It is amazing how this is finally coming to the forefront.

I found this article in the National Post. It discusses the fact that your employees are not driven solely by the dollar and compensation. We are in a very competitive global market and to remain at the forefront you need a highly motivated and productive workforce.

Senior leaders can no longer rely on employees to work longer hours and accept compensation cuts without risking labour unrest, high turnover and reduced performance. Senior leaders need to begin to think creatively about ways to foster higher levels of employee engagement and commitment.

The ultra competitive market that has existed for decades was externally driven – as an employee you were pitted against your fellow employee and it was survival of the fittest. This has not brought the level of productivity that senior leaders thought it would – what it led to was burnout, manipulation and greed. It is known that socially people tend to compare themselves on their own accord. People compare themselves with their peers and this incites employees to work harder in order to be recognized or to maintain prestige.

What I do not like about this article is the message that it is giving to human resources and those in a position to hire. It concludes by encouraging companies to be more cognizant of peer comparison especially when designing compensation and measurement plans. “In order to motivate employees, firms may want to consider more uniform and standardized salary scales, combined with ancillary incentive programs and contests that exploit the positive effects of social comparison”.

Any company considering “exploiting” their staff, to me, is not worth working for. Engaging people to be their best and to pay for what value they bring back to the company is a much more valuable way to encourage people. This alone will entice people to do more and better work without the need to bring down their fellow workers.

Tags: compensation plans for employees, engageing and encouraging your employees, how to engage your market, how to survive in a competitive market

I am reading this article in the National Post called, RED TAPE: The silent killer of jobs written by Laura Jones. The article talks about how Prime Minister Stephen Harper acknowledges the destructive impact of excessive regulation in 2011 and wants to do something about it. The article actually is a comparison between the U.S. and Canada — saying that President Barack Obama feels the same way however Canada’s approach seems more promising in getting results and the P.M. is acting on this.

For this article, I want to focus on Canada rather than compare. What I find most amazing is how long it has taken our P.M. to do something about this. With nearly 98% of Canada made up of small-to-medium size businesses, the impact of red tape on these businesses has been paramount — just ask. All Stephen Harper had to do was ask. Any small business owner that I talk to says the same thing … “The paper work is killing us. There is duplication of rules and regulations in the municipal, provincial and federal requirements. The Canadian Federation of Independent Business estimates that regulation costs Canadian businesses more than $30 billion a year. Canadian business owners estimate regulatory costs could be reduced by about 25% – or $7.5 billion – without affecting legitimate health, safety and environmental regulatory objectives.

Thank goodness Stephen Harper is acting now. He created the Red Tape Reduction Committee to consult with small business owners across the country, collecting more than 2,300 examples of regulatory irritants. They complained about everything from bad customer service with Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) to capricious enforcement of questionable rules that threaten the existence of some businesses. What I find astounding is that the Harper government has been part of the actual problem – growing the government to the largest it has ever been. That in itself creates inefficiencies. So what to do??? Committees? Interviews? I guess it’s a good start. I say it is time to JUST DO IT. Cut the red tape so that we can begin to be competitive and innovative and creative in the Canadian market and the world at large!

The first paper came out, What Was Heard, and this paper did not hold anything back. This paper asked for accountability from the regulators and government; to change the culture in the government to one that is more customer-centered. Stephen Harper says he is prepared to act — it is time to put your money where you mouth is. We can learn something from B.C. – they have reduced their red tape by 42% over the last 10 years and its reforms are widely credited with a dramatic improvement in the province’s economy.

It is good to see movement toward change in a positive direction for small business!

Tags: Canadian revenue agency, getting rid of red tape, making our government more responsible, reducing red tape, regulations, Stephen Harper, What Was Heard report

Trustiness

We’re all looking for someone to trust. People and institutions that will do what they say and say what they mean.

Banks used to use marble pillars and armed guards to make it clear that our money was safe. Doctors put diplomas on the wall and wear white smocks. Institutions and relationships don’t work without trust. It’s not an accident that a gold standard in business is being able to do business on a handshake.

Today, though, it’s easier than ever to build a facade of trust but not actually deliver. “Read the fine print,” the financial institutions, cruise ship operators and business partners tell us after they’ve failed to honor what we thought they promised.

It’s incredibily difficult to build a civil society on the back of “read the fine print.” Emptor fidem works so much better than caveat emptor. When we have to spend all our time watching our back and working with lawyers, it’s far more challenging to get anything done–and it makes building a business and a brand infinitely more difficult.

The question that needs to be asked by the marketer is, “are we doing this to create the appearance of trust, or is this actually something trustworthy, something we’re proud to do?”

Building trust is expensive. You can call it an expense or an investment, or merely cut corners and work on trustiness instead.

Trust is built when no one is looking, when you think you have the option of cutting corners and when you find a loophole. Trustiness is what happens when you use trust as a PR tool.

The difference should be obvious. Trust experienced is remarkable, trustiness once discovered leaves a bad taste for even your most valued customers.

The perverse irony is this: the more you work on your trustiness, the harder you fall once people discover that they were tricked.

Tags: authenticity, inauthentic, listening to your client, Seth Godin, tribes, trust

With a labour shortage of highly skilled workers particularly in certain industries, recruiters are looking outside of their normal spheres of influence. Jamie Rogers is a recruitment specialist at Calgary-based engineering firm Hatch. He is a firm believer that international experience is a terrific advantage in the Canadian workplace. That’s why he spends a lot of time working with immigration agencies, colleges and other associations to meet, greet and mentor new Canadians.

Mr. Rogers considers it an important opportunity to find talent that might otherwise be overlooked. Having Canadian experience is not necessarily needed first. Canada is a country of diverse cultures and bringing someone in who has worked in an other part of the world, with different cultures or background, is not hard to overcome. It is something that companies are dealing with right now.

Tapping into this work pool is quickly becoming a business imperative especially when you consider the trends – older workers retiring, lower birth-rates. etc. We are depending more and more on immigration to sustain our corporate growth. Some experts say that immigrants are expected to account for all of Canada’s labour force growth this year. For this reason alone, access to this pool of talent has become a pressing issue for employers. The real issue for employers is knowing where to find the right qualifications and talent for the job.

You can look to CCIS and colleges that offer a range of networking, professional development and placement services designed to encourage business leaders to connect with new immigrants. CCIS alone has placed 105 engineers in the oil and gas industry. Aside from the technical skills companies will look at the softer skills like communication, critical thinking and analytical skills along with leadership skills.

Some of the universities, like Ryerson, are building bridging programs in collaboration with industry stake-holders to ensure new Canadians develop right skills to fast track into the workplace.

Networking is also a focus, using social media to reach out to these people before they immigrate here. As a company be clear on your “why” and the people who align will want to join.

Tags: how to attract immigrants to workforce, interanational workers, labour shortage

No choice

“I had no choice, I just couldn’t get out of bed.”

“I had no choice, it was the best program I could get into.”

“I had no choice, he told me to do it…”

Really?

It’s probably more accurate to say, “the short-term benefit/satisfaction/risk avoidance was a lot higher than anything else, so I chose to do what I did.”

Remarkable work often comes from making choices when everyone else feels as though there is no choice. Difficult choices involve painful sacrifices, advance planning or just plain guts.

Saying you have no choice cuts off all options, absolves responsibility and is the dream killer.

Tags: accountability, responsibility, Seth Godin

Here is a movie from Simple Truths by Mac Anderson.

When thinking about your future, start today with your passion and ideas.

What’s The Big Idea movie

Tags: business inspiration, Mac Anderson, simple truths movie

After you’ve done your best

(and it didn’t work)

…then what do you do?

Slamming your six iron into the ground, yelling at yourself, cursing out your staff, second-guessing, berating bystanders—there are plenty of ways we demonstrate our frustration that our best didn’t work this time.

But is it helpful?

Learning from a failure is critical. Connecting effort with failure at an emotional level is crippling. After all, we’ve already agreed you did your best.

Early in our careers, we’re encouraged to avoid failure, and one way we do that is by building up a set of emotions around failure, emotions we try to avoid, and emotions that we associate with the effort of people who fail. It turns out that this is precisely the opposite of the approach of people who end up succeeding.

If you believe that righteous effort leads to the shame of personal failure, you’ll seek to avoid righteous effort.

Successful people analytically figure out what didn’t work and redefine what their best work will be in the future. And then they get back to work.

Let the guys at ESPN do the racket throwing.

Tags: business success, learning from failure, Seth Godin

This is so profound that I wanted to share this with you.

Seth Godin says, There is nothing wrong with having a plan

Plans are great.

But missions are better. Missions survive when plans fail, and plans almost always fail.

See the articles by Seth Godin

Many CEOs and companies do not get this. They work on the premise of What and features and Benefits – the plan to bring their product or service to the market.

When you understand the WHY of your business then your mission follows that – how you will make it happen. People buy your product because they buy into your belief system of “why you exist” and not because of the feature and benefits – the “what”.

Tags: having a mission, having a plan, Seth Godin, why plans fail?

There are some people who believe that government should not be involved in business. In Canada, this is not the case – our government is very involved in some of our largest businesses: energy, communications, banking, lotteries, gas and oil to name only a few. They reap the benefits of these industries, particularly from the taxes levied on these items.

The question becomes, if the government is involved, do we have a checks and balance in place to monitor the involvement, especially at the leader role, our Prime Minister. You have to look at the structure of how our government is set up to really understand if this does exist. I came across a great article in the National Post, by Andrew Coyne, entitled, “If our leaders were corrupt would we know it?” that gave me some insight. I want to share this article with you:

The author, Andrew Coyne, starts his article with examples of corruption that has taken place over time with our leaders. He notes that, ” Prime ministers in any Westminster system have always been powerful, but ours (Canadian) have amassed powers that are quite without parallel, if not without limit.” He goes to say that in other countries , executive powers is subject to various checks and balances. The question becomes, who or what prevents a primer minister of Canada from doing as he/she pleases?

Let’s look at our system in Canada:

Is it the governor general who does this checks and balance – no, because he/she is appointed by the queen.
Is it through our senate? No, because our senators are appointed by the PM.
Is it through the courts? No, because the PM appoints every member of the Supreme Court, and all federal court judges too.
Is it through the bureaucracy? No, the PM appoints the clerk of the privacy council, every deputy minister, the heads of all Crown corporations and even the ambassadors.
Is it through the police? No, the PM appoints the chief of the RCMP.
Is it through the House of Commons where the PM must command their confidence? No, the PM appoints all the committee chairs (those in which the government has a majority). He/she appoints not only the cabinet ministers, but the parliamentary secretaries and the whips. So members of the governing caucus has every incentive to seek his favour and fear his/her wrath. For that matter the PM appoints the caucus, since without the PM’s signature on their nomination papers, they cannot run. Yet they have no similar power over the PM.

Since 1919, party leaders in Canada have been elected, not by the caucus, as in the classical Westminster model, but by the party at large.

The author goes on to say, “In consequence, Parliament has become a kind of electoral college, its sole purpose to translate the votes of perhaps 40% of the electorate into a majority. A PM in possession of such a “mandate” decides what will be debated, and, for how long. He decides when Parliament shall be convened, when it should be prorogued, and when dissolved. And if he has to, he has the nuclear option: the power to declare any vote of matter of confidence, and to insist on fresh elections if MPs are so foolish as to defeat him.”

I think you are getting the point. When you sit down to look at all the appointments, large and small, nearly all are without any independent oversight. That is scary and very undemocratic. The author writes, “Have the powers been abused? Yes, all of them. In past, decisions to place people in position of power by the PM were not necessarily in the best interest of the country (Mulroney appointed his wife’s hairdresser to the Federal Business Development Bank). The cabinet today is so bloated in size as to be more than a ceremonial body. Worse has been the continual whittling away of Parliament’s ability to hold the prime ministers to account. Closure of government, prorogue the House rather than face a confidence vote, loss of confidence without the consequence of resigning — these are the actions of our past and present PM.”

Where it was once thought that Canada could never have a Watergate situation because the PM would be accountable to the House, he/she would be compelled to resign long before things progressed to a cover-up and obstruction of justice stages. Today, there has been a decline in our institutions of accountability, the noted absence of checks and balances, formal or informal.

For the business world what does this all mean? Canada is comprised of 98% small to medium businesses yet our government tends to put focus to the larger corporations. If the PM holds so much power and there is little to no checks and balance how can the “little guy” come up against and question business practices that are hurting our very businesses? Is the CFIB effective in this area? I say no.

Is it not time to band together and start to question the structure of how our government is set up for this surely impacts businesses, innovation, creativity and our ability to trade and work in the global market. Now is the time to do so — all systems around the world are being questioned, why not ours?!

There has been talk of reform and change, reducing the “red tape” that impacts productivity and innovation yet there has been little movement, if at all. Thank goodness for the youth who are willing to question and challenge systems. Yes, it comes from frustration; years of attending universtiy with large debt loads at the end and no jobs in their field to be hire for (14% unemployment); seeing the amount of greed and manipulation that has been allowed to happen at the benefit of few.

Start being the lead player in your own life. Like every relationship we have, personal or professioanl, it is built on trust and mutual respect; It is in the best interest of all, not self-interest and self-motivation.

Canada is a great country, wake up Canadians and demand you are treated with the respect you deserve!

Tags: Andrew Coyne, checks and balance of powers, government and business, powers of the Prime mnister, The National Post

Next Page →