Caras Consulting Inc.

In today’s blog post, I’m going to share what a leader’s role is in building a high performance culture. As a leader, no doubt you have a lot of responsibility and a lot of things that you have to do. I’m gonna suggest 5 things that you should be incorporating into your weekly, monthly, annual routine in order to build a high performance culture. If you are a leader who has ambitious plans to build a high performing team that basically runs itself, then sign up for my weekly email for more posts that teach you exactly how to do this.

My name is Sadaf Shaikh and I have been working with senior executives for the past 20 years up close and personal. I’ve seen some of the behaviours and qualities and characteristics that drive a high performance culture and a seen some that hinder it. In this blog post, I’m going to share what exactly those characteristics are. The characteristics that drive a high performing culture where your team works autonomously, where they manage the day-to-day, and they free up your time to focus on the strategic work and on things that are going to grow your business. 

Before we start diving into what a leader’s role is in building a high performance culture, let’s first set the set the ground on what exactly a high performance culture is. I want to ensure we are speaking the same language. Essentially, a high performance culture is one where your team manages all of the day-to-day, where you are not involved in the day-to-day decision making, and you’re not involved in fighting fires. What you are involved in is doing the things that light you up as a leader, where you’re focused on strategy and you’re focused on growing your business.

Leader’s Role in Building a High Performance Culture

Now that we’ve set a baseline for what a high performance culture is, let’s talk about what your role is in your organization.

Role 1 – Define the Aspirational Culture

One of the roles that you have is to define what your ideal culture is. That definition of what your ideal high performance culture looks like rests solely on your shoulders. Now it doesn’t necessarily have to rest solely on your shoulders but you definitely have to provide the vision to your team. The accountability of defining the culture, to ensure people that are that are coming into the organization are working in accordance with that culture, is up to you. I have a great video that I did a few months ago on how to define your aspirational culture. In it I do a walkthrough of how to define your aspirational culture. Think about where do you like to see your organization in 12 months, 18 months or 24 months from now.

Role 2 – Always Scout Talent

The second thing that you as a leader of a high performance culture should be doing is scouting talent now. I find that most leaders will wait until they need somebody to go out to the marketplace to find them. If you’ve ever struggled with hiring the right person (I know a lot of people struggle with then), this is point is for you so listen up. If you wait until you need to hire a person, you’re coming at it from a reactive position. By constantly scouting talent, you’re approaching it proactively. So, what does proactive look like? The key is to scout for potential employees no matter where you are, no matter what interaction you’re having, you have to constantly think about who could be the next person to come into organization. Who would fit your culture?

It’s funny because in business we are taught to constantly be thinking about where you can find your next client and that anyone is a potential client. Yet, we rarely think about that for our employees. We rarely think about who we could bring into the company. You could be walking a trail and strike up a conversation with with somebody who might be a future employee. Even if they’re not interested, perhaps they know someone. Plus, your existing employee population is a huge source of candidates . If you wait until you actually have a vacancy you may potentially be missing out on a really good hires who would positively contribute to your culture.

Role 3 – Building a High Performance Culture by Setting Clear Expectations

The third role all leaders need in building a high performance culture is to set clear expectations. This may sound simplistic, but if you have a culture you’re working towards, and you have certain behaviours that you expect your employees to exhibit, you have to set those expectations. There have been too many times where I’ve spoken to leaders who say things like “They’re just not doing what I want them.” And when I ask them if they’ve had a conversation with the employee about it, they say “They should know this.” No, people don’t know. They can’t read your mind and they don’t know what you’re expecting from them. So, the next time you see an employee behaving off-side or you somebody isn’t doing things the way that fits within your culture, have the conversation with them and set the expectation. For new hires coming in, proactively set the expectation by describing how you do things in your organization. .

Role 4 – Hold People Accountable

This leads me to the next point. You have to hold people accountable. Saying something one time is just not enough. People have busy lives and they have a lot of things going through their heads. Once is just not enough sometimes. You may have to repeat it. And you have to hold people accountable. If someone consistently your culture, or consistently goes against what you’re trying to build, then you have some hard decisions to make.

Role 5 – Track Your Progress Each Year

This is something I don’t see a lot of leaders incorporating, but I think is so important. Take stock every year (usually at your year end planning session) of how far you’ve come in your aspirational culture journey. Once you determine your aspirational culture goal, you need to then go back every single year and see how far you’ve come. For example, if you had a baseline customer fulfilment time of 21 days and at the end of year one you’re at 15 days because of process improvements, you have to celebrate that. Your team needs to know their hard work paid off. Another way you can take stock is to look at your calendar. As an example, from January 1st to December 31st you can see whether you have cut down the amount of time that you spend working inside the business fighting fires and working on the day-to-day operations versus how much time your spending on the strategic working.

If you’d like some support on defining your high performance culture, drop me an email at sadaf@carasconsulting.com or book a call with me here. I am here to help you if you want to bounce ideas off me or if you just want to discuss your plans for the remainder of this year.

Now I want to hear from you. Do you have anything that you have incorporated in your role as a leader towards building that high performance culture? Comment below and let us know.

In this blog post, I talk about the one tool every small business leader needs when they’re recruiting. An Applicant Tracking System for Small Business.

As a solopreneur or small business you need to invest in an applicant tracking system. An Applicant Tracking System is an online tool that helps you organize your entire recruitment effort.

My name is Sadaf Shaikh and on this blog, I talk about everything that you need to build and nurture and grow your high performing team.

An Applicant Tracking System helps you organize your candidate flow as they move through your recruitment process. You can add little notes for yourself, figure out what you liked about a candidate, what you didn’t like about the candidate. And the best part is it helps you eliminate the need for saving multiple documents in on your drive or having to print copies of resumes or interview notes or handwritten notes. Everything is contained in that one system.

I did a video on the on the Top 5 Applicant Tracking Systems that are out there in the market specifically for small businesses and I did a walk through of each one, so check out that video.

Do you need an Applicant Tracking System?

You might be thinking to yourself, hold on a second, I’m just a small business, with only a small team and we don’t hire all that often. Perhaps a person here or a person there. Or perhaps you’re a micro business where you only really hire one person every few years. So, why then do you need an Applicant Tracking System? I’m going to share exactly how an ATS Applicant Tracking System will change your life.

Now, if you know me you know I am all about organization. I’m all about putting things into a process and systematizing them so that you know exactly what you’re doing, and your processes don’t change week after week, year after year, day after day. Because the worst thing you could possibly do (and this is very prevalent in smaller companies) is have every person on the team do things in a different way each time. And because you’re a small company, you likely say, “do I really need to have a process for this because we are such a small team”. The difference is that when you do have a process for something, it automatically elevates your status. So you could still be a small company but it elevates your status from small business to a professional organization.

Benefits of an ATS

So, when I share that an Applicant Tracking System will change your life, I don’t mean it literally, but I think that it’s worth mentioning that it will eliminate all of the different things that you have on the go when you’re hiring. One thing I know for a fact is that when you are smaller organization, everybody on your team is doing multiple things. Every person on your team wears different hats which is understandable because you want generalists in a smaller company. The problem is that if everyone’s doing their own thing, and they have a lot of things on their plate, when you add this extra element of recruiting on their task list, things can get a little bit hairy. An applicant tracking system is designed to keep everybody on your team on the same page. It is sort of like a Kanban board if you are familiar with that terminology. It has columns like a pipeline or a workflow for how the different candidates proceed through your recruitment process. It will show you all the people that applied, all the people that went for interviews, all the people that that you call back in for a second interview, and who you you give an assessment to and will show you who you’re giving an offer to.

Reach More Candidates

Your Applicant Tracking System will share your job posting out to multiple job boards at a time. Some ATS will send it out to as many as 200 job boards! Now not everyone of those job boards may be relevant to you and likely you may only get your candidates from a few select sources. However, the thing that you have in your favour is that as a small organization you don’t have the clout and you’re not well-known in the market place. So the more people that hear about your job the better because you don’t have your brand to fall back on as far as finding talent is concerned.

Streamline Communication

Finally I do think applicant tracking systems are really good for eliminating the need for email communication related to that particular role and a particular candidate. Most ATS have a built-in a communication feature. You can tag people on the recruitment team to say you really like a candidate and think they have all the requirements that you’re looking for but you want another team member to take a look at the resume too. So, instead of sending an email to the person and attaching the resume you do all that through the system. You can tag the person and the resume is already attached to that message.

Small Business Friendly Price Tag

These are just some of the reasons why investing Applicant Tracking System is beneficial for you to maintain your sanity. However, one other reason is that there are Applicant Tracking Systems out there in the marketplace specifically for small businesses that start at $0. That’s right they’re 100% free! There’s no credit card required. But even if you do decide that you want to have some of the extra features that they provide on the paid plans, I think it’s still worth the investment. A quick hack: you could sign up for the paid plan when you’re hiring and then downgrade to the free plan afterwards.

I firmly believe that having an Applicant Tracking System in your toolbox to help you find the right person is the way to go.

If you are currently hiring, you want to attend my live masterclass I’m hosting. In it I teach you my what your recruitment process should look like. While an ATS offers you a tool, I will give you the roadmap for how you need to set up your recruitment, how to set yourself up for success so that you hire the right person every time. Not just that, I also show you how you need to lay the infrastructure to ensure your new hire performs to the best of their ability once they get start.

Now, I want to hear from you. Have you used an Applicant Tracking System for small business? And, if not, what did you find most helpful in today’s blog post to convince you to sign up for an ATS. Comment below and let me know.

In this blog post (check out the full video here), I’m going to share my favourite tips on how to manage those super high performers on your team. I’ve had the privilege of working with some pretty high performers. I know what makes them tick and what they need from their boss. High performers are those employees who consistently go above and beyond, are typically ambitious and require a little something extra from you.

Managing a team is intense work at any point. You have your own work to do, you have to coach, mentor and teach your team, you have to manage your own boss and you have to manage all the projects on the go. It’s no wonder that burnout is so prevalent in the workplace. And it’s no wonder that we’re constantly clamouring for more hours in the day. So, then you think to yourself, if only I had a super high performing team. They’d be able to take some of this stress and work off my plate. The thing is, when you have high performing employees, the work doesn’t go away. It just becomes different work. Leading high performers means you have to show up differently. You can’t direct, you can’t be autocratic, you can’t just leave them alone. Plus there are ways of challenging them in unique ways so they really bring their very best to work.

So, how do you need to show up for your high performers? Here are my three tips for managing high performers differently.

Managing high performers Tip#1 – Involve them in decision making

Even something as simple as asking their opinion on a matter is hugely empowering for people. 

Imagine telling a high performer on your team that you had the choice to make a decision, but you decided to involve them. Not because you couldn’t make the decision without their input, but because you really want THEM to decide the next course of action.

Tip #2 – Have them represent you at client meetings

Of course, this depends on their comfort level, but with the right guidance and once they’re ready, give them the opportunity to do different type of work.

Tip#3 – Give them autonomy in their work

High performers don’t need to be micromanaged. Presumably you hired them because they were capable. Then allow them to show you what they can do. 

Simply tell them what you would like to see (i.e. the end result) and then resist the urge to interfere in HOW they get to that end result. Be available for questions, but other than that leave them alone. If you allow yourself, you’ll be surprised at what your high performer can achieve without your input.

If you’re in the middle of hiring your own high performer right now, you’ll want to attend my masterclass on How to Hire the Right Person every time. I share my entire proven recruitment process to not only hire, but also onboard and engage your new team member so they start delivering right from day 1.

Now I want to know, do you agree that managing high performers requires you to show up differently, or do you treat everyone the same? Comment below and let’s share some ideas.

I also have another video on how to retain your high performing employees, so check out this video here.

 

In today’s blog post, I’m going to share an alternative to face-to-face interviews during your interview process.

My name is Sadaf Shaikh and I have filled over 300 roles in that time. I’ve made many hiring mistakes along the way. Hiring the wrong people or taking too long to hire. And I’ve learned what works and what doesn’t. 

According to a recent study, candidates are expecting to receive a response on whether they got the job or not within 2 weeks of their first interview. And on the other side, employers are having as many as 12 interviews in some instances. Clearly there’s a disconnect. On top of that, 3 in 4 employers say they’ve hired the wrong person. We can say that relying so heavily on interviews clearly doesn’t work as well as we think.

The purpose of the interview or assessment stage is to see if the candidate will be able to perform the job and will be a good fit. But if 3 out 4 of us say we made the wrong choice, then interviews aren’t really most effective. I want to introduce you to an alternative to interviews.

Enter: the Assessment

Work assessments are the best indicator of future performance and a perfect add-on to your interview process.

There are several types of assessments:

• Technical knowledge assessments
• Writing assessments
• Verbal assessments
• Case studies
• Language assessments
• Personality assessments
• Portfolios
• Pre-interview assessments

Check out the video for a description of each of the assessment types.

My recommendation is to have 2-3 interviews at the very most, and then have employees complete various assessments to get the full picture of what they offer.

Assessments are just one small aspect of the whole recruitment process. I’m pulling back the curtain to reveal my tried and tested recruitment process to hire the right person every time in the free live masterclass. You can register for it here.

In today’s blog post, I’m going to share the three key recruitment metrics for small businesses that you need to track in your organization.

My name is Sadaf Shaikh and I’ve worked closely with CEOs of small businesses. I understand the pressure of being on a tight budget and needing to maximize resources. Tracking these three key metrics will help you pinpoint how well you’re attracting top talent into your company and how to get the biggest bang for your buck. Now, let’s get to it.

Key Recruitment Metric for Small Businesses #1 – Track candidate source

Metric #1 is to track where you’re getting your candidates from. Some common candidate sources are:

1. Specific job boards
2. Referrals
3. Agencies
4. Social media
5. Specific schools or programs

You can then take this a step further and track which source you’re getting your new employees from. This makes it easy to duplicate your efforts when it’s time to hire again, assuming that the new hire is a success. The best way to track the source of your candidates and employees is by using an applicant tracking system. This is an automated tool that helps you post your job on job boards and manages the whole recruitment workflow for you. I have a blog post on the Best applicant tracking systems for small businesses. Check that out to learn which applicant tracking system is best for your business.

The key to doing recruitment in a small company is to make the whole hiring process as easy as possible. When you track where your candidates and new employees are coming from, you can double down your efforts on that particular source making all future hiring that much easier.

Key Recruitment Metric for Small Businesses #2 – Track quality of hires

Metric #2 is to track the quality of your hires. Unfortunately, most companies don’t track this information even when they have large HR departments. For a small business, this metric helps you understand how effective your recruitment practices truly are. Look, I get it, you spend hours on posting the job, interview candidates, and deciding on the top person. You want to ensure that the person you’re picking is really the right person.

Tell me, in the comments, have you ever hired someone, spent 2-3 months getting them up to speed only to find out they’re not all that great. But by then you’ve invested so much time, you can’t bear the thought of going back to the drawing board to find another person. If you’re saying yes right now, you’re not the only one. This happens too often and in a small business, you can’t afford mishaps like that.

You have to know how well your new hires are performing 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 6 months and 1 year after they’re hired. Plus coupled with tracking the source of your candidates, you can focus your recruitment efforts on that source because it’s been proven to pay off in the past.

Recruitment Metric #3 – Track cost of recruiting

The third key Recruitment Metric for small businesses is tracking the cost of your hires. This is a key metric that is relatively easy to track. Mostly. 

The cost of recruitment takes into consideration direct costs like money spent on posting jobs on specialty job boards or on recruitment agencies. Indirect costs are the cost of time and resources from within your company. How many hours of time are you and your team spending on hiring employees? All this also goes on the recruitment tracker.

The thing about tracking costs is that the ultimate goal is to use this metric in conjunction with the other two key metrics. Knowing how much you’re spending with the quality of hires and the source of the hires will give you a nice, full picture of what recruitment looks like at your company. On top of that, tracking costs will allow you to see where money is flying out the door and how to possibly reduce the costs of hires. 

For example, if you’re spending on specialty job boards, but a bulk of your high performing new employees are coming from employee referrals, then it’s a pretty good indicator that you could save that money because it’s not giving you a good return on investment.

If a bulk of your recruitment costs are coming from recruitment agencies for whatever reason and you’re getting good employees from this source, then go ahead and negotiate a better rate with the agencies. Insider tip, if you give agencies enough business, they’re more than happy to discuss rates with you, especially if you’re happy with their work and you’re a good client to work with.

Tracking these recruitment metrics will allow you to see a full picture of your process and help you make better hiring decisions.

Recruitment metrics notwithstanding, the success of your new hires is directly tied to how well you screen them and your selection process, namely your interview questions. The number one reason new hires don’t work out is because they don’t fit into your culture. That’s why I created the Top 10 Interview Questions to Assess Culture Fit. It’s a list of questions you can ask to assess how well the candidate in front of you will fit in your organization and with your current team.

Now, I want to hear from you. Tell me in the comments, which recruitment metric you’re going to track first and what was your biggest take away from this video.

Don’t forget to check out my blog post on the best applicant tracking systems for small business – it’ll help you track some of the metrics. If you prefer video, check it out here.

Countless studies have shown that engaging employees in the workplace leads to improved employee and company performance. In this blog post, I’m going to filter all the noise and share my top 3 sure-fire methods to increase employee engagement. Let’s get to it.

If you’re new here, my name is Sadaf Shaikh and every Tuesday I talk about building and nurturing your high performance culture with simple, logical action items. 

Now, let’s talk employee engagement.

When I hear leaders talk about wanting to improve employee engagement, they refer to employee engagement as a collective of all their employees. The reality is employee engagement can only be addressed by learning about and understanding each individual employee.

Get to know your employees

When you focus on one employee at a time and you do this with deliberate, consistent effort, employee engagement will inevitably go up. So, talk to your employees, not just about work, but about their goals, aspirations, about their past, how they learn, how they like to be recognized. The more you get to know each of your employees, the better you’ll get at giving each person what they want and need and the more engaged they’ll be. And that engagement is infectious. Before you know it, you’ll have an engaged team and it all starts with one employee and engaging employees in the workplace will be a cinch.

Does it take time? Yes it does. Is the effort worth it? A thousand times yes.

Communicate More

There’s no such thing as over communicating with your employees. If you think you’re communicating too much, chances are you’re JUST about doing enough.

What do you communicate about?

• Your vision – people need to know where the team is heading
• Your strategy – the also need to know HOW you’re going to get there. Talking about your start plan and how they will be contributing to that is a huge engagement driver. Your employees want to feel like they’re making a significant contribution and what the straight line is between their role and the company’s success.
• Progress on company or department goals – same as the strat plans, keep employees abreast of where things are with respect to initiatives and projects. Most importantly share with them where their work goes and what happens. If everyone is pitching in to do a board presentation, come back and tell them what the board said and what the next steps are.
• Failures or set backs – too many times leaders will shield their employees from failures. But painting a too rosy picture makes you seem inauthentic, because we both know that there’s no such thing as constant epic successes. Share where you fell down and how you’re going to get back up.

When you keep the lines of communication open, employees will start opening up and sharing their thoughts and ideas with you too. That’s when you really see engagement go up.

Eliminate all signs of politics

Office politics is an energy suck and drains all engagement out of the company. I’ve worked at many companies in my 20 years and the organizations that had high employee engagement (and I mean engagement that showed in employee and company performance, NOT engagement survey scores) had virtually NO office politics. 

In these organizations, employees knew what they had to do, they had a clear idea of how their role contributed to the overall company goals and they put their head down and did the work. There was no bickering or frivolous complaints. Leaders have the ultimate power to stop office politics by refocusing employees to the job at hand and not on silliness like empire building or egos.

And once you have your current employees engaged and performing at their best, it’s important that any new hires fit that culture. I have a free cheat sheet on my Top 10 Interview Questions to Assess Culture Fit.

Now, comment below to tell me which of these tips you liked best and are going to put into practice first. Also, don’t forget to check out the video version of the blog post here.

You know giving employee feedback can increase performance, but did you know it can also increase revenue?

Giving feedback has been known to increase employee performance. Human beings are designed to want to be accepted and seek social approval. When an employee does a good job, words of praise and encouragement are actually known to increase their motivation to seek more of the same. In other words, positive feedback actually elicits a position response from the person. 

On the other hand, negative feedback motivates us to perform better. At the very least, the fear of negative consequences such as embarrassment or losing our job makes us want to do better.

So, either way, feedback helps with employee performance. It’s important to sprinkle both positive and constructive or negative feedback in your feedback arsenal.

So, how does this contribute to revenue, you might be asking. Well, here’s how. 

I call it the “All Roads Lead to Revenue” map. When you give positive feedback, it increases employee engagement. When employee engagement increases, employee productivity increases. When productivity increases, employee performance increases. And, you got it, when employee performance increases, the business makes more money.

Ok, this is all fair and good, but you might be asking exactly HOW employee performance increases business revenue. After all, it’s not necessary that there’s a direct relationship between performance and revenue. I’m so glad you asked. Let’s dig a bit deeper.

Let’s start with the employees at the very front line of your business. THe ones that deal with customers all day long: your customer service people.

Better customer service leads to customer loyalty. Better product or service development leads to more customer referrals to your products. Better sales leads to closing more deals. Better internal departments like administration, operations, HR and finance lead to better support to core functions which lead to better product development, sales and customer service.

Do you see how increasing performance in every single department in your company can directly impact revenue. Of course the reverse is also true. If you don’t focus on these areas, don’t give feedback, the areas suffer and so does your top line.

So, here’s what I want you to commit to moving forward:

1. Commit to giving regular feedback to your employees
2. Give a mix of both positive and constructive feedback with actionable things they can implement
3. Ask for feedback on you and the company processes from both employees and customers. Continuous improvement is key to increasing revenue.

If you feel like you could get better at your feedback game, then let’s hop on a call and put some actionable strategies in place.

Now, I want to hear from you. Comment below to let me know which of the three actions you’re going to do first. 

If you’re building a high performance team, I’d encourage you to take a look at this video and this one to lead and retain your top employees.

 

In this blog post, I’m going to decode what an EVP or Employee Value Proposition is, explain why you need one, and where to use it once you’ve created yours.

For the past 15+ years I’ve done recruitment for companies of all sizes in multiple industries. I can tell you, the ones that attract the best talent always have a great EVP and I’m going to help you create yours today.

What is an EVP (Employee Value Proposition)?

Your EVP tells prospective employees all the reasons why you’re their ideal employer. It acts like a magnet for your ideal employee. In an EVP, you talk about all the things that make your organization unique and attractive. An EVP is essentially the marketing package for your prospective employees, much like a brochure talks about your products and services for your customers. An EVP includes the key things an employee gets when they work for you. 

A good EVP will include:

• Compensation and benefits information such as salary, health insurance, perks like parking or gym memberships, bonuses and any other methods of recognition
• Work environment like the type of work people do (interesting or challenging), your unique culture, the makeup of your team, your mission or purpose and your values
• Career development opportunities like promotions, transfers, focus on continuous learning, and career progression

Ideally these things would be different from your competitors and a unique value proposition that sets you apart in the employment marketplace. You can find examples of some great EVPs on the career pages of companies like Hubspot, PwC, Goldman Sachs, or, my former employer, OMERS. Check them out for some inspiration.

Comment below and tell me if you have an EVP and, if not, when you’re going to set aside time to work on yours.

Why do you need an EVP?

The main reason is to show your ideal employees what the benefits are of working with you as opposed to your competitors or any other company. It really helps you stand out from your competitors, because so few companies spend good time and effort on their EVP. Your EVP also acts as a conversation starter. When you bring people in for interviews, the EVP makes a great jumping off point to start talking about your company culture. Finally, I’ve found that a great EVP makes for some great material for your social media posts

What other reasons can you think of to create an EVP? Comment below and share your views.

When and where should you use your EVP or Employee Value Proposition?

In a nutshell, you should use it everywhere you possibly can and where it makes sense.

Use it at the top of all your job postings

Use it on your company careers page on your website. If you don’t have a careers page, I highly recommend creating a page, even if you’re not hiring. There’s nothing better than to have a compelling EVP that has people applying to work at your company when there’s no job posted. That way you have a ready list of candidates already waiting in the wings when you do hire.

Use it on your company profile page on job boards like Indeed, Glassdoor and Linkedin.

Finally, use pieces of your EVP on social media, both in posts and in the about sections.

But most importantly, talk about your Employee Value Proposition in every interaction you have with people. As a senior leader of your company, you should be marketing your company to potential employees all the time and your EVP will help you with speaking points to do just that.

Take it to the next level

If you’re ready to take your hiring practices to the next level, you’ll want in on my new program High Performance Culture Academy. In it I help you put HR processes in place, including designing your EVP, to maximize the performance and potential of your people and take your company to the next level of growth. Let’s get on a call to see if this is the right fit for you.

Once you hire your top employees, which you will with a fantastic EVP, you might want to check out this video to create a stellar onboarding program..

Also, if you want more tips on upleveling your recruitment, put a comment below to let me know what you need help with.

Be sure to come back next week, same day, same time!

Do you worry that your business is too dependent on you? In this blog post, I’ll talk about what business owners can do to lighten the load and remove themselves from the daily grind. I’ve helped dozens of leaders with creating succession plans to remove themselves from the day-to-day operations and build a pipeline of future leaders on their team.

First let’s talk about whether this succession planning for small business owners is, in fact, right for you and your business right this second. For most business owners, there are three key reasons they want to spend time on creating a succession plan.

1. Have an exit plan from their business. 
2. Create a legacy business that they can pass down to their children
3. Have a contingency plan for your business in the event you are unable to work in it anymore

There may be other reasons, but in my experience these are the most common. Comment below and tell me which one you most identify with? OR if there are any other reasons.

Ok, so how do you even do a succession plan? Where do you start?

Step 1 – Succession planning for small business owners

Assess all your current employees on three key things:

1. Aspiration
2. Engagement
3. Aptitude

Aspiration is whether or not the employee has the will and desire to take over your job of leading the company. 

Engagement is to what extent the employee is entrenched in your culture. Are they enthusiastic about the company’s products and services and are they an ambassador for the company.

Lastly, Aptitude is whether or not they are able to take over the top job. A person can have the aspiration and the engagement levels to be the next owner of your business, but they may not have the aptitude to ever do the job well.

Step 2 – Succession planning for small business owners

For the employees that you rated high on all aspiration, engagement and aptitude, you’ll need to assess what they need to develop on in order to take over the top job.

Do they need to learn more about a certain aspect of the business? 

Do they need to learn how to acquire customers? Or manage customer service? Or service delivery?

Whatever it is, document it and think about how long it’s going to take for them to get there because that’s going to lead to the next step.

Having a development plan for your high potential employees has the added benefit of retaining this talent because you’re telling them that they’re valued and that they have a future in your business.

Step 3

Once you have the employees’ development plans in place, it’s time to think about how long it will take them to get there. You can slot them into time frames such as “Ready now”, “Ready in 1-2 years” or “Ready in 3-5 years” and “Ready in 5+ years”. I like bucketing people like this because it gives you a great snapshot of where your employees fall on the development scale. For example, if you only have employees who are in the 5+ years bucket and you want to hand over the business in 2 years, then you have some choices to make.

Either you push your timeline out, or you think about hiring someone externally. I’m not a fan of hiring externally for succession planning because it takes a while for people to get really entrenched into your culture, but if that’s what you need to do to do, then so be it.

That’s your 3-step process to create a succession plan

Now, this is a quick version of the succession plan process I use with my clients inside my High Performance Culture Academy program. If you’re ready to take your business to new heights by putting processes in place to maximize the performance and potential of your people, then let’s jump on a call.

I will say this. Succession planning is extremely easy to push off and procrastinate on. The only way I know to ensure that you actually follow the process and get your succession plan done, is to put it on your list of business priorities. I have a really handy goal setting guide that you can download to help you.

You can access the video version of this blog post here.

Alright my friends, that’s it for this week. Be sure to come back next week, same day, same time.