She Owns It
Portraits of women entrepreneurs.
In a recent post, the members of the She Owns It business group talked about the prospects of successfully rehabilitating an employee who isn’t working out. That discussion continues in this post.
Susan Parker, who owns Bari Jay, said she had come to realize that rehabilitation simply doesn’t work. Rather, she said, you need to hire the right people from the start. To do that, Ms. Parker said she knows she and her sister, who co-owns the company, will need to improve their interviewing techniques.
“I hate how we interview,” she said. “I feel like we talk, talk, talk, and the other person barely says anything, and then when they talk, they’re kind of hearing what we want,” she said. Going forward, she plans to change that, by experimenting with the interview techniques described in “Who,” a book on hiring that she’s finding helpful.
But becoming a great interviewer isn’t guaranteed to solve the problem. “You might not always find the right people because sometimes, especially when you’re growing, you don’t know what that person looks like,” said group member Jessica Johnson, who owns Johnson Security Bureau.
“And you’re also going to settle for a lot less because you don’t know any better,” said Beth Shaw, who owns YogaFit.
“But then you don’t keep those people on indefinitely when you realize that they may be better served in a place that’s a better match for them,” said Alexandra Mayzler, who owns Thinking Caps Group.
Deirdre Lord, who owns the Megawatt Hour, said that, while an owner must set expectations for each role and employee, “it’s not something you should have to do over and over again.” People make mistakes, but they shouldn’t keep making the same ones — and if they lack the right attitude or work ethic, there isn’t much hope that their performance will improve, she added.
Ms. Shaw agreed, but stressed the importance of sharing “nonnegotiable expectations” with employees. People may need to be told — once — that they have to respond to calls and e-mails within a day, she said.
Some employees may have never worked in a corporate environment where that’s the norm, Ms. Johnson said. “Particularly when you’re dealing with younger people who are relatively fresh out of school, their norms are very different so we have to have a sensitivity to that,” she said.
Ms. Shaw pointed out that employees with a corporate background may come with their own set of problems. Sometimes, she said, “those people end up not being able to perform in an entrepreneurial environment.”
“Correct, they don’t know how to operate,” Ms. Lord said.
A related issue arises when employees who excel at their day-to-day jobs are promoted to management — and fail, Ms. Parker said.
“That’s a big one,” Ms. Lord said. Getting an employee to return calls and e-mails promptly is one thing, but “you cannot teach people emotional intelligence, people skills,” she said. “People get elevated all the time who are so ill-equipped for management. Then what do you do?” she asked.
“You can’t demote them,” Ms. Shaw said.
They’ve become overcompensated, Ms. Parker added.
In future posts, we’ll revisit the owners’ management challenges and provide updates on the issues facing their businesses.
You can follow Adriana Gardella on Twitter.
Article source: http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/further-thoughts-on-employee-rehabilitation/?partner=rss&emc=rss
You’re the Boss Blog: A Tutoring Company Learns a Lesson
She Owns It
Portraits of women entrepreneurs.
In my last post, Alexandra Mayzler pondered the best way to train the tutors she hires to work for her company, Thinking Caps Tutoring. She had devised a manual but feared she wasn’t presenting the information it contained in a compelling or memorable way.
At the last meeting of the group, Ms. Mayzler said reader comments prompted a breakthrough for her. “I’d kept thinking of staff as one entity and students as another, but at the end of the day we’re all students,” she said. Or, as two commenters, Jen from New York and Dan from Syracuse put it, “learners.”
Ms. Mayzler said she realized her training efforts were “just teaching.” With that insight, she considered the methods Thinking Caps uses to teach students. A Thinking Caps tutor would never expect a student to spend a 60-minute session reading from a textbook, she said. But that was how she trained her tutors. There was virtually no interactivity.
By contrast, during a student lesson, tutors give examples, show videos and “grab the computer and look at different Web sites,” she said. They break subjects up. For example, covering just one topic in chemistry, not the entire subject, in an hour.
When a business group member, Susan Parker, who owns the dress manufacturer BariJay, asked how many tutors are trained at once, Ms. Mayzler said that was another thing she was reconsidering. Initially, tutors were trained one-by-one. But as their numbers grew, they were trained in groups — without much forethought. “I realized, if you have four people, shouldn’t they be role-playing and asking each other questions?” said Ms. Mayzler. Going forward, she plans to harness the strength of the group, taking a more deliberate approach.
She has allocated half of November, December, and January to hammering out the specifics. “I decided it would make sense to use the exact model — we have a very specific way of structuring a lesson — in creating our training modules for the tutors,” Ms. Mayzler said. She also decided to get some help, and is working with a Thinking Caps employee, a former teacher, to draft an interactive training process, which she hopes to complete by January.
Ms. Mayzler asked a group member, Jessica Johnson, how her business, Johnson Security Bureau, communicates its protocols to its security guard employees. Ms. Johnson said that during orientation, new employees receive classroom training in company policies, and a written document. Later, they can access the policies on the company’s intranet site. For Ms. Mayzler, the mere use of the word “orientation” was a revelation. She was amazed by how much better it sounded than “polices and procedures,” the term she had been using.
In future posts, we’ll catch up with the other group members and check Ms. Mayzler’s progress.
You can follow Adriana Gardella on Twitter.
Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=1ea00cdb6ca89d9750d230893c1bea89