I have a great one for you tonight. You can use this in sales, in fact, for the professional salesperson it is a must! However, for tonight we are going to focus on the management side of the equation.

This is all about getting the peak performance from your staff. To test yourself, you should try this little quiz. If you dare, without asking anyone or even speaking to anyone on your staff, see if you can write down on paper each employee’s name and beside it put down why you think they are working for you or the company. Already got you thinking don’t I?

You see, good managers know exactly why each person is working for them. What will amaze you is that very few people are there just for money. Now lets think, if you do not know why they are there then how can you possibly motivate them? Here is a very simple example. The teenage girl works at the local pet store cleaning poop from the kennels. By the way this is a true story. When the young girl is done cleaning the kennels the manager immediately moves her to the front and puts her on the register for the rest of the night. The manager could not figure out why he had so much turnover at the position. He asked “The Specialist” for some advice.

First I asked him what he thought? He rationalized the turnover by saying for $6.75 per hour people could find better things to do with their time then clean poop. Well, of course, I did not agree with his analysis. I suggested to him that if he let the young girls play with the animals a little bit they would stay for a long time. He replied, well that would be costing me money. My reply was very simple. The few minutes that he let the young lady play with the animals saved him the much larger cost of turnover, not to mention the inconvenience of sometimes him getting stuck with the chore, due to their untimely departure.

You see, the reason the girls took that particular job was their love for animals. Not the $6.75 per hour. He never understood why the young girl worked there. Now when you take this self evaluation quiz your first question to me is how do you find out this information without asking each employee? That’s tomorrows post. I hope I have opened your minds and I expect to hear from some of you tomorrow to tell me some of your results.

“The Specialist”