uncover some of the special inputs that help foster boardroom effectiveness
It's not just a lack of financial performance that can bring a board into the spotlight. Leading AFL club the West Coast Eagles, for example, had the highest turnover ($46 million) in 2007 of any club, was the most profitable ($6.6 million) and had sustained success on the field (only four times in its 21-year history has it not made the finals). It suffered, however, from a player behaviour issue, forcing not only an AFL investigation but also a shakeup of the board.
Ingredients for boardroom effectiveness
~ A good mix of skills
~ A strong chairman
~ Mutual trust and respect
~ Honesty and openness
~ Independence and teamwork
~ Clear understanding or roles
~ Effective board evaluation
~ Acceptace of differences of opinion
Chairman Mark Barnaba, co-founder and managing director of Azure Capital, is slowly rebuilding the club again after a series of player incidents culminated in star player Ben Cousins being sacked in October 2007.
There were criticisms of the board and senior management for their failure to act, especially when two seperate reports (one conducted by retired Victorian Supreme Court judge William Gillard) found there had been 35 off-field incidents involving 13 Eagles playes in six years.
Read more of how this article may apply to your board ...
Extract from Company Director - Vol 24 02 March 08 by Adreian Dignam, pages 35-36.
If you’d like to investigate the benefits of forming a Board for your business, read further about company Oversight, Board Due Diligence, and/or forming an Advisory Board. Then call us on 08 9271 7661 to find out why every business that turns over more than $1m pa should have a properly composed Board of Directors.
The war for talent will not be won through salary alone. Graham Doyle, a director of Hays, provided some tips on what else companies can do to attract and retain good staff.
1. Know what you are looking for.
Retention starts with great recruitment. Clearly identify, by benchmarking great performers, what makes someone successful in your organisation. Make sure the individual fits this criteria. Include an assessment of the individual's values and motivators in the recruitment process to ensure they are aligned with the company's or team's goals.
2. Train people well.
Ensure that the people in your business have everything they need to do their jobs well.
3. Communicate expectations.
Let employees know what your company stands for - its culture and values - and what is expected of them in terms of technical output and behaviour.
4. Performance management.
It's no surprise that employers of choice have solid performance management methodology, such as a robust, regular appraisal system, that is user friendly and to which managers are committed. Formal performance feedback is critical and is an excellent opportunity to ensure talent is engaged.
5. Career development.
Not everyone is interested in career development, but top talent always is. It can be difficult for small organisations to offer opportunities, but career development is not restricted to promotion. Can you offer additional responsibility such as supervising other employees, coaching and training others, managing projects and chairing meetings?
6. Quality of managers.
Frontline managers are the key to retention. How good are your managers at motivating and inspiring their team members? Managing performance, good and bad? Setting useful goals? Providing useful performance feedback? What does your organisation do to develop its managers?
7. Inclusion.
Ensure employees feel included and are empowered to make decisions. Allowing people to be part of the decision making process, especially when it affects their jobs and the overall direction of the company, engages them with your business.
8. Rewards.
Well developed reward and recognition programs work as long as there is a fair and equal system of processes for rewards. Research shows that employees prefer financial, or a combination of financial and non-financial rewards, over straight non-cash benefits.
9. Attractive package.
Not all organisations can offer a competitive salary. If you can't you should try to offer an attractive benefits package, which could include flexible hours, weekly or monthly office lunches, life or health insurance, sports events and a work/life balance.
10. Recognise unique talents.
Recognise and utilise the unique talents of each staff member.
Extracted from Company Director, Vol 24 No 05 June 08, Page 14.
BARELY MANAGING
Their selling point should be the principals' expertise, experience and immediacy
It used to be a pub on every corner. These days, it's more likely to be a management consultancy. Like shrill mushrooms in the shadow of the giant consulting groups, thousands of single-operator businesses and "boutique" firms squeal increasingly: "Pick me, pick me."
It is an article of faith among the legion of consulting businesses vying to cut through the clutter that simply offering a range of services is a mug's game. The key to success, it is held, is a proprietary concept, product or tool.
The goal is to offer a "unique" branded solution that suggests plenty of intellectual rigour. These consultancies build their businesses - or their aspirations - on proprietary diagnostics thick with impenetrable "management science". Their principals believe that a signature offering will set them apart from their competition. Unfortunately, their competitors are thinking exactly the same thing. As a result, Australia is awash with mostly useless proprietary mangement "products".
Small consultancies are so determined to emulate the McKinsey & Co's of this world that they forget that their real advantage is that they are not McKinsey & Co. Their selling point should be the principals' expertise, experience and immediacy.
The rapidly expanding pool of guns for hire should signal a vast resource of management expertise available to business, but there is little evidence that the explosion of consulting businesses and their proprietary tools has added to the depth of management thinking and expertise available to business. Businesses are daily flooded with marketing materials from business advisers and their over-hyped proprietary systems. When these firms manage to impress themselves on a new client, their grand promises and elaborate management systems are very often found wanting - and can sometimes inflict enormous disruption to client organisations.
The proliferation of management consultants should be good news for business, but it won't be until the spivs are rooted out of the system. The mania for contrived management products and claims to unrealistic levels of capability is causing harm to the businesses that engage these consultants, as well as clouding the benefits of utilising external expertise.
While the pretenders are busy presenting themselves as something they are not, it is important to acknowledge the contribution that many solo consultants and small consulting firms make to Australian business. These men and women are smart, experienced, no-frills operators who are confident in their abilities and take pride in their work. And not a branded product in sight.
We understand your frustration because so often our first assignment with a new client is to enable them to overcome the consequences of bad experiences they have had with the people they engaged before us. But if/when you read our testimonials, or talk to some of our current clients, any justifiable caution will soon be addressed.
Rule Zero: Do Not Cheat. Period.
If you walked into a room full of genius scientists with PhDs, do you think you could outsmart them all? No. Google has hundreds of rooms full of genius scientists with PhDs, and their job is to work 60 hours a week to make sure you can’t fool Google. You can’t outsmart them. Ever. Ignore any advice on trying to cheat the system and focus on making great web sites with great content, and your sites will show up fine in searches.
Rule One: Stick to Your Keywords
Pick a few keywords or phrases that describe your site. Use them, and words related to them, whenever it’s natural to do so. Repeating them uselessly is no good (rule Zero). Use them in sentences, headlines, and links.
Rule Two: Content is King
Users don’t search for design, they search for content. If your site doesn’t have content people want, no one will look at it.
Every page on your site should follow the Inverted Pyramid. Each page should lead with a relevant H1 tag with one of your keywords, and the first paragraph of text should be a summary of the rest of the page.
Rule Three: Clean Code is Searchable Code
Build your sites in a text editor, and write clean, human-readable HTML. The HTML should follow the conceptual structure of the page, navigation first, followed by the H1 tag, then the first paragraph, etc. Try to use descriptive tags when possible. Use UL for lists, P for paragraphs, H tags for heads and subheads, and STRONG for bolded text. Don’t overuse Divs.
Your site can still be artistic and cool, that’s what CSS is for.
Rule Four: The Home Page is the Most Important Page
Your home page is the key to your site being found by search engines. It should summarize the rest of the site, and give a clear, compelling reason for a user to look at the other pages in the site.
Rule Five: Links Have Meaning
Search engines pay a lot of attention to the links on your site, and the words used in those links. Never use “click here” or “see more” for a link. The link text should describe where the link will take the user, such as “more examples of CSS web design” or “learn how we can improve your SEO.”
The more relevant the links on a page, the more findable the page becomes. Don’t go overboard, and don’t link to anything
irrelevant. If your page is focused on minimalist web design, a link to the Design MeltDown page on minimalism will boost your SEO. A link to a hilarious picture of a cat will not.
Rule Six: Title Tags for the Win
Every page in your site should have a title with the site name and a short description of the page. About 60 letters total. Include a keyword. Remember that the page title is what appears in search results, it should give users a clear reason to click on it.
Your navigation links should have title attributes that match the titles of your pages. This looks like <a title=”name of page” href=”link”>. originalAttribute="href" originalPath="”link”>." originalAttribute="href" originalPath="”link”>." originalAttribute="href" originalPath="”link”>." It’s a small thing, but it will give you a significant SEO improvement.
Rule Seven: Alt Tags Matter
Every image on your site should have an alt tag. Especially images that are relevant to the page. If your page is focused on CSS tricks, labelling a screenshot “example of rounded CSS corners” will improve your page’s findability. Labelling it “screenshot” or “image” will do the opposite.
Rule Eight: Ignore Most Meta Tags
A long time ago meta tags were the secret to SEO. Those days are gone. The only meta tag that really matters now is the description tag. Search engines may use it to provide the text under the link to your page in their results. Make sure it describes the page in a way that explains why a user searching for your content would want to look at your page.
Rule Nine: Have a Site Map
Make sure you have a site map. This is an xml file that describes the structure of your page. Make one, and give it to Google.
Rule Ten: Design for Humans
Search engines are designed to find what humans want. That means the best way to make your site findable is to design it for humans. Your job as a designer is to solve a problem, not make art, prove a point, serve your ego or break a boundry. In this case, your problem is to provide your users with a site that is easy to use and full of what they’re looking for. If you can do that, the search engines will find you.
This is an article written by Joshua Jeffrey’s who describes himself as a “busybody in the local and national design/web world”.
If this all sounds like gobbledy-geek to you, or just too much time and effort, visit www.webpartner.com.au and see instead how it can all be done for you.
What is the quickest way to improve your bottom line?
Edensilk Team - Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Improving the performance of your staff is the quickest and most effective way to improve the bottom line.
If you were told that you could have a 10 per cent improvement per capita employed added to the bottom line simply through good Performance Management, what would be your reaction? People account for at least two thirds of operating expenses so a 10 per cent improvement per capita can have a very beneficial impact - yet many Australian employers have not fully woken up to this fact.
Many managers seem to prefer to give informal occasional feedback without engaging in formal performance appraisals. According to a recent research paper by 1st Executive on attitudes to work entitled - The Great Divide - Performance Management is slowly being phased out of Australian business life.
Andrew Thoseby, Director of 1st Executive says "whilst it is often stated that people are the biggest assest of a business, whether managers are being made accountable for managing their performance in fact sheds a different light on the truth of performance management".
Extracted from myBusiness magazine, April 2008, pages 36-37.
Read further about leadership and management or call us on 08 9271 7661 for a comprehensive diagnosis and proposal to ensure your valuable personnel are being effectively deployed.
COMMAND PERFORMANCE
A consulting model rather than a fulfilment model for developing training courses can avoid the conspiracy of convenience.
Organisational learning practice has been based on the concept that improving an employee's skills and knowledge leads to an improvement in that person's performance. If training improves individual performance, the corollary is that it must also increase organisational performance - which in turn suggests that the role of learning and development departments is to deliver as much training as possible.
Charles Jennings, the head of global learning at news and information company Thomas Reuters, based in London, calls this the fulfilment model. "One of our challenges is overcoming the fulfilment mentality, which just asks, ' How many courses do you need?'."
4 sets of questoins that will lead you to breakthrough performance
Edensilk Team - Wednesday, July 16, 2008
4 sets of questoins that will lead you to breakthrough performance
1.First Principle Costs and prices almost always decline
How does your cost slope compare with your competitors'?
What is the slope of price change in your industry right now, and how does your cost curve compare?
What are your costs compared with competitors'?
Who is most efficient and effective in priority areas?
Where can you improve most, relative to others?
Which of your products or services are making money (or not) and why?
2.Second Principle Your competitive position determines your options
How do you and your competitors compare in terms of returns on assets and relative market share?
How are the leaders making money, and what is their approach?
What is the full potential of your business position?
How big is your market?
Which parts are growing fastest?
Where are you gaining or losing share?
What capabilities are creating a competitive advantage for you?
Which ones need to be strengthened or acquired?
3.Third Principle Customers and profit pools don't stand still
Which are the biggest, fastest-growing, and most profitable customer segments?
How well do you meet customer needs relative to competitors and subsitutes?
What proportion of customers are you retaining?
How does your Net Promoter Score track against competitors'?
How much of the profit pool do you have today?
How is the pool likely to change in the future?
What are the opportunities and threats?
4.Fourth Principle Simplicity gets results
How complex are your product or service offerings, and what is that degree of complexity costing you?
WHere is your innovation fulcrum?
What are the few critical ways your products stand out in customers' minds?
How complex is your decision making and organisation relative to competitors'?
What is the impact of this complexity?
Where does complexity reside in your processes?
What is that costing you?
If you'd like to discuss this article in full, please call us on 08 9271 7661. Or consider some of our more detailed diagnostic tools such as a Business Health Check or complete Business Diagnosis.
an improvement in that person's performance. If training improves individual performance, the corollary is that it must also increase organisational performance - which in turn suggests that the role of learning and development departments is to deliver as much training as possible.
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