Want to Improve, Put Women in the C-Suite

Want to Improve, Put Women in the C-Suite

At the end of last year, there was a male-to-female ratio of 19:1 for CEOs and 6.5:1 for CFOs, which exposes a persisting underrepresentation of females in key executive positions. Within my Vistage groups, I am pleased to say that the male-to-female ratio is 11:3 for CEOs. However, that aside, some recent articles have shown the superior performance of companies that have women in C-Suite positions that are typically not reserved for females.

According to a study by S&P Global Market Intelligence, if you are looking for better returns, hire a female CFO! Companies that hired female CFOs saw, on average, a 6% increase in profits and an 8% better stock returns compared with the performance under male predecessors. The 6% increase in profits accounted for an additional $1.8 trillion in additional cumulative profits across 6,000 companies.

Thus, female CEOs drove more value appreciation, improved stock price momentum, better-defended profitability moats, and delivered excess risk-adjusted returns for their firms.

However, a new study by HEC Paris Business School and MVision Private Equity Advisers found that investment committees of private equity fund managers comprising both males and females have experienced comparatively higher returns compared to their male-only peers. Therefore, if PE firms want to outperform their peers, they should appoint more women to their investment committees. The diverse investment committees well outperformed their male-only counterparts! Professor Oliver Gottschalg found that on average, companies in the top quartile for gender diversity on executive teams were 21% more likely to outperform their peers, and 27% more likely to exhibit substantial value creation. Specifically, his research found that gender-diverse investment committees outperformed all-male committees in alpha, TVPI, and IRR by 7%, 0.52%, and 12%, respectively. The level outperformance is due to a broader base of perspectives and the subsequent avoidance of more blind spots!

So what is of interest is that while women’s participation in Investment Committees results in outperformance, Private Equity never received the memo. As can be seen from the chart below, women are very under-represented in the major Private Equity Groups

Not only that, Bloomberg has found that startups with all-male teams raise less money than those with a woman. Therefore, you would think all startups would be looking for female teammates. Unfortunately, many are run by men who “know best.”

Thus, while I am the first to say that correlation does not necessarily mean causality, there undoubtedly enough data to say, “If you want to realize above-average performance, put women in your C-Suite!”

This has to be one of the easiest things to improve your performance and make better decisions. If you say, “We just can’t find them,” you are not looking in the right place.

Copyright (c) 2019, Marc A. Borrelli

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Professional US Sports Teams for Sale – Should You Consider It?

Professional US Sports Teams for Sale – Should You Consider It?

Entry into the professional sports franchise, i.e., a Major League Baseball (MLB) or National Basketball Association (NBA) team ownership club, is limited to the very wealthy. Especially in the U.S. with the franchise system, it is a way for the richer to get even richer. Now there’s a growing movement to help non-billionaires buy into a league.

Bloomberg recently reported that MLB has formally opted to allow investment funds to purchase a minority stake in multiple teams. The rationale behind the move is to help minority team owners find potential buyers for their shares, given the rising valuations of clubs. Forbes estimates that the average MLB team is worth $1.78 billion, up over 8% compared to 2018, and the top teams in the league have seen their values rise much more. The top clubs are estimated to be worth:

New York Yankees: $4.6 billion
Los Angeles Dodgers: $3.3 billion
Boston Red Sox: $3.2 billion
Chicago Cubs: $3.1 billion

Even the last-place Miami Marlins are reported to be worth $1 billion.

Although no investment vehicle has officially begun taking stakes in any clubs, it would, in theory, serve as a sort of fund-of-funds. A secondary market would eventually emerge, allowing investors to make equity trades that increase team valuations or earn a payout in the rare case when the majority owner sells. The opportunity to do this would be especially appealing for investors, given that the pro sports teams’ valuation has no correlation to the stock market in the event of a recession.

Meanwhile, in March, it is reported that the NBA told team owners it was discussing also establishing a similar plan for an investment fund, thanks again to surging valuations. According to the latest Forbes estimates, the average NBA team is valued at $1.9 billion, marking a 13% YoY jump. The New York Knicks topped the list with a $4 billion valuation, followed by the Los Angeles Lakers ($3.7 billion) and Golden State Warriors ($3.5 billion).

 

Some Considerations

However, before you go rushing off to acquire your share of your favorite sports team, consider the following. Technology is allowing fans to watch any game at any time from anywhere, with the result that sports audiences are more extensive than ever. However, revenue growth has slowed as attention spans are shrinking, and the “stickiness” of viewers is dwindling. A 3% decline in the number of minutes watched per game is typical, and sports that drag on for hours (football and baseball), if not days (cricket), are most vulnerable. Those that fail to attract an audience will lose revenue as advertisers flee. Thus, there is increasingly intense competition between sport for fans’ money and attention. However, today, the sports market is a global business that generates about $90 bn in revenue a year, so the stakes are high and competition global.

 

How to Reverse the Decline

Soccer (or football as it is known worldwide) is the world’s favorite sport, and since 2000, its overall market share has grown, according to Futures Sport. The reasons are:

  • It is simple to play and easy for fans around the world to follow.

  • FIFA, the sport’s governing body, has invested vast sums of money in emerging markets.

  • The women’s game has galvanized the sport still further attracting a broader and younger audience. More than a billion viewers watched the 2020 women’s World Cup.

  • Football’s popularity has soared in China and America, especially among young people.

Football is unlikely to be dislodged in the foreseeable future; however, all sports can look at four main lessons from its success to improve their standings.

 

1. Adapt to Modern Viewing Habits

According to a McKinsey report, “In a world with so many sports options across so many screens, sports fans of all ages are clicking away from low-stakes or lopsided games.” While fans may still care about the outcome of a boring game, they are less likely to watch it. Viewers impatiently resort to alternative entertainment on whatever device they are watching, including clips of the highlights. Viewers are increasingly seeking out videos of top game moments, according to Google, with an 80% increase in sports “highlights” video views on YouTube. Cricket is now selling its match highlights separately from the coverage of the entire game, as they appeal to different markets and worth more independently than in a single package. Also, more fans are engaging with sports across a multitude of platforms. In America, major sports leagues are still extremely valuable to advertisers and pay-tv providers because while viewership has declined, almost every other type of television entertainment has suffered worse declines in viewership.

In a time-poor age, no game has reinvented itself as successfully as cricket. In 2003, dwindling stickiness led to the launch of professional Twenty20 (t20) cricket. Games last just three and a half hours versus eight hours for “one-day” cricket and as long as five days for Test matches. t20 matches are now as long as an American Football game. However, due to the nature of t20, as every ball counts, the batters are more aggressive, resulting in far more action during the match than an American Football game. t20 now is the most-watched version of cricket worldwide, especially among the younger fan base. Cricket’s reinvention has paid off and that over the past decade, its revenues have grown faster than those of any other big sport, primarily due to India, where the Indian Premier League is the fastest-growing major league of any sport.

Taking a page from cricket’s success, Rugby Sevens, in which matches consist of two halves lasting seven minutes, compared with the usual 40 minutes, were first featured in 2016 at the Olympic games. Next year at the Olympics, three-a-side basketball will make its debut. In three-a-side basketball, the games last ten minutes versus 48 minutes for National NBA matches.

 

2. Break into New Markets.

Sports can increase their revenues either by gaining new fans or by relying on existing fans becoming wealthier. Cricket is betting on the latter as India has a fast-growing middle class and is expected to overtake China as the most populous nation in the world sometime in the 2020s. However, most other sports must look farther afield for new fans. By opening international tournaments to new players, viewership and supporters have increased. Basketball has i
ncreased the number of teams in the men’s World Cup to 32 since 2002, a 100% increase. Rugby is considering boosting the number of teams in its world cup from 20 countries to 24. The rationale: viewership in countries is higher when they are competing in a world cup.

“The more inclusive you make sports, the wider the market is going to be,” says Dave Berri, a sports economist from Southern Utah University. Again football is the world leader in this regard. FIFA recently expanded its World Cup to allow 48 teams to compete. The next women’s cup will include 32 countries, a 50% increase from the last one. Holding such competitions in new markets also helps. Rugby intends to hold either the 2027 or 2031 tournament in America, after the success of having Japan host the 2019 World Cup, the first time the event was outside the sport’s traditional strongholds. Japan, Indonesia, and the Philippines are hosting basketball’s next World Cup. Even without a world cup, sports can venture abroad. Major American league football, baseball, and basketball all played regular-season matches in London in 2019. They are already attracting more massive crowds beyond ex-pat Americans, but will the new fans stick or be attracted to more of games?

 

3. Home Grown Talent

However, to attract foreign fans involves more than merely staging matches in new countries, it requires finding home-grown stars from these markets. Thus, sports have start spotting star players in the markets they are eyeing up. Foreign athletes are a powerful recruitment tool in these new markets and keeping new fans watching. The success of basketball in China, which hosted this year’s World Cup, is partly down to one man, Yao Ming. While finding a star always involves luck, the NBA developed a grassroots network in China in 1992. Since 2004 it has been playing exhibition games in China, long before any other professional American sports league.

The NBA has capitalized on Mr. Yao’s popularity, expand basketball’s reach still further. In China, the NBA has three academies, as well as others in Australia, Mexico, India, and Senegal. The NBA hopes that if the organization can nurture outstanding players in such markets, it will dramatically increase interest in basketball. The extent of the NBA’s investment in China and reliance on China as a future revenue source was reflected in its response to the Chinese boycott over comments by Daryl Morey, the Houston Rocket’s General Manager. China’s reaction was swift and damaging, but the NBA and key players gave in quickly, saying Mr. Morey didn’t speak for the league or other teams. The NBA was accused of being willing to sell its integrity and legacy for the future of its business. While the NBA sought to increase the attraction of the game with international expansion, especially in China, this is risky. Any future market comprising such are large share is critical, but one that is likely to suppress human rights is risky and should be a warning to other teams seeking to follow the NBA’s lead.

Basketball Africa League, including teams from nine African countries, is a collaboration between the NBA and FIBA, the global basketball governing body, and is expected to launch next year.

Source: The Economist

The result of this investment helps explain why basketball players have become more internationally diverse. Today the league has 108 international payers, from 42 countries, a substantial increase from the four players from four countries in 1980. While this figure is well short England’s football Premier League which has players from 64 countries last year, it comfortably outstrips similar leagues in other sports.

According to NBA research, particular sports participates are 68 times more likely to be committed fans. China now has 600,000 basketball courts, giving players plenty of places to dream of becoming the next Mr. Yao and developing more fans. In the U.S., football participation among the young has increased fan numbers.

Developing audiences in new markets requires commitment, time, and money. Any sports that put on one-off matches and hopes to gain devoted followers, as a result, will be disappointed. In 2015 a set of t20 matches between teams captained by two cricket legends were staged in America. However, once the tickets had sold, little serious investment went into developing American interest in the sport, and cricket still has a small following, a sad decline from a game that was one of the most popular in America 150 years ago.

Basketball has done better than its competitors at following football’s recipe for success. According to PwC, among the big sports other than football, basketball will see the highest increase in revenues in the coming years. The world seems to have settled on its second-favorite game.

 

4. The Excitement of the Match

While cricket, rugby, and basketball have changed formats to appeal to new viewers and declining attention span, the traditional game still has to be interesting to retain viewers. However, that is dependent upon the actual action within a game.

Sport Clock Duration Amt of Action Amt of Commerical Time No of Commericals/Hour
Football (Soccer) 1 hr 55 mins 57.6 mins 19 20
Hockey 2 hrs 20 mins 60 mins 30 26
Basketball 2 hrs 18 mins 48 mins 45 39
Baseball 2 hrs 56 mins 18 mins 75 47
American Football 3 hrs 10 mins 11 mins 43 29

Second, and only applicable to the U.S. leagues, there is that time in the season when teams struggling at the bottom of the standings start to play their reserves and rest their stars. Tanking, as it is known, is done to secure their chances of receiving a high draft pick. While Tanking is a management strategy, not a player strategy, that makes sense, it is annoying for fans who start to tune out. Meanwhile, in the Premier League, the matches are just as exciting at the bottom as at the top, as bottom-dwelling teams fight desperately to avoid relegation. Sadly, in many cases, it’s not only the team’s status that’s at stake but that of the whole town. As the Netflix documentary, Sunderland or Bust, noted, Sunderland’s relegation from the Premier League resulted in a 60% fall in revenue dropped from $100 million to $40 million. The fight for survival retains fans’ attention and interest, making it less likely that they will lose value.

However, relegation will not come to the U.S., as all U.S. leagues are franchises, and the franchisors seek to maximize revenue for its franchisees, not the quality of the overall product. So, the majority of U.S. major sports fans are stuck with a mediocre product in which the franchise owners continue to make steady profits, as opposed to superior products overseas where some franchises make tremendous profits. (In 2018, Manchester United reported revenue of £613 million, and teams like Sunderland get relegated and struggle. The opposite of Sunderland are teams like Leicester City, which was in the second division in 2008/09 and acquired by a Thai consortium in 2010 for £39 mm. In 2015/16, Leicester City won the Premier League, and today Forbes estimates it to be worth £500mm.)

Interestingly, American billionaires are not necessarily averse to taking a risk and investing in teams within promotion and relegation systems as Americans own Arsenal, Liverpool, and Manchester United. Sunderland and Aston Villa were also owned by Americans who later sold them at a loss, after relegation. However, they had to accept those systems which winners and losers, but for the U.S. leagues, no such luck. It is all about protecting their money over product quality. Some, including Martin Luther King and Noam Chomsky, have said that the U.S. is socialism for the rich and capitalism for everyone else. If so, then U.S. sports reflects American society at large.

But, whether or not the U.S. sports leagues are socialist, going back to the initial point of this article, do you want to invest in a team in a U.S. Sports Franchise? Overall it is a mediocre product with declining revenue growth.

An investment vehicle would make sense for the NBA, given that one-fourth of the league’s majority owners made their fortunes in Private Equity. While there may be an opportunity to invest at a bargain rate after the league alienated China, a $4 billion market for the league, having such a large customer who is so fickle may pose too much risk.

If you are a real cynic, you may consider this is another system to get the majority to bail out the rich from their bad mistakes. If you follow Jim Collins’ ideas in Good to Great and Built to Last, it would appear that the U.S. teams are not excellent investments, as I would consider a good investment, one that has the most significant opportunity to grow in value. However, if you are looking for a utility or dividend stock, then maybe it is worth another look.

 

© 2019 Marc Borrelli All Rights Reserved

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Hiring Results are Bad. Surely, We Can Do Better?

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Most hiring is wrong; businesses have a 54 percent success rate

How successful are we at recruitment? According to the Harvard Business Review, 80 percent of employee turnover stems from bad hiring decisions. A Brandon-Hall research brief found 95 percent of employers surveyed admitted to making hiring mistakes by recruiting the wrong people each year.

According to a 2015 Leadership IQ study, 46 percent of hires are considered failures by the time they reach the 18-month mark. A 54% success rate! Would you accept that from any other area of your business? Not only do we have a 54% success rate, but the costs of a bad hire are huge. Google searches give estimates as follows:

  • The cost of a bad hire can reach up to 30% of the employee’s first-year earnings — US Department of Labor

  • Bad hires cost $240,000 in expenses related to hiring, compensation, and retention — The Undercover Recruiter

  • 74% of companies who admit they’ve hired the wrong person for a position lost an average of $14,900 for each lousy hire — CareerBuilder

 Since all businesses need employees, why are businesses bad at it? Why do they tolerate this inferior performance, as they all have to face the repercussions of poor hires?

Every business leader understands the negative consequences of a bad hire. Hiring a bad fit for your team can disrupt team morale, decreased productivity, and hurt customer service. Also, there are those terrible hires, which are great, but the company puts them off so much they leave.

But the most successful businesses have what it takes to ensure a bad hire doesn’t derail their teams.

 

Disposable Employees

Part of the issue, in my opinion, is that the disposable society has migrated to employees. We tolerate lousy hiring, as we believe we can easily replace them with better employees if they don’t work out. However, this assumption is flawed and is another example of hubris.

Because of this faulty assumption, we don’t bother to put in place processes for recruiting, interviewing, and on-boarding to ensure that we are not undertaking lousy hiring practices.

Many will say, but we have processes, and indeed, you do. However, are they useful? It goes to your culture. If your firm has a culture of continuous improvement, then you be continuously looking at your hiring practices and making changes to improve the results. If you don’t have a Kaizen culture, you should, but, just because you have a process, doesn’t mean it is an efficient process. You need to examine that process and then start measuring the results to see where it can be improved.

 

Direct Costs

  • Hiring Costs

  • Compensation Costs

  • Severance Costs

 

Indirect Costs

  • Support Costs

  • Cost of Poor Performance

  • Loss of Poor Subordinate / Department Morale

  • Value of Bad image in the Workforce

If you want to determine the cost to you from a bad hire, click here for a model that will help you estimate the costs of a bad hire.

The second reason is the damage to morale among the employees that stay. They might think the person was a good hire, and if they left, the remaining employees might question why they are still around.

 

So Hiring is a Process

Like so many things in business, hiring is a process. I have heard that if a company establishes a good process and sticks with it, it can move that hiring success rate from 50% to 80-90%. If we stick to the process and work to improve it, we should get better results. If we “wing it” and don’t track the success, then we have no idea what is working and what isn’t or how we are performing.

To avoid keeping bad hires on your team for long, have a strategy in place to continuously hire–especially for roles you know will open up throughout the year. It’ll help you quickly replace bad hires and build a network of talent to staff up as your team grows.

Keep jobs posted on your career site–even if you don’t have an immediate opening. If a strong candidate comes along, you can offer an informational interview. If the meeting goes well, you might even decide to hire the candidate before you have an immediate need. If not, you’ll have a pool of talent to tap into when you need to make an urgent hire, i.e., when you let go of a bad hire or suddenly experience business growth.

Hiring the right employee is much more important than simply filling a seat.

I have identified the hiring steps to be:

 

The Job Advertisement

From a talk I heard many years ago, I took away that ads, in general, do not attract good people, more like the bottom third. Most job specifications define the minimum standards; basically, we end up with the tallest pigmy. Good people and Millennials want to know what I am going to learn and what is the job going to do for me.

You have to inform candidates of the following:

  • What is the situation or problem?

  • What are the main obstacles the employee will encounter to be successful?

  • What actions need to be taken to accomplish the problem?

  • What are the measurable, quantifiable results required that define success?

Instead, what we state is the following:

  • Such and Such Industry experience

  • XYZ Technical Degree / Certification

  • ABC Skills and knowledge

  • D E & F Behaviors and attitude

  • Minim
    um of T Years of experience

If this hasn’t bored you yet, it should have. No “A” player is excited over this! You haven’t sold them. What we should be saying is:

  • Fast-growing company in fast /new/challenging sector

  • Opportunity to part of a successful team to create a market-leading organization

  • Increase sales by X% and improve margins by y% within T months

  • Build an Indep. Rep. Channel in X within Y days

  • Implement sales forecasting and pipeline management with Z months

  • Revamp all sales collateral within Q months.

 

The Search

Recruiters are expensive, and I hear they are often sending the same people that are responding to ads on Monster and Indeed. Instead, reach out to your network, customers, suppliers, advisers, etc. Provide them a copy of your job description and ask if they know someone who would be interested and who would fit within your culture.

 

The Sorting

A lot of HR departments have turned to technology to help them with recruitment. They are using scanners to look for words and phrases on a resume that meet their job description. However, given that they are using the failed advertisement, it makes matters worse as it excludes those that would be great hires but don’t fit with what the computer is seeking. Remember, all these algorithms are programmed and have biases, but we don’t always know the preference. Unfortunately, reviewing resumes needs a human eye until computers get much better.

I recently heard a story of someone who was looking for Venture Capital funding. They sent an email to a VC firm that had a video of them singing “Call Me Maybe” with revised wording. The effect worked. The VC was intrigued and asked to meet them. Your automated system will not take these people in and could reject some great possible hires.

 

The Interviewing

We have all heard of those interview questions to determine how an employee thinks. However, interviewing is more than a few tricky questions, not to say you should give up on them. Consider the interview an audition rather than an interview.

 

Experience

If you need a welder, get the applicant to do some welding. If you need an Operations manager get them to do a presentation on what they would do to solve the “S” in Soar. If they have to code, make them code something that doesn’t necessarily require the language knowledge but the thinking of how to structure the problem for coding.

Rather than ask them about the experience on their resume, which they have rehearsed, get them to whiteboard the entire project and layout everyone’s role and contribution. If an applicant just had a small part, they will not be able to do it.

 

Cultural Fit

Cultural fit is talked about continuously but still gets little application. Primarily I would put this down to the fact that many employees don’t know what their culture is. A client of mine recently when around their company, which has 50 employees, and offered each one $100 if they could say what the culture was. Only one employee could, and to my client’s chagrin, printed all over the office, is the corporate culture. The message is only in words and not carried into behaviors.

  • At Zappos, an applicant who is not a local gets a free ride from the airport to Zappos’ Las Vegas headquarters. In addition to being a convenience, it is also a subtle part of the application process. During the rides, the van driver is paying attention to how the applicants carry themselves and treat them, regardless of whether their travel was pleasant or not. After a full day that includes a tour and multiple interviews, a recruiter checks in with the driver to get their impression. Hsieh said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2013, “It doesn’t matter how well the day of interviews went, if our shuttle driver wasn’t treated well, then we won’t hire that person.”

  • Elon Musk, initially, interviewed every employee last to check for cultural fit and asked employees to write a letter saying why they wished to work for SpaceX. Former SpaceX talent director Dolly Singh said that Musk told her to find the single best person on the planet for any given job, no matter the role. When SpaceX built a yogurt stand in its headquarters, Musk instructed her, “Go to Pinkberry and find me the employee of the month.” Musk also looks for candidates with a positive attitude. He also considers whether co-workers would like working with them–what he refers to as a strict “no-assholes policy.” Musk asked her, “what makes you the right person to build my company? Why should I trust you?”

Due to the failings of the interview, some people have started to use unorthodox methods to determine a candidate’s potential, i.e.

  • playing table tennis to discern their level of intensity and risk-taking,

  • have candidates drive the interviewer’s car to gauge their multitasking skills, or

  • explaining why people shouldn’t work for the company to prompts more honest conversations

 

The Measurement

What about after the interview, how do you compare the candidates? Most people write down whether they liked them or not, and do think they are a good fit, but this loses the focus. I like using a Decision Matrix to select the best candidate. Click here on how to use a Decision Matrix.

 

What if You Couldn’t Fire

An e-commerce company, Next Jump, promises never to fire anyone. A company that will not fire is forced to hire slowly and very deliberately. Jay Forte says this type of hiring model (whether or not you choose to offer lifetime employment) is something all companies should consider. “When we choose wisely about who we bring into our organizations, we need to be aware we are making a lifetime decision,” he says. “Not everyone fits in the organization. Therefore, initially choosing wisely is critical. Once chosen, it is right to think that employees will spend all of their careers with the organization – this completely changes how we think about our people.”

 

Why Should I Work for You?

Like them or hate them, millennials are the largest share of the workforce, so we better figure out how to interact with them. Because of the way they look at the jobs, unlike the baby boomers, they will not accept, “You should be happy I am giving you a job.”  They saw what happened in the Great Recession and that they are disposable, so their attitude is “I work for you, you offer me something more than money – satisfaction, career advancement, training, etc.”

I have posed the following question to a lot of CEOs, “You have the perfect candidate in front of you interviewing for a job. They have everything you need, skills, experience, cultural fit, and attitude. You are about to make the offer, and they look at you and say, ‘Why should I work for you?’” None of the CEOs have a great answer. I get responses along the lines of:

  • We’re a great company.

  • There are great opportunities for advancement at XYZ.

  • We have a great workforce.

These sound good, but if this person is interviewing with several companies, all the companies are probably saying the same thing. You know none of the other companies are saying:

  • We are an awful company

  • We are offering a dead-end job in a dead-end company

  • The people here are terrible and will never go anywhere because they are so bad.

So how do you distinguish yourself from the pack? You better be able to answer this question well and authentically to get those “A” players.

 

Onboarding vs. Waterboarding

Over 70 percent of employees regret their decision after the first day of a new job! No one I have ever met has started work at a new company, not excited about the opportunity and the change for a fresh start with upside. If by the end of the day, 70 percent think they made a mistake, that should tell you how fantastic most onboarding processes are. I experienced such a great onboarding experience many years ago as follows:

  • I arrived and sent to HR to fill out reams of paperwork (they could have sent them to my house, and I could have come with them completed).

  • Taken to security to get my badge – took an hour

  • Brought to my desk to find out that my boss was away on business for the week. No one knew what I was supposed to do, but there were four binders on the desk full of information on some prior deals that I was supposed to read.

  • As I was during my “probation period,” my computer could not be connected to the network, so all files were transferred on disks.

  • I was not allowed to order business cards until my probation had ended, even though I was heading to Asia for a large conference the following week.

I was one of the seventy percent, which was thinking, “What the hell have I done, why did I move.”

By the time the probation period is over, the marriage is over, and the employee no longer loves the company. They have checked out.

I believe it was Cameron Herold who said that his philosophy was to celebrate the arrival of a new employee on their first day. The new employee would be asked to bring their Bucket List. The company would commit to helping the employee realize one item on their Bucket List during their first year. Helping didn’t mean paying for it, but rather seeing how the company could make it possible. People value experiences over money, and if you did this for your employees, they would appreciate you much more than any bonus you can give them.

Finally, onboarding doesn’t end on the first day, but it continues for more than the first year with regular check-ins. The check-ins are to:

  • reinforce that the employee knows what you expected of them,

  • they have the resources that they need to do the job;

  • they understand the company’s culture and values and are living them.

Good luck recruiting, and may your success rate increase.

 

© 2019 Marc Borrelli All Rights Reserved

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5 Ways to Use Email Automation to Boost Traffic

5 Ways to Use Email Automation to Boost Traffic

Every single business in the world wants to evolve and grow. This will happen using a variety of techniques and strategies. In 2022, digital marketing is more than a household name, and most companies will adopt at least a few ideas when long-term planning and coming...

Profit and Revenue are Lousy Core Values

Profit and Revenue are Lousy Core Values

As I mentioned last week, I am down with COVID and tired, so spending more time reading rather than working. I read Bill Browder's Freezing Order this weekend, and I highly recommend it. However, at the end of the book, Browder says that oligarchs, autocrats, and...