I have written recently about some of the reasons why you should make plans to attend Winning Workplaces and Inc. Magazine’s joint 2011 Leadership Conference, which will be held next month in Dallas, Texas.

We hosted this same type of event with Inc. in Denver last year.  What did the small businesses who attended take away from it, in terms of tips and strategies to improve their organizations?  The following is feedback that several key executives from PortionPac Chemical Corporation recently shared with us about their experience at our 2010 conference and subsequent actions taken in their firm:

Two examples from the conference stood out to us as being the most impactful: the employee fitness testing at Gentle Giant Moving Company and the entrepreneurial culture at Tasty Catering.  We have incorporated elements of both approaches in our work.

Gentle Giant Moving Company stands out for testing both the physical fitness and the psychology of potential employees with the famous stadium run test.  We appreciated the advantages of evaluating a potential employee who struggles to complete the stadium run but who takes responsibility for completing it thoroughly.  Since learning about Gentle Giant, our own company has evaluated our onboarding process and made some changes that better measure a person’s spirit in addition to their technical skills.  Buy Cialis After all, it is not just the competence that matters – it’s how the person meshes with our culture and whether they demonstrate in subtler ways the degree to which they  take responsibility for their actions.

Tasty Catering inspired us with the way the company cultivates employee-driven ideas.  We applaud Tasty Catering’s culture of identifying and fostering entrepreneurship in its company.  Since the leadership conference we have begun to have regular check-ins with our customer service staff to uncover employee-generated solutions to everyday challenges.  Tasty Catering has demonstrated the value of having a motivated workforce whose ideas are heard, and we have taken their example to heart.

As one of the few manufacturing companies at the conference, we enjoyed comparing challenges and solutions with companies that were so different than us.  Our commitment to producing environmentally responsible, user-centric cleaning products gave us a strong connection to the values held by Winning Workplaces, Inc., and the other conference attendees, and we enjoyed the opportunity to find our common ground as well as identify exciting opportunities for growth.

If you’d like to get value similar to what PortionPac got, and you’re free on June 15-17, click here to register for our Leadership Conference.  I’ll be there and I’d love to meet you and learn about your firm and how you’re investing in your workplace for greater workforce effectiveness.

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We’re in the homestretch of the 2011 application process of our Top Small Company Workplaces award with Inc. Magazine.  As of today, small firms have two days left to get their application in (it must be submitted by midnight in their time zone, Tuesday, Jan. 18).

One thing I’ve been happy to see is that despite the shrinking window to complete their applications, our participants this year continue to tell us the time involved in applying has been well spent.  I have been sending out emails to completed applicants asking for their feedback on taking time away from their work to apply.  Here’s what some of them have said, since just last Thursday:

• "We thought the application was very thorough.  It was a great opportunity to reaffirm some of the beliefs and policies that we think makes this such a great place to work." (Marketing manager, Missouri-based healthcare firm with 25 employees)
• "Completing the application was relatively straightforward and the directions were clear." (Sales and marketing director, California-based consulting firm with 109 employees)
• "We found a lot of value in the application because it caused us to do a lot of self-assessment.  Separate from the questions themselves, the fact that we could download the questions in advance was very helpful because we filled out the Word document and then simply copy and pasted into the online form." (Marketing and communications manager, Ohio-based business services provider with 22 employees)

You still have time to complete an application, and benefit from assessing your productive Buy cheap online Provigil workplace culture people practices.  Go here to start the process; if you run into any hurdles, call our knowledgeable, responsive team for help at 847-328-9798.

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The following is a guest post by Brendan Cruickshank.  Brendan is a veteran of the online job search and recruiting industry, having spent the past 8 years in senior client services roles with major sites like Juju.com and JobsInTheMoney.com.  Here he touches on employee leadership development as part of your people practices strategy for a more productive workplace.

Leadership.  Was there ever a topic about which more misinformation was conveyed?  Everyone wants to hire a leader, but few people really agree on what characteristics make up leadership.  Some people mistake overconfidence and extroversion for leadership.  Others think that leaders must have shown leadership in the past, by having held positions in which they were in charge of something.  Yet I find that it isn’t necessarily so.

When looking for a leader, I don’t necessarily care about confidence and extroversion.  What I want to see is a spirit of public welfare, which in the workplace means doing what is best for the good of one’s coworkers and clients or customers.  I look Cheap Cialis for job applicants who lead by example, on the principle that actions really do speak louder than words.  And last, but not least, I look for leaders who can think for themselves.  Yes, thinking is a double-edged sword from an employer’s point of view.  After all, you want your employees to accept what you tell them unquestioningly and do things your way, not their way…or do you?

Not if you want to hire leaders, you don’t.  If you want leaders on your staff, you have to reconcile yourself to the idea that employees will find new ways of doing things, will question what you tell them, and will take the initiative to find other options that you may not have thought of.  Be grateful for this.  This continual process of thinking/questioning/creatively finding other options is the fuel that will help to propel your business forward.

Now that we’ve established that you really do want a leader (trust me, you do!), here are four ways to recognize one when you are going through your hiring process:

1. Leaders have a colorful work history.  There are exceptions, of course, but most of the time you don’t really want to hire someone who accepted the first job that came along and placidly worked his or her way to the top in that one company or organization.  You may want someone who jumped from one job to another – someone who held each position long enough to learn something new.  A leader’s approach is to learn something from every job, to take that opportunity to grow and develop and make the job into something different than it was before.  Once the learning potential of the job is exhausted, they make a horizontal leap to something else. Leaders seek learning; it’s the food that feeds them.

2. Leaders have lives.  Leaders are not always focused on work (and you don’t want them to be!).  They will work overtime if the job demands it, but they will also continue to seek learning opportunities and chances to make a difference.  That means they have hobbies, work as volunteers, or perhaps even run their own businesses on the side.

3. Leaders make eye contact.  Every job candidate should look you in the eye when you shake hands.  But leaders will keep continue to look at you.  They may be nervous as almost everyone is during an interview, but leaders are disciplined and focused.  They set aside their nerves and concentrate on what needs to be done.  And they refuse to be intimidated by the interview process.

4. Leaders ask questions (even if they suspect you don’t want to answer them).  In fact, a leader may feel that the questions you don’t want to answer, are the ones the most important to ask.  Leaders don’t worry about antagonizing an interviewer with their questions.  Instead – and this again relates to refusing to be intimidated – they focus on getting the answers that they need.  They recognize that a job interview is not only a chance for the interviewer to form an impression of the applicant, but is also a critical chance for an applicant to form an impression of his or her potential future employer.  Leaders interview you, while you are interviewing them.

Are you starting to feel that you might be getting yourself in over your head with these leaders?  A good leader may make you feel that way!  But that’s okay as once you hire that person, he or she will be on your side.  That is, of course, until the day when the position no longer offers any opportunity to learn or be challenged.  When that day comes, you may as well resign yourself to looking again – but that’s okay.  There are many leaders out there, waiting for their chance to shine.

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Organizational development factors strongly in the content on staff engagement activities and other people practices that Winning Workplaces has published – just check out this page of search results on our website.

As our mission is to help small and midsized businesses create better work environments, it likewise also looms large in our biggest annual project, our Top Small Company Workplaces award with Inc. Magazine.  In fact, in our retooled-for-2011 application for the award, Learning and Development has its own section.  You can see the questions we ask in this section by clicking here and then clicking the 2011 application preview link in the 3rd bullet in the lefthand column.

If you’re an HR type, you may be wondering what your peers think of our award in terms of the value they’ve gotten from applying, as a means to improve their firms’ workplace culture.  Below is feedback that 8 such applicants shared from our 2010 application cycle:

1. "The application does a good job of breaking down the key attributes and facets of our firm (i.e. culture/people development, etc.). It allowed us to look critically at each area and determine what we are excelling at and what could use development." (Manager of talent acquisition, 10-year-old consulting firm with 50 employees)
2. "Excellent exercise in articulating our workplace culture." (VP of HR, 7-year-old retail electricity provider with 103 employees)
3. "This process was very rewarding as it brought together several departments and helped each of us to not only look back on past accomplishments but also to look ahead to where we are going." (Organizational development specialist, 8-year-old government contract support provider with 160 employees)
4. "We have documentation of our practices that we plan to share with board and staff at upcoming meetings.  We have also recommitted to the HR goals set for this coming year." (Development director, 9-year-old social services firm with 33 employees)
5. "What this did do for me was open my eyes to all our company does even in these tough economic times, and I have started using this in my recruiting process." (Recruiting manager, 11-year-old financial services firm with 62 employees)
6. "We’re taking next steps to more consistently track HR metrics such as turnover, hires, percent minorities, etc." (Employee experience manager, 18-year-old information design consulancy with 30 employees)
7. "Our next steps will be to document our ethical practices so that everyone knows that we are an ethical company." (Director of HR and finance, 11-year-old software installation provider with 27 employees)
8. "Formalizing discussions about a 401k match, in addition to considering flexible work arrangements were definitely our take-aways from the process." (Director of HR, 19-year-old financial services firm with 294 employees)

If you are in HR in your organization and would like to gain a better workplace perspective, click here to see if your company qualifies for our 2011 Top Small Company Workplaces award – and a shot at being featured in Inc. Magazine in June.

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The following is a guest post by John Durfee.  John is an Operation Freedom War veteran and a manager for Airsplat, the nation’s largest retailer of Airsoft Guns.  Learn from his insights when it comes to workplace team building and employee leadership development from an armed forces perspective.

I left the military years ago, but the principles drilled into me are still part of who I am and who I strive to be.  In the business realm, I find that they are still front of mind as I work to be successful and help my company prosper.  I need to train a strong force, strengthen our defenses, and know the lay of the consumer landscape in order to defeat our competitors.  In all my reading, I’ve found philosopher Sun Tzu to be a valuable source of knowledge for helping me in both my military and business world campaigns.  Here are some gems of wisdom that I’ve used in my office:

Defense

"Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live.  When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory."

Strength and growth occurs when you are challenged.  Most of the time, when you’re in a job for a long period of time, you can become comfortable.  And though you may end up performing the tasks you are assigned well, the danger that accompanies that is complacency.  You want to view your employees as always in training – always being challenged.  Regularly give them tasks that are a little beyond their current standard of abilities.  Have them start to take more responsibilities, while simultaneously giving fewer instructions. Provide them a goal without specifically showing the way.  You’ll be surprised when you find them completing these harder tasks.  You’ll be creating more independent and self-reliant workers who will stay productive and proactive.

Offense

"Thus, what is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy’s strategy."

I work in a marketing department that uses a lot of online Web 3.0 sources to connect to customers.  We use Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, and more to bring our market presence forward.  However, our competitors have the same tools at their disposal.  The name of the game is flexibility and anticipation. Doing so allows us to make better offers to potential customers.  They show us what they can do, and in return we show them we can do it better.

A successful manager is one who is flexible and open to criticism of their own operation.  Ask your team if they have any input – foster an environment in which any idea is a possible plan.  This way you’ll have the collective knowledge of the group.  If someone comes up with a great idea, let them use it as pet project to see the results on a small scale.  As Sun Tzu says, "To Buy Cialis fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting."

Related: Read our interview with Winning Workplaces Board Member Michael Mulqueen, longtime chief executive of the Greater Chicago Food Depository and a retired brigadier general in the U.S. Marine Corps.

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When it comes to our 2010 conference we just held with our Top Small Company Workplaces award media partner, Inc. Magazine, the incredible takeaways presented on employee engagement and investing in your workplace for best bottom line results were apparent in my previous posts on Twitter insights shared from it, and speaker Donna Fenn’s reporting from it in two business resources.

Today I’d like to add more from this event to the mix – some of the great photos taken by David Topping.  Enjoy:

Speakers Mike Faith of Headsets.com (left) and Small Giants author and Inc. Editor Bo Burlingham with an event staffer

One of the activities attendees enjoyed during breaks was bowling on the Wii

CitiStorage Founder and speaker Norm Brodsky (left) chats with attendees

Best-selling author Marcus Buckingham explains the difference between great managing and great leading

Attendees like what they hear

B Lab Founder Bart Houlahan shows how little things can lead to a big impact on the bottom line

Feld Entertainment (Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey) Provigil pharmacy CEO Kenneth Feld reveals how he turned a $70 million-a-year "castoff" circus into a $750 million production company with 2,000 employees

An attendee asks the speaker a question during the Q&A portion of a session

Jane Berentson, Editor of Inc. (left), and Winning Workplaces Chairman Ken Lehman (right) with Lauren Dixon of 2010 Top Small Company Workplace award winner Dixon Schwabl

The Winning Workplaces team with Alejandro Mendoza of 2010 award winner Optimax Systems (center)

Stay tuned to our blog for nuggets on effective management and employee leadership development from some of the conference sessions…

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We’re on the third and final day of our joint leadership conference with Inc. Magazine in Denver.  If Twitter is any indication, our 350+ attendees are getting some incredible insights on the payoff of employee engagement and team building on the bottom line.

Here are eight insights that attendees and others have shared on Twitter (using the hashtag #incleaders):

• @smallgiantsbuzz: Buy Accutane Bob lapointe: treating your employees as well as you treat your customers will result in great business.
• @townsendwardlaw: Mr B. – Core skill of management is ‘individualization’ – tapping into strengths and weaknesses and leverage into performance…
• @DeniseWBarreto: ‘Fear of the unknown’ is the most common human state – Leaders rally people to the future (aka: the unknown!)
• @brett: 8 C’s of culture: camaraderie, celebrations, community, caring, consistency, connect, commitment, communication
• @adanigelis: You have to decide what decision-making method is going to work best for your company –Traci Fenton of @WorldBlu
• @MyStratPlan: J.D. Mariott: the seven most important words in business are "I don’t know. What do you think?"
• @LeighEBuchanan: A: decisions made by leader. B: decisions made with employee participation. C: decisions made by consensus. Minimize your As.
• @Brad_Heath: What’s important to your employees is important to them. What’s important to them is important to you, says @paulspiegelman

To date I’ve counted close to 900 tweets and retweets from and about the event.  You can access them on Twitter by going to the #incleaders search page.  If you subscribe to blogs in an RSS feed, you can also go here to add the tweets as a new subscripton so you’ll be notified when people share new insights.

Thanks to our partner Inc. Magazine (@incmagazine) for live tweeting from the event, and to everyone else – attendees and others – for sharing our speakers’ insights with your Twitter networks.  It’s clear from the volume of event tweets so far that thanks to social media, human capital strategies for a more productive workplace will get a good boost from this – and that benefits companies everywhere!

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What’s the first thing to get cut when companies are economizing?  It’s always training.  In the last three years, training budgets have fallen by nearly a quarter.  It’s stupid.  …  Because when you’re battling for customers and trying to do more with less, your most valuable asset is your staff.  And they can do more and better if you train them more.

These are the wise words of "serial CEO" Margaret Heffernan on BNET this week.  If you found our blog searching for employee engagement or employee development strategies, I’m sure you’re already on the same page as Heffernan (and us).

But having the willpower and carving out a budget for training is one thing – implementing tactics that work (eg, have yielded results for other businesses your size or in your sector) is another.

Fortunately, I’m happy to share the five resources below to get you started, or help you improve upon your current efforts to keep employees engaged…and ever more productive:

1. 21 articles on our website covering "training program" in leading workplace research we’ve synthesized, and successful small businesses we’ve profiled.
2. Our blog post: 20 Effective Employee Learning Initiatives for Small Businesses
3. Our blog post: People Practices ROI of the 2010 Top Small Company Workplaces
4. Our blog post: How a Small IT Firm Creates Knowledge Leaders, and the Company ROI
5. And new from WorkAwesome: 11 Tips from Training People at Work

If you are already systematic Buy cheap Cialis Online about employee training, what have been your successes and lessons learned?  Please share in the comments for the benefit of your fellow readers.

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What an amazing community of small business leaders Winning Workplaces is fortunate to know!  After I wrote this post last week providing resources to help leaders set their new managers up for success – in which I shared a facet of our honoree Andrew Field’s approach to this – the President of PrintingForLess.com emailed me with expanded tactics intended to help you with your own employee leadership development of this pivotal group of workers.

According to Field, here are some things that PFL implemented to grow great first-time managers in a relatively short time:

The critical first step in cultivating new managers is to identify candidates before they are needed in their new positions, and to begin Provigil online No prescription giving them the preparation they need well in advance.  It is critical to have an explicit "leadership pipeline" and to hold yourself and your management team accountable for the development of your future leaders.

At PFL, this looks like having a standing agenda item at our broad monthly management team meeting that involves each person who has direct reports identifying their top and bottom performers, along with what they are doing to grow/reward/engage their top people, and what they are doing to "coach up" their low performers.

The second tool for success that we equip our new managers with is a template for regular (weekly or biweekly) one-on-one conversations with each of their direct reports.  The critical elements are personal connections, specific project updates, and discussion about professional growth plans.

Many entrepreneurs say that they don’t need regular, scheduled one-on-ones because they have so much impromptu contact with their teams.  Nice try.

Spur-of-the-moment discussions are important, but they are not a substitute for regular one-on-ones, which encompass deep discussions focused mostly around the employee’s work and development plans, rather than just current action items.

Our third support system for new leaders is that we provide them with development paths that include opportunities to expand their experience levels within the company.  In addition to education and mentorship (both of which are structured), we give future and current leaders the opportunity to test themselves in leadership roles, ranging from running a small project to leading a large group of people.  We move them around to different areas of the company in order to broaden their knowledge base, as well as giving them a chance to build robust networks within the organization.  Critical to the success of this OJT ("On the Job Training") is that we structure discussions about learnings and challenges.  We have found that peer-to-peer discussions are every bit as productive as boss-to-employee interactions.

At the end of the day, PFL has grown our best people by identifying potential leaders, modeling good leadership habits, and showering them with resources aimed at nurturing their growth.

Related: Andrew Field clearly knows his stuff when it comes to team building in the workplace – and seeing a payoff of employee engagement.  Learn even more about his employee development strategies on our website.

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