Five Benefits of Losing Your Star Players

My team is undergoing a tremendous amount of change as several of our long-term, star players are moving on to other opportunities both in and outside the organization. For several years the composition of my team has remained relatively stable but now we’re entering a new phase of growth, which is both scary and exciting. It seems like each day I’m having the old Abbott and Costello “Who’s on first?”conversation with my managers, as we try to sort out who’s going, who’s staying, and how we’re getting our work done.

It’s easy to get discouraged when top performers leave your team. The immediate reaction is often to look at all the challenges that lay ahead — How do we replace the intellectual capital that’s walking out the door? Who is going to cover the work while we hire replacements? Will the new hires be able to match the productivity and contributions of the previous employees? All those questions swirl through your mind as you ponder the endless hours you’re going to have to invest in recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and training new team members.

Rather than being discouraged, I’m energized and looking forward to the future because the long-term benefits outweigh the short-term difficulties. Here’s five benefits I see to losing top performers:

1. It proves you’re doing something right. Huh? Doesn’t it mean that something must be wrong with your leadership or team dynamics if you’re losing your top people? Well, if you’re a toxic leader and your team’s morale and performance is in the tank, then yes, there’s something wrong. But if you’re doing a good job of leading it means you’re hiring the right talent and developing them to high performance. I take a little pride in knowing that other leaders see the immense talent I have on my team and they want to hire them away.

2. Your team is better off for their contributions. The contributions of my star players have helped raise the level of professionalism, productivity, and capability of my team over the last several years. They have redefined what “normal” performance looks like and we’ll be looking to existing team members and our new hires to reach that same level. We are better off for having them on our team and I believe they are better off for having been on our team.

3. It provides a chance for existing team members to step up. Losing valuable contributors is an opportunity for other team members to step up their game, either by moving into higher levels of responsibility or by taking on short-term duties to cover the gap. When you have several high-performers on a team, it’s easy for other valuable team members to get buried on the depth-chart (to use a football metaphor). Losing a star player allows second-team players to step into the limelight and prove their capabilities.

4. You can bring in new blood. Having long-term, high-performers on your team brings stability and continuity. However, stability and continuity can easily become routine and complacency if you aren’t careful. Hiring new people brings fresh perspective, a jolt of energy, and a willingness to try new things you haven’t done before. Teams are living organisms and living entities are always growing and changing. I see this as a new era to bring in a fresh crop of star players that will raise our performance to even higher levels.

5. It facilitates needed change. Bringing in new team members is a great time to address broader changes in your business. You have new people who aren’t conditioned to existing work processes, systems, or ways of running your business. They aren’t yet infected with the “that’s the way we’ve always done it around here”virus that tends to infiltrate groups that stay together for a long time. It’s a time to capitalize on the strengths and ideas of new team members to help you take your business to new heights.

Losing high-performers is never easy but it doesn’t have to be devastating. I’m grateful to have worked with star players that are moving on to other challenges and I’m excited about developing a new wave of top performers that will lead us in the years ahead. It’s time for change…Bring it!

Counter-Offers Are a Sucker’s Play

By Kris Dunn · 03.15.2013

Retention is important for organizations.

Paying substantially more for the talent that’s currently sitting in your office is a total sucker’s play. Don’t confuse the two.

Let’s break this down a little bit. You found that diamond in the rough. You hired them, nurtured them and grew them to the point where they’re relevant in your industry, their profession, etc. Or maybe you just bought them from someone else at a price you considered at the time to be fair, right?

Either way, after a couple of years with you, they have more value on the open market. That means people are going to ping them and see if they can strip them away to another company. At which point many managers and companies start freaking out, even in reaction to the potential of a slightly above-average talent leaving the company to go to work for a competitor.

It all comes down to replacement cost. Can you find another cog to fill the gap with? If you can, you don’t freak out and you don’t counter with a raise that gets into the 20% range to save the referenced employee with another offer in hand.

In the Talent game, there are really two types of employees that warrant a counter-offer when they’ve told you they’re getting ready to accept an offer from another company:

Great Creators = the people who create what you sell, and I mean truly create. In a lot of companies, those are software developers. Good creators in any type of company that produces products and services are worth ten of their peers.

True Rainmakers = not salespeople in general, but people who have the ability to bring in business in a way that an average salesperson can’t. Generally, these people have networks that have been formulated in a way that’s different from the average sales pro. Normal sales pros bitch about the quality of the leads. True Rainmakers never seem to give a flip about the leads marketing is producing. Hmm.

Not everyone who creates or sells for a living is special. In fact, most are average. BUT – when you find a top tier creator or rainmaker, they are different. They can drive results for your company in ways that others can’t.

That’s why they’re the only people you should counter when they appear to be seriously considering another job. Everyone else’s replacement cost is too low to freak out about.  Accounting, Marketing, HR, Operations, Customer Service – you only save people in these areas if they qualify somehow as a creator or a rainmaker. Few will qualify.

Four final thoughts about retention and counter-offers:

1. You should pay people aggressively/fairly and provide career paths so talent can grow and get theirs at your company in at time frame that’s fair. I’m not talking about playing hardball when you pay people at the 17th percentile.

2.  You create a culture over time related to how you handle resignations and counters. If you always go into save mode, there are a lot of people who play games. If it’s crickets when even a solid player brings their notice, you’re going to stop “I’m taking another offer” games.

3.  Your tendency to freak out over average people resigning means you haven’t institutionalized knowledge transfer and operational soundness. The knowledge is in the average person’s head and nowhere else, thus your freakoutedness (that’ a word, I just made it up).

4.  For a great primer on who Creators and Rainmakers are and who is replaceable, look to the New England Patriots. Their creators are Tom Brady and Bill Belichcik, and everyone else (and they mean everyone) is replaceable. The goal should be to have our stuff together as organizations to the point where we can replicate great results with different talent – while protecting the creators/rainmakers.

Retention and counter-offers.  Don’t confuse the two.  Counters are a sucker’s play in most cases. If they’re not, we’ve got to look at our organization to find the answers why.

http://fistfuloftalent.com/2013/03/counter-offers-are-a-suckers-play.html

Managers often think that they have reached a career level where they have been magically imbued with the gift of giving a good job interview. It doesn’t work that way.

By Stephenie Overman

FORTUNE — What songs best describe your work ethic? How many cows are in Canada? A penguin walks through that door right now wearing a sombrero. What does he say and why is he here?

Those queries come from the Top 25 Oddball Interview Questions for 2013, as compiled by the job hunters’ website Glassdoor. Allegedly, they’re all actual conversational gambits used by corporate interviewers.

You may think such questions could produce useful insights. Or you might see them as off the wall. But are your interview questions any better?

Managers tend to think of interviewing job candidates as “something that’s easy,” says Pamela Skillings, president and chief trainer at Skillful Communications in New York. Believing they’ve reached a career level where they have been magically imbued with the gift of giving a good job interview, such managers wing it and fail to prepare questions that will reveal the best potential employees. All too often, they get a penguin in a sombrero.

“They end up hiring someone who costs the company a lot” in wasted training time and salary expenses, Skillings says. “You try to fix the mistake you made in the interview process. Then you have to fire the person or move them into a different role, and you have to start over.”

A bad interview “hurts the manager first,” Skillings says. “A bad hire is going to come back to bite you.”

Some managers try to protect themselves with vague questions of the “tell-me-about-yourself” variety. But experts say such prosaic questions produce answers of little use.

Before you sit down with job candidates, “you need a great shopping list” that lays out what you need to know about each applicant for a particular position, says Mel Kleiman, author of Hire Tough, Manage Easy and president of HR consulting firm Humetrics, which is based in Sugar Land, Texas. It’s basic stuff, Kleiman says: “Can you do the job? Can you do the job at the degree of excellence needed? Will you do it? Can you and I live together? If you are hired, can you put up with our culture and [can] we put up with your personality?”

Those aren’t the interview questions, Kleiman says. They’re templates you can use to design questions whose answers will tell you, “Is this person right for the job and is this job right for the person?”

Rather than focusing on eliciting the answers they need, inexperienced interviewers often ask rote questions that “bounce along the surface without getting to know the real person behind the interview hype,” says Paul Falcone, author of 96 Great Interview Questions to Ask Before You Hire. “There’s not much rhyme or reason to their questioning techniques” and they ask the same basic types of questions to all candidates for all positions.

Falcone’s examples of rote questions:

• Who was your favorite boss, and what would he or she say about you?
• Which position was your favorite and why?
• Why do you think you’d want to work here?
• What questions can I answer for you?

Effective interviewers ask “behavioral” questions, according to Skillings. They use phrases such as, “tell me about a time, give me an example,” she says, because the way a person reacted to a past situation may be an indication of what he or she will do in the future.

So, “instead of asking ‘Are you a good negotiator?’ it’s better to say, ‘Tell me about a negotiation and how it went.’ Get a real example. Probe for details. Get to the heart of what you need to know,” Skillings says.

Falcone agrees. “We need objective diagnostic indicators of an individual’s probability of succeeding within our organization.” Otherwise, interviewers are “left picking from among people who may sell themselves better than others.”

Falcone’s examples of effective interview questions:

• Walk me through the progression in your career leading me up to what you do now on a day-to-day basis.
• What makes you stand out among your peers?
• What criteria are you using in selecting your next employer, including the industries you’re considering, company criteria, and the roles and titles that you’re pursuing?
• If you were to accept a position with us today, how would you describe that to a prospective employer five years from now in terms of your career development and longer-term goals?

Ask questions that “reveal a candidate’s level of career introspection,” Falcone says. “Do they know what they want? Can they articulate their career history in a clear and compelling manner?”

During the interview, really listen to the candidate, Kleiman says. “You’ll never learn anything while you’re talking.”

If hiring people isn’t your main job, don’t be afraid to ask for help, recommends Skillings, who teaches workshops and online courses on conducting interviews. “We see a little bit of attitude from managers” at the beginning of training, she says. “`I don’t need this, I know how the deal works.’ By the end, they realize they didn’t know things, or were rusty.”

http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2013/03/08/why-so-many-job-interviewers-are-terrible/

As a restaurant manager for over 20 years, I hated snow days. I was told there had to be enough staff on to cover whatever business came in, but, make sure you meet payroll projections for the end of the week. In other words, you can’t use having little or no sales for one day as a reason to blow your budget.

It doesn’t take a math genius to realize you can’t do both… yes, you can have a skeleton crew on, but that would mean you cut the host or hostess, you call the dishwasher and tell him or her to stay home, you keep two cooks on, because you will be seating guests as they walk in and probably tending bar, because the bartender isn’t going to come in when there won’t be any tips.

So what do you do?

The staff at Twin Peaks in Omaha will go on Facebook and post a picture of the girls outside making a Twin Peaks snow girl or servers posing with winter hats. They get immediate results, hundreds of “likes” within an hour of posting. I’m guessing they did a little more business than the restaurant down the street who trimmed down to 1 or 2 servers. So, we all don’t have pretty girls with skimpy uniforms to photograph in the snow. What can you do to make your restaurant stand out and how can you bring in new guests ?

Applying the core principles of project management to your hiring and training practices is one of the best ways to both attract and retain qualified hospitality staff with a positive attitude. “Plan and execute,” the mantra of accomplished project managers, refers to the second and third phases of traditional, or phase-based project management, which are all about strategy.

Here are some tips to help you create an effective strategy for hiring the best professionals for your establishment.

1. Set clear and precise hiring and retention goals. How many people do you need to build your dream team, and how are their duties divided? Will your team members acquire new skills and responsibilities throughout their tenure at your establishment, or are their roles fixed from the start? Remember, while setting goals, that the hospitality maxim of “hire the smile and train the skills” is only as useful as you make it; and that means defining in words, what a positive employee attitude looks like in practice.

   Bear in mind that it probably won’t look the same for every employee, especially those with very different skills and responsibilities. So don’t just list general personal attributes; place your ideal hires in challenging, position-specific situations and describe their speech and actions.

2. Get organized. Take inventory of the resources at your disposal, including available project-management tools, hiring budget, and time-frame. Schedule plenty of wiggle room for unexpected obstacles: a surplus of qualified applicants, budgetary changes, employee illness, hard-to-reach applicant references, etc. Then, start planning your interview process.

   Be sure to include at least three or four behavior-based questions, such as “Tell me about a time when a stressful situation got the best of you at work,” or “What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made as a server/front-desk manager/chef/concierge/etc.? How did you remedy the situation?”

3. Use role play. Any major change to your interview process merits a practice session with a team member or fellow hospitality manager, particularly when first adding tough questions, such as those above, to the roster. As your establishment’s representative and manager, you are firmly in charge of the interview dynamic, and deploying forced questions will get you forced answers.

   You may also want to role-play with applicants when posing your challenge questions. Pay attention to the entire person as he or she responds; body language, tone of voice and facial expression are all powerful indicators of attitude.

4. Keep the lines of communication open. Your supervisor, current team members, and even professional competitors can help you refine and revise your hiring process if you keep an open mind and seek out their expertise, experiences and feedback. Meet regularly with front- and back-of-house staff and establish interdepartmental communications protocol, whether via email, project-management tools, or shift-change documentation. Recognize strong employee performances in front of other staff members, and thank employees frequently for their service and loyalty.
5. Initiate new and existing employee training. In any high turnover industry, consistency in quality and kind of services rendered, particularly when integrating new hires, is best established by ongoing employee training sessions and performance incentives. When crafting training sessions, seek your team members’ input. Ask them what “soft skills” comprise a positive attitude and how they recognize those skills in practice. Solicit feedback on the most challenging aspects of customer service in your establishment and consider formalizing, with recognition or award systems, employee best practices.
6. Stay flexible. Seasoned project managers know better than to expect perfection of any person or process. Instead, they find humor and opportunities for personal growth in every possible outcome. If your first round of interviews or new hires is a flop, step back from the experience, make note of where things went wrong (mistakes are usually attributable to inadequate planning or preparation), and revise your strategy accordingly.

Finally, never forget that attitude flows downhill from the top. Staying open to acknowledging and learning from your mistakes will insure that your attitude remains positive and your employees will follow your lead.

This guest post is provided by Ren Lacerda who works with University Alliance on behalf of Michigan State University and University of Florida covering topics on Hospitality Management and Human Resource Management. You can follow Ren on Twitter @RenMarketing.

HR managers and headhunters see huntress of resumes each day from all levels of restaurant managers. They quickly stop looking for the right or perfect resume format. A properly laid out resume does not guarantee that the candidate will be a successful restaurant manager.  The most the resume format can identify is your personal choice.

10 second commercial

The resume should not be a job description. The HR manager knows the restaurant manager’s job description and assumes that if you’ve held the job, you’ve done the tasks. The recruiter wants to see where you’ve been, and your level of experience. They want to know whether your skills have developed a General manager, kitchen manager, etc… But if nothing catches their eye than they will move on.

At the most, you have 30 seconds to capture the recruiters attention. This is probably much shorter later in the day, and may be extremely short Friday afternoon.

Success and Accomplishments

Save the task details for the interview. Your successes will highlight your skill base, strengths, and weaknesses. They want to know the impact your decisions made on the bottom line.

Did you save the restaurant money?

Were you a problem solver?

Are you a team leader/trainer?

Will your skills save the company money/reduce outsourcing?

Did you increase revenue, reduce costs, reduce overturn?

Are you good at marketing and customer retention?

Are you a good organizer, planner?

Are you a good problem solver?

Do not try to be everything for every HR manager. Identify your greatest strength and focus on the skills and experience that show your ability to handle problems, and find solutions in this aspect of the job.

Tips and Advice

Instead of listing:

- tasks – focus on the outcomes

- education – highlight leadership skills

- achievements – recognize awards and acknowledgements

- experience – outline your personal development

It is important to realize that you won’t win every job in the job seeker campaign. It is dangerous to try to be ‘everything to everyone’ and hope to get ‘a bite’. Instead of trying to get ‘a’ job, work to win ‘the job’, your dream job.

Once you’ve developed the skills needed to manage a restaurant, successfully, and develop a strong team who are motivated and goal oriented, it is time to sell your skills.  The restaurant manager’s job requires good communication skills, and the ability to present projects and reports in a way that will sell ideas to the team, management, investors, and to the customers who walk through the doors each day.

The resume is the first place you have to highlight your skills.

Identify Yourself as a Serious Candidate

HR managers are less interested in what you have done for others, or what you have learned. They are interested in seeing what you can do for them. If you’ve followed this blog then you’ve seen multiple places that discuss your personal development. Invest some time in personal development. Listing coaching, courses, and career development steps you’ve successfully completed is a great way to alert HR managers to the fact that you are aggressively and seriously focused on becoming the solution to the restaurant’s problems, not another problem.

Identify Yourself as a Team Leader

The days when managers barked orders and punish poor performance are over. Today’s manager needs to develop their communication skills. They need to be able to motivate and encourage, not push. The stakes are high. The cost of replacing disgruntled employees is staggering. The cost of investing in training, and then having an employee leave because they do not feel empowered, fulfilled, or challenged is immeasurable.

A manager needs to be able to develop their team, encourage and motivate them, and create an environment that encourages longevity.  Even when this is done, the good manager understands that the team’s personalities, boundaries, and personal habits can undermine the team. They learn to identify problems and create solutions that will empower the team, and encourage them.

They understand that the reason to build a strong team is to reduce the loss caused by employee overturn, days off, conflict in the workplace, and resentment directed toward management.

Understanding these is only half the battle. It is important to learn how to condense that information into your resume. It is necessary to understand which skills will make your resume stand out above the crowd.

Leadership is a learned skill. The myth of the natural leader halts too many restaurant manager careers and discourages many restaurant professionals from aggressively seeking better jobs in the hospitality industry. In reality, the only true obstacle to becoming a restaurant manger is knowledge. Everyone may be at different stages of the leadership learning curve.

The plugged in leader understands the ‘life force’ behind a strategy and can anticipate what may go wrong, problems they may face, and create exit strategies, or a ‘plan B’. They divert problems before they evolve, and have prepared their team to execute a plan of action at a moment’s notice.

Here are 10 questions that will help you determine whether you are a critical leader and place you on the learning curve.

•           I am/not interested about execution within the group of people I am currently in.

Take the time to answer this honestly. Do you have influence and can guide people to perform better? If you are interested then you make things happen. If you are not interested then things happen around you and you ignore them, or gossip.

•           The organization is efficient.

If everything is good enough then you have no execution plan.  Can you see places where things can be improved. Can you envision and can imagine improvements. Do you have suggestions for improvements in every aspect of your life? Do you walk into a job and achieve more results than your predecessor

•           I enforce consequences of ineffective execution consistently

The problem with enforcement is that it imposes your level of integrity, belief system, and perceptions on another person. It is a self centered form of leadership management which disrespects those who are not fitting into your plan. Once this happens those around you stop believing in your dream. They lose their motivation. The strategy looses synergy and any serendipitous opportunities are lost as the team either abandons their leader, or withdraws inside themselves and stops contributing.

The Critical Leader learns how to motivate and reward good behavior, motivating their actions based on results. This forward moving form of leadership produces results. When a leader focuses on correcting inappropriate behavior they are in fact doing nothing more than trying to solve problems by force.

•           I break projects down into measurable, result focused goals

The final result may be the culmination of several goals. Leaders who fail often try to execute too many goals at one time. Leaders who succeed put all their efforts into achieving results. The successful completion of a goal is merely the symptom of an effective leadership strategy.

By Marty  Tarabar  

Bob told me about his amazing experience at Chick-Fil-A in a mall food court and I had to see it for myself.  The normal food court experience is walking up to a counter, having a teenager asking “what can I getcha?” giving you your food and giving you a farewell of “have a good one”.

I sat in the local food court for about 20 minutes on the Saturday before Black Friday. Each of the food court stands had staff at the counter. Sbarro’s manager was making pizzas and his one hourly kept shuffling back and forth in to the back of the store. The Asian food stand had two employees standing around heads down, doing some food prep. McDonald’s seemed to have a full crew, but no one was smiling and an assistant manager was doing some training with a new employee, pointing out the menu board above their head.  Did I mention no one was smiling?

Pan over to the Chick-fil-A. There are 4 smiling teenagers behind the counter with a shift manager moving between the counter and the kitchen. They are waiting there to greet every guest who came by with a big smile and a ”How are you doing today?”   I watched as one of the teens took a mop to the floor behind the counter (it was only 11am) and then dutifully wash her hands at the hand sink. She then went to the customer’s side of the counter and wiped down every area a customer would see or touch.

As food orders were completed they would hand the customer their food and respond with “my pleasure” when thanked by a customer. The teens behind the counter even hand delivered food  to the mother with little children who was getting them settled at the food court table, smiling all the time, even when the customer was not looking.

I walked up to the counter and placed my order. The young man repeated my order back to me, gave me the correct change and told me it was his pleasure to take care of me. He asked my name, so when my order was ready he could find me.  In no time at all another teen walked to me with my sandwich and said “thank you Marty, here is your order”.

I sat down, started eating my sandwich and then one of the girls from behind the service counter, walked out in to the food court with a basket of condiments and asked each customer if they needed more ketchup, or salt or if she could refill my beverage!

I tracked down the franchisee, who is at his location every day to compliment his staff and ask how this was happening.

Mike Endicott owns and operates a single Chick-fil-A. He has over 20 years of experience with McDonald’s and then a few years with Chuck E Cheese, before purchasing his franchise.  “It’s all about hiring” he said.  “look around this food court, there is no one working at any of these stands I would consider interviewing, let alone hire”.  Most of his teens are referrals, his smiling happy teens know other smiling happy teens. “You can’t teach personality”  Mike continued.

A pleasant greeting, a sincere smile, a ‘my pleasure to serve you’ attitude, table service, offers to refill drinks, this is what I expect when I dine at a sit down restaurant. I was pleasantly impressed by how Chick-fil-A got it right at my local mall.  Good job Mike!  I’ll be back and I will make sure I tell others about  your restaurant.