For Immediate Release

For more information,
contact Dottie DeHart,
DeHart & Company
Public Relations,
at (828) 325-4967 or
DSDeHart@aol.com

Five Leadership Tactics
Resolve to make 2008 a pivotal year.

By Quint Studer

Want to make resolutions that not only improve your bottom line but have staying power? As you look back over 2007, you may feel a vague sense of discontent. Business is sluggish. Several key people have left. And with new competitors springing up every day, you need to be at the top of your industry. Oh, things are not terrible—not yet—but they could be a lot better. You need to turn things around, and you know you need to make some big changes in this year. Problem is, you’re not sure what they are. A new improvement initiative? A hot new product? A new executive team? Make 2008 the year you focus on leadership. Not leaders, mind you—leadership. Solid results that stand the test of time are the result of excellent leadership. Products and services change with the demands of the market. Individual leaders come and go. The key is to create a culture that ensures great leadership today and tomorrow. You need a long-term fix, not a magic bullet or a trendy program du jour or a charismatic leader. You need a culture built on good, solid, timetested leadership principles. Institute proven across-the-board behaviors that don’t depend on particular individuals. Implement some tried-andtrue best practices—also known as evidence-based leadership—to create results that last. These practices are simple, commonsense tactics that leaders can get their hands around
and start doing right away. And you don’t have to adopt every directive in his book to enjoy significant results. By implementing these five “biggies,” you’ll see dramatic changes:

1. Get rid of low performers, now. Let’s say your employee Carol consistently comes in late, gets “headaches” every other (non-payday) Friday, and spends more time cheerily chatting up coworkers than she does working. Others will notice—and they will be resentful. But worse than merely causing contention in the ranks, turning a blind eye to the “Carols” squelches profitability. Why? Because middle performers get pulled down to the low-performer level, while high performers either disengage or leave. Many leaders give low performers a pass. My remedy involves implementing a series of performance conversations. It’s easier not to confront low
performers, but until you move them either up or out, your company will never advance beyond short-term gains. Low performers hold everyone else back. Stop looking the other way.

2. Accentuate the positive. The next time you’re having lunch in a restaurant, listen in on the conversations at nearby tables. Chances are, you’ll hear people griping about their workloads, difficult clients, annoying coworkers, or the ridiculous policies. Everyone does it, but if they realized how harmful it is to their company, perhaps
they’d think twice. The solution is to hone the art of managing up—positioning your people, products, or company in a positive light. Hardwire the technique into your leadership practices. Managing up doesn’t just happen; you have to make it happen systematically. Help people see what happens when negativity is allowed to breed—good people quit and customers leave—and they’ll be more likely to stop doing it.

3. Make a real connection with employees—every day. I recommend “rounding for outcomes.” Rounding helps you communicate openly with your employees and find out what is going well (and not so well) for them at the company. But it’s not just empty “face time”—it’s rounding for outcomes, which means the process has a serious
purpose. You make the rounds daily to check on the status of your employees. Basically, you take one an hour a day to touch base with people, make a personal connection, recognize success, learn what’s going well, and determine what improvements to make. Rounding is the heart and soul of building an emotional bank account with people. It shows them that you care.

4. Say thanks. In fact, put it in writing. Send thank-you notes to employees who do an excellent job. But that doesn’t mean just sending the occasional note when someone goes far above the call of duty. It means literally mandating a specific number of thankyou notes for leaders to send to the people they supervise. “Thank-you notes don’t just happen. If they aren’t hardwired into a culture, they don’t get written. And a thank-you note is too powerful a tool not to use. People love receiving thank you notes. They cherish them. The best thank-you notes are:

• Specific. A thank-you note that focuses on something specific the recipient has done is far more effective than one that reads, “Hey, nice job!”

• Handwritten, if possible. Most people would rather receive a short handwritten note than a two-page typed letter. It’s more authentic and special.

• Sent to the employee’s home. When an employee receives a thank-you note at home, it feels more personal.

5. Don’t just recruit great employees— re-recruit them. We all know employee turnover is expensive. But more than 25 percent of employees who leave positions do so in the first 90 days of employment! To retain new team members, you need to build relationships. Scheduling two one-on-one meetings, the first at 30 days and the second at 90 days, greatly improves retention and that turns into savings. If these meetings are handled successfully, new employee turnover is reduced by 66 percent! Use a list of questions to discover what’s going well, and not well. These meetings help you shore up relationships. Once you implement these tactics, results soon follow. Your employees will see that you care about them, which boosts morale, which improves performance, which leads to happier customers, which leads to higher profits. The leaders’ job is to create happy, loyal, productive employees. They, in turn, will create happy, loyal, profitable customers. They are two sides of the same coin—and that coin is the currency that buys you results that last.

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Quint Studer heads the Studer Group, an outcomes firm that implements evidence-based leadership, and author of Hardwiring Excellence and Results That Last (Wiley). Visit studergroup.com.

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For more information, please contact Dottie DeHart, DeHart & Company

Public Relations, at (828) 325-4967 or DSDeHart@aol.com,

or visit www.studergroup.com.