In this chapter, we will show the way combined selection and training efforts can help you build stronger teams, all the while employing simple internal strategies that will help you retain more customers and accelerate growth.

All of the lessons we will study by way of a case history in this chapter are tied in with accountability. Because the issue of accountability will be paramount, I want to take a brief moment to address an intriguing question that has been circulating of late in management circles. The question is whether enlightened managers should try to be good friends with the people they manage. On this question I have a very simple answer.

The manager must be a friendly “teacher”—approachable, helpful, and respectful—but never a friend in the conventional sense, if friendship means unconditional love and implicit favoritism. Though there is much debate on this issue, I would like to offer an insight from the real world: Workplace friendships among peers can be valuable, but friendships between managers and the people they supervise can be disastrous if they lead to bias, favoritism, or conflicts of interest. Furthermore, friendships between managers and their team members can make the enforcement of accountability almost impossible. As Harvard psychologist Dr. Myra White has pointed out, research has shown that managers who are high in the need for affiliation make poor managers because their need to be liked causes them to liberally grant employee requests for special treatment.

Again, the manager or executive should be a respectful coach who is a constant teacher, and one who leads by example, but friendship between a manager and team members can be risky. This risk is a critical point to consider when you are attempting to build successful teams.

In the early part of this book we discussed the specter of entitlement, which corporations must guard against at every turn. Although we have stated it before, we will state it again—there are job candidates out there who feel that the world owes them a living, and that the most important goal is to find a “comfortable” place to work where one will be taken care of. Such a mentality must be eradicated as a workplace attitude if teams are to realize that their first goal is to be accountable. Friends, as far as I understand the term, offer unconditional positive regard. They are there to listen without judgment to complaints, gripes, hurts, and excuses when the situation calls for it. If a manager develops such a relationship with a person under his or her supervision, it will be almost impossible to discuss or enforce measures of accountability.

Because most high-performing individuals are being choosy about the environments they will agree to work in, most organizations must walk a tightrope.

On one hand, organizations must do everything in their power to create working environments and business models that are based upon honest values, excellent products, and services, and respectful leadership.

However, these working environments can never be so friendly that team members lose sight of the fact that they are not there to be comfortable—they are there to prove themselves, perform, and constantly raise the bar. Building a respectful but competitive environment is easier said than done.

In the next section, I will provide a case history of one client I have worked with: the MAGIC fashion industry trade show of Advanstar Communications, which is the largest fashion industry trade show in the world, and Advanstar’s most profitable business unit.

The environment of leadership and accountability at MAGIC provides an excellent example of how a company can provide a meaningful and exciting work environment, with strict measures of accountability and performance at the same time.

MAGIC’s corporate offices are nestled in the palm-tree-lined community of Woodland Hills, California, just a stone’s throw from the film capital, Burbank. Twice a year, in February and August, the company takes over the Las Vegas convention center and produces the largest fashion trade show on the face of the earth. This trade show not only represents and promotes the international fashion industry, but in many ways it also helps to define it. Brand-name designers—both the famous and the up-and-coming—attend the show in order to dazzle buyers with the latest offspring of their fashion genius. Buyers from every major retail store, large and small, attend the show in order to see what’s hot, what’s trendy, what the latest brands are up to, and how they are stacking up against the competition. Manufacturers of fabric, contract manufacturers, and original design manufacturers from every corner of the globe come to show their wares as well, as they mingle with those branded companies who may well end up using their fabrics, designs, or manufacturing expertise. The environment of the trade show is consummately thrilling and competitive. In every sense of the word, everyone is trying to look his or her best. Inside the brightly lit Las Vegas convention center, in rooms the size of football fields, are thousands and thousands of glimmering racks, upon which hang the shirts, dresses, coats, ties, jeans, T-shirts, belts, and earrings that will end up as new product offerings in every major retail store in the world. Circulating among the beautiful throngs of artistic mavens and hipster denizens are fabulous fashion models, celebrities, and hundreds of cool, confident young millionaires attending to their booths, dressed in $200 T-shirts and $300 jeans.

Certainly, you could not ask for a more entertaining or “fashionable” place to work. The team members of MAGIC work, interact, and consult with more people in more sectors of the fashion industry than any other company—in any area of the globe. Yet there is more to the job than just a fashionable good time. There is a tremendous amount of accountability and responsibility to both the client and the company.

That is because the clients of MAGIC—both retailers and brands—are looking to MAGIC’s account executives to help them take a pulse of the industry and obtain insight on future trends. In many cases, they make critical business decisions based on the level of the market intelligence with which MAGIC team members provide them. So, when you show up at the world’s largest trade show, and you witness the evolution of trends (what the fashion industry refers to as morphing), and you see how many of the world’s most creative designers are riffing on similar themes, it becomes glaringly apparent that MAGIC does not just organize an exhibition of fashion trends; it is intimately involved in helping to communicate those trends. Staying on top of the competitive intelligence in this complex industry requires sophisticated, ongoing training efforts coupled with stringent measure of accountability for self-education, self-direction, and performance.

In the next section, we will describe the way the senior management at MAGIC work with their team members to conduct the balancing act of providing meaningful, “fashionable” work, and high levels of metric-driven accountability at the same time.

In working with the sales, customer service, and marketing teams of MAGIC, my firm has collaborated with senior management to build and deliver training programs that help the people who work for MAGIC to be better consultants to the fashion-oriented companies and designers with which they work.

While we cannot discuss trade secrets or competitive positioning items, it should be useful for all readers to go behind the scenes with us for a moment to look at the necessity of applying a philosophy of accuracy and simplicity to all efforts aimed at employee training and customer retention. To give a sense of “being there,” we will shift to the present tense.

So, here we are behind closed doors in the training room of MAGIC. A few doors down the hall there is a large holding room for all of the clothes that will be exhibited on the runway shows at MAGIC in February. Hundreds of hands and eyes are busy at work, as they concentrate on coordinating and staging one of the largest marketing, entertainment, and buying spectacles in the civilized world. Yet, inside this room—behind closed doors—the executives of this organization are focused on simplicity, conciseness, subject matter knowledge, and consultative credentials. At the head of the room are Laura McConnell, executive vice president, who knows the fashion industry like the back of her hand; Chris McCabe, vice president and general manager, who knows the trade show industry like the back of his hand; Camille Candella, director of marketing, who has as much hard data on the fashion trade show business as any human being working in the industry; and myself.

When Laura speaks and addresses the roomful of people from many corners of the organization—operations, sales, customer service, retail relations, marketing—she makes a simple but powerful statement.

“The most important thing you should ask yourself each morning is this,” she says. “How am I different today than I was yesterday?”

In explaining what she means by “being different every day,” Laura drives straight to the heart of customer service and accountability—by making it intimately personal. She continues:

After this speech, there is a moment of silence in which you can tell that some people feel excited and newly motivated, and others feel scared to death. Once the weight of these expectations has had time to sink in, Laura moves into training mode.

“Okay,” she says. “In preparation for next week’s training, I want to tell you a couple of competitive facts and messages that are defining the future of the fashion industry. After that, I want you to research these trends and then be prepared to tell us next week—concisely—how these trends impact your customers and your business division.”

After Laura has finished her part of the training, Chris McCabe, the vice president and general manager of the show, addresses the group. Chris is here because he (similar to Laura), has also proven himself as a subject matter expert and industry leader in the trade show business. Chris, who (similar to Laura) can appear soft-spoken and friendly, is also a classic coach. He is seemingly modest and helpful on the surface, but in spite of this, he (similar to Laura) is brutal and relentless when it comes to performance. In a meeting the week before, he had summed up his plan with the following words:

“Good morning people,” he said. “As you know, I have been brought to MAGIC to help achieve growth. In order to do that, we are going to do everything in our power to give you the training and the resources you need to be as successful as you can. But you have to do your part. Because there is a tough part to my job. For lack of a better expression, I have been asked to build a Super Bowl team. And that means there is no insurance you will automatically stay on this team forever.”

When Chris had made this statement the week before, some people had seemed excited, and in their eyes you could tell they were thinking, “Well then, bring it on! I can take the heat!” Others, of course, looked terrified, as if they were already reading the handwriting on this wall.

This morning Chris has a notepad in his hand. And this is how he addresses the group:

The group that was being graded here on their ability to accurately communicate the company’s key competitive messages had also been assessed on workplace competencies using validated instruments. And for the salespeople, data was captured, naturally, on how close they had come to meeting targets. In addition, the director of marketing, Camille Candella, had given a numeric grade on her perception of the quality of SWOT analyses done for each salesperson’s main competitor in the market. Each salesperson, that is, was asked to do a SWOT analysis comparing MAGIC’s competitive advantages to the competition on a spreadsheet using the kind of simple formula we have discussed in previous chapters.

One interesting aspect of the grades Chris gave to the presentation format just described is that there was an evident correlation, however rough, between the scores that individuals made on their competitive speeches, and the results they had received not only on validated assessment tests of skill and “sales character,” but also on the exercises that required them to read, study, and take notes in previous training sessions.

After having studied the results of implementing multiphased training and assessment programs at numerous companies, it has become clear to me that high-achieving individuals in the workplace seem to have similar and predictable traits that show up time and time again, whenever they are assessed or given challenging assignments. The following observations, I believe, are key to understanding how we go about assessing, building, and developing “intelligent” teams.

As I have noticed in my firm’s work with cutting-edge companies such as Advanstar, there is a link between simplicity and innovation that is often misunderstood: The best ideas usually are simple—they are not difficult to understand, they are easy to explain, and once embraced by the right team, they are a cinch to implement. If implemented properly, they are usually profitable as well. However—and this is the hard part for some to grasp—simplicity takes a long time to perfect.

Moreover, the type of ideas that drive a company forward are always tied to a burning vision, and the best visions are always created collaboratively by businesspeople and business teams that have a relentless desire to be better today than they were yesterday. In this light, all training programs designed for high achievers must be personal, and they must challenge the individual to aspire to greater levels of excellence. In other words, great training programs always help to waken employees from their slumber, and cause them to become dissatisfied with current levels of performance. But—and this is important—the process of helping people see how they can become better, and why they must become better, cannot and does not happen overnight. The process has to be methodical and deliberate.

For example, one of the most important competitive considerations for MAGIC and other units of Advanstar is the development of new initiatives—new targets, approaches, or concepts that might attract more and better customers because they are better in tune with the market.

The goal then is to come up with beautifully simple initiatives that can be sold and implemented rather quickly. But you can’t just walk up to people and ask them to come up with beautifully simple initiatives that will sell and make money. You have to prime their brains for innovative thinking first.

Everything we have talked about in this chapter (and in the entire book, for that matter) has been about helping to prime the brains of team members to think the way champions do—in the context of simple, meaningful, and purposeful plans they can put the full strength of their minds and hearts behind. Here is another way to look at it: If the company is to be different and better next quarter than it was this quarter, all individuals must be challenged on a daily basis to be better than they were yesterday, the organization must hire managers and executives who are worthy to teach, and people must be held accountable for their progress once they have been given the benefit of the classroom.

Here is a portion of a simple worksheet we have used with some teams, with most of the questions leading back to the simple but powerful principle of personal “difference-making.”

Most business owners will realize that these are important questions for many teams and individuals. However, in looking for answers to these questions, it is important that you not ask your people to give their responses too readily.

The best, most simple, and most profitable answers to these questions most often come after a trial by fire—after you have asked people to prove their passion, their intent to study, their desire to always do their best in front of their peers, their desire to somehow always be just a little bit better today than they were yesterday. In this context it is often useful to give your potential high performers tough assignments and rigorous training, if only to see what they will do with it all. Tough assignments and high expectations almost always motivate high performers to come forward with creative solutions for competitive challenges. When employees with high levels of entitlement are given tough assignments, they usually do nothing but complain. In the end, the fastest way to build intelligent teams is to put forth high expectations. Once you set these higher expectations, and bring the entire organization together as a single, united teaching unit for those who do desire to learn and become better every day, you will begin to see your company’s best ideas emerge, take hold, and grow.

As the preceding sections have attempted to demonstrate, companies that are passionate about and committed to selection, retention, and development ask star players to constantly put themselves under a microscope with regard to self-improvement goals.

But, as we have discussed, great leaders also put themselves under the microscope on a regular basis, and take the time to examine their own developmental needs so that they can be in a better position to teach others.

Rick Rocchetti, manager of organization development and training for the City of Raleigh, North Carolina, has written an excellent article entitled “Leaders Who Work at Change Can Change Work” (Employment Relations Today, Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Summer 2006).

In this paper Rocchetti makes the following pivotal and succinct observation: “Leadership is about the decision to become more human. It is about bringing forth my character and developing my competence as much as it is about dealing with the external environment.”

In describing how leaders conduct their own process of ruthless self-examination, Rocchetti provides a long list of important questions that leaders must ask of themselves when facing any important change that is occurring, or must occur, inside of their organizations.

Just a few of them are:

The type of fearless self-examination suggested by Rocchetti is thematically consistent with the type of fearless “moral inventory” truthfulness outlined by Lennick and Kiel in their book Moral Intelligence, which we have cited many times.

Interestingly, a significant number of the questions listed in Lennick and Kiel’s “Moral Competency Inventory” are remarkably well aligned with the competencies or “character traits” of high-performing individuals—traits such as being honest with oneself, having follow-through and interest in other people, and being helpful.

Here are but a few statements leaders are prompted to consider in the Moral Competency Inventory:

The simple but solid value behind such character-oriented statements proves once again that studying character in oneself or in one’s organization does not have to be viewed as an abstract or impossibly philosophical task.

In most instances, great leaders implicitly understand that character improvement is an immensely practical affair. Benjamin Franklin made a list of traits he wanted to improve (most of them character traits), and worked on them ceaselessly. One at a time.

Viewing character improvement at the individual and organizational level as a practical concern, one might ask the question: How do I most effectively go about improving the character of my organization, or the character of myself?

One simple response might be: Ask your leaders to take the Moral Competency Inventory, find a few traits they would like to improve, and then get them to explain to you how they plan to go about improving those traits throughout the next few months. Or, using the Moral Competency Inventory as a guide, along with the resources in this book, you might construct another list of questions for yourself that are tied with the character traits you feel are most important for success. Using your own list, what do you want to work on first?

Some critics may point out that it is impossible to improve character in an organization or an individual because the most important character traits are either innate or ingrained by the time a person becomes an adult.

Even if it is or might be true that character becomes cemented by adulthood, that does not undermine the value of our proposition. Character can always be improved by individuals who have character to begin with. This is a concept well recognized by the Marines, and a theme we have been following since the beginning of this book. A person without character would not even bother to take the time with a Moral Competency Inventory. But a person with high character will make this kind of self-examination and self-development second nature.

Therefore, if we spend more time selecting, hiring, and developing these kinds of individuals, then we can be guaranteed that we will not only build more intelligent teams, but will also make daily, monthly, quarterly, and yearly improvements to the character of our companies.

In this light, putting a greater value on character in hiring and development must certainly be a part of “moral intelligence” as well.