champion represents the will of the leader.

If this is not indeed the case - if the CEO just doesn't get Social Media, and everyone knows it - well, that's too bad. Use your role to gain experience for your next employer, who with luck will be a bit more attuned to the way business is done in this new century.

Either the CEO is for Social, or he's against it. Which is it?

3. Without a robust strategy, Social Media is destined to be little more than a quaint distraction and, ultimately, a failed project that turns leadership off to the entire concept for several years. Choose your Champion now, but take your time developing your strategy. You can't rush this one. Social is such a huge topic, and evolving so quickly, this is going to be a mammoth undertaking with countless iterations. Enjoy the process!

Champion first, then Strategy.

4. The fourth necessity for a worthwhile Social Media effort is an understanding of, and alignment to, the culture of the business. Business is driven by the constant interaction of leadership and culture, which manifests itself in everything the company does. So be very careful here. If you have a "round peg" 21st-Century Social Media strategy, it won't fit in the "square hole" of a 20th-Century business culture. That isn't to say that the 20th-Century business can't have any Social Media effort at all, it just needs a different one from that of a modern culture's.

With hope, your company's Social efforts will help pull even a reluctant old-school culture closer to modernity. But don't rush it. Remember that Social can't blaze a trail and leave its company behind.

Only three things matter in business: Culture, Culture, Culture. Make sure your Social strategy fits that culture, or you're doomed to failure.

Four essential components, one rousing success. Enjoy the ride!

*****

I'm grateful to say that my last post on Social Media attracted comments from some heavy-hitters in this nascent field - I encourage you to read them all.

Those comments and the Twitter conversations that followed hit home with me, especially the remarks about crafting a careful alignment of culture with whatever social media strategy your company undertakes. In future posts, I'll dive deeper into the whole topic of culture as it pertains to a successful Social Media strategy.

What have I left out? What have I gotten all wrong? Your comments will help me develop my next post.

The Four Stages of Social

Welcome to the 21st Century, where all business is Social!

...Which is to say that - like it or not - if your company isn't involved in Social Media in some way, what are you waiting for? I hope not a pink slip.

But what can you do with Social? What's the point of it? How is is useful?

Here are four of the main things you can do with Social, in order of sophistication:

1. Listen.

2. Broadcast

3. Repair

4. Build

1. Listen. If you aren't using Social Media to listen to what people are saying about your brand, you're way way WAY late to the party. Fortunately, this is something you can do easily and with no exposure at all. Just open some anonymous accounts online - I'd start with my favorite medium, Twitter - and take a look at what people are saying about (a) you (b) your competitors (c) your favorite brands. In other words, start learning. Now!

2. Broadcast. In other words, you can use Social to get the word out about your company, just as you've been using print and broadcast media to do for generations now. This comes with a caveat, however: those companies that blare their message and fail to interact by fostering a genuine community don't get much traction. That's why I'd call broadcasting through Social immature. It isn't very social.

3. Repair. Restore. Soothe. In other words, use Social as another - necessary, highly effective - channel for putting out your brand's fires. People complain online all the time. Tap into where your customers are, and put your most talented customer service stars online to respond to their problems and complaints.

4. Build. Build what? Build community. Build your brand. This is where the magic is! This is where the potential, the fun, and the payout, is for savvy companies. It requires intelligent brand-ambassadors to establish, maintain, and grow your brand in the instant-paced give-and-take of Social. But if you look at the pioneers of Social Media, you'll notice it is already working wonders for their brands. For some, Return On Investment is already clear. For many others, it's in the pipeline.

Most of all, make sure it's fun! Because that's the number one rule of business: if it isn't fun, you're doing it wrong.

Oh, and of course the underlying rule of all business: if it isn't profitable, it isn't business. At least not for long. Social is all about the long-term payoff, which we'll cover in future posts.

*****

This is the first of a periodic series on the uses of Social Media in this new, exciting century. Stay tuned for more, because this barely scratches the surface of what can be done with a savvy Social effort.

Note: What have I left out? I named this "The Four Stages of Social," but maybe I was premature. Perhaps a more accurate (though less compelling) title would have been "Four of the Ten..." or some such. Please let me know!