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The War for Talent Continues

Wednesday, December 21st, 2011

In 2006 I was sharing with many people about the impending employee shortage that was looming on the horizon. At that time it was predicted that by 2010 there would be a 10 million more jobs than qualified employees to fill them. There were a variety of factors that were going to be in place to cause this shortage, including the beginning of retirement of baby boomers in 2006. Another reason was that jobs were becoming increasingly more technical in nature, requiring people holding even the most rudimentary of jobs to have some sort of technical skills. Then 2008 hit and threw things dramatically off track. Or did it?

Here we are in 2011, with unemployment rates still hovering around 9%, considerably much more than where we were in 2006. But after just over 3 years of higher unemployment rates we are beginning to again see the job market tighten, and employers are struggling to fill positions with qualified, high performing employees. I spent the summer of 2011 talking with current and previous clients about their employee situations. Every single one of them indicated that they were having a hard time to find qualified employees with the right skills to fill their vacant positions.

It seems that they are not alone. In a survey conducted by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute found that there are currently about 600,000 open positions across the industry in the USA. This is about 5% of the manufacturing workforce, and is due largely to the lack of skills by current applicants. This isn’t an isolated incident. Across all industries there is about 3.2 million jobs that are vacant for the roughly 14 million unemployed.

Most claim the 3.2 million job openings is normal, a result of normal turnover and the lag in the ability to refill the jobs. In fact, this number has been fairly consistent for a number of years, even before our recent economic downturn. But with current employees hesitant to jeopardize their income, many have postponed looking for new or better jobs. So we should see a drop in job openings, not remain the same; and with the number of unemployed people, we should be able to fill the positions even quicker than before.

But this isn’t the case. In a survey by Towers Watson recently, they found that 59% of companies across all industries were unable to fill critical skills positions due to a lack of skills by applicants. This is down only slightly from the pre-recession rate of 66%; a rate that was at a time when unemployment rates were 5% or less!

What this all tells us is that finding top performing employees that have the drive and skills to dramatically impact your organization is still going to be tough. They are still in short supply while being in great demand. It doesn’t matter how many people are unemployed, the best employees will still have jobs and everyone will be competing to recruit and retain them. These top performing employees can still move from job to job with little concern, as they will always be in demand.

The challenge for employers is to be able to find and retain these top performers at all levels within their organization. This means that organizations must create a climate where these top performers can feel appreciated and have the ability to be responsible for their own work as they continue to grow and become masters at their craft. Most organizations struggle with this, while only a few excel. These few have learned how to master the Seven Elements of High Performance™, and these elements allow them to find and keep the best employees.

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Despite High Unemployment, Good Employees Are Still Hard to Find

Thursday, June 30th, 2011

I was fortunate to have a considerable amount of downtime during the month of June of 2011. There are a lot of ways that I could have spent that time, but I chose to spend a lot of it visiting with past, present, and future clients and just have some casual conversations with them about what was going on and what they saw as some challenges for their future. Now, please understand that these organizations are not average at all. I have been very fortunate to get to work with some very good organizations and help them on their journey to becoming even better. So what I heard from each of them came as no real surprise to me. Every single client shared with me that they were struggling to find great employees to fill positions in their organizations.

That’s right; despite an unemployment rate running above 9%, every single one of these organizations were still having a hard time finding the right kind of people to fill critical positions in their organizations. After all, they weren’t just looking for anyone to fill a position. They all knew the damage that this approach could have on their organization’s ability to perform, as people who do not fit and who are not high performers could set the wrong example for the rest of the organization.

Instead, they were very meticulously searching for employees who had both the right skills and the right attitudes that could enhance the performance of their organization. This isn’t an easy task, but these organizations understood the value of taking their time to find the best employees and then doing what it takes to make sure they are welcomed and that they will want to stay for the long-term.

One of the things I often do in our Strategic Executive Briefings, as well as in our work with executives and managers, is to ask them about the challenges that their organizations face over the next 7 to 10 years, and the kinds of people they will need to overcome those challenges. No matter what the challenges are that these organizations face, in over 8 years that I’ve been doing this, the answers about the kinds of employees remain the same. They all want committed, self-motivated, creative, innovative, responsible, team players who are talented, proactive, willing to learn, and who will work hard for their organization.

Everyone is after the same type of employee, and even with the high unemployment rate, they are still hard to find. It is all too easy to put bodies into vacant positions and see if they will make it or not, but that approach is very costly, both in recruiting and onboarding costs, as well as the long-term impact it has on your other employees. It is far better to leave a position open, even those critical ones, than to fill it with someone who is not the right person for the job or the organization. These organizations understand that.

What my clients, both past and present, also understand is that no matter if they hire the best employees, they will only remain the best if they provide them with the right environment for them to work and excel. Providing this kind of environment also gives them an edge in recruiting the best employees, as the best employees do want to work for an organization where they can excel and are not micromanaged. Of course, this environment comes from the way management chooses to manage, and the Seven Elements of High Performance™ provides them with an excellent blueprint. After all, it all begins with Putting People at the Center, and making sure that you have good people and a good environment for them to work in is a key component to high performance.

This is just one of the many insights that I gained from my visits with my clients and what they had to share with me. Keep an eye out for more articles, as I expand on this issue of finding good employees, as well as other thoughts that they stimulated.

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Good Enough and Being the Best

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

The other day I received an e-mail promotion where the person was talking about being “good enough.”  They shared that they had to replace their old food processor, and the new one had all sorts of features that they did not use and that it was very hard to clean.  They didn’t enjoy using it, which was quite frequently, and in a couple of months it had broken.  They then went out and bought a different machine that only had “chop,” “blend,” and “pulse” as features and it was simple to take apart and clean, and it is very durable, allowing it to work consistently on a daily basis over many, many months.  To top it off, it was even less expensive than the fancy machine that only lasted three months.  As they shared this story they said that they loved the second machine and that it was “good enough.”

I have also heard several others talk about this concept of “good enough” in regard to a variety of products, including the revolution of the new video cameras that are simply point, shoot, and upload the video to the internet.  Again, they talk about the simplicity of these products as being “good enough” because they cost less and do less.

I would disagree with their assessment.  I do not see these products as being inferior and just barely satisfying the customer’s needs.  After all, that is what “good enough” really means; just barely satisfactory.  Often just barely satisfactory products are made of inferior components that do not last for a very long time.  But that is not the case of the food processor or the video cameras.  They are well made and perform very well. For millions of people, these products aren’t simply “good enough” but are meeting the needs of the customer extremely well.  For the situations in which these products were created, they are the best solutions to meet the customer’s needs.

I think we need to be careful when we start confusing inferior products and services with those products and services that meet our needs extremely well just because those latter products might cost less, have less features, or only do one or two things.  It usually takes a lot of thought and preparation to provide our customers with the things that are just what they are looking for so that we can delight them.  Rarely does it just happen because we are cutting costs by using inferior materials or by providing less features.

For example, the manufacturer of the food processor would need to know what speeds that their customers usually use (chop, blend, and pulse) before they decided to only provide those speeds.  But what would have happened if they had left off the pulse speed, or perhaps the blend speed?  Obviously it would not meet the needs of many of their customers.  Or what would have happened if they did not take the time to insure that the blender was easy to take apart and clean?  Again, it would have had the same complaints as its fancy predecessor had as being hard to use.  And finally, what if it had only lasted a few months, also like its predecessor?  It would have hardly seemed a bargain at any price if it won’t work as we want it to. 

Being the Best means listening to your customers and giving them what they want and doing it well, even if those products or services are simple to use, have less features, or cost less than their competitors.  How they are manifested in your product or service is up to you to find out from your customers, but here are some things to consider: 

  1. Solution – What ever else the product or service does, it must be a solution to the customers’ needs.  If it is not providing a solution to the customers’ problems or desires, then it will not capture the attention of the customer. 
  2. Simplicity – While customers might want a robust solution to their needs, they never want something that will be hard to figure out to use.  They want to be able to understand it and want to be able to use as few steps as possible.  When things get to be complicated then mistakes can be made, steps forgotten, or things just not work as they were intended.  The more complexity an item has, the more chances are that it will be less reliable or fail entirely. 
  3. Reliability – Customers want things to work as they expect them to work and for the period of time that they expect them to work.  If an item is a single use item, then they expect it to work that one time.  If it is something that they expect to last, then failing after a few times of use is unacceptable. 
  4. Choice – Customers want to have a choice of features or options.  While these might be limited to only a few, they hardly want the old Henry Ford choices of “any color as long as it is black.”  Many of the “smart” phones that are on the market are a good example.  These phones come with some basic features, but a buyer can chose to add on additional applications or not, and if they do then they have thousands of choices of add-on applications that they can download to their phone, making it as robust as they would like so that the phone meets their needs.  On the other hand, just imagine if all of those applications came pre-loaded on your next phone and the problems it might cause in simplicity and reliability.
  5. Value – Customers want what ever product or service that they buy to provide them with value for their investment of either money or time, or both.  If something is extremely valuable to a customer they will pay more for it, especially if it will help them do more or enjoy more.  Value is not always connected with cost, but with how well the product or service meets the above criteria. 

Meeting the above criteria is not easy, and it certainly is not “good enough” no matter how simple the product or service is.  The research, however, is clear that those organizations that know who their customers are, know what they want and give it to them are typically much more successful and sustainable than those organizations that just give their customers “good enough” solutions that are only marginally useful. 

Besides, which would you rather be known for: being just “good enough” or for being “the best” at meeting your customer’s needs, no matter how simple you make it look when you meet those needs?

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5 Thoughts for Mid-Level Managers

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

What seems like a life time ago I was flying back from working with some mid- to upper-level managers and I was making some notes about things that I thought they could do to impact the systems in their organizations.  These managers were not the top executives, so they didn’t have direct control over strategy or the systems inside and outside of their organization, yet, it was important for them to be able to impact those systems in other ways. 

As I was continuing to unpack boxes from our move a little over a year ago, and rearrange things in my office, I uncovered my notes from that plane ride.  As I reviewed them I thought that these thoughts might also be useful for others that didn’t get to attend my session, despite the fact that they were sort of specific to the material we covered in that session.  So here they are:

Things to Do to Impact Your Systems:

  1. Catch people doing things right.  If you focus on what is going right instead of what is going wrong you might find that there is a lot going right in your organization.  Too often we get discouraged, and discourage others, because we are continually only seeing what is wrong.  If you have managers reporting to you then also encourage them to catch people doing things right; then have them tell you about it so you can also thank them for their “right stuff.”
  2. Stop telling people what to do.  Instead, tell them the goal, objective, or problem, and ask them how they would handle it.  You just might be surprised at the innovative and creative ways that they might have for getting things accomplished.  Remember, you do not have to have all the answers; you just have to ask the right questions.
  3. Ask “why” a lot.  Don’t take the way things have “always been done” for granted.  At one time the way things were being done might have been a good way of doing them; but time and circumstances change, and they may not be the best way any longer.  If you do consider making changes then always keep in mind the impact those changes will have on others.   
  4. Insure you know what your organization’s top goals are and how you and your team impact those goals.  Share your thoughts with your staff and encourage them to share theirs with you and the team.  Constantly talk about the importance of these goals.  Find a way to measure and track progress on these goals.  But when talking about your goals make sure that you also talk about the values that place boundaries on your behaviors in reaching those goals. 
  5. Be Purposful!!!  Remember, the best managers and best teams don’t get that way by accident, but rather through intent and purpose.  Think about the things you want to talk about to your people, such as the Purpose, Values and Goals of the organization and team.  Remember that you need to constantly be looking for opportunities to provide recognition for the good things that your people are doing.  Always look for ways that you can help your people do their jobs better, including yourself.  Keep in mind what you want to achieve, and how your people can help your team achieve it and remember that in interactions that it isn’t about you always being “proven right,” but rather it is about being effective in achieving your goals that matters.    

As I reviewed these, maybe these are some good thoughts for managers at all levels, not just the mid-level managers that I was working with.

Make a Great Day!

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Make a Great Day!

Friday, October 30th, 2009

I have often received comments about how I end e-mails, letters, and sign my books with “Make a Great Day!” instead of “Have a Great Day,” so I thought I would share my reasoning.  In Leadership Lessons From the Medicine Wheel I share in Chapter 1 about the concept of Intent, which is closely linked to Volition, and has a lot to do with Personal Responsibility.  Intent or Volition resides in the Center within us.  We have the choice to determine things for ourselves.  As a result, we either choose to do things or we choose to allow others to do things for or to us. 

An example of this is the story I share in Chapter 4 about Personal Power.  In the story my friend the hospital administrator chose to give his Personal Power away by allowing the actions of the doctor to “make him angry.”  In other words, the administrator made the choice to allow the doctor to control the administrator’s emotions.  My friend gave away his Personal Power to the doctor at the same time as he was stealing the Personal Power from the elder.  An interesting paradox, indeed!

So what does this all have to do with the “Make a Great Day!” that I so often share?  Well, when we say “Have a Great Day” or “Have a Nice Day” we are using a more passive tense in our choice of words.  Through this choice of words we acknowledge that the ability to have or not to have a nice or great day is up to environmental controls that we have no real control over.  Sure, we’ll have a nice day if it happens, but if it doesn’t, then there’s just nothing that we can do about it, right? 

Wrong!  We do have the ability to choose how we will act and behave, and we can chose how we will react to other’s behaviors.  One of the basic tenants of the Adventures in Attitudes® program from Inscape Publishing, which was originally created by Bob Conklin over 50 years ago, is “I can’t help the way I think and feel, but I can help the way I act.”  And, of course, our choice in actions provides a double-loop feedback, of sorts, that can impact on how we think and feel. 

So we can make a choice in how we will act as we go throughout the day, and as such we can make that great day for ourselves that I wish everyone.  It simply starts with Intent and making the choice to retain your Personal Power.  No matter what happens during your day, you can choose to make it great.   So stop taking the chance on having a great day just happen and start making great days happen for yourself every day.   

Make a Great Day!

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