During research for his book, “Now, Discover Your Strengths”, Marcus Buckingham asked this question; “At work, do you have the ability to do what you do best every day?” He reports that only 20% of the people responded “strongly agree”. He also points out that most organizations operate at 20% capacity. Coincidence? I think not.

When you ask yourself, “At work, do I have the ability to do what I do best every day?” What’s your response? And even more to the point, do you really know what your strengths are?

Our clients most often laugh and say they have an opportunity to do what they’re best at once per week. This is critical and stunning data given we work exclusively with high potential and high performing leaders! Yet it also indicates a tremendous upside if we can find a way to bring their strengths into play on a more regular basis.

The question we then ask is: “How can you design your week so that you are playing to your strengths at least some time during each day?” The challenge, of course, lies in meeting the expectations of your job, combined with playing to your strengths. Many times these are not aligned. Your manager needs you to achieve the expectations that they hired you to accomplish and you may learn/decide that your strengths aren’t tied to the job you accepted. This is where negotiation and strong communication needs to happen, beginning with you! Bringing your A-game to the table on a regular basis before you start this conversation will exponentially stack the odds in your favor. P.S. You may think you are bringing your A-game, but there needs to be consensus, especially from the people who can give or keep you from what you want!!

That begs another question: as a leader who manages, are you hiring the right type of people for the positions you need filled? Most people are grossly ignorant about their strengths, but they do know what they like to do — and many don’t associate that with work!! (I’ve noticed this quite a bit as I go out into the world and deal with retail clerks for an extensive home remodel my husband and I have embarked upon.)

With the talent shortage that we are currently experiencing in business (and predicted to get worse), it is imperative that you foster a work environment that people want to be a part of, plus use a rigorous interviewing/hiring process, including behavioral questions, interviews with you and critical people on your team who will work with the new hire, references, and appropriate talent assessments.

As a leader, the best way for you to attract great people who are engaged, perform their best and stay with your organization, is for you to create an environment that speaks to that group of people! What do you need to put in place to make that happen?

It’s a harsh reality, but it’s true.

The first indicator of quality talent is desire — not intelligence.

I’ve seen people who are not the smartest, who are not most strategic, who are not the best strategic thinkers, but who kick butt everyday because of their passion, because they care about the company and helping people.

There are a lot of people that just want to show up everyday and put in their time, feel like they matter and then go home. Their passion lies elsewhere and unless you’re MIT, UCLA or your’re doing exceptional work to make the cream of the crop show up on your doorstep, then you are going to be like most organizations slogging through mediocre talent.

Most of the time only 20% of your team is extraordinary and then you’ve got the middle - lets just say 60% - and then you’ve got 20% of your team that’s totally missing the mark. It’s your job to figure out how to get that 60% performing at such a level that they sustain profitability, forward momentum and a competitive edge.

At MK Performance Grou, we put an emphasis on developing high-performers, because that’s our area of expertise, but hey, it’s not horrible to have average performers whom you don’t have doubts about everyday and whom you know you can count on to get the job done.

It’s not extraordinary, but if the work is done right, you can make them your bread and butter.

Which should we have, performance goals or learning goals?

When I’m out and about speaking to various groups about leadership or when meeting with a new client, that question of performance vs. learning goals always manages to crop up.

Of course, performance goals are goals set around someone on your team actually performing to their top potential, setting goals based on what management sees as their potential level and their level of confidence, etc. And, learning goals are all about increasing your confidence and continued education…sharpening the saw.

Is there a happy medium? With all that’s required of leaders today, how can they make sure they get the right performance/learning mix?

The first thing is, you shouldn’t make one more important than the other. You need to have both. What keeps you employed and earning a paycheck are meeting or exceeding performance-based goals, but what gets you better so that you can ask for more pay are learning goals.

Leaders also need to remember there are some people who don’t want to learn, so you’ve got to understand who your people are, what they’re trying to accomplish, what their performance goals are and finally, how can you include learning goals and what will that mean to you and them?

For companies that operate in the financial services space, some of the hardest positions to fill are going to be sales managers and sales people.

We are seeing this happen now and have been seeing this come to fruition over the last 20 years. It has been harder and harder to recruit people into financial services and more and more difficult to get people who have been recruited to step up and be leaders, because to be a leader in the financial services industry is very difficult and sometimes not as quickly rewarding as people would like to experience.

So, the train of thought is: “I am giving up a lot for no promise unless I perform.” And, of course, performance is the essence of the sales industry.

In the world, not just in the United States, people afford to be more picky, selective and as a result more risk averse. Then they quickly come to the conclusion that they can go someplace where they will get benefits and a pay check versus actually being in an industry where you are an essentially an entrepreneur. And, yes, that means you can call the shots on your own schedule and you become your own boss, but it is also more risky and the reality is in these times, many people would prefer to have the comfort of a pay cheque.

When washing machines first became popular, people said, “Oh, gosh, you’ve got a washing machine! It’s going to make your life easier, because you won’t have to do the wash by hand.”

And, I know that I’m using a very simple example, but it’s really the same with today’s information technology. You start getting all this technology which supposedly makes you more effective and then suddenly you’ve got a 24/7 work week and people are expecting you to be uber-responsive.

Leaders who have historically been very responsive have risen to a certain level of success and people love them as leaders because they are so responsive and they get things done. But, what will happen going forward is leaders are going to have to be very vigilant about what they pay attention to and who the rest gets delegated to

It was really beautifully written by Jim Collins in Good to Great - and I’m paraphrasing here: they start doing less and start figuring out what they can eliminate on their to-do lists and how they can minimize and simplify the things that they’re doing on a daily basis.

People can’t sustain a 24/7 work week for very long, they can for a certain amount of time, but ultimately the only things people are going to be able to pay attention to are the things that matter most and delegate the rest all the while teaching (by example) their people how to do the same. It all comes down to…how many emails are sitting in people’s in inboxes?? I mean, good gracious, how do you get all this stuff done??

And I really believe that today’s leadership is going to be focused on:

• setting priorities as relates to responsiveness
• simplifying and uncomplicating things and
• focusing on what they absolutely need to do so that they can have more relaxation time and/or time for what truly matters

  And what matter is people’s families, their well being and taking family vacations.

  I mention vacations because people really don’t take vacations anymore. They have blocks of vacation time that they keep rolling over from year to year. Companies used to reimburse them for that time, but they don’t do that anymore. If you don’t use your vacation time, too bad. And, the irony is, the companies really don’t give people the time to take the vacation.

  So, leaders have to encourage taking time off, getting away from technology and focusing on what matters. But, it’s not enough to just talk about it, the leaders have to model this behavior themselves.

Financial services has a unique set of challenges when it comes to leadership.

A few that come to mind are:

• It is really difficult for us to recruit into this industry. It is very difficult for us to find people who are in the industry volunteer and say, “Yeah, I want be the next leader, I want be the next person who will take this industry into it is future and have it thrive.”
• The other thing is about that is the accountability. Leaders are having a tough time holding a volunteer work force accountable and because of that they’re letting things slide. They are hiring people who they wouldn’t normally hire in the past. They’re still hiring them, because they’re feeling desperate about bringing talent into their organizations. But lowering their standards isn’t helping the industry, or them for that matter. And, in the mean time if they became more strict on accountability for themselves this would allow them to have a deeper pipeline of people who could potentially be successful in this industry — that would help a lot.
• As for as leadership in the global big picture, it all boils down to the individual leaders. Is the leader leading both from their personal values as well as for the greater good of the organization? Then, secondly, are they holding themselves accountable and are they holding the people that report to them accountable? How do you do that? What kind of conversations are people having? What kind of benchmarks are they putting in place?

What’s needed is a higher level of self-regulatation, self-coaching and then taking the time to determine what they’re working towards accomplishing as a group — besides getting to the end of each day in one piece.

As we close out June 2008, I think it’s important to take a look back at what was happening with leadership as we ended 2007. After all, the saying goes, you can’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’ve been.

In the financial services industry, in 2007, what we saw was that there was such a dearth of leaders.

So, what happened in 2007 with leadership was we were finding we had less and less people saying, “Yeah, I want to be a sales manager, which means that I am getting groomed to the next and highest levels of leadership.” Again, how do we make it more appealing for people to become a leader in the financial services industry?

The other thing is, when you are leading in the financial services industry you’ve got to remember that you’re dealing with basically a volunteer work force. So, it is much different leadership style. You have to be a leader that people want to follow and you have to be a leader that people believe so they can say, “If I am in that environment, if I am the space of that leader then I will be able to evolve to my best. That I will be able to bring my A game by virtue of being in the presence of this leader who brings out my best, who has an extraordinary way of seeing my gift and inviting me ‘out to play’ on a regular basis.”

As far as universally outside the financial services industry - and I will say that this applies within the financial services industry as well - it is about accountability. Leadership is about not only the leader being accountable, but how does the leader create an environment were people hold themselves accountable.

The truth of the matter about leadership is that we are all leaders. It just comes down to how many of us will own up to that and take responsibility for how we are leading our lives, how are we leading ourselves during the work day and were we actually going.

It is so easy to look at leaders and say, “Hey, you didn’t do everything right, therefore I am not doing my best or we are not succeeding,” but I think that personal accountability, especially in a commission only environment, is the only way if you are going to be successful.

We see accountability missing everywhere. It is just not in people’s personal life which you can see everyday on a reality TV show, but it’s in business and social situations.

The more a leader can figure out ways to hold themselves accountable and evoke accountability from people on their teams, it will spur on exceptional performance.

They say there is a new trend in town that is making Wal-Mart not have the future growth potential that it used to enjoy. That trend is world affluence and with affluence comes the choice to pay more to get something better, i.e. better customer service, higher quality of product and more choices. Even with the blow-up in the U.S. mortgage market, people are still finding ways to consume outside of their means.

For years in the United States we’ve been watching products that used to be exclusively targeted to the rich, get designed and marketed to the majority, i.e. BMW’s, Mercedes, designer watches and clothing, and even neighborhoods! I recently dropped my wash and wear Labrador Retriever off at the groomer for a $25 bath and the groomer (in her 20’s) recognized my car key and shared that she had a beamer too. Yes I have a BMW, but not only can we afford it; it’s been paid off for years. Should I mention that my dog sitter (for when I’m on business or vacation travel) drives a brand new Escalade and the woman who does my nails drives a Mercedes? My husband, a National Sales Manager for a fortune 100 company sees the Escalade drive up and jokes, I need to quit my job and become a dog walker! We do live in San Diego, which is a community contaminated by the “keep up with the Joneses” syndrome. I cringe knowing we led the country in home appreciation and now are leading the country in the housing slow-down, with foreclosures running rampant.

As a Marketing Major many moons ago at San Diego State, a part of me is thrilled and still awed at the power that marketing has on consumerism. But my 20 plus years coaching on leadership effectiveness for financial services advisors, managers and executives and what I know about the US savings rate (less than $500 per family at the beginning of 2007, per USA Today) makes me uneasy. This unabashed consumerism has to do with personal accountability and the have the “get-it-now mentality”, combined with a “me, me, me” mentality.

So how does consumerism relate to leadership? I don’t know about you but customer service seems to have taken a beating. With so many customers willing to buy, and companies trying to squeeze out as much profitability as possible to report to Wall Street, service has fallen low on the priority scale. When I poll people and ask them to share an outstanding customer service moment, most people have to reach back weeks, months or even years! Ask about a bad service moment and they can rattle off almost one per day.

If you are a leader with direct reports, what grade would you give to yourself and your team on providing outstanding service to your clients? How do you really know? What are you doing to measure your clients’ expectations and satisfaction or even better, “delight” in your area of expertise? I promise you, if you pay attention to this area, you will set yourself and your team apart from the rest, which will positively impact your sales, recruiting and retention!

As a collector of quotes, one of my favorite comes from George W. Dudley, the co-author of “The Psychology of Sales Call Reluctance “Earning What You are Worth in Sales”. Dudley states, “The spoils do not go to the most talented, best prepared or hardest working. The riches go to those who are most willing to self promote!”

Is this fair? Well, that’s your call. Is it true? Haven’t you seen it played out over and over again? I know I have, and especially with successful sales people and executives. Many of us get so imbedded in the “getting stuff done” and forget that keeping people aware of “why work with me, or why promote me”, is part of the job.

Many people actually admonish self promotion (”let my work speak for itself”) while at the same time our culture rewards it handsomely. Some people play it beautifully - have you seen Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks in action? Think what you will, he turned a half dead franchise into a standing room only entertainment experience that people want to be a part of. He is spectacular at painting his vision and then getting people excited about being a part of that vision, and doing whatever it takes to help him accomplish it. Check out his blog if you want to see self promotion at its best at www.blogmaverick.com “ in Mark’s world, everyone benefits from his success.

I’m sure you can create a long list of people who self promote that you have vowed never to be like, but rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater, why not find a way to promote yourself, your work or your organization that isn’t offensive to you? If you read the paragraph above, don’t dismiss the fact that many people have benefited tremendously from Mark Cuban’s success –and promotion has been a significant part of his formula!!

Who besides yourself would benefit from you being wildly successful? So why not find a way to promote yourself in a way that works for you and helps you accomplish your professional goals?

In our work with Sales Managers in the Insurance Industry, the common frustration we hear is, “I could make more money, have more control and freedom over my calendar and be less stressed if I were in personal production.” So why do they do it?

There are a variety of reasons, all of which you should certainly uncover before you hire someone into this role if you want to coach them to perform at their best. Some do it for prestige (I’m a leader in my firm) and some do it in the hopes of one day heading up the entire organization, which includes the promise of economic bounty.

The best and happiest in the business do it because they want to help lead themselves and other people to financial success and they would do it regardless of whether they were compensated for doing it. It’s a calling that they cannot ignore! Quite honestly, we’ve found it’s almost impossible to sustain the type of energy and engagement required of the Sales Manager role without having this “leadership calling”. So, how do you find out if someone has this leadership calling?

The easiest way is to determine what the particular job rewards and search for people who are motivated by the rewards the job delves out. We use a job rewards/culture questionnaire for the job and a values/motivators questionnaire for the candidate or the person currently in the role, plus we ask specific questions to help our clients identify who has this leadership calling. Or you could just put someone in the role and see how quickly they burn out or thrive.

I was invited to share our research project titled “If the Sales Manager position could talk, what would it say it needs to produce Superior Performance” to a GAMA-sponsored study group this afternoon. There were 30 Learning Leaders from the Insurance Industry who were sharing what they look for in a field leader and how they develop their managers. What our research found is their Sales Manager role rewards people who are motivated to help people and lead others and themselves to financial success through employing the most efficient use, of time, talent and resources. Please go to our website http://www.MKPGroup.com/study to get a copy of this report.

A particularly surprising discovery that we shared with this study group is the fact that values/motivators trump talents! Meaning, if someone has average talent but they are getting their values/motivators met, they have the extra energy and engagement that outperforms someone who is more talented. Just like EQ trumps IQ, values trump talents. With a burning desire, people can move mountains! What are you doing to discover and engage that desire in yourself and in your team?