Clay Staires: This is Clay Staires with Tulsa Business Leadership with podcast number 20, Evaluating Through the Lens of Culture. We’ve been walking through a series here talking about how to lead your company culture. The importance of creating, and nurturing, and evaluating, and promoting, through the lens of culture. I promise you as a leader if you can connect with the heart of your employees, and if the heart of your employee connects with the heart of your company, then you will find that you will be able to move much smoother through the rough waters of commerce. As opposed to, as we have all heard that 71% of the American workforce, right now, is disengaged at work. 24% of that is actively disengaged.
Again, I think that that’s because there’s a disconnect between what is in the heart of, what the desires are, what the employee wants, and what the company wants. What we’ve been talking about is how to create a culture, how to identify it, how to cultivate it, how to nurture it, and then, how to reproduce that culture in the heart of your employees. At Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, this is one of the key things that we do with our clients across the country. Is help them develop the culture, and then, how to manage and how to maintain that culture of production. That culture of success, that culture of winning, that culture of growth, whatever those core values maybe. As we talk about today evaluating your employees through the lens of culture, the very first step that we want to do — I’ve got six steps that we’re going to walk through here.
The very first step is we always want to make sure that we tie back, tie everything back to the core values of the company. In other words, saying this is why I’m evaluating you. The evaluation that you’re going through isn’t just evaluating your work, it’s evaluating your fit in the company. Your fit in the company culture. We talked quite a bit about the function that our employees play, but also the fit. The importance of having employees that function as well as fit into our company. We always want to tie back the evaluation process to the company core values.
If you have your, a written worksheet that you take people through, I think the very first step, the very first piece, the very first section that you have in that written piece is the company core values. Those core values are the same core values that they will find in their employee handbook. They are the same employee values that they see up on the wall throughout your entire company, where they have the the words of the core values and pictures of the core values. They are surrounded by it on a daily basis.
Once again, we always want to tie back this evaluation to the core values. If you don’t then what you will find is it’s just you evaluating their work. It’s you evaluating what they are doing on a daily basis. I promise you, if your evaluation of them does not meet their evaluation of themselves, they will get offended, they will get mad and they’ll say, “Oh, you’re just playing favorites. Oh, you just don’t like me. You never have liked me. You’re never going to let me succeed.” It will become this tug-of-war back on, “I don’t agree with how you’re evaluating my work.”
Once again, we want to make sure that we are evaluating core values as well as production, and as well as work. As everybody knows, our second point here is everybody knows, when we are evaluating, you have to inspect what you expect. I’m sure there’s — I don’t know who said that, but you can Google it, right? Find out who said, “You must inspect what you expect.” I’m going to throw a little Clayism on the end of this thing. You must inspect what you expect or people won’t respect what you are telling them to do, and asking them to do, and encouraging them to do, and motivating them to do.
You have to let them know that this is what we are expecting, and then, you are following up. We must inspect what you expect or people won’t respect what you are trying to accomplish. Another phrase there is, what you focus on will grow, what you purposely focus on will grow. I want to give you a couple of very simple tools that I use with my employees to help me evaluate them on an ongoing basis. I think that it’s important in my companies, personal growth is one of our core values in all of my companies. I want to be able to evaluate people on a daily basis even moment by moment. I need to have a system that allows me to do that.
What I found, you’ve probably heard of Jack Welch, he’s the former CEO of GE. He expanded that company’s bottom line profits 4,000%, during his leadership. He came up with a system that he calls the four Es. I want to share that with you here. Again, this is something that I’ve used across the country with Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, to help managers and leaders evaluate their employees on a consistent basis. Because if you’re not careful, you’ll fall into that. What is that? The, 30, 60, 90, day evaluation, and then, the annual evaluation. My gosh, that is a long time between evaluations and between those evaluations, I promise you, you will get significant amount of drift away from the direction where you’re wanting to go, from the goals that you’re trying to accomplish. We have the four Es in place.
E number number one is energy. This is evaluating a person’s energy that they bring on a daily basis, the amount of personal inside energy coming out of them that they are able to bring on a daily basis. Step number two, E number two is energized, this is the employee’s ability to use their personal energy to energize the environment, to energize the group, the team, the division, the Department, the entire company. Are they able to use their personal energy for good, or do they use it for bad, do they use it to, do they use this energetic loud voice to suck energy from the rest of the team?
E number three is execution. This is actually the production, what they are getting done. Are they doing what you have asked them to do? Are they meeting their metrics? Are they meeting their numbers? Are they meeting their quotas? This is their execution. Then finally, E number four is their edge. This is huge. You know that you have encountered employees that come to work on a daily basis and drama follows them around. They’ve had a bad night, they didn’t sleep good, it was a hard weekend, they’ve got this going on with a certain relationship that they have. Oh, my car, oh this, oh the government, oh this type of thing. They just carry this drama around with them at work, and it impacts the amount of work they get done, and the amount of production that they were able to do.
What the edge here is all about is it’s a person’s ability to cut through the drama, even though there is struggle, even though life is happening around them, and their radiator hose broke on the way to work, or they had a flat tire, they got stuck in traffic. They are able to push through the emotional drama and get things done. Continue to meet their requirements, continue to produce what needs to be produced, even in the midst of difficult things, difficult circumstances going on outside of work, or difficult circumstances going on inside of work, like the internet goes down.
But some people when the internet goes down, they shut down, oh can’t do anything. They just allow that external circumstance to shut them down. Then there are other people that will cut through it, they will still continue to produce what needs to be produced. I want to encourage you with evaluating through the lens of culture to use energy, energized, execution, and edge.
The way that I evaluate people on this is, because I was a teacher for 15 years, I use the ABCDF system. On a given day, I will just walk by see somebody that is energized in their work, that is doing a great job, that is smiling, that is happy, that is connecting with customers, and I’ll walk up to them and say, “Man, that was fantastic. I loved your energy there. I’m going to give you an A for energy. Thank you so much for doing that.” They know what the A means, they know the system because we grew up with it here in America. They know what the word energy means because I’ve introduced that word into my culture. Because I’ve said it, I’ve written it, I have shown it, and I have also modeled it throughout the company.
These are the four Es, and how we evaluate is ABC and D. It’s very possible it happens very often, where I may go up to the same person on another day and go, “Man, now I’m used to coming up and seeing your energy around an A, but today man you really seem down is everything okay?” “Well, yes, I got this going on, that’s going on.” “Well, come on. Remember your edge, let’s press through that, let’s get that energy back up to an A, is that okay? Can you do that for me today?” “Yes. I can.” “Okay, good. I’m going to hold you accountable to that.” Same thing with energized ,execution, and edge, ABCDF. If you have someone that you have given Cs, Ds, and Fs to on a consistent basis, then guess what, it’s time to move them to customer status, time to move them out of the company. I get this a lot as I’m doing my training, as I’m coaching through Clay Staires at Tulsa Business Leadership. I get al ot of people say, “Clay, what do you do when people don’t quite meet their quota? When people aren’t doing what you asked him to do? I’ve got these employees, I’m trying to get them to do it but they don’t. It’s so frustrating, it’s hurting me, it’s frustrating me, I’m getting mad at them, they don’t like the company and all this. Clay how do I do that?” Well this is where on the evaluation piece where I use what I call the 3 T’s. I got this from another trainer down in Texas and you’re going to love this. business speaker Tulsa
It is called the 3 T’s and the first T is train. If I have an employee that is not meeting quotas, if they are not meeting the metrics ,the very first thing I want to ask myself as a leader is, have I train them to do what I’m asking them to do? Have I taken them through a quality training that has had enough time for them to learn? Have I trained them? If not then I know the first thing I want to do is make sure that I train or retrain, spend more time training, okay? However, if I have trained them and I know that they’ve gone through a good training system but they still aren’t doing it, they still aren’t able to hit the metrics, then the next thing that I’m going to do is go to T number two which is to transfer them. If I have another spot in my company, another position that may be open for them, they’re great people. It’s just the position that I have them in they are not able to perform the way that I need them to. business speaker Tulsa
I’m going to look to transfer them to another department, another team, another group, another division where they can be more effective. However, if they are performing low and I know that I’ve trained them and I’ve already transferred or I don’t have a place to transfer them, then I move to the third T and that is dun dun dun terminate them. We train, transfer or terminate. Those are your three choices, there is no fourth choice of tolerating. You train, you transfer or you terminate. Do not fall into the trap of T number four of tolerating low performance over a long period of time. Introduce to your entire culture these three T’s, let everybody know this is what we’re doing. You come to somebody you’re evaluating them. Okay, we need to do some more training they know that you are doing the first T, you are moving them to training and they will pick it up really quick. business speaker Tulsa
Then finally what we want to do here as we are evaluating people on a daily basis through the lens of our culture is we want to make sure that the work is driven by to-do lists. Again, we want to make sure that we don’t just expect our employees to do great work but the work that they are doing is great work because the work is planned, the work is in a checklist, the work is in a to-do list, we’re not just depending upon their intrinsic desire to do it. For instance like I mentioned in another podcast with my employees that I hire every single day, they have specific to do list and in those to-do lists are specific task and specific outcomes that I expect them to have during the day. At the end of the day, I get together and I go, “Okay, did you do number one?” It’s either yes or no, it’s not kind of, it’s not well I did a 30%. If it’s not a 100% the answer is no it’s not done and I’m able to immediately check on their work at that time to see if they actually did it. business speaker Tulsa
If I give them 10 things to do on a daily basis then at the end of the day when I evaluate and look at their to-do list and see what is checked off, I can see how much they were able to complete. If they did not complete the 10 things but did eight things then I got 80% production out of them that day. But I worked really hard okay it’s not about working hard it’s about producing the needed outcome. Again, I want to when it comes to this evaluating through the lens of culture, we want to make sure that the work is driven through to-do list and not just hey we need to do some things today. Let’s all go out there and do some stuff. Hey, some weeks — man that word some can just really get you. Let’s do some things. I need you to come up with something for me ah that will shoot you in the foot.
It’s something that’s Clay Staires with Tulsa business speaker Tulsa leadership that I found over and over not only my companies and learning the hard way but also as I’m working with other business owners, we have to be specific with the work. I love the work and my companies to be driven by to-do list. Did you do the 10 things I asked you to do today. This is Clay Staires at Tulsa business leadership with podcast number 20, Evaluating Through The Lens Of Culture. business speaker Tulsa
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