Friday 17 August 2012

ONE THING YOUR COMPETITORS DO NOT HAVE



It is no longer news that the greatest assets an organization can ever have are the right mix of people, what is news now, is the ability to harness and effectively utilize these talents. It is one thing to have a pool of talent, and another to bring out the best out of the pool for the common good of the organization and its stakeholders.
Talent management in both small and medium organization is source of concern as either the boss becomes a mini dictator or doesn’t understand the concept at all. The 21st century entrepreneurs that must be successful should posses or imbibe a skill for finding the right people, then motivating and managing them to achieve greater significant results. The best way to achieve this is to come up with a simple but effective system.
THE TALENT SYSTEM
A business or organization needs a Talent System that is based on the key principle that there are three elements to the expectations from staff. These elements are:
Attitude
Skills
Responsibility
Attitude is far more important than anything else. It has to do with honesty, enthusiasm, friendliness, desire to learn and a host of others.
Skills are what the people need to know, what they need to be good at, in order to do their job effectively and efficiently. Examples of skills may include: communication skills, networking, writing letters, programming computers, data analyses, operating machines, driving a vehicle and a host of others.
Responsibilities are our expectations from them at different times and levels. For instance it is the responsibility of a marketer to meet his/her marketing target every month. This responsibility can only be carried out effectively amidst the right attitude and with the right skills.
Talent management all starts with attitude. If employees are recruited based on their attitudes, then trained with the necessary skills to take on responsibilities as there come, it will be a lot better and easier than having employees with the right skills then trying to ensure they have the right attitude afterwards. It can be frustrating. Imagine having a staff with the right skills but very dishonest and fraudulent? It is better to have one without the skills but honest, dedicated, and upright. He can learn the skills on the job. Employees with the right attitude will pick the required skills at a fast pace because the attitude usually determines the altitude.  But it will be pretty difficult if not impossible to change one with terrible attitude. As entrepreneurs, one of the most important signposts to watch out for in all dealings is the attitude.
Your team and the future
Most start-ups hardly imagine that there would be anyone other than them handling the business, as such fail to do a holistic plan for the future. It is honestly very easy to fall prey of never designing what the company will look like in future. Some people just add one person here, one person there, without recourse to planning. It would help most businesses if at the early stage, the owners can develop the structure of the kind of company they are building then work back from there to how it should be now. Ie, designing your business in reverse – see the end from the beginning.
You could start by itemizing the responsibilities that will need to be taken care of when the company eventually blossoms. The responsibility list for the big picture might be:
·          Manage existing customer accounts
·          Identify and research new customers
·          Approach new customers
·          Win business from new customers
·          Communicate with local press
·          Communicate with shareholders
·          Do newsletters
·          Update the website
·          Manage external supplies
·          Recruit new talent
·          Train talent
·          Effective and efficient administration
·          Invoicing
·          Debt recovery
·          Pay suppliers
·          Plan finances
·          Manage finances
·          Prepare monthly management accounts
·          Test products for quality
·          Provide certain services
·          The list is endless
It is certainly not the case that each responsibility represents a person’s job; it is just that it needs doing by somebody. Each employee will of course be saddled with many responsibilities. It is then important to allot these responsibilities according to groups as represented in the company e.g marketing, production, finance, sales, administration, support services etc. At least you have a rough organi9zational chart for the future with all the tasks broken down to the various groups. Copy onto a sheet of paper to keep and make reference to.

The present team
The next step in this system is to repeat the exercise above only this time to fit the current organizational circumstances.
Go through the list allotted each department, unit or group and begin to remove the tasks that are not currently needed in the business. Once that is done, you would be left with responsibilities that need to be fulfilled now.
The Talent cake
As a result of the way some start-ups commence their business, they usual do not see the need to put in place a formal system to define jobs and assess the performance of employees. Honestly it is not everybody that can handle freedom as such people need to be guided and controlled. The only way to do this effectively in a company is by setting up a simple system to outline expectations and requirements. To get a good system, you have to look out for one that will strike the balance between simplicity and effectiveness, and avoid creating boring, complicated paperwork.  Let’s consider the talent cake system.

Picture the Talent Cake
The talent cake is three layers stacked one above the other, getting smaller as they go up. Usually drawn on one side of the paper, it is everything need to define the employee’s job and make your assessments. Each cake is divided into slices, with each slice representing one part of the layer.











As stated earlier, the expectations from your employees re based on these three factors:
Attitude
Skills
Responsibilities
Attitude, is the bottom cake, the base on which everything is built. If their attitude is poor, then their output will be dissatisfying. Likely attitudes for team work include:
Honesty
Enthusiasm
Helpfulness
Keenness to learn etc
Divide the layer of attitude into slices of qualities you expect from your team. The quality of attitude should be such that fit into your company attitude generally.
With skills, you identify the range of abilities you expect the team to display during the course of duties. Skills can be learned, so the team members can grow their skills as they are in the organization. The range of expectations could include: Proficiency in the use of MS-Word, Corel draw, power point presentations, data base management, concept development, etc.
Responsibilities are on top of the cake, which rests upon Attitude and Skills, because being able to meet their responsibilities depends entirely on the other two. Responsibilities are particular tasks and assignments or expectations of work. This layer might include: meet monthly marketing target of N2, 000,000.00, produce xyz quantity of goods every two weeks, increase profit by 20% every quarter, etc.

Tuesday 14 August 2012

UNLOCKING THE LEADER IN YOU


In this article, I am not gonna be talking about what a leader is and not; you might have read a lot of books that would have explained that to you and I am not here to contradict what you might have read.
Some people would tell you leaders are born while others would tell you that they are made. A friend once told me that everybody cannot be a leader because we must have followers.
We are all born to lead but in different ways and styles, the general commander who leads his army to war and the peace maker who wants everybody to live in peace are all leaders but with different cause. Anyone can be a leader if he/she is suitably driven to a particular cause.
I have made researches over time and found out 13 highly significant leadership qualities; ranging from INTEGRITY to SENSITIVITY which I am going to discuss with you next week.
Today we are going to be discussing what you need to know about good leadership and how to unlock the leader in you. One thing you need to know is that in every individual, there lies unlimited potentials waiting to be unleashed and until these potentials are utilized, you can never live that fulfilled life you want for yourself.
Leadership sometimes comes to people later in life, and this is no bad thing. Humanity tends to be generational characteristic. There is no real obstacle to seek to become a leader if leadership is approached with proper integrity.
As a leader your responsibility extends beyond leading the people. True leadership also includes as far as your situation allows- the responsibility to protect or refine fundamental purpose and philosophy.
A leader should be brave enough to talk when lesser people want to fight. Anyone can resort to threats and aggression. Being aggressive is not leading. It might have been a couple of thousands years ago but it is not now.
As a leader, your main priority is to get the job done, whatever the job is. Leaders make things happen.
Before you can even become a leader, you must know yourself.
There comes a time in every life when one must search out his or her life’s purpose. Once you become clear about your purpose then strive daily to invest time and energy toward its fulfillment. You cannot afford to spend an entire day without doing something directly related to accomplishing your purpose.


Know your own strength and weakness so that you can build the best team around you. Take time to listen to and really understand people. Walk the job. Ask and learn about what people do and think, and how they think improvement can be made.
If I continue telling you what good leadership is and what it takes to be a good leader, we might remain here till the coming of Jesus Christ. But the important thing is developing yourself, that way you can unlock the ‘sleeping giant’ in you.
Whether you believe it or not, you are a genius. But you will never learn to develop and control your genius unless you believe you possess it. Everyday more than 2,000 ideas pass through your mind and each time you act upon an idea you are exercising your powers of genius.
Every action produces a reaction and these reactions eventually produce results. In other words, by acting upon ideas, you awaken the leader in you, hence producing and creating results in your life.
NOTE: Your purpose will not somehow miraculously fulfill itself, and every day you neglect to work toward it represent a day longer that it will take you to reach your desired destination. The fastest route to good LEADERSHIP is SELF DEVELOPMENT.
                                                                                                                                  
                                                                                                                                      Sadiq Daniel
                                         

Monday 13 August 2012

WHAT QUITTERS ARE AFRAID TO DO


“Where is my inhaler?” I asked myself. I am used to losing little things like this. The other time, they were my keys. You never can tell of what importance little things like these can be in your life until you lose them (might even cost you your job).

Okay! Here I am still in search of my ‘inhaler’ when I stumbled on a book I bought some years back covered in dust. I must tell you, the book changed the way I think and if you haven’t read it, you should.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People written and inspired by late Stephen Convey, who died this year; May his soul rest in peace.

The book is a very good book. It inspires and motivates you to be proactive and follow your dreams, but ‘Big daddy’ omitted one habit, PERSISTENCE. Yeah! Persistence, without persistence, we wouldn’t have great men like Thomas Edison, Brian Tracy, Joe Girard, Ken Blanchard and even Stephen Convey.

Many people fail to achieve because they quit before the desired results have been obtained. Every effort we make produces a result, yet seldom do our initial efforts yield the end results we seek.

No great achievement, or great failure, for that matter, has ever been attained without persistence. There are many reasons why people fail to persist but we shall only examine two; their causes and how to avoid them and also discuss how to develop persistence and why it is an indispensable quality of a highly effective person (someone that gets what he/she wants out of life).

FAILURE: one thing quitters don’t know about failure is that it is never failure until it becomes accepted as such. Remember Thomas Edison, after thousands of attempts to create the electric light, he (Edison) didn’t consider any of his unsuccessful attempts as failure. 

In your search for success, many obstacles will stand between you and your goal. Don’t abandon your goals; instead consider altering the path you are taking to reach them. If you persist, eventually you will find the road to success.

FEAR OF REJECTION: rejection is a natural by product (except you are introvert) in life. Persistence is the only protection you have from the painful effects of rejection, for you can’t waste time licking your wounds when you are busy pursuing your prey. Like a bull, develop a thick horn not easily penetrated by the blades of rejection, but be intelligent enough to identify and charge the real target rather than the empty excuses that are sometimes used to divert you.

Persistence is one of the greatest principles of success; if you persist long enough you will win and I am sorry for the ‘quitters’ who are afraid to persist.

As a person who thirsts for success, you must possess a fierce initiative that allows you to make things happen. Do not possess a sheep’s mentality, waiting around until someone else prompts you to act; be the lion and take care of yourself.

Quitters have settled for something different from their dream just because they are afraid to persist. The road to success is not smooth; you can only make it so with persistence. Without persistence, you can never get what you want out of this life.

The blow that tumbles the oak tree is not the final blow, but a collective blow. Because of man’s impatient human nature, we often have little appreciation for the number of blows that have come in between.

Instantaneous efforts seldom produce long term benefits; it is the efforts we make over time that usually produce the most permanent results. In this way, every effort you make will produce a result even though it may not be immediately noticeable.

NOTE: whatever becomes engraved in your subconscious mind will eventually become a reality in your life.
If you are inspired by this piece, I would be glad to read your comments and respond to them likewise.

                                                                                                                            Sadiq Daniel