Your Next 90 Days – Accelerate Your Learning
This is the second of 10 challenges for you to consider embracing to create a new year that is more productive for yourself as well as for those around you. I have borrowed ideas from a book I read last year, The First 90 Days: Critical Success Stories for New Leaders by Michael Watkins.
Read previous challenge articles:
First Challenge – Promote yourself.
Second Challenge – Accelerate Your Learning
If you have committed to being a professional, whether you did it consciously or not, you committed to a lifetime of learning. And I don’t just mean the learning that comes with experience. I mean the type of learning that only comes as a result of a determination to always be the best at what you do.
Learn with a purpose – Whether you are taking on a new role, or just committing to execute your current role at a higher level, stop to think systematically about where you have knowledge gaps. Prioritize the need to fill those gaps and use this as your guide for focused learning.
Analyze your early wins/losses – Whenever you have a win or a loss, dig in and analyze why you won or lost. As difficult as it may be, being honest about a loss is the surest way to avoid future losses. And, as strange as it may sound, be just as determined to find out why you truly had a win. It’s the surest path to replicating the win.
Schedule your learning – There are almost always tasks that seem to be a higher priority in the moment than learning. This makes it way too easy to procrastinate. Make learning part of your job description and, like everything for which you are responsible, block out time on your calendar to make it happen.
Become the teacher – The surest way to learn something new is to commit to teaching it to someone else. Put yourself in the position to have to make a presentation, teach a class, or just mentor another individual.
Be the student – Identify someone (or multiple people) who is already in the role to which you aspire, and ask them if they are willing to answer some questions, provide guidance, and help fill your knowledge gaps.
Know your learning style – Some of us are visual learners, some are auditory, while others are tactile. In reality, we are all some combination. Experiment with various techniques and learn what is most effective for you.
Acceleration Checklist as suggested in The First 90 Days (paraphrased in places)
1. Are you guilty of assuming that you already have “the answer”?
If so, how will you avoid doing this?
2. What is your learning agenda?
Compose a list of the knowledge gaps that stand between you and the knowledge required for you to better perform your role as you would like to.
3. Given the knowledge you would like to acquire, which individuals are most likely to provide you with solid actionable insights?
4. How might you increase the efficiency of your learning process?
What are some ways you might extract more actionable insights for your investment of time and energy?
There is no better time to start learning than right now.
Photo by Alan Levine.
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Gone In an Instant – Our Year In Review
2011 was an incredibly busy and blazing fast year for us. Or it sure feels that way! We have been very involved with creating and training, and time seems to be defined by each of those mile markers along the way. We’ve learned a lot of great lessons and continue to incorporate each of them back into training, resources, and blog posts – where you’ll find our experiences and lessons diligently documented!
We started out the year launching our new sales system and digging into training sessions throughout the spring. Then there were on-site strategic planning sessions we conducted with individual agencies. That definitely kept us moving and thinking a lot about agency business models and the need to evolve that model. We rounded out the first half of the year with our networking conference, BGNLive.
From the conference we had several takeaways to develop for the remainder of the year. That included additional training and vetting new strategic partners. Another big project was getting an internal social networking site up and running for agencies to discuss ideas and share files & best practices with one another.
While we’ve learned many things along the way, here are a few key summarized lessons that we met again and again this past year which have been invaluable:
- Set your mind to it, create a plan, and commit to getting it done. Persistence, persistence, persistence.
- Making public commitment statements to your clients/community is a great motivator to keep going even when it’s difficult.
- Listening to clients’ struggles provides great opportunity to develop new/improved solutions/offerings.
- Asking for accountability is an amazing way to get things accomplished.
- Repetition, repetition, repetition. One time and one method of communication is not enough to learn something new or change thinking and behaviors.
Coming Up Next
As we move into 2012, we are looking to go deeper and get more specific on training, both at the network level and within each agency. Another area that will receive increased attention will be driving more interactive agency networking as a means for faster and more effective implementation.
We have our sights set on transforming agencies into independently thriving businesses regardless of the outcome of the various economic and healthcare challenges we face. You can be sure that we’ll continue to take every opportunity to learn and incorporate those lessons back into what we do every day to make our member agencies and brokerages more successful.
Thanks for a great year and here’s to another one to come!
Photo by Dharmit Shah.
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The Opportunity Is Yours…Or Someone Else’s
We are in a period of enormous opportunity to help employers fix what’s not working in their businesses. And right now, there is a lot that’s currently not working well in businesses.
I’m reading The New American Workplace, which was published in 2006. It’s a follow-up study to a book called Work in America published in 1973. The book looks at the current state of the how workers and employers interact with and feel about one another and how these interactions differ from 30 years ago. It’s particularly interesting to read it now in 2011 because at the time of writing we hadn’t yet entered the recession, yet there are very clear indications throughout the book that if things don’t change with the way employers interact with and treat their employees, there will be some significant consequences. Of course, now we’re watching those predictions actually play out.
Employees
So many businesses have been in such a decline in the treatment of their employees over the past 30 years that many business owners and managers today don’t even know what it means to train your workforce and take care of them in exchange for hard work and loyalty. We lived a bubble of economic growth where business grew at such rapid rates in spite of continual cuts, squeezes, and off-shoring that we believed the way we were managing companies was clearly good management. Or was it? Was it good management and ownership? Or was it circumstantial and merely fortunate due to growing economic conditions?
Over this 30-year period, employees have worked harder and increased average company productivity by 65%, yet at the same time, average wages only increased 22%. This has been a great boon for top executives and shareholders because of the enormous revenue gains from this productivity and profitability increase.
However, it’s clearly proven to be a great de-motivator for the folks doing the work. Right now, according to Met Life Study of Employee Benefit Trends, one in three employees hopes to be working elsewhere in the next twelve months. A clear indicator that employees are sick and tired of the way they’re being treated.
Employers
What would happen if your agency lost 33% of its staff? A big huge blow to the revenue, profit, productivity, and morale, I have no doubt. This leads to other issues down the road with damage to your customer service and brand reputation, R&D opportunities, and on to business continuity. It all rolls down hill, and if it gets started, it’s extraordinarily difficult to get it stopped and going back up that hill.
These very same ideas apply to your clients. You can guarantee that if you are thinking about and struggling with these issues, so are your clients.
The opportunity is ripe to turn things around. And the opportunity is yours for the taking, if you choose.
Clearly things have changed, and I would guess that many of these long-time owners and their managers don’t even understand what good quality leadership needs to look like today. Many don’t even know what they don’t know.
- The old way has been management by pushing and prodding people to just meet the minimum expectations of the job.
- Now empowering employees to be self motivated at work and take on projects because they want to is the new management…rather leadership.
Effectively leading a team in this way requires two foundational elements:
- Have excellent communication around the vision and goals of where the company is going and why. Be sure to communicate they “why” in ways that appeal to the individuals – not just because the company wants to be more profitable.
- Figure out what performance metrics really make a difference in reaching those goals, communicate those to the team so they understand their roles in relation to the goals, and regularly communicate the ongoing status to team – good, bad, or indifferent.
There is a great study from Stanford University, Management Practice & Productivity: Why They Matter, that very directly ties the productivity and profitability of a company to good management and leadership – communication of the strategic direction of the business and progress toward goals were at the top of the list. As a matter of fact, the study results showed that an investment in quality management practices (such as these and others) were equivalent to large increases in existing labor and capital.
Notice that these things we’re talking about here require no capital investment – simply an understanding of the importance of good management, the time to plan, and a commitment to making it happen.
There is certainly more you can go on to do that would require financial investment around training, systems, processes, etc., but it’s got to start with these fundamental pieces. Once the momentum starts, it makes sense to continue exploring other options for further training and growth within the organization.
Taking the time to study and learn quality business practices that you can take to your clients – right now – will prove transformative. For them and you.
Speaking as a current and former business owner, I can attest that if you help someone fix something significant in his or her business, you’ve got a client for life (assuming, of course, you continue to influence their business as time goes on).
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Do You Have a Job or a Career?
I guess there are many ways you could describe the difference between the two, but I’m sure you have an immediate difference that comes to mind for you. At a recent Producer Training Camp, we overheard one of the attendees describe the difference as the following:
“A job is something you learn once and just do it. A career is something you intentionally choose and commit yourself to constant learning in order to stay current.”
I like that explanation as much as any I’ve ever heard. I know I wouldn’t want to go to a doctor who quit studying and learning as soon as he had his degree in hand. It goes without saying that when he committed to being a physician, he committed to a lifetime of learning.
Guess what? You’ve chosen a career. You are a professional. You’ve committed to, and your clients deserve, a lifetime of learning. Just being a reader and a listener, while a great start, isn’t enough. You have to be very purposeful about your ongoing learning.
I suggest you start by evaluating your current abilities, and the future requirements, in the following areas.
Technical Skills – What are the technical skills that have to be razor sharp? What are the technical skills that you need to develop to stay on top of your game?
Some examples might include: alternative financing, actuarial analysis, or compliance issues.
Sales Skills – What is required for you to be able to effectively communicate your value proposition? What new skills would allow you to position yourself as a true partner with your clients rather than just a vendor?
Some examples might include: 30 second commercial, listening skills, closing strategies, effective networking, asking for referrals, etc.
Business Acumen – What is the general business knowledge that you must have in order to have a peer-to-peer conversations with a business owner? What knowledge could you obtain that would have them coming to you for advice about “non technical” challenges?
Some examples might include: national economic trends, operational basics, corporate structure, or perpetuation.
There is no limit to the learning opportunities you need to embrace to make you more effective at what you do and to improve the impact you can have on the business of your clients.
If you’re interested in a tool that would help you assess the areas on which you should be focusing, leave a comment and e-mail address below, and we’ll be happy to share with you.
