In consumer marketing research there are 4 P’s, with the first “P” being People.  Marketers segment consumers by income, geography, gender, age, etc. in order to prescribe the right “treatment” or create the right message to the population.  We are now taking that same segmentation concept and applying it to employee development. 

All employees are not created equal.  We suggest that team leaders and managers segment their employees and then target each segment specifically to get the most from that population.  Segmentation will help the team leaders and managers determine how much time they should spend in meetings, coaching and training with each segment.  Since their time is always tight, we want to make sure we can maximize the benefit team leaders deliver while minimizing time constraints. 

What does employee segmentation mean?  Segmentation is just a way to divide up the team based on performance.  The team can be divided in to:

• Quadrants
• Stack Ranked
• Outliers
• Statistical or Mean-based
• Or divided up manually by the team leader

Not all segments need to be equal in size, as not all segments will need the same coaching or meeting time from the team leader.  For example, I can easily divide a team in to four categories:

• Top Performers
• Solid Performers
• Weak Performers
• Bottom Performers

Depending on the priorities of your business, whether in Sales, Productivity, or Customer Experience, the best way to start employee segmentation is to select one key metric or a balanced score to stack rank the employees; use a metric that is well aligned to your business initiatives.  From there you can decide how to divide up the population, keeping in mind this division will also dictate the team leader’s meeting, coaching and training time for each population group.  Employee segmentation can also address some of the common questions you answer in your organization today, such as, “Who are your top performers, who are your bottom performers, who is struggling?”

For a typical team leader in a Call Center, their team of 21 agents might look something like the graph below:

From the segmentation above, I can easily see I have:
3 Bottom Performers
5 Weak Performers
10 Solid Performers
3 Top Performers

Where would a team leader in your organization likely spend their management and coaching time? Do they get the results your company needs from the current time management decisions (or ‘formula’)?

What we do with these Employee Segments will be covered in my next post – "Where do Team Leaders spend most of their time?"

 ----------------------------------------------
Author: Diana Leccese
Diana Leccese is Principal Business Consultant with Merced Systems.  Diana has over 15 years experience in Sales and Service Performance Management as both pre and post sales consultant.  She has worked with Fortune 1000 companies in Telco, Finance, Insurance, and Travel industries.  Diana can be reached at diana.leccese@mercedsystems.com

It's a new year and leaders at all levels are in the process of setting annual performance goals.  To turn these goals into results it's important to change the conversation from a focus on what to a focus on what, why, and how.

What.  Goal setting conversations often begin - appropriately - with a focus on what.  What, specifically, is the goal that we want to achieve?  It's important to set a SMART goal that is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.  After all, the more clearly that people can see a target, the more likely they are to achieve it.

Unfortunately, goal setting conversations often fall short because they fail to consider two other key questions: why and how.

Why.  In most organizations, goals are the outcome of extensive discussions about future direction and business strategy.  Yet too often, leaders fail to "connect the dots" and help their people understand why the goals are so important and how they contribute to broader strategic aims.  If you want your team to buy in to the importance of achieving this year's goals, it's important to communicate clearly the "why behind the what."

How.  From a coaching and development perspective, the most important question to ask and answer is how.  This year's goals are undoubtedly higher - and harder to achieve - than last year's.  So, how are we going to succeed?  How can we build on best practices and execute more consistently and more effectively?  How can we develop and implement new practices to respond to competitive challenges and capitalize on new opportunities?

By focusing on what, why, and how, you can get the year off to a strong start and set a course for turning your goals into results.

--------------------------
Author: Andy Elkind

Andy Elkind is Vice President of The Elkind Group, a San Francisco-based firm that provides consulting, coaching, and training services to transform organizations.  The Elkind Group aligns strategy and performance so that the front-line makes a greater contribution to the bottom line.  Andy can be reached at aelkind@elkindgroup.com

With all the new reporting tools that are now available, it's easier than ever to be seduced by the expanding array of performance metrics.  So if you're a sales or service leader, ask yourself this tough question.  What are you actually doing to move the needle on performance?  Are you really coaching, or are you just keeping score?

The difference is in how you answer three questions: What?  So what?  Now what?

What?  The first question is about awareness.  As you look at the metrics, what do you notice?  What has changed?  What has stayed the same?  What's the trend?  How does this individual's performance compare with the performance of other members of the team?  How does this team's performance compare with other teams?

So what?  The second question is about analysis.  What is the root cause of the results?  What are the behaviors that account for the numbers?  What is this person or team doing - or not doing - that is making a difference?

Now what?  The third question is about action.  What are you going to do to help change behaviors so that your team can produce better results?  Do you need to help people develop better skills?  Does your team need access to additional information or new tools?  Do you need to change underlying attitudes and beliefs?

If you're answering all three questions and following up with appropriate action, then you're coaching and improving performance.  Congratulations, and keep up the good work!

If you're not answering all three questions and following up with appropriate action, then you're just keeping score.  Isn't it time to get off the bench and into the game?

--------------------------
Author: Andy Elkind

Andy Elkind is Vice President of The Elkind Group, a San Francisco-based firm that provides consulting, coaching, and training services to transform organizations.  The Elkind Group aligns strategy and performance so that the front-line makes a greater contribution to the bottom line.  Andy can be reached at aelkind@elkindgroup.com

What separates the most effective performance coaches from their less effective colleagues?

There are many factors that make a difference.  These include: preparing in advance, establishing trust, analyzing for root cause, active listening, asking powerful questions, gaining buy-in, and following up - to name just a few. Many of these critical success factors require coaches to master new skills.  So, as coaches continue to focus on these factors they can make gradual and incremental improvements in their coaching effectiveness.

But one critical success factor is really a mindset - an orientation where a simple shift can yield an immediate and significant improvement in coaching impact. What is this powerful factor?  A focus on urgency. Any coaching session should conclude with an action plan that specifies: who will do what, by when, and how will we follow up to assure success. Less successful coaches tend to answer the "when" question with a date sometime in the future.  "Let's check in during our next one-on-one and see how it's going" or "I'll follow up with you toward the end of next week and see if you have any questions." The best coaches focus instead on what an employee can do right away that will make the biggest difference.  "Let's go take some calls right now and see how this goes for you" or "Try this now and I'll sit with you this afternoon to see how it's working."

In today's demanding and complex performance environment, most coaches have many things to do and not a lot of time to do them.  If something: isn't important, don't do it.  If it is important, do it now.

As the great sage Hillel asked, "If not now, when?"

--------------------------
Author: Andy Elkind

Andy Elkind is Vice President of The Elkind Group, a San Francisco-based firm that provides training, coaching, and consulting services to transform organizations.  The Elkind Group aligns strategy and performance so that the front-line makes a greater contribution to the bottom line.

On a recent flight I found myself seated next to a career officer in the US Army.  I thanked him for his service and we spent the flight talking about the Army's approach to leadership training and its "up or out" policy.

"Up or out" means that military officers are expected to continue to acquire new skills and advance in their careers.  If they don't consistently move "up," then they are asked to move "out."

Later that week the "up or out" approach came to mind as I was working with a call center client.  Like many call centers, this one had a large team of friendly, capable, hard-working, and highly productive CSRs.  But they also had a group of persistent poor performers - reps who had failed to achieve service, quality, and productivity standards for months and sometimes years.

This group of poor performers was only about 10-15% of the total workforce.  But the supervisors were expected to spend 40-50% of their coaching time with this small group.  And despite this intensive and focused coaching, many of the poor performers did not improve.

Firing employees is never easy.  But who benefits when perpetual poor performers stay on the job without any obligation to improve?

Not customers - who don't receive the courteous and high-quality service they deserve, or have to wait far too long to receive it.

Not other CSRs - who have to work harder to take up the slack and correct the problems caused by their less capable colleagues.

Not supervisors - who squander most of their precious coaching time with agents who cannot or will not improve.

Not the company - which pays for poor productivity and pays again when customers defect to competitors because of poor service.

The bright side of today's challenging economic environment is that there are plenty of people with good skills, strong experience, and positive attitudes who are eagerly looking for work.  Isn't it time for your company to take an "up or out" approach to managing performance?  If not now, when?  

--------------------------
Author: Andy Elkind

Andy Elkind is Vice President of The Elkind Group, a San Francisco-based firm that provides training, coaching, and consulting services to transform organizations.  The Elkind Group aligns strategy and performance so that the front-line makes a greater contribution to the bottom line.

As the initial shock over the receding economy has started to fade, smart companies are starting to think more strategically for the long-term - not just what the end of the quarter will bring.  With long-term business plans in mind, what are some of the guiding principles companies should follow?

1. Alignment - What really matters to your business - to your customers, employees, and shareholders?  What are the measures and metrics that align with those stakeholders' values?  And most importantly, what actions must be taken to make progress against these measures?  Doesyour operation have the integrated coaching and workflow to close the performance gap?  Are there effective public recognition or incentive programs to reward both performance and progress toward goal?  Can your organization focus and align your employees' activities on the 3-5 critical measures they can impact, empowering them to act appropriately to attain both personal and company goals?  Giving front-line employees and managers the power to track their KPI's daily and their rank among peers helps bolster self-correction.  Giving supervisors the information and tools they need to improve their coaching drives accountability for the alignment of staff with results.

2. Reducing Variability - Variability limits an organizations' ability to improve performance and attain business goals. By identifying sources of both rep performance and business process variation, and then defining initiatives to reduce the occurrence of variability, operations can significantly improve customer experience while reducing operational expense. Where does your organization see variation in performance? What approaches have you taken to reduce this variation? Most organizations focus on the "outliers," or invest too much time singling out bottom performers. Instead, try to identify the employee segments where improvement can have the biggest impact (often mid-performers), and develop the necessary coaching and employee development processes around the needs of this group.

3. Accountability - Accountability within an organization is what makes a strategic plan stick.  But where does accountability come from?  When front-line employees have visibility into their current and past performance, and can see the business impact they and their team are having on the organization, strategic initiatives can mature from a "flavor of the month" program to an embedded or ritualized aspect of the business.  Engagement and accountability at the executive level is critical to developing the organizational infrastructure needed to succeed.  And without buy-in and program commitment at the top, any strategic initiative can prove to be a dead end.

Taking action on all of these principles simultaneously may appear daunting, but attempting to answer any of these questions will yield progress. What would it take to answer only 1-2 of these questions in your organization this week?