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In our last post, we discussed cultural fit and the importance of hiring and supporting people who fit in well with your organization’s culture, values and strategy. That’s advice most of us heartily agree with but don’t always follow, and we explored the reasons why. Now I want to talk about “when.” Sometimes, a bad culture fit is obvious. Your teammate is selfish, doesn’t always tell the truth, doesn’t support others. In short, he’s a jerk, but the company tolerates him because his numbers look good. But often, the cause of a bad culture fit is subtler. Someone who has been a good cultural fit and has reflected the organization’s strategy and values for years is now out of step. What happened? In many cases, the person didn’t change; the organization did. Your organization might be facing a new business environment – a new competitor, a new technology, a new opportunity – that forces everyone to adjust. And a few of your teammates, for all their good qualities, can’t or won’t make the necessary adjustment. They aren’t bad people. But, they are still causing the team and the organization to under-perform. And like it or not, if they can’t get back in step with the organization’s direction and evolving culture, you have to make the tough choice that they must go. These critical moments are inevitable in successful organizations. Market and customer preferences change, the competitive landscape changes, technology changes. These changes force the organization to change to stay relevant. I worked with a consumer products company in the US that faced one of these moments. To this point, its sales force had been a “team,” to use the term very loosely, of cowboys. Each one had her own territory and was told to sign up as many customers as possible, plain and simple. If a customer just outside a sales person’s territory had a problem, she had zero incentive to help her teammate – that was just time wasted that could have been spent selling to one of her customers. Customer turnover was huge. At some point, it became clear that the company’s sales people had successfully sold the product to just about every potential customer in the area. Sales people were paid entirely on commission, based on selling the product to the customer, whether the customer was using it or not. Customers were winding up with a backlog of product they didn’t want and likely would never exhaust. What now? The company realized it had to change its approach. The focus could no longer be about getting new customers. It became, “How do we keep the customers we have, and make each customer relationship more satisfying and more profitable?” Accordingly, compensation for sales people changed from straight commission to a mix of salary and bonuses based on team results and dramatically improving the customer experience. One sales person was resistant to the change. He was a cowboy, and a good one. He had been a sales leader, and a lot of his peers respected him. But now, he was holding the organization back. He saw the new compensation system as a threat, and he didn’t change his approach. The group’s performance was being held hostage by this one guy. We had conversations with that company’s leadership team about this salesman several times. They agreed he was holding the organization back, but chose not to act. Maybe they thought they could rehabilitate him over time. Months went by. Other divisions were making the transformation much more effectively. Finally, after a year, the division leadership terminated the salesman. How do you think the team responded? First, a striking the number of people the very next day told the divisions managers a version of, “Wow, it’s about time. We thought you were never going to make the change.” As for team performance, it was like flipping a switch. Within days, the performance improvement was noticeable. We drew two critical lessons from this experience, which have been confirmed on many other occasions: You can’t hide a bad cultural fit. Your team members know if someone isn’t playing by the rules, and they expect you to do something about it. You might focus on the sales or productivity that walks out the door with the person you just let go. But your team’s performance is likely to rebound, perhaps more quickly than you expect. Intrigued by what you’re reading? Download our white paper on converting strategy into execution and learn more about us by visiting our website . WhiteWater International Consulting, Inc. helps organizations understand the challenges they face and helps enterprises achieve and sustain outstanding performance through unleashing the passion and capabilities of its people. Because an organization is only as good at the people who power it.

How Sears Killed Sears A Horrific Case of the Missing Follow-up/Follow-through Process Early in my career, I was responsible for a team of technical sales engineers. After a few weeks, I inherited an engineer who had worked for our company for about a year and had developed a reputation as lazy and ineffective. Yeah, I know: the proverbial Thanksgiving Special: the organization was playing “Pass the Turkey” with him. Yet, as I got to know him, I found that he was bright, energetic and highly motivated…the complete opposite of his reputation. I asked him what he’d been doing for the last year. His completely honest response: “Not much.” Why? “Well, frankly, no one has asked me to do much, and then they never check on me. So, I spend my time researching, reading and, generally, hanging out.” Besides the obvious lack of direction or anything that resembled a critical goal, the Follow-up/Follow-through process was totally non-existent. While the sales engineer bore a lot of the responsibility for being missing in action, his previous leaders also clearly failed him. The good news: after we established a few critical goals and started a regular Follow-up/Follow-through process, the sales engineer began to put all that reading and research to work. Within months, he had earned his new reputation as being smart as a whip and doing great things for our customers and our organization. Follow-up/Follow-through: Generating Learning and Accountability for Results In our last post, we talked about the 7th gear in the Strategy>Execution>Results Framework: Follow-up/Follow-through. It’s the gear that keeps the other gears aligned and translating effort to results. As the story above illustrates in stark terms, when Follow-up/Follow-through is missing or ineffective, the other gears wobble, grind and waste time and energy. Effective Follow-up/Follow-through: Set the Rhythm Performers and Leaders need to establish a consistent rhythm for following up and following through. They should create a consistent time frame for meeting, updating and assessing progress toward the project’s goal. Once the rhythm has been established, the burden is on the performer to follow-up with the leader at the agreed upon time. This shifts the responsibility and accountability for performance to the performer and away from the leader. Instead of having to nag performers about scheduling their next status meeting, leaders can focus their attention on their own critical goals and priorities. Follow-up/Follow-through Rhythm: Driven by the Performer’s Needs and the Goal How frequently should they meet? The answer is generally driven by: • the performer’s needs • the nature of the goal or task. Let’s say you just hired a new team member who brings a ton of new capabilities, raw talent and enthusiasm to the organization. But, she has no experience with how things work within your organization and has not proven that she can apply her talent and enthusiasm to consistently achieve critical goals. In this case, you would be wise to start with a fast follow up/follow-through cycle. This enables the leader to provide the guidance the new team member needs to be successful. It also allows the leader to celebrate quick wins and understand her quickly evolving development needs. In the first few days on the job, the cycle might be daily or even every few hours. Or the new team member might be assigned to shadow or be shadowed by a mentor, in which case, the cycle might be nearly continuous. As the new team member demonstrates that she can operate safely and effectively on her own, you can (must) gradually decrease the frequency of the follow-up/follow-through cycles. On the other hand, your “pros in position” will feel smothered by an hourly or daily Follow-up/Follow-through rhythm on a goal or task they are expert in. Weekly, monthly or quarterly better fits their needs. A Recipe for Disaster Establishing a Follow-up/Follow-through rhythm that is less frequent than quarterly is a recipe for disaster. Waiting for the annual or six-month performance review creates too much potential for performers to drift out of day-to-day alignment with their critical goals. (Wait a minute…are you still doing annual performance reviews? We should talk.) If you’re not already comfortable with follow up/follow through, I suggest that whatever interval you choose, make it regular, such as every week at the same day and time. But follow up/follow through can also occur at specific, but not necessarily regular, intervals if that’s what a project plan or task requires. For example, a foreman at a commercial windows and doors company might follow up with his manager within a day of completing an installation. Depending on the size of each job, their meetings could be days, weeks or months apart, but they still occur at specific times. What do you think? To what extent have you established a Follow-up/Follow-through cycle for each of your goals? Is Follow-up/Follow-through driven by the Performers’ needs and the nature or the goal, or driven more by crisis? To what extent does your Follow-up/Follow-through process push responsibility and ownership to Performers, rather than Leaders? Next: The project’s role in setting the Follow-up/Follow-through rhythm. Intrigued by what you’re reading? Download our white paper on converting strategy into execution and learn more about us by visiting our website . WhiteWater International Consulting, Inc. helps organizations understand the challenges they face and helps enterprises achieve and sustain outstanding performance through unleashing the passion and capabilities of its people. Because an organization is only as good at the people who power it.

Understanding: Custom Training & Development WWCG provides a wide-range of training and development services to ensure our clients attract, develop and retain the talent necessary to be successful. We provide turnkey training management services; conduct training needs assessments; design, develop and deliver the necessary curriculum; and measure the effectiveness our clients’ training efforts to ensure they optimize the return on their training investment. No one would take a whitewater kayak through Lava Falls in the Grand Canyon without the proper skills and training necessary to navigate through the rapids. The skills can take years of hard work and effort to develop. Hence, we firmly believe that successfully executing the rapids and turbulence in business today is a direct result of an organization’s ability to recruit, select, engage, develop and retain the talented people necessary to execute effectively, in real time, at the speed of light. The ability to develop people is key. Few people who walk through the doors of their employers have all the skills necessary to be effective. They need the right developmental opportunities, at the right time, in the right place, delivered the right way. Many people in organizations believe that training is a waste of time, energy and money. And, frankly, it often is…when the audience is wrong or the timing, content, place or delivery of the developmental activity is off-the-mark. This wastes resources that should be targeted toward productive tasks. Fortunately, education and development in most organizations can be much more effective. Our process for doing so includes: Fully understanding the organization’s business goals and strategies. Understanding how these business goals and strategies tie directly to the skills and competencies to be developed by individuals and groups of people. Building, buying, acquiring etc. appropriate courseware or making other developmental efforts that best build the needed skills and competencies while cutting out wasted material. Helping clients effectively implement their People Development strategy. Rigorously evaluating the outcomes of your learning efforts to ensure they contribute to business objectives set out in the first step. Intrigued by what you’re reading? Download our white paper on converting strategy into execution and learn more about us by visiting our website . WhiteWater International Consulting, Inc. helps organizations understand the challenges they face and helps enterprises achieve and sustain outstanding performance through unleashing the passion and capabilities of its people. Because an organization is only as good at the people who power it. Custom training and development .