Regardless of who you’re leading, you have people reporting to you that should perform better.  A sales team, technology professionals, the operations teams — sometimes you just need a little bit more from those involved.

A lot of books on leadership will tell you that under-performers should be fired.  Jack Welch, the highly successful CEO of General Electric for 20 years made it a religion to fire anyone rated in the bottom of the company.  Year after year, thousands of employees were cut loose to make room for “high performers”.  Out with the bad.  And in with the better.

And while that sounds sexy. It is often not the right move.  Especially in today’s fast-moving economic churn.

The fire-and-hire cycle just leads to even worse results.

Frankly, the executive you think you should fire was probably performing like an all-star when you hired him.  Given your skill at knowing what your company needs, you hand-picked that person.  For their talents, their charisma, and a work ethic. They were the right fit.

And they probably still are the right fit for you now.

Life just got in the way.  That’s what happens.  Life happens.  Busy executives have personal lives that get confused and chaotic.  Sometimes, for no fault of their own, life deals them a unfair hand.

One of the common challenges we hear from customer strategists is centered around taking action. People will say things like,

"How do I get people to pay attention?"

"When I share results from our customer survey research people are engaged, but after the meeting, nothing happens."

"Our leadership team says they are committed, but they aren't engaged."

Creating a customer-focused culture has many challenges, and taking action appears to be at the top of the list.

One of the first steps to taking action is goal setting. There are many different formats and criteria that companies use for goal setting. But, I was recently reminded of one criteria that often gets overlooked  - "Excitement."

My daughters are on a swim team and each year, they set goals that are:

• Specific
• Exciting
• Believable

While I doubt requiring goals to be exciting will singularly solve the taking action challenge, excitement (and food) never hurt to get people engaged.

And, who said customer retention strategies couldn't be fun and exciting anyway?   

What would happen if you were able to double your sales and marketing resources overnight? Assuming that you haven’t already saturated your target market, how confident are you that you could at least double your revenues - and how long would that take? What if you were able to quadruple your resources?

This question often poses a problem for B2B-focused organisations with long and complex sales cycles, or for sales teams that have a long history of relying on sales heroics. Without a well-defined, scalable sales and marketing process, no matter how much resource you can throw at the market, you’ll inevitably struggle to attract, engage, qualify and convert enough of the right sort of prospects.

The challenge is particularly acute for growth-phase organisations that are trying to “cross the chasm” from early adopters to mainstream markets, and for established organisations that are wrestling with increasingly competitive markets. It’s hard - some would say impossible, in today’s business climate - to break free of these constraints unless you have managed to establish a truly scalable, repeatable and reliable sales and marketing machine - a machine that is continually improving its return on the resources already being deployed.

Our group focused on a second aspect of communication this week. As we discussed in previous sessions, communication has to be clear, specific and actionable. This week, we focused on finding out how your audience was receiving the information.

New managers often overlook this second aspect of communication. They focus on a one-size-fits all way of communicating and then get frustrated when some of their team does not understand what was asked of them.

The group took a multiple-choice test to see what category each fell into. With the test we used, communication styles were broken out into four different groups. The groups are based on two things that help you learn how to manage each member of your team: how people receive information and how they receive communication.

The four groupings were:

D: The Driver or Dominators

I: The Expressive or Influencers

S: The Amiable or Steady

C: The Analytical or Calculator

There is no one “right” group to be associated with. These groups show how you take in communication. I am sure once you read the grouping, you will be reminded of the people you deal with and this may help you understand why communication at times seems harder than it has to be.