Jim Jubelirer - Creating a High Performance Culture (G0717)

Welcome to the Exit Coach radio show, the show for baby boomer business owners who are looking for cutting edge information as they plan their 3 to 10 year business succession and exit. Every week we interview top professional advisors for. Their best tips, strategies, and precautions so you can be well planned. And don't miss our one minute exit coach tip of the day on Exitcoachradio.com. And now here's your host, the exit coach Bill Black. Welcome to the show. I appreciate you joining us. It's always great to have you here and you know, our, it's always great to have back guests that have contributed a lot in the past and our next guest is just that type of person. Before I get into that, I want to remind you to go to Exo coachradio.com, uh, look in the section called the audio library where you'll find over 750 interviews from. Uh, advisers, authors, and thought leaders on 12 different types of topics you can listen from your smartphone any time 20 minute interviews, 1 minute highlights while you exercise, while you're driving around, uh, tell your friends about it and, uh, and learn while you're while you're exercising and driving around. uh, great information there exit coachradio.com. My next guest is Jim Jubilier from Jubilier Results Group in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Again, I said he's been with us before, uh, and we had a great. Discussion before you can find his interview there in the audio library and uh Jim is uh he's he's got a why you know do you know your why? Jim's why is to contribute to others and add value and today we're gonna talk about creating a high performance culture. uh, Jim, welcome back. Thanks for joining us again today. Thanks Bill. Glad to be here. Jim, tell us a little bit about the results group. What do you do? Who's your target market and how do you help folks? I'm a business coach and in that capacity I work with middle market business owners who are ready, willing and able to make a 3 year commitment to their own growth and the growth of their team in order to achieve breakthrough results. So I helped the business owner create a vision for their life and how the business is going to work for them because otherwise they're working for the business. And then we go about setting goals and executing against the strategies and plans that we make together to really help them drive the business forward. I'm a certified gazelles coach, and in that capacity, I'm one of 150 people worldwide that has been trained to deliver the mastering the Rockefeller habits framework. And our new book Scaling Up is based on the work that thousands of companies have have used implementing our principles and practices. That's an exceptional group of individuals. Um, the Gazelle's group, if people aren't familiar with it, is there a master website for Gazelle's group to for people to understand more about that? Yeah, we have a couple of websites. My own company's website, Jubileresultsgroup.com, and the beauty of my complicated last name is, no matter which way you butcher it on Google, it all points to my website. Our corporate entity is gazelles.com, and then our coaching business is Gazelless it's the coaching organization is called Gazelleses International Coaches. And our URL is GI coaches.com and all three sites offer a wealth of resources. Terrific. OK, so I just wanted to build some awareness about that group, but let's talk about you and your group because that's what we're here to talk about and especially creating a high performance culture. Now I think you've coined a frame higherology uh H I R Eology, and I like the term a lot. I think it makes, uh, it, it paints a work picture, but how does it work? What does it mean? Gallup surveys have tell us conclusively that 70% of the American workforce is disengaged. They're checked out when they come to work, and it ranges from mildly checked out to actively disgruntled. So what that means is 30% of the workforce is engaged, and that ranges from mildly engaged all the way to people who put a tattoo of their company on, you know, on their body. And I'm fortunate that I I I work with high performing companies or I work with good companies that want to go to great and they may not have a completely engaged workforce but generally speaking I work with business owners who already understand that you can't get anywhere without your team. That said, we then build upon that to really create a high performing workplace. It's sometimes called creating an A player culture. Now that's not type A, that's grade A. And what that means is an A player is someone who's in the top 10% of performance for the job that you're looking to fill in the labor market you're in for the amount you're willing to pay. So if you're in Silicon Valley and you're looking for a hotshot database programmer and you're gonna pay 40,000 you're not gonna get anybody good because they're making 80 or 900 and they're getting jobs at places like Google. So we want to have an A player culture of people who are top performers and there's two parts to that the people who are currently with you now and the people who you're looking to hire and recruit. And so today's conversation is focused more on how do we ensure that we go about getting the best candidates. Yeah, so the higherology and that that meaning, um, you know, how do we, how did we get here if, uh, if the employer hired so many duds in general, right, and there's so many people that are disengaged now 70%, um, how did it get so out of whack? Well, there are a lot of reasons for that. The number one reason is people join a company because of the company, but they leave because of their boss. And if you look at most of the small and medium sized companies who are listening to this show, most people who are the front line supervisors never had any previous supervisory skills experience, and they are the ones now in charge of everybody that's reporting to them. So most of the time people say I don't like my job because my boss sucks and it could be partly because it's true. And so there's a lot that I do as a business coach to come in and help a company upgrade its HR practices. And that ranges everything from revising the compensation plans to creating performance management, getting people performance reviews, creating learning and development plans for each person, and then making sure the jobs themselves are structured in a way that enhances people's probability of success. OK, now what Jim if it I'm sorry go ahead I'm I I thought you were down there, go ahead. Yeah, I, I was uh sorry Bill I was just gonna transition then to focusing on the hiring process or the hiring decision is one of the most important things you as a business owner need to get right. And most business owners don't run their hiring as good as they could, so I'm committed to helping business owners get breakthrough results and I've partnered with a software platform called Hierology. Hierology is a cloud based software program that supports you and handles end to end everything associating with recruiting, interviewing and hiring a players. And it starts with creating good job, a well, creating good job descriptions, but then the advertisements for those jobs matter tremendously. You are in a war for talent. You hear in the news about unemployment and this and that, that's not what's really going on. What's really going on are companies that are growing and are attractive are fighting other companies like them for the best people. There's a real war for talent. I see it all across the country and in a wide variety of industries, and we have to win that war for talent in order for us to get the best people to keep raising our company's culture and our results. So it's a really big deal and we wanna get it right and we need better tools and the average company is too busy they're being pulled in too many directions, even if they have a full-time hiring person or or HR department or a talent recruitment uh team, there are things they could do to get better. So the higherology platform helps you advertise your job more widely. It's very, very important to get as many prospective candidates as possible into your funnel. But a lot of small businesses don't want too many candidates because it's too time consuming to wade through and deal with all those people and higherology has built a wonderful way of screening people to ensure that you're getting the right kind of candidates and then you can decide who you wanna bring in for the in-person interviews. Then there's a support system for ensuring that you're conducting good interviews, you're recording them properly, and then most importantly, Bill, you're properly assessing each candidate. So I have one client who's who who loves to tell his team when we do hiring here's what we're looking for we're just looking for people I like. And I'm like no that's not quite accurate enough what does that mean? And of course we're making fun of him and he's making fun of himself, but if you are in any kind of situation where you have multiple people that are interviewing the candidate or you might have multiple locations and you want to standardize the way you go about um interviewing and assessing candidates, you have to be more structured and systematic about it. So we break our interview into two parts. One is the achievements. What have you done? And the elements of success or the behaviors, the competencies, and that's more like who are you as a person. A lot of job interviews just consist of, well, tell me what you've done, but it doesn't get at the underlying attitudes, abilities, competencies that really are the better predictor of success than what you've done. And so we're on the top on the top end we're looking to increase the number of candidates that we're bringing in and then in the middle of the process we're looking more closely like putting them under a microscope to really figure out who would be the best fit for our company. OK, so, so Jim, uh, my, I guess back to my question is if we went out and said, OK, 70% of workers are disengaged, can we re-engage some of those workers? Can we fix the problem without firing everybody and putting them back through a whole new process and rehiring them with a with a with a new hiring process? And if so, how? It depends, yeah, it depends. Uh there are some cultures that are just, they're in rough shape. It takes 18 months to implement the A player culture. So if you're just not where you need to be, you need to go through an assessment of your existing talent. You have A players, you have B players, and you have C players, ABC. And some Bs could become A's. So think of it as 4 buckets. Right now, you as a business owner, are spending a disproportionate amount of your time cleaning up the messes that all the C's make, and you don't have time to coach and mentor the B's to become A's. So over time we turn that all around and it does involve introducing some people to a different opportunity inside the business. Sometimes it involves introducing people to a different opportunity elsewhere outside the business and then doubling down on our investment of time and money on those B players to help them become A's. While we're also ensuring we're doing a player hiring using the higherology process to only bring the best people into the company going forward. I get that so we're, we're trying to, uh, assess, uh, how we can upgrade our current, uh, worker environment and maybe get that number from 70% disengaged to somewhere maybe in let's say um 30% disengaged and then maybe we have to replace those workers. I mean, you know, GE always did that Jack Welch always did that right roll roll roll the bottom 10% out and bring in another 10% uh, it might not be. Uh, it might be disruptive at first, but eventually you'll get to a much better culture of employees, it sounds like. Absolutely it doesn't have to be disruptive at all. Most of the time when the C performers are introduced to their next opportunity outside the company, the reaction of the people remaining inside the company is thank God what took you so long? so I'm not talking about coming in and doing mass layoffs because business has gotten bad. I work with growth companies that are growing, they're hiring they're dynamic there's a lot going on but even still there can be people who aren't quite the right fit for where the company needs to get to. Yeah yeah it it sounds fascinating sounds interesting and what's the first step for a business owner who says, you know, I need to talk uh about this uh can they go learn more about the the overview or should they give you a call or visit your website? What's the best thing for them to do? Yeah thank you Bill it's not uncommon for people to not even know what they don't know and so I always encourage people to hop on the phone 15 minute phone call uh just flesh out what's keeping them up at night and is it something they want to do something about. So on my website is a link to my calendar and you can book an appointment time automatically without talking to me or needing to spend uh any time setting it up. Perfect. That that makes it really simple and again uh the the concept is that you can increase your performance, you know, it's often been said that your best assets go home every night in your business so why wouldn't you want them to be the best they can be? So you need to talk to somebody like Jim Jubilier about uh getting the results from those people, and he has the, the, the tools and the experience to help you create a high performance culture. Uh, Jim, any, any, uh, final thoughts for our audience out there, any final tips or ideas or precautions for them? Yeah, Bill, good question. Uh, People underestimate the cost of turnover or the cost of bad hires, and someone who's not a good fit is costing you somewhere between 5 and 15 times their annual salary. So if it's a senior level person, let's say it's a $100,000 a year operations person and it's just not working out, they could be costing you a million dollars over the time period that they, they would have been with you otherwise. So people tend to underestimate the cost of getting it wrong because they're afraid they think it's harder to get it right than it actually is. So I want to simplify the process of creating a high performing workplace. If if an employer were to approach hiring their next key executive with that mindset that this is uh this could be a million dollar mistake if I don't do it right, I think they'd be a little bit more careful, don't you? Exactly, good point. It's a good, that's a great way to put it and uh and it is so important because of the productivity. The the statistics that you shared with us are staggering, alarming, and uh and really helpful for us to understand that. It's not it's not necessarily that difficult to take what you have and get more out of it if you understand and analyze what you have and use tools that are available, you can get a lot more out of your business by getting a lot more out of your people. Jim, thanks so much for joining us today and happy holidays to you. Thanks for being with us again. I hope you'll join us again sometime soon. Alrighty thank you Bill. We're gonna take a short break we'll be right back with another guest. Please stay with us. Business owners, if you came back from lunch and there was a resignation letter on your desk, which employee would you really, really not want it to be from? What are you doing to prevent this from happening? At Exit and Retirement Strategies we design plans that attract, motivate, and retain key employees for a free consultation called Bill Black, the exit coach at 866-370-3774. Call today. Does thinking about what will happen to your business if you're gone keep you awake at night? Will you get the price you need from your business to carry you through retirement? The BEI Network of Exit Planning Professions is the world's leading advisor network with the power to help business owners transition out of business on their own timeline and terms. Ask your most trusted advisor to create a BEI plan for you, or visit us at exitlannning.com. That's exitlannning.com. Thank you for listening to Exit Coach Radio.