My CEO Life

The short answer is nothing!  However i am hearing more and more about companies either banning or strong suggesting that employees dont use messenger and other similar applications.  This got me to thinking – why?

For me, banning messenger is like banning the phone or email.  I guess in days gone by bosses were banning email and the internet however imagine work life today without either of these. 

The real issue is trust and understanding. 

Read more…

I was chatting with a few folk the other day about different styles that CEO’s have.  Some wander around and chat, some roll up their sleeves and get deep into the hot issues, some just look at the numbers from their desk, while others cant help but micro manage. 

This got me to thinking, can a CEO really manage a business from his / her desk or do they really need to get out amongst the people?

Read more…

I received the following email from a reader in Italy and i thought i would reprint it as i think it is a well thought out piece on the importance of culture and how many companies are approaching the management of people. I would love the thoughts on this article. Here it is …

While reading about your experience, I’ve been strucked by how you point out not to the fact in itself (indeed the risk is part of the game) but on the way things have been managed, fully conflicting with the culture you had been building within the company over the years.  Not a question of “what”, but of “how”.

  Read more…

How often is it that you get invited to a meeting that goes on and on and on.  You get there and there is no formal agenda, the other attendees are late, some don’t know why they have been invited, there is no real leader of the meeting and an hour or so later you leave with no real outcomes and you are left wondering what that was all about.

Well i think there should be a different approach – the 30 minute meeting.  In fact, if it can be shorter, thats even better. 

Read more…

The other day i wrote a post about politicians emerging where there is a leadership gap.  (Click here to read it).  In it i looked at some different types of people within a business and what happens when things change.  The article identified 4 types of peope – worker bees, survivors, aspirants and politicians.  Well the article stirred some discussion and Alain in Luxembourg wrote a great email all about the Worker Bee Politician Mutation.  Here it is …

  Read more…

Working for a business takes up a significant part of every day and when you are travelling it can take up even more time however how often is it that you end up working with people that you just don’t get on with.  Well i think a question that is important to ask yourself in any interview is “does this person pass the beer test?”

Read more…

During my time with the REA Group we grew the business from operating in just one culture – Australia – to one operating across many different cultures – from Australia and New Zealand through to the English and European cultures.  When we started a small office in Shanghai and acquired Squarefoot in Hong Kong, we further enriched the cultural mix. 

Now the challenge i always had was do i change my style to adopt to the various cultures or do i maintain, as much as possible, my approach to doing business and help move the operating cultures in each of the countries to a more common culture.  I made the choice that i would, where possible, adopt the second approach as i felt it was more important that we had a unique REA Group culture rather than half a dozen different cultures.

“How did you make this happen”, i hear you ask.  Well first and foremost i lived the cultural values that i have written about before http://myceolife.com/2008/06/what-makes-great-culture/. 

Read more…

I had the opportunity today to visit the San Francisco offices of Google.  They are fantastic.  I was given a guided tour and saw just how the Google guys do it.  A couple of things i observed were:

• The technology (ie screen / keyboard) was identical on every desk – this means that people can move desk and just plug in
• There were some offies but these were shared – evidently no one has their own office
• The office was decorated with lots of fun things that people had obviously bought in from home
• Casual clothes is the order of the day – and i dont mean business casual – i mean casual
• They have a free cafeteria with a great selection of food
• There are TV screens everywhere
• The office is in general very open plan
• They had a huge slide between floors – unfortunately i didnt get a chance to ride it

So it made me think about how important open plan is to the culture of a business.  In many businesses, management have their own offices and sometimes, they have their own floors.  Often they have an office with a secretary sitting out the front.  I always remember doing a study at the National Australia Bank in Melbourne in the mid 90’s and there the senior management had their floor and even an express lift from the carpark to that floor.  These senior management floors still exist today in many large businesses.

Now, for me, this is old world culture – a representation of the baby boomers and not in alignment with what Gen X or Y expect.  At the REA Group we went for open plan.  I had a desk just like everyone else and i think it helped create a very open culture.  Quite often people would just walk up to my desk and have a chat.  I found i could keep in the loop and openly participate in discussions that were randomly happening around me.  If a private meeting was required, people can go to a separate meeting room and then have their discussion. 

I would recommend to any business that wants to build a open, fun, engaging, happy culture that they think about the structure of the office and how they keep it open and equal.

Business always conducts employee satisfaction surveys in an attempt to find out just how happy their teams are.  Often, when they revew the results, they are looking for downside risks rather than upside positives.  In addition they will spend time reading the comments and trying to work out what the real issues are.

Now the problem with employee surveys is that not all employees believe they are anonymous and therefore dont tell you what they really think or they just don’t complete them.  Therefore you need to look at what people are doing to get a better grip on the true feelings within a team.

The first measure i would look at is absenteeism.  This is simple to measure and can provide very quick feedback on the happiness of the people in the business.  I was talking to a senior person at a business recently who said they had recently noticed a sharp increase in the number of people who are taking sick leave.  Managers need to watch this.

Secondly i would look at outstanding leave or accrued leave.  A happy business tends to have high levels of outstanding leave as employees often dont take it as they are wrapped up in their jobs.  In an unhappy work place, employees with always take their leave.

Thirdly, turn over of staff is a traditionally clear way to track an unhappy culture.  However how do you know BEFORE HAND that people want to leave?  Well in today’s world that is simple – just join linkedin and facebook and see what happens.  Now i have been on linked in for ages and have hundreds of contacts.  These contacts tend to be people that you have or are working with.  Now when someone is thinking of moving on, they ask people to recommend them.  The result is that by looking at the number of “recommendation requests” you can get a feeling for what the true culture is in a business.  Now the problem is most senior people in organisations are Baby Boomers or Gen X and they dont embrace social networking sites.  This is where they are missing a great chance to track the actions, rather than words, of those they work with.

OK … i am now off to answer all those recommendations requests

In many of my discussions with staff over the years, there seems to be an inbuilt expectation that a business is going to actively train and educate you with your long term career in mind.  Well i hate to break it to you, but that is probably not the case.  If a business is offering training and education, it is probably because they have an immediate skills shortage or they have a statutory obligation to ensure that everyone has good OH&S training (for example).

So what should you do?  Well the first step is to take charge of your career.  Perhaps a good way to think about yourself is as a business.  So what are the things a business needs to be successful?  A vision of where it wants to be, finance to make sure it gets there, the right skills and capabilities to achieve the vision, good sales and marketing of tyhe business, and of course a great product.

So lets apply these to yourself.  What is your vision in life?  When they are chiseling your tombstone, what will they write on it?  The vision may be to have a lasting impact on those around you or perhaps something far greater, to change the world.  What ever that vision is, that should be your guiding light and everything you do should be building towards delivering that vision.

Now to achieve the vision, you need a product to sell – you.  When you think about a product, what is the product that you are offering a potential employer?  How do you package it up and how do you continue to improve it?  That is where education and training come into play.  You need to actively think about what improvements are needed and then just do it.  It is always good to package them into something that is attractive to the business and try to get them to fund it but at the end of the day, you just have to do it – even if you have to pay for it yourself!

Now the last thing i want to talk about is how you market yourself.  Now this is an interesting topic.  Firstly – this is NOT about being political.  That is just about short term gains – does anyone know of many politicians that truly stands the test of time? 

So this is about how you market yourself (the product) externally and internally within an organisation.  

External marketing is important as you want to make sure that you are constantly on people’s radar in case they are looking for someone just like you.  This is where sites like linkedin and facebook are excellent.  Recruiters today are scouring them for great candidates and it is important that you manage your brand on these pages. 

Internal marketing is about getting on and doing your job, delivering each and every time, making sure that you lead where you can and most importantly making sure you, the product, shines through.  Internal marketing is NOT about politics, sucking up, taking credit for other people’s work, big noting yourself and so on – you will be found out!

The bottom line – its your career – take charge and make the most of it!

More tomorrow