Biz 101

When to Say No

During my almost 40 years in the business world I have seen a lot of people derail their careers by not knowing how or when to say no. I know this may sound strange because conventional wisdom says that to get ahead in the business world you should say yes to your supervisor and to your customers. While that is generally the case, I have seen a lot of careers get torpedoed because someone said yes to a request when they should have said no.

Many times people get in trouble by taking on tasks for which they are ill-suited or for which they don’t have the time to do properly. By trying to be perceived as a team player and taking on a task that they shouldn’t have, I have seen more than one career damaged or even destroyed. I’m not saying that you should say no to requests from your manager or a key customer often but when the request is for more than you can reasonably deliver you’re better off to nicely say no than to say yes and let down your supervisor or your customer.

When considering saying no, clarify the request being made of you to ensure that you fully understand it. What are you really being asked to do? How will success be measured, exactly what do you need to do to do the task properly? Do you have the proper experience to do the job? If you do all of the above and you conclude that you aren’t the best person to do the job, and that you might fail at the task, explain this and politely decline.

Sometimes you have the proper skills to do the task but you still should decline it if you don’t have the time to do the task correctly by the due date. I had a manager who once reported to me who tried to curry favor with me by saying yes to each and every task I assigned to him. This person thought that by accepting every task willingly that he would get ahead. Unfortunately, he took on more than he could do properly and after he made several major errors I had to terminate him. When I explained why I terminated him he was puzzled. He couldn’t understand how saying yes to my every request could lead to his termination. I explained to him that he should have told me that he couldn’t do the tasks properly rather than either doing them wrong, or late.

As mentioned above, if you decline a task presented to you by your supervisor you need to do so tactfully. Take the time to review all of the other tasks you currently are working on with your manager so that he or she can see that you are being prudent, not lazy.

Learning when to say no might just save your career!

How to Ruin Your Career

Since graduating from college in 1976 and getting into management in 1978 I have seen a lot of young people succeed in business but I’ve seen a much larger number of people flounder or outright fail. There are only a few ways to succeed in business but there are a lot of ways to fail. Here are some of the ways I have seen people destroy their careers. Avoid these bad habits:

· Not hitting due dates. One of the surest ways to destroy your career with me is to develop the habit of not being on time. Whether it is turning assignments in late or getting to work late, if you develop the bad habit of being late this will kill your career at most companies. My father used to tell me it was better to be an hour early than one minute late. So many people think that being on time is optional anymore that you will stand out versus your peers if you are simply on time.

· Excuse making. My father also used to say, “There are two things in life: results and excuses. If you don’t have the results, I don’t want to hear the excuses”. Most bosses don’t want to hear excuses and if they hear them often enough your career will be short-lived. When you make a mistake, admit it. Don’t make it worse by coming up with a long, drawn out, convoluted story to try to avoid taking the blame. When people who report to me do this they don’t report to me for long.

· Not responding to phone calls and emails on a timely basis. Given that most of us now have cell phones, tablet computers, and laptops, there is no excuse for not responding to phone calls within four hours and not responding to emails within 24 hours. If you regularly make your boss follow-up with you because you didn’t respond to a call or email on a timely basis you may as well start looking for a new job. In this tepid economy bosses have too many other options to put up with an employee who doesn’t respond in a timely basis.

· Telling a customer off. I have overheard employees of mine telling a customer off when a customer irritated them. I don’t know why anyone would think they have the right to tell a customer off but I have seen too many people do it over the years. As the legendary sales trainer and motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar, is fond of saying, “When you’re tempted to tell off a customer remember that you can feed your ego or you can feed your family, you can’t feed them both”.

· Not being prepared. When I first was promoted into management from a sales job in New York I walked into my new boss’ office in Dallas without a notepad. He looked up at me and told me to go get a notepad and never come to his office again without one. His point was that I should take notes on our conversations so that I don’t forget what was said. Suffice it to say that I never walked into another meeting with a supervisor (or a customer) without a notepad.

· Lying. Nothing will end a career with me faster than lying to me. Once I feel like I can’t believe every word someone that reports to me says, I have no use for them. Resist the temptation to shade the truth and always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

· Not learning from mistakes. Another saying I love is, “The only thing worse than learning from a mistake is not learning from a mistake”. I don’t mind if someone learns from a mistake as long as it’s an honest mistake and it doesn’t happen a second time. When someone repeatedly makes the same mistake that tells me that they are sloppy, stupid, or both. In any event, I have no use for them.

· Not “doing your homework”. One of my longtime mentors stressed to me, and the other people who reported to him, that you never meet with a customer or supplier without “doing your homework” prior to the meeting. By this he meant that you should find out as much as possible about the person you’re meeting with. This may mean looking up earnings reports from your public suppliers or looking in your computer system to see the sales trends with one of your customers before meeting with that customer. Better yet, have a CRM system and check it for the latest information on your account before you meet with them. When you just “wing it” at a meeting with a supplier or customer it rarely works out well.

There are a lot of other ways to get fired but these are the top ways to lose your job if you work with me. What other career killing moves bother you?

Other Mistakes I’ve Made

My last post on “my biggest mistakes” caused me to think about some other big mistakes I’ve made that I thought might be helpful to share. Here are some other things I have learned the hard way:

Improper delegation. Delegating a task to a subordinate without giving clear directions on what needs to be done isn’t delegating, it’s dumping. Don’t dump tasks on subordinates. Explain what needs to be done, and when it needs to be done, but resist the temptation to say “how” it should be done. Manage results, not technique. Your subordinates won’t learn much from a task if you detail every step of how to get it done. Plus, by the time you finish detailing every step you could have done it yourself, thus defeating the benefit of delegation.
Not monitoring delegated tasks. Especially when a new manager is first doing tasks you’ve delegated you should check in and see how the task is progressing. This way, if your associate didn’t fully understand the task you can get him or her back on track before they get too far down the road in the wrong direction.
“Selling” your company during the interview process. When I first became a manager and had to learn how to interview I had to be one of the worst ever. Instead of asking a small number of open-ended questions and listening/taking notes during the responses I spent most of the interview “selling” the candidate on our company before I had established that the candidate even fit our profile. Tip: When interviewing strive for a 25/75 mix, i.e. you shouldn’t talk more than 25% of the time and the candidate should speak approximately 75% of the time.
Jumping to conclusions during an interview. Again, when I first started in management if I was interviewing a candidate with a similar background I tended to be less critical and spent too much time talking about our mutual background. Over time, I learned that I should keep an open mind until all of the questions on my list had been answered and the results were in from the background check and the testing we use.
Poor management of subordinates. As I am not by nature a detail oriented person, when I first got into management, I tended to hire people and then “throw them to the wolves” instead of spending time training them and ensuring that they went to appropriate training classes. Your direct reports do not learn by osmosis. They learn by exposure, access to learning tools, and training classes. Don’t skimp on any of these things with a new hire, no matter how busy you are.
Not doing monthly meetings. I mentioned in one of my early posts that the legendary former CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, said that the most important management tool he employed in his career was the face-to-face monthly meeting. While I use e-mail heavily, I do a face-to-face meeting with each of my direct reports monthly. This gives them the opportunity to talk to me at length about not only business subjects, but personal ones. Having done monthly meetings for over 30 years I can unequivocally state that I agree with Andy Grove.
Not getting a new hire back on track at the first sign of poor performance. Sometimes when we hire people and we see they aren’t doing as well as we hoped we don’t always intercede immediately. The natural tendency of many managers is to hope that, somehow, the new associate will get back on track on the room. Rarely does this work. When you see that a new hire, or someone you’ve just promoted, isn’t performing as you expected, sit down with him and restate the objectives for the position and ask what you can do to help. Believe me, this is much less time-consuming than starting the hiring process all over again.
Skipping steps in the termination process. When you’ve tried everything you can think of to salvage a struggling employee with no success, and you don’t have any other options for this person in your company, then termination is inevitable. The only thing worse than having to terminate one of your reports is to bungle the termination. Always speak to a labor lawyer or a labor law consultant to review the planned termination to ensure that no important steps have been skipped and that you aren’t asking for a wrongful termination lawsuit. Never fire in anger and never terminate someone hastily. If you do, sooner or later, you will likely regret it.

These are some of the other mistakes I’ve made that I thought of after my last post and after getting some feedback about it. If you have any other mistakes to share, please let me know.

My Biggest Mistakes

I have made a lot of mistakes in my career but I learned a long time ago that the only thing worse than learning from a mistake… is not learning from a mistake. I always feel good anytime I can save someone else from learning something the hard way. Below is a list of some of my biggest mistakes. I hope I can save you from learning them the hard way.

Not firing fast enough. I have mentioned this in previous posts but it bears repetition. I have never regretted firing someone but I have almost always regretted not firing him or her sooner. No matter how painful it is to fire someone and to find their replacement, once your gut tells you that you have the wrong person in a position and you have nowhere else you can put him, terminate him. However, be sure to do it with dignity and respect.
Not firing someone for disloyalty or theft. I have caught people being disloyal or stealing and given them a second chance. I have always regretted it. My experience has been that if someone will be disloyal or steal from you once, they will do it again. Get rid of him the first time and save yourself a lot of heartache.
Hiring a warm body. Sometimes you have a position open and are having a hard time filling it. Don’t compromise and hire a warm body. Until you have a candidate who fully meets the position specification, don’t fill the position. You are better off working overtime than cleaning up the messes created by someone who didn’t fully meet the job description.
Skipping steps in the hiring process. Again, when you have a position that needs to be filled ASAP resist the temptation to skip steps in the hiring process. For example, don’t fail to do a background check, reference checks, drug screen, etc. Most of the time when I have skipped a step in the hiring process I have regretted it.
Not saving for a rainy day. I once heard a speaker at a convention recommend to business owners that they put 10% of their annual earnings in a separate savings account for rainy day. I’m glad I listened to this advice, because if I hadn’t done that I probably would already be a victim of the current recession. It’s always good to have a rainy day fund, both personally and professionally.
Not having succession plans in place. Good sports teams always have a lot of “bench strength”. Your business should be no different. You should have a succession plan in place for all key positions and you should have people already on staff to be able to step into key positions as they come open.
Skimping on training. It has been said that if you think education is expensive, try ignorance. Truer words have never been spoken. Don’t skimp on training for your staff or for yourself.
Being lax on credit. I have bought companies only to find that there were no credit applications on hand for any customers. Over the years, accounts were opened for customers without requiring the completion of a well-written credit agreement. I have probably seen more companies fail due to excessive bad debts than any other reason. Being strict on credit keeps you from having catastrophic losses and sends the poor credit accounts in your industry to your competition where they ding them instead of you.
Arguing with a customer. The customer is always right… especially when he’s wrong. No one ever won a fight with a customer. I don’t care how “wrong” a customer is you will never win the argument. Not only will you lose that customer and make an enemy for life but that customer will tell everyone he knows his side of the story, and believe me it won’t be flattering to you.
Not spelling names correctly. When I was starting out in sales I sent a letter to a prospective large customer without verifying the spelling of his surname. His name was Craft and I spelled it Kraft. I got back a scathing letter informing me that if I couldn’t even spell his name correctly how could he trust me to sell him millions of dollars’ worth of products a year? The thought of that situation still makes me wince and it happened over thirty years ago.
Not reporting bad news immediately. Fine wine gets better with time but bad news only gets worse. When something bad happens to you or your company report it to your stakeholders immediately. A few months ago we had a surprisingly bad month and I let our banker know at the end of the last day of the month even though I didn’t have to report our results to him for 30 days. I immediately got back a reassuring e-mail stating that while he didn’t like to hear our bad news he appreciated my telling him as soon as I knew it. Two months later he renewed our revolving line of credit.
Being overly optimistic with budgets. I am an optimistic person by nature but I have found that being overly optimistic with budgets isn’t smart. Banks set your loan covenants off of your budget in most cases so if you budget too aggressively you will end up with loan covenants that will be hard to meet. And in this type of economy the last thing you want to do is not meet your loan covenants.
Not cutting back fast enough at the start of a recession. Most businesspeople don’t want to start cutting expenses and laying off people at the first sign of a possible recession and I understand that. However, after three successive bad months you are probably looking at a recession and you need to cut deeply and quickly. If we hadn’t laid off 35% of our employees in November of 2008 we wouldn’t be in business today.
Not reassigning or terminating people who you have outgrown. Some people who were fine when your business was doing $5 million a year are no longer capable of doing their job when your company is doing $50 million a year. You should try hard to find another position for those types of people in your business, but if you can’t, you need to let them go. Yes, it’s painful as you generally have gotten to know them and their families but it’s more painful to let your business pay the price for retaining a person who has hit their ceiling.
Buying from too many suppliers. Sometimes it’s tempting to buy from every supplier with the latest hot product. However, my father taught me long ago that it’s better to mean a lot to a few instead of a little bit to everyone. Plus you don’t have to meet with as many suppliers. Try to buy from as few suppliers as possible and you will also have a lot more clout with those suppliers.
Trying to get the last nickel from every deal. Drive a hard bargain but don’t try to take the last nickel in every deal. Make sure that your supplier ends up with a profitable deal because unless the deal is mutually profitable it won’t last for long and you will have to start the negotiating process all over again when the supplier you squeeze too tight stops doing business with you.

I certainly have made more mistakes than the above but these are some of the most painful. What other mistakes have you made? Please share them with me and my readers.