AchieveGlobal's blog

An Endless Trend?

By Chris Blauth I’m a frequent reader of the Wall Street Journal.  This week I saw an article about IBM that caused me to reflect on an apparently endless trend: the outsourcing of jobs to emerging markets. WSJ reports that over 70 percent of IBM’s 400,000 employees work outside the United States, up from 65 percent in 2006. The obvious incentive for IBM and others to embrace this trend is to tap into lower-cost talent in non-U.S. markets, resulting in greater profits for shareholders. Advances in technology continue to fuel this trend, of course. What does this fact mean for leaders? A thought immediately comes to mind (and I would welcome your comments): As never before, leaders need to be culturally literate. In the past, high-potential U.S. managers and their families often relocated to foreign markets for extended periods. The deep insights these leaders gained about conducting business in other cultures was invaluable in strengthening their company’s brand at home and abroad.  Today, overseas assignments are less common. Advances in technology and the Internet now allow for a vivid cultural intersection between, say, a manager in Canada and another in Greece – without either leaving home!  Below are three best practices for leaders of virtual cross-cultural groups, who do not have the benefit of a quintessential sojourn assignment:

• Work hard to understand the other cultures represented in your group.  On thing you can do is spend time on the webpage for the Center for Intercultural Learning to get better acquainted with communication styles and relationship-building in other cultures. 
• Be the emblem of your brand, always.  Represent not just the values and visions of your cross-cultural group, but also the essence of your brand in the marketplace.
• Be self-sacrificial.  Act in the best interest of the group, as opposed to solely in your own interest.

Following one or all of these best practices can take you a long way toward building strong leader-member relations that enhance communication and overall team performance. What do you think? 

Greed is good

This is a perilous world we live in. Everyone around you is a threat.

• The corporate CEO whose salary makes your company unstable. 
• The union boss whose strike disrupts your supply chain. 
• The neighbor whose foreclosed house blights your street. 
• The government whose taxes negate your hard work.
• The environmentalist whose regulations constrain economic growth.
• The customer service rep whose sense of urgency is non-existent.
• The driver whose mobile phone conversation slows your commute.
• The salesperson whose motive is to close the deal and move on. 
• The foreign country whose exports out-compete your industry. 
• And now some manager whose bonus is apparently singly responsible for The End Of The World As We Know It.

Those people are evil. They are clearly motivated by greed! But wait—aren’t we all? In his recent Wall Street Journal article, “Greed is Good,” Yaron Brook, president of the Ayn Rand Institute, wrote:

“Selfishness—that is, concern with one's genuine, long-range interest—required a man to think, to produce, and to prosper by trading with others voluntarily to mutual benefit. Rand also noted that only an ethic of rational selfishness can justify the pursuit of profit that is the basis of capitalism.”

In short, greed is the very engine that drives your company. Greed creates ambition. Without greed, your company will fail. Don’t believe it? Prove it!

• Eliminate your system of paying salespeople commissions.
• Stop any profit-sharing payouts to your customer service staff. 
• Kill any performance bonuses promised to managers. 
• Eliminate perks for large-volume clients.
• Downgrade business travel lodging to bare minimum quality.

Those might sound silly, but that’s the point. “Rational selfishness” is hard to define, but generally it means you want to give enough to keep the other person happy but keep as much as you can for yourself. Sway too far in either direction and the whole system collapses. Why is this important? Because a big part of performance improvement is “ya gotta wanna.” If an employee doesn’t CARE about improving performance, it won’t happen. What motivates your staff? Is it money? (probably) Is it respect? (yes, according to recent AchieveGlobal research) Is it that you care, too? (definitely) Then give them what they want. Even in these troubled times—or maybe because of these troubled times—people look out for #1. As altruistic and high-minded as people want to be, they are selfish. And, apparently, a little greed is exactly what our economy needs.

Soft Skills: Lace Ruffles in Today ’s Economy?

By Jack McDaniel I’ve always been slightly troubled by the fact that I work on the “soft skills” side of performance improvement. It doesn’t have a manly resonance. I’ve given some thought to wearing a red flannel shirt and cutting down a mesquite tree (we have more than a few of them in Texas) every time I create a new customer service simulation. Maybe I can work in a power tool or two in our next leadership skills model… “As you can see from this diagram of a table saw, our next key action is all about cutting through your organization’s barriers to success.” Maybe not. OK, so I’m probably overreacting. But it does raise a question of apparent value. How are “soft skills” like leadership and customer service perceived in today’s turbulent and alarming economy? Is there a place for them, or are they merely decorations in an organization’s HR wardrobe? Some would make this case. In scary times you have to pull back, conserve what you have, and resist the overreach. Forces beyond your control lead to uncertainty, and every one of your actions is fraught with unintended consequences. On the other hand, I would make the case that “soft skills” are what will see us all through hard times. With soft skills you not only retain your talent, but you grow it, benefitting both the organization and your best people. Those with leadership abilities will steer their ships though these stormy seas to safe and prosperous harbors. How else will an organization retain its external customers – and keep its internal customers happy – if not by honing their customer service expertise? And sales professionals who cannot span the gap from transactional to consultative selling will be hard-pressed to remain employed. Hard skills are necessary. The people in your organization need to know how to fulfill their job functions. But there is a danger in dismissing soft skills as lace ruffles, as mere decoration. I’d rather think of them as layers of armor, shielding your troops from the arrows of a global recession. That’s a much more masculine picture. Maybe I don’t need to chop wood now.

How to Avoid a Great Depression

By Craig Perrin I don’t care what your tenure is, three months or 30 years: These days everyone has that queasy thought, “Is my job on the line?” Whether you answer “Yes!” and you’ve already hung out a shingle, or “No, but no one is safe!” – we all want to live to pay another utility bill. Times like these unsettle even this grizzled vet, with 22 years in the same remarkable company. What have I learned about keeping my job? I’m still learning, really, but I’m willing to share five provisional rules of thumb that I’ve tried to follow: 1. Make your boss successful. Create something wonderful. Then delete your name from the title page. If your boss, like mine, has integrity, people will know who’s behind the throne. You don’t need a throne. You need a paycheck. 2. Make no one look bad. I once made a dignitary look bad by knitting my brow at his puzzling ideas. I suffered, nailed to the shed, for two years. Then I learned a lesson I once taught to cheeky college students: “Diplomacy gets you anywhere!” 3. Treat everyone with respect. My friend the janitor is a cool dude. We talk about politics. We talk about handheld mobile devices. He advises me: “Jailbreak, man. You need Jailbreak.” I value this connection more than any on Linkedin. 4. Produce something tangible every week. The best thing is a clever object that people can hold. Second best is a performance, like facilitating a tense meeting. Figure out, “What’s important this week?” Then ask, “What can I do to help?” 5. Smile when you walk in the lunchroom. I learned this at age 18 from a rogue uncle, an IBM executive. Then he uncapped a fresh bottle of bourbon and said as he poured, “One glug-glug per bottle!” I think of Uncle Jim – and that first shot of bourbon – every time I walk in the lunchroom. Or boardroom. The wisdom of the ages! OK, OK, this is pitiful advice compared to your average Sunday-supplement story on weathering the worst downturn since the Great Depression. If you have other advice, rules of thumb, whatever, please help us out! My goal is never to write a tear-stained final blog in which I confess my own Great Depression.

Confessions of a Red Carpetbagger

By Todd Beck I have a big ego, but I am not a snob. I don’t dress, eat, drive, shop, watch, or otherwise consume “as a statement.” In other words, I don’t have an iPhone. But lately I have been pretty haughty when shopping. In fact, I don’t even like to shop (see first paragraph) and yet nowadays, as one of the few people in the stores I visit, I find myself annoyed that salespeople don’t kiss my…well, ask me what I need and give me the VIP treatment. If I’ve got money to spend in this economy, they had better be especially grateful. Apparently I’m not alone in feeling that way. This recent BusinessWeek article, "Safeguarding customer service in a recession," profiles other people confused by the simultaneous reduction in customers (suggesting that companies should be fighting desperately to keep those still around) and reduction in customer service (the result of budget cuts). It’s a paradox—two opposing forces, that wouldn’t seem to co-exist, yet driven by the same bad economy. It’s the vicious cycle, the worst-case scenario. And although rationally I understand the need for cutbacks, when I’m the customer I don’t emotionally tolerate it. What’s funny is that I remember traveling in less affluent places, maybe in the Third World or in some tiny rural town in America. Yeah, the hotel or restaurant is old and tiny and sometimes even dirty, and I am lucky enough to be able to afford better. But I automatically lower my expectations to match the environment. I inherently “get” that they don’t have resources to treat me even half like I would be treated somewhere else. And emotionally I’m OK paying “too much” for lesser quality because I know they are offering their best. I become grateful for everything. Will we get to the point where we emotionally consider our vendors the same way? Will we keep lowering our expectations until whatever the staff provides is considered “their best”? Gee, I hope not. For all these decades we’ve been trying to raise the bar, improving customer service to meet rising expectations. This economic downturn has a lot to do with lowered accountability. I hate to think what would happen if as service providers we abandon that accountability, too.

Maybe This Really IS Your Father ’s Oldsmobile

By Todd Beck I’ve mentioned here before that I'm a pragmatist. So although I create videos for my YouTube channel and practically live in Facebook, I never (repeat never) use Instant Messaging. And I have a webcam (given to me free for participating in some survey) still in its original box in my closet. My wife says she thinks she wants it. Until she pushes hard, though, I'm procrastinating. So maybe I'm not a pragmatist, I'm just lazy. Either way, for me a technology must meet a need. If it doesn't, I consider it a waste of my effort. All of this makes me wonder if technology adoption is not a generational thing but just an age thing. In other words, regardless of generation, as we get older, maybe we start to prioritize more. We don’t have (or take) time for new technologies, not because they’re new but because the time required to learn them or use them won’t have the ROI we hope for. Kids love to pick up new toys which they often quickly abandon for something else. You can blame that on attention span, but I think it’s just that kids have the luxury of being able to spend time on what might turn out to be a dead end. What adult would take six months of golf lessons with absolutely no intent of ever playing after that? If the pace of technological change continues, then my 4-year-old son will eventually grow into an old man bombarded with new stuff. He’s a “digital native” who may end up just like his father—skeptical about how valuable each Next Big Thing actually is, and thus becoming very choosy. And if he does, I will be so proud.