Are you talking or listening?

This was originally published in the Starguard Newsletter.  For more information on Starguard Lifeguard Training Programs or Starfish Swimming Courses, please visit http://starfishaquatics.org/

Title: Are you listening or talking?

 

Cuts, Cuts, Cuts.  It seems wherever you turn these days, you are getting squeezed from one direction or the other.  The April issue of Aquatics International even ran a cover story titled “Cut Backs”.  The pressure is on facility operators and owners to evaluate all aspects of their business and decide where some spending can be trimmed.

 

One of the first areas that is usually scrutinized is spending on recruiting and advertising.  This year, there seem to be more applicants for seasonal positions then in years past, and this is making the advertising and marketing budget an easy target. 

 

As hard as this is, it can be a great opportunity for you to really examine how your marketing is set up, and whether or not it is right for you.  The atmosphere has changed.  The old ways of talking “at” your employees/ customers/ recruits is over.  There is a new era, and now is a time to make sure your message aligns with it.

After a recent conference, AdAge (who is the industry publication that covers marketing and media), came out with its “5 New Rules for Marketing” (www.AdAge.com ), and while not all five have direct application, it gives an interesting overview of where media and advertising currently is.

 

Here are a few of them:

 

• Listening to customers is more important then talking at them. 

 

For years we have carefully crafted marketing “messages” as we tell our client/customer/ employee what we KNOW they want to hear.  That game is over.  It is a conversation, and a conversation is two way. 

 

• You can’t separate the corporation from the brand

 

Gary Vaynerchuk (http://garyvaynerchuk.com/) has said that the days of multiple personalities are over.  You can no longer have a work personality, a web personality (Facebook, etc), and another for your friends – you are who you are, whether it is at home, at work, or online, and your passions will be transparent.  It is important you believe in what you do.

 

We are all salespeople, whether we sell anything or not.  We – and to a lesser (or greater) extent, our company is judged by how we act and what we do EVERY time we interact with someone.  There are no secrets anymore.  We need to live our lives like everything we do is being recorded and will be posted online – and much of it is. 

 

• Social Media is not a strategy

 

I feel strongly that EVERYONE needs to be involved in social media.  That being said, what is important is your product/ business, how it is run, and how you treat people – whether they be customers, recruits, or employees. As CC Chapman said on Managing the Gray, “Social Media will not save a crappy product”.  There are many tools out there – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and they should be part of the many areas you participate in, but they alone are not what is important.  

So what is important?  As I mentioned earlier, the “new rules” say a lot of old stuff.  What is important today is what has made businesses successful since the beginning of time.  Whether you look at Making Friends and Influencing People by Carnegie, or stories of how Bank of America was started, the important thing is the relationships, and today, more then ever there are tools to help you cultivate and grow those relationships.

Welcome new visitors

Welcome new readers from StarGuard, great to have you.

Thanks

Josh

Seasonal Hiring Strong

Wall Street Journal recently posted an article about the abundance of labor for seasonal positions due to the down economy.  I posted about this a while back.   Some employers in the article also say that this will affect their international/ J1 student hires. 

This could spell big trouble coming in the summer.  I predict many many J1 students will arrive and not have jobs that they were promised before they came.  This will be very bad for both some of the resort towns, as well for the students themselves, and the J1 program as a whole.

Article HERE

Webinar Alert

There is a webinar entitled “Getting a Grip on Gen Y” hosted by Lisa Orrell and Unbound Ideas that some readers may be interested in.  Get the details here

Cool Post

I have read Brad Feld’s blog for some time, he is a Venture Capitalist out of Boulder.  He always has some interesting insight.  I read a post this morning that has both personal and professional meaning.  It’s called “The Rhythms of My Life” and it details his personal schedule.  Good stuff. Check it out here

The Cult of Done.

I was turned on to the Cult of Done by a post on The Practice of Leadership where they highlighted a recent manifesto called The Cult of Done by Bre Pettis and Kio Stark.  The main points:

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

It also was made into a cool poster by Joshua Rothaas.  Things that have posters are always cool.

Best is not always nice

Sharlyn Lauby has a recent post also talking about managers – it provides a slightly different view then my previous post, but I agree with it as well.  Your thoughts?

See the post here

Advice on Managing Gen Y. Please give me a break..

In the interest of full disclosure, I am somewhere between Boomers and Y, generally in the X era, where we loved grunge, coffee, made mix tapes and spent most of our lives listening to people say how our generation wouldn’t amount to much. 

Now I find myself in management, watching this whole generational relationship thing play out.   I have been stewing on this post for quite some time because it frustrates me.  There is a whole cottage industry who I assume make a good deal of money professing to know the best way to “manage” the generations.  Here is a Business Week article:

article link http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/dec2008/sb2008122_338569.htm

The author puts forth some tips such as “Don’t give just one way to solve a problem” and “Gen Y thinks physical meetings are ineffective”.

I don’t want to discount any of the hard work that has been put into researching whether listening to Britney Spears changes employees’ view of upper management, but there is NO secret sauce.  Every time I read something about the best way to handle this generation or that generation, I always go back to the best (IMHO) management book ever written, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.  In it, he lists the following fundamental techniques: (referenced via Wikipedia)

• Don’t criticize, condemn or complain.
• Give honest and sincere appreciation.
• Arouse in the other person an eager want.

And if I could add one more – Respect.

It doesn’t matter if they are 7, 17, or 70 – treat people right, treat them with respect and they will do well.  You can’t win them all.  You also can’t change the entire makeup of your organization because the conventional wisdom is that Gen Yers don’t like meetings.  That is hogwash.  You know what is right.  You know how your organizations runs best. 

This does not mean that you should not be open to new ideas.  It does however mean that you can’t go chasing every idea an “expert” says is the new hipness.

I think it was Ghandi who said “Be the change you want to see in the world”.  On a smaller scale, BE the change you want to see in your organization.

Great New Blog

Andrew has added a great new blog over at Waterpark Leadership .  He has extremely well written and insightful posts. 

I am excited to see this side of the industry getting more exposure.  It has been looked over for quite some time.  In my opinion, solid leadership on the HR side makes safer and better run facilities.

Please welcome Andrew.  I look forward to his posts!

Your team is only as good as the Middle

This time of year, everyone is “building the team”.  If you are like most in charge, you will be giving a lot of thought to how the team is put together.  How do team members fit into the puzzle? How will they interact?  Who will be good? Who may fade off?

There is much study on teams, and how teams work together, and what works and what doesn’t.   I have heard both that a team is only as good as the leader, and have also heard that a team is only as good as it’s “weakest link” (I held back and didn’t do any tv show references).

I would propose this – this lifeguarding industry, and any industry that relies on large numbers of young folks to be the face of your organization – we are only as good as the Middle.   

There is sometimes a tendency to overlook those in the middle.  The thought is that if you have a good team at the top, and a good team at the bottom, then everyone else isn’t as important. 

You are top.  Do your job well, lead your team well.  The middle is where the leaders are, and where the future leaders are.  The middle is where the next the leaders in your organization are.  The middle is where the work is done. 

Don’t cheat on the middle.