(Hiring) the Right Stuff

I have found that many organizations hire people that represent the culture they have ended up with, not the culture they currently want to have. Whether you own a company or you are part of the hiring team in a company you have an important decision. Are you willing to hire the right stuff?

This can cause a conflict if you are the business leader because, consciously or not, you created the culture that already exists in your company. There in a battle can ensue that pits the new team member against the current culture; culture always wins. So how do you make an impact on culture without causing so many waves that people get lost at sea or worse yet sea sick?

When anyone is entering a new business it is like merging onto a highway. If you are moving too fast or too slow relative to the rest of the traffic, there’s gonna be a wreck. The on-boarding process of a new team member is imperative to both their success in the company as well as the growth of the company. As many us of know divorces even in the business world cost money too.

Companies that want to make a cultural impact need to be daring enough to hire the right people; change agents, forward thinkers, visionaries. Business leaders have to be crystal clear about the latitude that these team members will have. As well, making it clear to the rest of the organization that the new person is there to help the company change and grow. This will be a little uncomfortable for many employees.

I think of an exercise I walked through with a sales team once. Close your hands together, interlacing your fingers like you would normally. Now switch the hand on top. Maybe now it is the left hand on top. It feels odd, awkward, strange - but after awhile it will not feel so abnormal. It's just different and soon enough you can have your hands clasped either way and it doesn't seem to be such a big deal. Just as with my sales team learning new tools to use with customers, employees can also learn new techniques and skill sets that will after awhile feel like the norm.

With proactive communication in a company, change can be empowering and grow sometime stagnant employees into very innovative team members. The fear of change, is what can hold many companies and employees back. How do you take away that fear?

We could all be reminded of the movie Office Space and cringe thinking of the two yahoos coming into the office to make things more productive - to make change. It the movie, leadership did not transparently communicate with the employees why they were there. Whether good or bad communication has to transpire for current team members to understand why things even need to change.

The connotation that change is bad has to instead be replaced with the vision of an opportunity to improve, an ability to shift current initiatives and make those necessary tweaks to make a company better for employees and customers alike.

Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine. ~Robert C. Gallagher

Honey, please!

On a recent eight-day trip with my family to California I found myself needing a bit of java to keep up the pace of a travel coordinator, entertainment manager, tour guide, wife and mom of three. As I visited the SoCal area I think I seriously visited ten or more different Starbucks. It was funny to see that even in the quaint area of Balboa Island the S-factor has taken over the small coffee houses. However, we succumb (or don't) to the fact that Starbucks is here to stay they have a pretty good process and system to getting their customers what they want quickly for a reasonable cost. Most of the time...

Over my vacation I found frustration in one small fact; honey in my latte. I have one of those orders that has morphed from a plain cappuccino (about ten years ago) to a Venti, Non-Fat, One-Honey, Two-Splenda, No Foam Latte. Yes, you can laugh, it is a bit ridiculous but it is what I like. As most people that have ever been to California know, its a bit more pricey in the land of Mercedes then say, here in Chicago. So when I put my $5.24 out on the counter I expect a hot latte made to order my way. One out three times I was handed my packet of honey and told to do it myself.

They seriously expected me to put the honey in myself? I just paid them $5.24 for my Latte and yes I maybe a bit picky, (my gram would say being selective is good) but they expect me to rip this packet open and dump it into the cup? I was baffled. Mouth agape. Seriously.

Time after time I got the story that the they can't touch it because it's food. Hum...I guess maybe, but then isn't my milk and bagel food too? I would raise the question and they didn't want to hear it - a few would refuse and others would give in to my requests to make my drink with my honey in it.

It was after my last "honey encounter" (while visiting Store 9505 at Crenshaw & Washington) that I realized it isn't the barista or cashier that should be to blame for this problem at all - it is culture. They are not delivering a consistent message to their teams or their clients.

Why would three of the ten Starbucks tell me they can't put my honey in my drink but the others could? Strange that there is such a disconnect in what they are practicing vs. their mission.

Starbucks has a great mission statement: To inspire and nurture the human spirit - one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time. Why was I not inspire? Why was I pissed off - what was wrong with me?

This got me thinking of how we at Obtiva create expectations to our customers? How do we interact with them? Are we consistent in everything we do? Do we insure that we are delivering the same consistent service to our customers every time we engage with them. Are we giving them the "honey" excuse.

One of our core values at Obtiva is to Deliver WOW, its interesting to me how we do this. There are some of our developers that do this by crafting awesome code that turns into this product our clients drool over. Some of our Sr. Developers are out on-site training the new breed of developers on Ruby on Rails or TDD. We even have an operations team that is facilitating the coordination of bringing in our new recruits to on-boarding new Obtivians. Along the way making sure they have a smooth transition into Obtiva so they can be nothing but successful. It doesn't matter how big or small it might appear; we do these things over and over and continue to Deliver WOW to both our external and internal customers.

As part of the leadership team we've shrived to empowering our teams to bring the WOW to their clients in any fashion they can. Is everyone in our company doing this? Are there a few that are feeling like they are limited? constrained? not able to make the best decision for their client?

We work hard to implement only the necessary constraints needed to run our business and above all else we are consistent. Aren't we? If one customer what's "honey" then are teams should be able to evaluate why we can or can not put honey in their cup. If they decide we can then should we do it for every customer. We want our customer's to know when they partner with us they will get the same or better experience than they did the last time.

As I went out to a few of our Obtivians and quizzed them on our consistency and our delivery of service to both internal and external customers I found we've been doing a pretty good job. The empowerment is felt and emulated on a daily basis to make the best decision for their customer. Additionally, our staff feels that if something was on that line of "not-sure" they had the necessary support to make a best choice in the situation and then bring the matter to leadership for potential permanent change to our process and/or service.

That made me smile.

The passion created in individuals that gives them this freedom to do what's best for their customer given a situation is something that is created from a culture that empowers their people. To be able to communicate to Leadership what has happened after an "on the spot" situation and know that we will have their back is a HUGE factor to enabling them to do what's best for our customers.

Although I may never be able to get a straight forward answer as to why Starbucks can't put honey in my latte 30% of the time I've gained some power insight into our Obtiva teams. We do empower our staff to make the right decision for our customers and as a company we support their decisions and each other.

Marketing Director: a/k/a Stalker

Recently as I got onto my morning train I found myself next to a man mumbling about his company's marketing "gal" and that she wasn't listening to him. "How can I sell if she doesn't listen to me", he told another man. It's hard when you are sharing any type of public transportation to not get drawn into others lives, whether by their obnoxious cell phone call or just plain perving their computer screens. After years managing marketing departments and directly needing to interface with the sales and business development staff I was trying to guess at what he and this gal where having issues with in communicating to their client.

With more and more of my role being solely focused on the Marketing strategy and goals of the company and the need (the requirement) to work directly with sales on what our message is and what is being relayed to the customer had my head spinning with ideas of the breakdown that these two people might be having:

• Perhaps they just have a personality conflict?
• Perhaps egos are in the way of the core purpose - to sell?
• Perhaps they are looking at the function of marketing differently?

I went on with my day, in that mode of getting things done and really didn't think about the morning conundrum again until I started walking back to the train and literally almost ran into the guy in the revolving door. Now I'll have to make confession - I followed him wanting to see if an opportunity to talk to him would make way. Well "we" (listen to me - we) stopped by the bar and got a drink. He decided on a beer and I got a wine then "we" headed over to the newsstand and thumbed through some magazines; then I turned and lost site of the guy - damn. So much for getting the chance to pick his brain and see if I could learn something from his experience.

I make my way to the third car of my train, up on the top level and to the left and I sit and sigh. As I start plugging everything in and tethering my iPhone (shh) the guy crawls over everyone on the row and sits right beside me. Fate!

I pull up Feedly and start catching up on my blogs and doing a little searching on marketing and sales communication and I run across a Marketing Interactions website. Low and behold I have a computer perv next to me. He said, "Are you in marketing? (Hallelujah). I explained to him my recent refocus back to marketing and brand strategy for the company that I work at. He then laid on me all of his issues with his marketing department. He ranted, raved and vented. The theme - customer transition.

When Marketing works with a customer in pre-sales at his company their Director of Marketing would give the potential customer a different story of what they do. The communication during the pre-sale stage (warming that lead) was not consistent and by the time the customer was transitioned to Sales they were becoming frustrated with the company and the process. As I was talking to the guy (Jason I found out later) I told him that this sounded to me like inconsistent messaging between Marketing & Sales. I asked him if they were loosing some of their leads after the Marketing phase and if Marketing was blaming Sales for not selling and Sales blaming Marketing for over selling their service. He stared at me like I was reading his mind.

As we were coming closer to my stop we had swapped business cards and a few of our war stories throughout our career's and I knew I had a new LinkedIn friend. I got off the train and started walking to my car, my mind still churning through all of the information that we had volleyed back and forth. I realized then and there how important it is even in appearance to the customer that Marketing and Sales are on the same team. So many times there is this wall between the two departments in any business. Either Marketing is seen as support instead of leading the sales efforts in their generation of leads or Sales is seen as the pavement hitters instead of the closers that they can be.

The fluid transition of a customer between Marketing and Sales seems so simple yet is imperative to the customer's perceived service level that they will receive after that contract has been signed. Such a small thing that can make such an impact to how many leads become customers in the end.