Team Building

Team Building – 7 Steps to Success

“We are going to build a team”. Replace the word “team” with the word “house” – or any other noun that can be built and will take more than just a few minutes – and most sensible people will want to adopt a structured approach.
Plans will be drawn up and approved. People will receive copies of the plan and efforts will be made to ensure everyone understands it. Progress will be monitored against the plan. Lessons will be learned along the way that will be used to improve the next phase. Anything less will lead at best to mediocrity and underachievement.
So why is team building so often treated in an ad hoc manner? You wouldn’t take bricks and mortar out, show them a good time and expect them to rearrange themselves into something better just because they had a nice break. So why expect a group of people to do any better?
The only answer to that question with any merit is that bricks can’t think and people can. Which sounds like management by abdication. Or perhaps management by trusting to luck. It certainly doesn’t sound like a structured approach.
So if taking people off for some fun is not team building – what is it?
Traditional away day options are team bonding exercises – and that is different. Take a group quad-biking, paint-balling etc and it will help bond the participants through a shared experience. You can even justify its use of some of the training budget if you like by claiming it has helped them develop as a team. Just don’t believe it – or you’ll be disappointed to discover that while the group is closer it is no more effective.
No – if you want to build a team rather than just bond the individuals closer, you need a structured process. You need to decide before you start what improvements you want and can realistically expect the team to achieve. Next you can decide how long it will take to achieve those results.
Often, fun remains a key objective for such a session. If it is the only one – or is only combined with a desire to get the team to become closer – organising a team bonding session is an ideal solution. If, however, your expectations are set higher than that – then you need something more structured.
So what are the key characteristics of a genuine team building session? I suggest the following 7 steps will lead to success:
1) Have definite session and longer-term goals and know how the session goals lead to the longer term ones.
2) Use an engaging and varied base activity that involves each participant in something that he or she enjoys doing.
3) Use an activity that achieves that engagement while having genuine parallels to the workplace and has relevance with the session goals.
4) Select an activity that requires the same kind of skill sets and team approaches that are needed at work – albeit one that is removed from the work itself.
5) Consider using an independent (internal or external) facilitator – to allow all levels to join in as equals and to avoid it feeling like a “sermon from above”.
6) Debrief using a predefined process that highlights the workplace parallels and allows the participants to extract their own learning rather than be preached to.
7) Use a proven mechanism to transfer the learning back to the workplace, ideally integrated within the debriefing process itself.
If none of these seem important, you are probably looking at a pure fun bonding session. Whether that is a trip to the nearest (or furthest!) bar or something that offers the group an experience that all of its members will enjoy doesn’t matter too much.
But if any of them do seem important, then I’d suggest that they all are. If one or more are missing then your team building session will be compromised. And that’s a word that sits well alongside mediocrity and underachievement.
Copyright 2005 Sandstone Limited

Alan is Managing Director of Sandstone, a leading UK team building company. He enjoys creating innovative activities that combine fun with genuine team development. In his spare time, he does voluntary work for the RNIB.

http://www.sandstone.co.uk

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Fun In The Workplace

How do you add fun or humor to the workplace? Well, there is no simple answer and it is certainly takes more than just adding it to your mission statement or job description.
Let me give you four examples of fun and not-so-fun workplace environments in the Las Vegas casino business. I have first-hand, inside experience with each of these major casino properties owned by four different companies. These examples can be applied to work environments outside the hospitality and gaming business.
Property A. I expected to find a fun environment in their workplace. For years I had seen cute, clever, funny advertisements enticing you to come play at their casinos. However I experienced none of that fun and joy in the actual workplace. Obviously, the people in casino marketing and the people in gaming operations were not the same people. To establish a climate of fun it has to be something that happens across the board in your company.
Property B. This was a company that was trying hard to recruit fun, smiling people. They were aggressively on the backs of new people if they were not smiling enough. I was scheduled for an interview with the casino manager and was told by a new employee, “Don’t let it bother you that he never smiles.” I sat through the interview and sure enough, he talked about the importance of smiling, but he never cracked a smile himself! I took a friend to the casino floor later that week. His response when seeing the demeanor of the employees, “Geez, where is the funeral!” And he was right, not a smile to be seen. The sad thing was that this was a casino where they wanted to do the right thing. It was a casino where they had one of the best trainers in the business. But you cannot dictate smiles for the employees when the leadership at the top does not walk the talk and where the supervisors are suffering from terminal seriousness.
Property C. On a night shift, two supervisors with personality differences got into a verbal fight. Fight is the right word. It was very loud, rude and nasty. And this was in front of the customers. Although this had happened before, to a milder extent, nothing had been done about it. Hiring the right people is important. Getting rid of the wrong people is probably even more important. Or at least you need to be dealing with the negative behavior and changing it. Along with that is truly promoting people on merit for the right things and not falling into the easy trap of promoting people primarily on seniority. Head-under-the-rug management is never an effective way to create a fun environment. Proactive involvement is critical.
Property D. I found that this was a fun place to work. The employees liked each other. The employees liked the supervisors. The supervisors joked around. The casino manager smiled a lot and appeared to be happy. The focus of training was ensuring that the guests AND the employees enjoyed being in the casino. And it worked. It was part of the mission statement and the philosophy was lived from the top down.
When you are in a fun workplace, you know it. When I lived in California, there were two grocery stores near my home. I always shopped at the one where the employees appeared to love their job. At the other store, they were just going through the motions. Happy employees draw customers like a magnet.
Property E. A casino I walked through last month impressed me. They had an area in the casino, let us say it was called the Party Room, with slot machines and table games. And I clearly noticed how strongly the employees were living the theme. The employees truly seemed to enjoy their work. I was always greeted by eye contact and smiles. I was consistently invited to join a table if I was standing behind it just watching the play. The behavior and quality of the employees was distinctively different from most other casinos. I do not know what their secret was, but suspect they worked hard to hire the right people, put their best people in the Party Room, and ensured that the top management led the way by example. It does not happen by accident. A fun work environment is usually created by design and led from the top down.

Copyright 2005 by John Kinde.
John Kinde is a humor specialist who has been in the training and speaking business for over 30 years specializing in teambuilding, customer service and stress management. Special reports available: Show Me The Funny — Tips for Adding Humor to Your Presentations and When They Don’t Laugh — What To Do When the Laughter Doesn’t Come. Humor Power Tips newsletter and articles are available at http://www.HumorPower.com

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A Day in the Life of a Customer

A consumer gets out of bed, visits the bathroom, has breakfast and rushes to the car to leave for work.
They have a one hour lunch break in which they need to grab a sandwich at the local deli and visit the bank. Time is limited, but they believe they can accomplish these chores in an hour.
They leave work and drive to the bank, the normal ten-minute journey takes twenty minutes and then they cannot find a parking space. Having eventually parked the car they arrive at the bank. There are two tellers on duty and there are five people in each queue. They wait for at least ten minutes before they get to the teller, who shows little empathy to their problem and processes their transaction. They now decide to skip the deli and lunch and return to work in a slow line of traffic. Once back at work they have a miserable afternoon, before facing the traffic jam on the way home. A typical day in the life of a consumer? It could be your day.
The key in today’s competitive climate is to ensure you invest in your team to ensure they are the best ambassadors you can have when they deal with your customers.
Communication includes some simple, but effective steps:
1. Let every team member know your vision and philosophy as a business.
2. Have team meetings once a week and share the ‘chair’ between key team members.
3. Product knowledge training should be on a regular basis; it’s essential to give your team members confidence.
4. Have an empowerment policy in your business to ensure your team feel they have responsibility and are valued.
5. Reward success.
6. Benchmark success so everyone has set goals.
7. Be consistent in your implementation.
Remember, it starts at the top, but is experienced at the grass roots.
Retailing is about putting yourself in the shoes of the consumer to allow you to empathise with them; we have all been in situations where salespeople have shown no empathy to our life stresses and we have often taken out our disgruntlements with these salespeople and become vigilante customers, whilst the salesperson has no idea what they have done wrong.

John Stanley is a conference speaker and retail consultant with over 20 years experience in 17 countries. John works with retailers around the world assisting them with their merchandising, staff and management training, customer flow, customer service and image.

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The Intrapreneurial Environment – The Top 10 Steps to Create It

1. Understand what you mean by intrapreneurialism in your corporation.
Before setting out to create this environment you had better know exactly what is sought. What are you looking for from your staff and what are the desired results?
2. Revisit your corporate vision, mission and values (or develop them!).
Appropriately chosen and fully understood, these help staff understand where your company is going and which opportunities might represent the stepping-stones. Your values define the behaviours and standards expected to be demonstrated in everything done in the corporation’s name. Are your corporate vision, mission and values appropriate for developing an intrapreneurial environment or do they need amending?
3. Is your workplace free of interdepartmental and interdisciplinary turf-protection?
If your people are to be continually alert to opportunities for all departments of your corporation, opportunities which they ensure are followed up, there is no room for action to be compromised by petty jealousies. Think of the way in which teamwork too will benefit following elimination of these toxic emotions.
4. Review your staff retention figures and do what is necessary.
Why would you develop the nation’s most intrapreneurial staff only to have them hired away by the competition as soon as they become effective? Compare your staff turnover with similar corporations, practices, businesses and strive to be the continental leader in staff retention. Look at the quantity of work and number of staff. Are the figures compatible? Consider wages, salaries, working conditions, staff training and development, the degree to which your people are acknowledged and encouraged to stretch in terms of personal and professional development. Do what is necessary to make your corporation a Sustainable Workplace(tm).
5. Develop descriptions of your target markets, target clients for today, tomorrow and the era beyond.
Continually collect information about your target markets. Not only who, what, where and expected developments but what do its representatives read, where do they go and what can you contribute to help them reach their goals? Who are your most profitable clients or accounts today? How do you see this changing in future? Who do you enjoy working with? What new markets are you anticipating? Is there a client sector which creates so much friction you will not serve it? Who do you want to add to your client list? Who do you want to delete?
6. Do all staff understand the range of services and products offered by your corporation?
How can opportunities be maximised unless everyone understands what the corporation produces and wants to produce? What sort of problems does your business solve? Ensure that all staff, regardless of their positions, can describe these characteristics of the corporation and more importantly, their benefits for customers. Give everyone in the company the language of your industry regardless of their primary responsibility and why not include some of your suppliers and customers/clients to enable them to make referrals with more confidence?
7. What guidelines will you give staff on the time to be spent on intrapreneurial activities?
Your staff are already fully committed during the working day applying the primary skills for which you employed them. How much time may they devote to intrapreneurialism and when? Will each person follow up the opportunities they recognise or alternatively refer them to a designated person or department?
8. Collect stories supporting your corporation’s expertise.
Ensure that extraordinary achievements during each campaign, project, contract, start-up are recorded: the ‘firsts,’ unique approaches, innovations, incredibly fast deliveries, techniques which significantly reduced costs or increased quality. This information adds zest to promotional and networking conversations and is also great ammunition for brochures and responses to Requests For Proposals.
9. Install systems to support the intrapreneurial effort and avoid duplication.
Ensure there is a model for ensuring that each lead is followed by one person only. Arrange a referral model for people able to recognise opportunities but less comfortable in pursuing them. What else do you need to have in place? Do it!
10. Reward intrapreneurialism.
How can you encourage an intrapreneurial attitude among your staff without the rewards of successful entrepreneurialism? Alternatives are not limited to financial incentives. Options might include involvement with the project, recognition before peers, a celebratory dinner for staffer and partner complete with limo service, donations to staffer’s favourite charity, a leader’s jersey/T-shirt/jacket based on the idea of the Tour de France’s ‘maillot jeune.’ Are there reward alternatives uniquely right for your business?

Copyright CoachVille
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martin Sawdon of Coaching-Works! has a passion for the creation of super-successful organizations – Sustainable Workplacesâ„¢. As a coach he has been described as a velvet-gloved bulldozer and as a speaker, powerful, engaging, outstanding.
To learn more about Martin and Sustainable Workplacesâ„¢, Sustainable Relationships, and the Sustainable You, visit his website ==>http://www.coachingworks.ca

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Intrapreneurial Staff – The Top 10 Steps for Developing Them

1. Share with staff your definition of intrapreneurialism and intention of
fostering it throughout the corporation well before the plan is complete and
the details fixed.
Poll staff’s fears, seek their input and suggestions: create an
atmosphere of excitement and support.
2. Revisit with staff your corporate vission, mission and values.
If these do not permeate the organisation like the rings of a tree,
take the steps necessary to make that happen.
3. Have staff developed their own personal missions, visions and values?
If not, help staffers create them. Should the two be mutually
exclusive, then it is in everybody’s best interests to help those concerned
find another corporation in which there will be no conflict.
4. Have your people developed strong Personal Foundations and do they live
according to the Irresistible Attraction model?
As part of your professional/personal development program offer the
associated courses to your staff. Help them to be their best in every area
of their lives, including the promotion of your corporation.
5. Have client sectors with whom the corporation will not work been
identified and discussed with staff?
On the one hand we clearly want to avoid bringing in work which is
simply going to create friction, but on the other, your people may have
another perspective which eliminates the problem.
6. Give your people the language to express the business of your corporation
in simple terms as well as the appropriately technical.
Do this not just for their own area but for every production department
of the operation. The more they share your business and its achievements
with all around them, the more people in their lives will understand the
work of your company and the more leads will come from completely unexpected
sources.
7. Help staffers effortlessly introduce themselves.
Help your people to effortlessly introduce themselves to individuals
and groups not in terms of what they do, but the benefits they bring to the
corporation’s clients.
8. Help staffers effortlessly introduce your company.
Help your people find the language uniquely right for them to introduce
your corporation to individuals and groups in terms of the benefits of its
range of services.
9. Present or arrange a networking workshop for staff.
Have them learn networking skills, teach them about relationship
marketing, have them practice asking the open-ended questions. Follow up
with group coaching sessions to help staff find the right language for each
situation, to disengage from fruitless conversations and to reprise any
interactions which didn’t go as well as anticipated.
10. Where do staff go, to whom do they speak, what do they read?
Intrapreneurialism is not for inside the head only. Your people may
already be surrounded by untapped business opportunities. Their lives
outside of work may not change at all but they will be more alert to
opportunities as they arise and the way in which they present themselves
will attract more business enquiries. Help them develop their strategies for
capitalizing on all the opportunities, existing and as yet unrecognised.

Copyright CoachVille
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martin Sawdon of Coaching-Works! has a passion for the creation of super-successful organizations – Sustainable Workplacesâ„¢. As a coach he has been described as a velvet-gloved bulldozer and as a speaker, powerful, engaging, outstanding.
To learn more about Martin and Sustainable Workplacesâ„¢, Sustainable Relationships, and the Sustainable You, visit his website ==>http://www.coachingworks.ca

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Random Word Brainstorming

When I was first exposed to this method, I was somewhat skeptical. The occasion was a brainstorming evening to generate new ideas for my book’s title. As our group gathered, A hypnotherapist colleague of mine, suggested this innovative brainstorming approach.
With the topic identified beforehand, the process began with a member of the group being asked to open a dictionary to any page. He then randomly selected a common noun, which was written on a flip chart. Each person was asked for a single word that he or she associated with that noun. The group was then asked to suggest associations between each of these words and the topic, accelerated learning. The words flowed in amazing quantity. We repeated this process a few times.
Why did this technique work so well? It’s really quite simple. In a typical brainstorming session, when members of a group are asked to come up with ideas or solutions to a problem, their minds access their memory banks and download what is already known about the issue. Introducing the random word method forces the mind to find a link between dissimilar things. Because of the gap between the random word and the topic, ideas may be quite unusual, or even off-the-wall. As the group members build on each other’s ideas, they generate more creative solutions.
This method is fast and simple, and usually leads to ideas that are more creative than those generated from the classic brainstorming format.

International speaker, Dr. Brian E. Walsh, is the bestselling author of Unleashing Your Brilliance. For much of his 30-year corporate career he was involved in human resources, specifically training.
While living in the arctic, Brian studied anthropology and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), which prepared him for working with other cultures. He was then transferred to China where he served as his company’s GM.
After his return to Canada, he elected early retirement to further his earlier interest in NLP and hypnotherapy. He returned to formal study, and within four years had achieved his Ph.D. His dissertation, which focused on accelerated learning techniques, inspired his passion and his book, “Unleashing Your Brilliance”. Information is available at http://www.UnleashingBook.com
Dr. Walsh regularly conducts workshops on accelerated learning. He is a master practitioner of NLP, an acupuncture detoxification specialist, an EFT practitioner, and a clinical hypnotherapist.
Subscribe to his monthly eZine, “Enriched Learning” at http://www.UnleashingBook.com

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The Imporance of Teams

Many start ups require a founding team. It is practically impossible for one person to have a broad enough skill set to start a successful new venture. I am a huge proponent of teams. I am a strong believer in the fact that no person is an island and that it is much better to have a smaller piece of a bigger pie than a large piece of a much smaller pie.
So who do you need on your team? Where do you find them? What values and characteristics are most important when forging your team?
Who do you need on your team?
First thing you need to do is objectively look at yourself and your own skills and abilities and compare that to what you need to start this venture to see where the gaps are. Are you a good sales person? Organizer? Accounting & Finance? Marketing? Researcher? Writer? Speaker? These are just some of the fundamental areas you will most likely need while planning and launching your new venture. It is hard to critically analyze your own skills and abilities so you may need a third party to help you, there are also tests online that evaluate what type of entrepreneur you are and what other types of entrepreneurs you need to add to your team (check out http://www.peoplethatclick.com/).
There may also be specific technical roles you need to fill on your team (such as software engineer, website designer, etc.). You need to make the decision in the beginning whether these key roles will be paid positions or are they so critical to your venture’s success that you should be making them a partner.
Where do you find them?
This is possibly the hardest question, where do you find good partners? Well the internet has helped make this a lot more feasible to reach a larger geographic area. Not all of us are fortunate enough to be in entrepreneurial hubs like Route 128 or Silicon Valley (or the top entrepreneurship college for that matter) so you need to keep that in mind while you are searching for your team. Also, keep in mind that friends and relatives may seem willing and able at first to be a part of your new venture, but, I highly recommend that these are the people you are most critical of in adding to your team. Many friendships and family relationships have been torn apart by new ventures that began to turn sour as one person began to not pull their fair share of the weight (which is bound to happen in almost all scenarios).
Networking is crucial, keeping a good contact management system (as simple as collecting business cards from people you meet and writing a short summary of who they are on the back) so you know who people are and what they are interested in. Attend events and forums as well as chamber of commerce events, take a class on entrepreneurship at a local college and network with your classmates, post a classified ad, getting yourself out there is perhaps the most important thing of all! Countless potential entrepreneurs are so afraid of people stealing their idea that they do not tell anyone and their venture never goes beyond a concept. Tell as many people as are willing to listen to you! You never know who knows that certain someone that will become your ideal new business partner and help make your vision a reality.
There are some great key resources for building a team online. A quick search on Yahoo! for forums relating to entrepreneurship or small business will get you started in the right direction in terms of networking with folks online. A free classified ad on Craigslist will begin to generate potential partners if you know specifically what you are looking for and can post an effective ad. If your partners are not located locally your start up can still be successful, services such as Skype (free voice telephony & conferencing), instant messenger, or email help make the world a much smaller place and can provide effective means of communication and file exchange. In fact, some new ventures find they are more effective with their time by utilizing these communication methods as opposed to sitting in the same room together with their partners from 9-5.
What values and characteristics are most important when forging your team?
If I was a venture capitalist the stock answer would be that they attended an Ivy League school, have either an MBA or engineering degree, and have launched at least one highly successful new venture. However, seeing as how for most of us finding someone with those qualifications is not an option in the start up phase I am going to throw out that list of criteria completely. You need someone with integrity, with knowledge and experience in the functional areas that you are most lacking, with drive and the entrepreneurial hunger, someone you can work well with but who will challenge you, and most importantly someone that agrees with your gut. On this area you never want to go against your gut feeling, our subliminal mind picks up things we may not at first and hence the “gut feeling” is often right on the mark in this area.
If something inside you tells you this person may not be the right partner, do not let them be a part of your new venture. Countless people make this mistake (including myself), always go with your gut instincts on this issue. On a side note, do not be swayed by individuals who approach you bragging about their immense personal network of connections and how they can contact numerous individuals who will greatly help your venture. Contacts in many instances are nothing more than a business card or a friend of a friend of a friend; while in some cases they may pull through, do not put as much faith in other individual’s “contacts” as they would lead you to believe…just a lesson learned through personal experiences multiple times.

Dan Marques is a young entrepreneur who is involved in multiple start-ups as a founder, investor, and consultant.
He writes daily about entrepreneurship on his blog http://startupguide.typepad.com

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Teambuilding by Visiting the Internet

How do you build a team that is already present? The least you want is that the members understand each other. That is an essential first step in team building.
This can be done by an external assessment. Companies are not equipped to do this by themselves, nor should they focus on these kind of activities, which occur sporadically. And there is another benefit by using a third party.
But first search for a simple online organizational assessment. In such an assessment you will have your team respond to a series of “difficult” questions about their organization (either focussing on the current situation or a new one). Take for example, this question and think how you might respond:
There is a new solution available on the market. Your organization is already involved in a project with a fixed deadline. However, the new solution will give you a lot of extra features and will bring more innovation. What is your response?

“We continue with the project as is and park the new development for later concern” (A).
“We start a new investigation, it could be the opportunity we are waiting for” (B).

Different team members will respond differently to such a question. Reckon what will be the outcome if you have fourthy of them.
Normally the result of such assessment will be measured in various dimensions.
Than you should present the results to the individual members. And additionally you could set up a workshop to discuss the outcome of the group. Not to learn the individual answers (that will reduce the incentive to participate), but focusing on where the team is aligned and on what issues the team in out of balance.
The discussion in such a workshop will serve as a teambuilding event. You could do this with or without a predefined benchmark. A benchmark will help if there is a strategy set, otherwise you can leave this open if you want input for new possible directions.
Internet is a powerful means of providing such alignment tools. And they are there in different options. The benefit of using a third party is that they can be independent.
© 2005 Hans Bool

Hans Bool is the founder of Astor White a traditional management consulting company that offers online management advice. Astor Online solves issues in hours what normally would take days.
You can apply for a free demo account

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The Importance Of Developing A Training Program For Your Company

It is important for companies to develop a good training program to keep their staff motivated. Training may cover a wide range of reasons from new-hire training about your operation, to introducing a new concept to a workgroup to bringing in a new computer system.
Whatever the reason for conducting a training session, it is a must that a comprehensive, ongoing and consistent training program be developed in order to keep your staff motivated about learning new concepts and keeping your department profitable.
A formal new-hire training program, with an overview of the job expectations and performance skills needed to perform the job functions, is an essential part of a complete training program.
A new-hire training program provides essential knowledge and understanding of the position and how the position fits within the organizational structure. The new associate will better understand their impact on the organization if he or she has good background knowledge of how one workgroup interrelates with ancillary departments.
A good and reliable new-hire training program starts with the creation of a sound and comprehensive training manual. A manager or supervisor must keep the associate in mind while writing the training manual.
It is also important that it is interesting so the associate will actually read it. It is highly advisable to use graphics and to deviate from normal “corporate” language. In computer training, it is essential to incorporate a visual image of a computer screen to illustrate a function.
A good training manual must act as a building block of practical and technical skills needed to prepare the new individual for his or her position.
A manager or supervisor must ensure the department manuals are kept current in order for the department to understand current policies and procedures. It must also include any system enhancements and/or change in policy or procedure.
On the Job Training or OJT is another form of a new-hire training program wherein a potential associate trains directly next to an existing associate. OJTs allow the new associate to see first hand the different facets of the position.
Through an OJT, the new-hire will have the opportunity to develop a working relationship with an existing associate. Concepts learned in the initial training are reinforced through OJTs.
Continuing education is another aspect of a comprehensive training program. In fact, a good training program should make it an ongoing responsibility of the associate in a department. Continuing education will keep all staff members current about policies, procedures and the technology used in the department.
Studies have shown that associates will only retain approximately 40 percent of the information learned in the initial training session.
That’s why a continuing education program for a department is just as important as the new-hire training. A continuous effort, either formal or informal, must be placed on reminding the staff about various procedures and concepts.
Common practice on informing associates about the need for continuing education often includes a member of management sending a memo to each associate.
Another, more informal way is to send a one-page information sheet to staff. The information sheet, called a training alert, should be informative and presented in a non-threatening manner. If the policy or procedure changes, therefore, the informal approach would better prepare the department to receive this presentation.
With a new-hire and continuous education as part of your company’s training program, you could be sure that your associates will grow well in your company.

James Monahan is the owner and Senior Editor of
TrainingWebs.com and writes expert
articles about training.

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Hiring On Attitude Gives Your Business Altitude

She had a nice smile and attentive eyes.
That’s what I noticed about the waitress at the Italian restaurant we visited the other night. After first asking permission to explain the restaurant’s menu in detail because we were first-time visitors, she thoughtfully pointed out special dishes, made her own personal recommendations and added emphasis to the specials of the night.
She had a nice smile and attentive eyes. Those two traits are important. I could have hired this young woman to do many different jobs in many industries. She has the prerequisite every employer wants in sales, marketing, finance or personnel.
That nice smile and fully present look told me she had a good attitude about work. The prerequisite is attitude. Attitude is the one thing we can’t change in employees. You’ve got a good attitude or you don’t. Given adequate ability and desire to learn, everything else can be taught to employees with good attitudes. I have tried many times to teach good attitudes and have come to the conclusion it is about as easy as making a mud fence.
How do you find employees with good attitudes?
It’s simple to understand. You look for them. They are everywhere.
• They are behind the teller counter at the bank.
• I’ve seen them at BestBuy selling computers.
• I’ve spotted them volunteering for their favorite causes.
• You’ve struck up a conversation with them working out at the gym.
• He showed up to fix your cable TV problem.
• She solved your insurance claim problem over the phone.
You have an employee(s) with good attitudes. Ask them about who they know that might want to work in your organization. Ask those with good attitudes because they hang out with others with good attitudes.
When you spot a good attitude try this technique. Simply say to the person, “You have a terrific smile and attitude. My organization is always looking for people with attitudes like yours. If you are looking for a change, please call me”, as you hand over your card, “ keep up the good work.”
The above message delivered correctly will, at the minimum, be the high point of the recipient’s day. It may be the next step on a career path.
For you, delivering the above message may be the first step to finding more employees with good attitudes. You can’t find gold without looking for it.

Doug Emerson trains consults and coaches business owners on how to make more profit in less time using 8 key strategies. He writes a free electronic newsletter about the business of life called Getting to the Point. Free subscription available at the homepage. http://www.douglasemerson.com

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