Step 4: Team

How to Hire...Then KEEP a Great Team of Employees...

Short Version:

This bears repeating!
Collectively, ActionCoach has spent tens of thousands of hours on this 6 step process and our team of worldwide coaches refresh them each week. We implore you to resist the temptation to jump to a step that sounds good.

For example, if you are facing problems with your employees you may want to rush ahead to this step. But many of the symptoms of poor team performance will be addressed by your coach back on step 1. Step 4-as you will read in a minute- is more about addressing any root causes of poor team performance and then developing your employees for even more growth.

You Know You are at Step 4/Team If...

• Other than yourself, there is no other strong leader, like a Senior Managers, VP's or Department Heads.
• Your entire team is not able to tell a stranger what the company's Common Goal is
• You as the Owner do not consistently maintain your company's vision
• Hiring, Recruiting, Orientation, Training and Development are not systemized into 5 separate parts
• There is no consistent and fair way for dealing with employee infractions like attendance, tardiness and work below pre set standards.
• There are no regularly held meetings with upper management, departments and work groups (or cells).

And You Can Graduate From this Step When...

• Each department and position has a specific set of KPI's
• The company and each team member has a S.M.A.R.T Goal in 90 day plan form
• There are separate, written down, systems for recruiting (based on de-selection), hiring, orientation, training and development.
• You have implemented a de-selection process like Action Coach’s 4 Hour Format.
• You have a fair and systemized away for dealing with employee infractions like tardiness and attendance using a tool such as ActionCoach's No Fault Late Absent Report
• The company has a incentive plans in place that share the wealth between the better producers and the company, where both sets are well compensated
• The company has set team meetings for all levels

Long Version

When you first arrive at this step, you'll immediately use one of the systems you created back in step 3: The Culture Statement. Before you do any type of hiring, training, development or even firing, make sure that your business is actually living the guidelines you set up in your Culture Statement.

Blow this Action Item off and suffer the consequences

It may sound cliché, but adopting an attitude of Win-Win from the top down is a simple way to make sure your business is ready for team growth. By approaching your Team building with this mind set, you are guaranteed to make better hiring and growth decisions.

One the specific things we recommend is to change your point of view from employees to reflect what we call "The Cycle of Business"

In our opinion the True Cycle of Business is...

• Where Owner focuses almost exclusively on her team...
• And if the team is taken care of, they can focus on the customers...
• The customers automatically take care of the business.
• And hopefully-that's what you want as the owner-
• The business takes care of you.

In Step 1, we talked about smaller item delegation but in the Team step you begin working on delegating entire departments or sections of the business. Using the organizational chart from Step 3, there is a specific method (and direction) you as the owner should delegate these departments from your control, to a team member's.

Believe it or not, ActionCoach suggests that your employees make less money...but earn more.

Let me explain- by keeping salaries and hourly wages steady, we encourage our clients to "share the wealth" through custom made, innovative compensation plans that motivate the team. Here is a sampling of what our coaches have come up with for their clients:

• Quarterly/Yearly bonuses paid to sales and marketing position for reaching target revenues in a storage shed business
• Weekly rewards for supervisors with an accident free week in a construction company
• Daily SPIFs, for the sales person in the furniture store who collected the most emails that day.
• In an accounting office, bonuses to the "technicians" when they meet or surpass a certain % of B.H.
• A monthly bonus for the customer service positions who met or exceeded average dollar sale goal at an industrial repair and retail shop
• Daily bonuses to waitresses who increased their average check amount over same day last year
• Work Cell or production shop bonuses for having a full week without defects and everything shipped on time in small and medium sized production plants
• Foreman bonuses when Gross Profit on a job meets or exceeds goals
• How to create non traditional incentive plans if we determine your team is not motivated by money-such as days off, paid education, additional insurance, etc.

As with everything you read here, ActionCOACH practices what we preach. The standards for becoming a certified Action Small Business Coach are high but by using our own variation of de-selection, only the most motivated and qualified candidate's rise to the top. (If you are interested in learning more about the rewarding life as an Action Coach, contact Coach Paul Currie.) Once a coach is certified and graduated from our own grueling training process, coaches are encouraged to continue their work to educate their own clients and freely giving to the entire business world. Recently, we published a popular article called "Getting Foreman and Supervisors Involved with Profit Management". And it's yours for free. Just put "Getting Involved" in the subject line of your email and we'll send the article.

Case Study: Dave Shares The Wealth In working with Dave, a Lancaster County based manufacturer, the work on the USP from Step 2 brought some of the best results our office has seen. With 200% improvements in revenue and net income doubling each of the first 3 years in his coaching program, Dave and his coach knew they needed to structure the team through systems and hire more team members to manage this explosion. When he approached one of his original employees about becoming a full time director of sales and marketing, Dave followed his coach's advice and offered a fair base salary but with an attractive commission plan of total sales. Two years after this decision, his Director of Sales and Marketing manages this department as if it were her own. Giving her a piece of the sales pie clearly was a sure fire way to surround himself with team mates that cared about sales just as much as he did. And it didn't cost him anything in Net income! Because he was coached on a smart incentive plan with the certain rules that protected the company from just paying out huge incentives while losing net incomes. Way to go Dave!

ActionCoach's Keys to a Winning Team:

• Strong leadership
• Common Goal - making sure that your goals are clear the team so you all can move forward and achieve them.
• Rules of the Game - by ensuring in the systems step that your position descriptions and culture statements are alive and working- having a team that will "call each other out" when an employee is breaking the rules of the game.
• Action Plan - more advanced than the 90 Day Planning sessions which essential in the first 3 steps, at the Team level this about following a specific and proven method for writing a business plan that will work.
• Support Risk Taking - As Coach's we teach our clients-and hold them to these new levels of higher expectations- to develop themselves so they can permit and encourage risk taking in their company.
• 100% involvement - asking/encouraging and maybe making it mandatory for team members to be involved in the businesses-so they have their say. "Once an employee has bought into a plan, it becomes his own, and the chances for that plan "sticking" just went up by about 70%" explain Coach Marcia Rynearson.

Coaching On Leadership Brian Dombach, Principal, Master Business Coach "I think one of the most challenging areas to coach on- and by no coincidence the most rewarding- is leadership coaching. Because it's so hard to teach- and although there are a lot of great books on it- it really is best learned and developed in a coaching relationship. I have found that a big part of it is mindset, and leaders need to have a good mindset. I coach my clients on how their thoughts need to change in order take the actions and get the results they want. Then its about supporting them and holding them accountable."

Don't Select Your Employees...De-Select Them

Many other trainers and consultants who charge per hour or per minute talk about a selection process. At ActionCOACH, we believe the tight labor market in our specific region is better suited to a De-Selection Process. One of the most popular systems ActionCoaches bring to their clients is a specific step by step process for recruiting new team members, and it’s based on letting the applicants deselect themselves.

"What we find with our Hiring Format is that our clients are spending quality time reviewing maybe 3-4 or highly qualified, and highly motivated candidates-which I think is more important- rather than wading through 400 responses to a bland ad", explains Coach Tim Rooney. Interesting to point out that Coach Tim and many of the other coaches- advise their clients to approach recruiting more like sales/marketing than personnel. Coach Tim continues, "So many times when I am with a client, I realize that there are so many great things about working at their company that they are not telling the prospective candidates. It's real similar to coaching on the USP of marketing- don't assume that people know all the great things about you. You have to tell them!"

"We signed up with Action when we were ready to give up and walk away from our business. We'd had such a hard time getting the right people in place so we could move forward. Using Action's advice in hiring and screening people in a different way than what we did in the past, we now have a great team in place!"
Mel & Linda Stoltzfus, Owners, Mel's Heater Service, Intercourse, PA.

Quick Coaching: This is the step where you improve your communication. Coach Ben likes to remind us "True Communication is the Response You Get" so when working with –and developing your team- watch the responses you get from your team. If they are not what you wanted- then the first place to check is with your own communication style. Coach Ben-like his fellow coaches- regularly uses DiSC and VAK behavioral assessments to help his clients make the best selections for positions within the company. To find out how to get your own assessment, contact us.

Free Download: 10 Elements of a Functional Team yours for the asking. Email with "10 Elements" in the subject line.

Action Coaches return your investment on this step by:

• We guarantee you won't find another coaching practice or even a consultant who has the inventory of Team and Personnel templates like ActionCoach does. Organizational Charts, How to Conduct Employee Reviews, agenda for team meetings, methods for conducting group interviews, sample reference letters...the 180 collective years of education and hands on experience from the Central Pennsylvania firm grants you access to all of these.
• Break down they psychology of your team into bite sized pieces like our exclusive "Different Working Styles" and how to best motivate and manage all different personality types on your team.
• Fast guidance on how to handle employee issues. "Because we are not consultants and don't work on the per hour/per minute model, our clients have access to us all the times. Some of my clients will call with emergency 'how should I handle this employee' where some quick spot coaching helps. We are reactive enough to know that sometimes, something comes up with our clients that can't wait until their next coaching session," explains Coach Thom.
• How to create tailor made incentive plans for every single position in your company-not just the sales and marketing folks.
• Teaching the business owners, their managers and their supervisors how to really manage the human resources on such taboo-no-one-will-touch- topics like conflict resolution, sexual harassment, discrimination and even firing.

Click NEXT to continue with Step 5 & 6!

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