The True Cost Of Leadership

Want to know the true cost of bad leadership?  Take a look at the hospitality industry.

The first job for most businesses when facing a New Year is to review and update their strategic plan.  With people costs being the major component of most budgets these always gain a fair bit of attention especially any training and development expenditure.  In the light of a fresh year and a few weeks off, the reasoning behind some of this expenditure maybe lost and the expenditure hard to justify.  If this is the position you find yourself in, I suggest that you look at this way to find tangible justification:

Over the break period we visited three very high profile vineyards in the Hawkes Bay and they had a lot in common.  Fantastic food drawn from the best local ingredients prepared by expert and innovative chefs, great local wines to match, all eaten at breath taking multi-million dollar locations.  The only clear difference between these three places?  Service.  This was made even more interesting by the fact that these vineyards were all within the same geographical location drawing on the same community for staff. We left two of these businesses vowing to return with friends as we walked out with a case of wine under our arm.  The third we will be not returning to and along with many others we have added to the complaints on their social media pages.

It came down to one simple thing… leadership.  It was extremely clear when these businesses had invested in providing everyone on the restaurant floor with the knowledge, skills and support to do the job and evident to all when it was lacking.  Imagine for a minute if your business was a restaurant, what would your clients be saying as they pay their bill and leave?

Food for thought.

^DB

Change... When Big Swallows Small

Change is challenging and this is amplified when it involves two businesses coming together. There are many tales of two successful businesses combining where the outcome quickly becomes less than ideal.  One recent high profile example was the purchase of Hell’s Pizza by Restaurant Brands which ended in the original owners purchasing the business back at a discount; while on the surface there was a good match between the two companies from a product and market perspective, other more tangible mismatches caused the failure.

New Zealand is ultimately made up of small and medium sized business where the owner’s retirement is based around a sale to either a competitor or overseas investor, so getting the merger right is key to maximising that 2 year post performance payout.  Generally the focus is around keeping and managing the staff through the process, which is the right place to start, but what often gets forgotten is the management and integration of two company cultures and managing staff through this transition; destroying the company culture which has made it successful to date can be counterproductive to the end goal.

Consideration needs to be given to the following, especially if a larger business merges with a smaller counterpart:

·         Currently how much leeway do the managers and staff have over the business decision making?

·         What avenues are open for feedback and input into company strategy and how formal is this?

·         What access is available for the team to interact directly with their leaders and the businesses management?

·         What gives each team member that sense of belonging and wanting to stay?

·         What level of general ownership do the staff feel towards the business and current owners?

·         How are the staff rewarded and what do they value?

Care needs to be taken when undertaking any change and ensuring the needs of the people are met, along with preparing them for a cultural change.  Every business is special in its own right and this has to be honoured in the process and in doing so, this increases the chance of success for all involved.

^JY

Negotiation Is No Art

When we attend our first negotiation course we naively think that we are going to learn some magic and tricks.  By the end of the first day you understand that it is a process with some rather fixed rules and there are no secrets.  We spent the first hour split into two teams arguing over the same orange with no success, only to find out once our process was reviewed that one party only wanted the skin and the other the juice.  I guess being shown up at the start of a course is a good way of making you shut up and listen.

Here are the three golden rules:

• Always have the high ground before starting the negotiation.  If you don’t have the high ground, go away and spend time getting it. Avoid jumping in just because you are right, a poor case leads to a poor outcome. The position you come from needs to be strong and the required outcomes clear. You cannot negotiate from a weak position and may need to look at other options. 
• In the case of the Ports of Auckland Dispute, the union seems to have never read the signs and their high ground has been eroded over the last few years.  For the long term benefit of the members they should have started negotiations when they saw the shape of the industry changing.  A slow start and time has removed their high ground.

• You can only have a reasonable conversation with a reasonable person. Common sense has to break through any negotiation and make sure you have a full understanding of the other party’s position and options. You don’t want to be fighting over the same orange due to a misunderstanding. 
• Again… reasonable offer after reasonable offer was rejected.

• Never show a card that you are not prepared to play. It can be so tempting at times to state a position or action that you are not prepared to take. Despite it making sense during the heat of the battle, a retracted position or action removes all your positional power and credibility. Once in this position it is impossible to recover. 
• The Ports played a card they were prepared to play and have kept their reputation intact.

 When dealing with people emotions can run high on both sides and in a lot of cases negotiation is not easy.  Over the years these three easy to remember rules have served me well.

^DB

Bridging The Ditch

Can the New Zealand labour market bridge the gap with our Australian counterparts?  After spending a week in Sydney for work and contemplating this question, the answer would have to be “no”.  Not because there is a perceived wage gap but because the markets are totally different. Take away the mining jobs in the middle of nowhere, Australia has more scale and this drives more opportunity.  New Zealand will never have this scale nor in some cases do we want it.  Australian society is a lot harsher and more competitive and there are high demands placed on individuals with little tolerance.  The current battles over the Labour party leadership and cricket captaincy are long, drawn-out and bloody affairs.

While keeping our young away from the bright lights of Sydney is proving to be too much of a challenge, there is an opportunity to attract older talent back to our shores.  Those where the busy hectic lifestyle is starting to wear thin and the hour and a half commute has become a killer.  These are the people that bring back the wider experience of working in a larger, more diverse market and value the work/life balance New Zealand can offer.  Returning expats have many advantages to prospective employers as they generally do not request relocation costs and there are no issues with work permits or temporary accommodation.

So with the wide spread use now of online employment sites like Trade Me Jobs and Seek, remember that there is an overseas-based target market looking for the opportunity to return as it is easy to forget this and limit your thinking to just the local market. Think about the key life style advantages that your role can offer around working hours and location and this, on top of the work place opportunities may be enough to gain an application from a highly skilled expat. 

^DB

The New IT Era – BYO IT Device

A supportive and innovative internal IT Team or external consultancy adds value across many aspects of a well performing business; without them we would be lacking the applications and tools required to service the changing needs of our customers.  What is considered less often is that how they manage the internal systems and desktop environment directly impacts employee’s feelings around a company’s culture.  Most of us have sat at our desk at some stage without the correct or updated tools required to do our jobs efficiently and questioned our usefulness.  While the last few years have seen new challenges for our IT cousins with the likes of managing employee internet access to online trading sites and personal social media pages there is a new change in the wind... the BYO IT device.

In the US alone there were 26 million iPhones opened on Christmas day and this count does not include iPad's, iTouch’s or similar devices from other manufacturers.  In NZ terms, we could see over 50,000 more internet capable devices being brought into the workplace as the New Year commences.  The key question is “is this to the benefit or detriment of employee and business productivity?”.  The more I consider this question that more I believe that it is one of those things (like social media), that unless employers embrace it, they will be the ones that are left behind.

Two solutions we have seen successfully implemented involve allowing employees more choice and freedom, both adopting the same methodology that became popular a few years ago with car allowances:

• One company gave their employee’s a monthly phone allowance to cover both their calls and data usage, thus giving the employee their own choice of phone and plan without having to carry two mobiles and whilst having ready access to the internet.  From the business’ point of view it reduced the management and headache of reviewing and managing staff mobile bills and productivity was gained by the employees having remote access to email and their sales CRM application.  A similar solution could also work well for tablets and other devices.

• An Australian based company went all out and for all new employees they offered a one-off payment of $3000 to cover the purchase of a selected range of laptops, mobile phone and home printers.  As these items became personal to the user they found that after the initial setup by their IT team was complete, the on-going support was minimal.

Obviously it depends on the type of role and business and this needs to be carefully considered when reviewing your IT policy, however wherever possible and practical, by supporting and empowering employees to choose communication solutions to fill the companies need and work for them personally, surely the end result will be a positive impact on company culture? Food for thought.

^DB