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What to do if Employees are “Always” on Social Media

By Al Levi |

Question: Are your employees going to stop checking their social media feeds anytime soon?

Answer: No!

Question: What can you do about it?

Answer: A few things.

Question: Is this a new problem?

Answer: Yes and no.

Employees being distracted at work has been going on since they put in a water cooler in the breakroom. And since going on cigarette breaks were routine. And even when the first access to the internet allowed them to go “surfing” from the comfort of their office chair.

Social Media Distraction isn’t a new problem but rather an old problem expressed in a new way. That problem is time spent not working while at work. The Social Media Distraction issue continues to grow to an even higher and higher level of disruption of productivity in the workplace as more and more social media channels are created that compete increasingly for the attention of your employees while they’re at work and on the clock.

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Police State or Permissive Where Anything Goes?

By Al Levi |

I was working with a client a number of years ago and he was a fantastic contractor, as were his partners. The majority of my work was with this one partner who was a smart, effective and knowledgeable leader of their fast growing plumbing, heating, cooling and electrical company.

He was the rare owner who not only knew the technical side of the business, but he and his partners knew what it took to grow a company, which meant learning and implanting the business side of things.

My reason for being called in to consult was that they had experienced explosive growth and they were suffering the ill effects that came with it. He and his partners were realizing that the way they answered their phones, to the way they dispatched, to the way they had their Techs run calls, had to be fixed.

They (not me) had said they had the worst group of Customer Service Representatives (aka CSRs) ever. And what made it worse is that they had eight of them. Sad truth is… they were bad. At least, they were when we first started.

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Office Politics and Gossip

By Al Levi |

My dad raised my brothers and sisters and me on the phrase, “If you’ve got nothing good to say, say nothing.”

Well, in corporate America and elsewhere in our society today where face-to-face and cyberbullying is rampant… that ship has sailed.

The question is should you participate in this?

In the old days (think Seinfeld TV show era… no… not the syndicated reruns or what you pull up on your phone from YouTube) there was always the water cooler topics of the day. The show itself was a catalyst for talking about a lot of things that had formally been taboo or just not thought of, or at least never expressed that way was safe or kind of safe to talk about.

The reality is that in our more politically correct era too many topics are off the table for discussion (probably should have always been the case), and we can weigh the pros and cons to that, but the reality is that there is office dynamite – that’s office gossip and office politics (different than the politics of our government but also something highly charged if pushed too far).

The truth is that we must accept that you’re never going to totally stop the Office Gossip and Politics because we, as people, love to talk and hear ourselves talk, and there’s a part of us that likes throwing others under the bus, and that for some is human nature.

What role do we as owners have in all of this?

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Write Your Game Statements

By Al Levi |

When I begin work with a new client, I seek to understand their company and how it ticks today. I also need to understand how the owner or owners function today.

That’s why I like to get to Leadership Power before I dive into Marketing Power….what?

Yep, the reason for doing Leadership Power before Marketing Power is to clarify the owner’s vision of what the company’s mission, position in the market (or how they go to market that differentiates them) and what they hope it will look like when they’re all done. Otherwise, the Marketing Power is off to work in the wrong direction vs. in synch with the goals and mandates that Leadership Power identifies.

I run them through a series of exercises that help reveal to both of us what they really want from their business and their personal life in the next 3 to 5 years. Yes, your business life is directly tied to your personal life. It’s not meant to be all consuming as it is to many contractors. Your business should be designed to serve your personal life, not the other way around.

To me, the often used phrase that speaks to Leadership Power is, “If you don’t care where you end up, any road will do!”

I don’t know about you, but I know myself and my clients, and we care an awful lot about where we end up; so, that’s why we spend time defining in WRITING the following:

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Goals, Beliefs and Actions: The Foundation of Leadership

By Al Levi |

When I first moved out to Phoenix, I brought the souvenirs of my career with me – a bad back and bad knees. My wife suggested that I sign up for a Yoga class, which I did with the sole purpose of my getting some physical relief.

Okay, I’ll admit it. I now love Yoga! It has been life-altering both physically and mentally.

One day as I was stretching out in class, the teacher was talking about some different philosophies. One of the things she mentioned is that if you set goals and you have actions attached to them – but you never seem to reach those goals – the step you might be missing is belief.

An illustration would be you’re a heavy person, like I’ve been most of my life, and you have the goal of losing weight. You know all of the actions – eat right, eat smaller portions, and exercise more often. But if you don’t believe that you’re a thin person – if you believe that you’ll always be a heavy person – it’s never going to change. So what we need to tie together are our goals (what we want to achieve) and what we really believe. And make sure that what we believe is in sync with our goals. And then take the appropriate actions that will make those goals a reality.

This applies to running a business every bit as much as it applies to your life.

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Making It Okay for Your Employees to Ask for Help

By Al Levi |

Is it okay for your Employees to ask for help at your company?

You might say yes. But, I wonder if that’s true.

The reason I wonder if that’s true is because at my shop it wasn’t. We had a typical New York shop full of “know it all” mentalities. That meant it was dangerous to expose what you didn’t know because at the very least it was cause for your boss and co-workers to unleash a ton of ridicule.

The other reason I know that your staff is probably highly unwilling to show you what they don’t really know is because I, myself, the boss’s kid (as someone who had risen to be the 2ndbest Tech at our shop of 25 Techs) would spend time talking Customers out of repairs that I wasn’t fully confident I could do.

Yes, that’s right I, the boss’s kid, would do that.

Also, the reason I believe that your staff won’t show you what they can and can’t do is because they probably oversold what they actually can do when you first hired them. Now they’ve become overly protective at exposing these weaknesses they have to you or any other management team members at your company.

Here’s what I know. All your employees have holes in their knowledge, and until you make it safe for them to share what they do and don’t know you’re going to be at risk. There will be lost productivity, mistakes or worse things like insurance claims or a sting operation that makes the news and makes you look bad.

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The Difference Between a Leader and a Manager

By Al Levi |

What’s the difference between a Leader and a Manager?

I get asked this question a lot when I do seminars and workshops. And even when I do 1-to-1 consulting. It’s a great question because this can be a confusing distinction between the two roles.

To me, a Leader has a vision and they share that vision with others as they try to move the company where they see it should be, so they end up where they want to go.

A Manager is busy getting the day to day stuff handled so the Leader can focus on the direction and the vision.

Leaders and Managers are both critical to the long-term success of any business.

But, there’s an issue that tends to pop up a lot when I work with clients. That issue is where there are Leaders and Managers and they are not sharing the same vision and they’re busy plotting separate courses for the company. It would be akin to have a car barreling down the highway with four people wrestling to grab the steering wheel and drive. Nothing good is going to happen in this scenario.

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The Importance of Getting Away from Your Business

By Al Levi |

I grew up working in my family’s heating business. And my dad’s coaching to his very young sons was, “We don’t do winter sports or take winter vacations.”

Basically, it meant every living breathing moment from Labor Day till April 1st was to be spent working in the business.

That made for a crazy time that could wear us and our employees down.

But, the nice thing was my wife saying to me in summer, “You home again?” or, “You’re going out to play golf again?”

That all changed when we branched out into the plumbing and cooling trades. Then, we had to be available 24/7/365. And my wife then began to say, “Are you ever coming home?”. Or, “When are we ever going to have time for a vacation?”.

The answer, for a pretty long time, was “never”.

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Creating a Business to be Thankful For

By Al Levi |

“I hate my business!”

That’s what I hear periodically when I talk with Contractors. And to me that is sad. But, I get it.

For many, the business they started didn’t turn out the way they planned when they took that big leap and typically left a secure paying job as an employee to go for the brass ring as an owner. It seemed like it would be easier.

The most common complaints I hear are:

1. “This business is making me go broke. I have to keep putting in my own hard-earned savings, borrowed money or what I had hoped would be my retirement money to keep things going and nothing positive seems to happen.”

2. “I work all day and when I get home there’s more work to do. Things like billing, returning calls, putting together bids and a whole lot more than I realized. The day never ends.”

3. “I can’t do at 60 years of age what I did when I was 50 years old let alone what I did in my 20s, 30s and 40s. So, what do I do now?”

4. “I can’t stop working or there’s no business. Heaven forbid I get hurt or sick. It’s scary.”

5. “My employees are infuriating. They act like they’re the owner and I’m their employee.”

Yes, business can be hard. But, it doesn’t have to be.

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Handing It Off Without Losing Your Mind

By Al Levi |

“Why won’t people at my company take responsibility for getting things done?

Seriously, if I don’t do it myself, it’ll never get done. I don’t know what they do all day but they don’t spend time getting done what I want them to, especially when it comes to important projects.”

This is a standard complaint I get from frustrated owners. And I get it. But, these owners never seek to change their method so they keep getting the same result but only more frustrated as time goes on.

The definition of insanity: Doing the same things over and over expecting different results.

Here’s the sad fact. You’ve trained your staff that if they don’t do what you want the way you want you’ll lose your mind and take the project back. And that is training them to NOT take responsibility or action because you’ll never be pleased with what they do anyway.

When you’re done complaining privately or publicly or both, you take back these projects and things that need to get done at your company so you remain overloaded. Am I right?

I know why you stopped delegating anything to anyone and it’s because you’ve been trained by your staff that it’s a waste of time and money to do so.

This used to happen to me at my company. Keep in mind we had grown to 70 employees and still no one was able to help me get things done. I blamed them. But, the problem was actually me.

Yes, me.

I never took the time to delegate anything to anyone properly because I was in too big of a rush and I assumed they were too. So, I dumped it on them vs. delegating it to them.

What’s the difference?

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