Harrison Barnes » business managers

How to Be a Good Manager

Harrison Barnes — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 05:01:38 +0000

Among the many interrelated problems that can occur in an economy, are people having not enough work, not enough holidays, not enough benefits, and of course, not enough pay. As disruptive and problematic as these issues may become to people, hands down, the most severe problem is when there are no jobs available at all. Companies and organizations are all out to survive, and the worst thing that can happen is a company or organization finding it can no longer survive. When a company can no longer survive, the jobs disappear with it, which is the absolute worst thing that can happen. I am sure we can all agree that having no job at all is far worse than having a job that is less than ideal. For as long as I can remember, I have turned on the news and read the paper and seen one story or another about a strike for more benefits, higher wages, more paid holidays, shorter work hours, and so forth. I have heard about workers walking off the job so they can have more of this or that. It is going on across the country, every single day. There is probably not a decent-sized newspaper in the United States that does not contain at least one article per day (and there are usually more) mentioning how workers are upset about this or that, or they want more of this or that, or they are refusing to work because of this or that. Many workers are, and always will be, angry that they do not receive enough of what they already have. They always want more. However, perhaps the worst possible thing that can happen is for the workers to suddenly lose everything that they do have. This is more common than you might think. Companies and organizations everywhere are struggling and in many cases are shutting down. This is what happens in areas of the United States and the world when workers and others demand too much from the companies. The companies simply close down a large percentage of the operation or they go away completely. Everything stops and suddenly those discontented people who formerly handled all of the jobs–are left with absolutely nothing to do. I remember when I first moved to Bay City, Michigan, in the mid-1990s, to work for a federal judge there. Bay City at one time had employed countless people in the automobile industry, just like Detroit, and scores of other towns scattered around the Midwest. My girlfriend and I were looking for a house and we had a hard time deciding if we wanted to buy or rent, because houses were so cheap. Some houses in the city were so cheap that the owners, instead of hiring a real estate agent, had simply taken bars of soap and written the price of the house on the widows: “$5,000!” said one house. “FIRST $10,000 TAKES IT” said another house on its windows. Detroit and other areas of the country where people once received great benefits have now literally been driven to the ground by worker demands. Companies and jobs have gotten the hell out of these places because they are incredibly dangerous places for companies to operate. The job of a good manager should be to keep a company in business and to keep creating jobs. Very few managers understand this, and this particular misunderstanding has probably killed more companies than anyone could ever count. If you want to be a manager–and a good manager–you need to truly be on the side of the company. Workers and managers can generally be put into two categories: (1) those who are on the side of the company at all costs, and (2) those who are on the side of the worker at all costs. Which worker or manager do you think lasts longer in the job? Which worker or manager do you think is more likely to be let go? Many people at some point in their careers are interested in going into management. In many respects, management is much easier than not being a manager; however, in other respects, being a manager is much more difficult. The reason being a manager is so difficult is that it requires a completely different orientation from the non-manager. Most people who are working inside of an organization are most concerned with what the organization can do for them. The manager needs to be more concerned with the organization’s needs, not his or her own needs. The best managers always focus on the interests of the organization–not so much on the interests of its workers. Most people out there do not truly understand this concept of management in my estimation, and so most of them fail when given the opportunity to manage. Moreover, the larger a company grows and the more bureaucratic and “professional” its management team becomes, the more likely the company is to fail. This assumes a management team that becomes more concerned with establishing perks and other incentives than the company’s need to survive–a common occurrence. Once a company gets large enough, it attracts managers and others who believe that the gravy train will roll on forever. At some point, these same workers choose to overlook the fact that one can only milk a cow for so long–and usually, by the time the people realize this it is too late; they are either already on the chopping block or their company is no longer profitable, and ends up downsizing or shutting down completely. The best managers are able to take into account and to balance the interests of both–the organization and the people working in them. One of the largest mistakes managers make is deciding that instead of being for the organization and its survival, they are just looking out for the people working inside of the organization, at all costs. More organizations fail due to this type of manager than for any other reason I am aware of. In fact, this sort of manager is among the worst sort of cancer any organization can have. I have seen managers like this ruin numerous organizations, and all around America, each day, organizations both large and small die off due to this style of management. Several years ago, I was standing in the Camarillo Outlets on a Monday morning. New Year’s Day had fallen on a Friday, and our company’s human resources manager had told me that every single company and law firm he knew of had Monday as well as Friday off so they could have a four-day weekend. I found this hard to believe, so I asked him to research this and to be absolutely sure. Sure enough, he came back later in the day and informed me that yes, every organization out there had this Monday off. As I stood there in the mall on that Monday, I was at a total loss for words. On almost every other day of the year, it would have been impossible to find any parking. Today, however, the entire mall was like one giant ghost town. There were hardly any people there at all–other than staff, of course. As I walked around the mall, I could not help but feel a bit angry. I realized that this was not a holiday anywhere else but our company. That day, over 150 employees were being paid for a day that was not really a holiday. I am not saying that the employees were not hardworking and did not perhaps deserve a day off. Nevertheless, a business is a business and in order to run a business effectively, it needs to make effective use of its resources. People are a resource and spending tens of thousands of dollars one day to give people a day off when it was not even a holiday, did not make sense. “Where did you hear yesterday was a holiday?” I demanded to know from the HR manager when he came in on Tuesday morning. He proceeded to tell me that everyone had the day off and it was a “common holiday.” I had my assistant do some research and we were unable to find any good-sized companies that had indeed given that Monday off. I was starting to become extremely displeased. I looked at numerous other things that this same employee had done and became quite concerned when I realized the number and extent of benefits and other perks that the HR manager had created. These perks had become so extreme that they literally put the survival of the company at risk. Moreover, any attempt I made to curtail or cut back on anything was met with so much hostility, I could hardly believe it. I realized right then and there that this person was completely out for his own self interest, and working against the company. A company that keeps people like this around cannot survive. The difference between a good manager and a poor manager can make or break an entire company. Many people go into management and immediately take pride in having an orientation toward helping the people they are supervising. Helping your subordinates is often a good thing; however, it is not good when it ends up destroying the capacity of a company to create and foster long-term jobs for its staff. When there are no jobs, there is only misery, and the misery that is left behind when there are no jobs is extreme. Drive through places like Detroit that have powerful unions and see what is left behind. There are no jobs and the economy is in shambles. The few workers who remain, however, have tons of rights. A man who works on an assembly line may be prohibited under union rules from picking up a piece of trash. If something needs to be cleaned up, he needs to call a person in another part of the factory to come clean it up. For many managers, an organization is something to be bled dry, just a giant money-making machine. For many managers, the greatest skill they have is how to get money, more perks, benefits, and other things out of the organization for themselves and the people they supervise. Their skill is not in creating value for their company. Instead, most managers are skilled in taking from the organization. What these managers do not understand is that you cannot take more than what comes in, and the more you take, the greater the possibility that there will soon be nothing left to take. Eventually, these sorts of managers and this management culture ends up choking the organization completely and it either closes down, or packs up and goes somewhere else to do the work. Managers concerned with taking from the organization typically have no care in the world what happens to the organization, and such managers move from job to job throughout their careers, generally leaving companies worse off than when they joined. A great deal of our social policy in the world is based on taking. Politicians come into office and believe that companies exist to feed tax dollars into the system. They tax the companies as much as they can and give the workers more and more rights. Pretty soon the companies are gone and the money slows down too. Individual states across the U.S. do the same thing. They tax their most successful companies, and eventually the companies leave and take with them the jobs. Or the companies end up closing. The greatest distinction between companies that run and continue going forward and those that go out of business is good managers that care about what happens to the organization. When a company has good managers who care about what happens to the organization, it is likely to survive. Decisions needed to keep the company going forward are made, despite the fact that they are difficult to make and may be unpopular with the rest of the staff. Any company that is able to make unpopular decisions is more likely to survive than one that is afraid or unable to. To be a manager, it is extremely important that you be seen as someone who is on the side of the company and out to make the company profitable and do well. The more you are seen and perceived as someone on the side of the company, the more you are likely to grow as well. If you are a force that is against the company, who is more interested in increasing the expenses of the company–this will be interpreted by the company as something that is counter to its survival. A company needs to survive and companies keep around people whose objective is to help them survive. Managers who are agitators, protesters for workers’ rights, and so forth, often care more for the workers than for the company, and therefore ultimately end up killing the workers’ jobs in the process. Managers like this create unemployment, bad economic conditions, and incredible problems in their wake. A prevalence of managers like this in a country or state can actually lead an entire economy toward a serious depression. The health of any company requires that good managers see both sides of the equation and do everything within their power to keep the company healthy and moving forward. A well-run company keeps its eyes open and will steer clear of managers who care more for the worker than the organization. There are managers and people out there who simply have a strong dislike of organizations in general. You will see them being careless with the company’s money, time, and property. They make a major effort to get more of this or that for the people they are working with. These people ultimately end up “doing in” the organizations and people they are working with. The best managers have a real concern with how much money is spent, how the work is completed, and if workers are being efficient with their time. These managers are concerned about ensuring the organization by continually making progress in everything it does. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are managers interested in selling assets, borrowing money, and refusing to do what is necessary to increase business in order to make more money for the company. These are the sorts of managers companies should not keep around. Once you understand these fundamental principles, you can master the art–and the business–of being a great manager. THE LESSON When a company can no longer survive, all of its jobs disappear; a good manager’s job, then, is to ensure the company’s survival. As a good manager, you need to truly be on the side of the company and dedicated to its continuance; the more the company succeeds, the more you will grow along with it. Good managers care about what happens to their organization, but the best managers focus continually on the organization’s progress and best interests.

The Kick-Ass Marketing Secret of the Most Successful Job Applicants and Employees

Harrison Barnes — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 05:01:27 +0000

I have been going to conferences about one thing or another at least a couple times a year for the past several years. I have spent thousands of dollars attending marketing-related conferences. If I go to one more conference where someone talks about USPs (Unique Selling Propositions) I will probably get up and leave. I am going to teach you in the next few minutes what the best marketing minds in the world would charge you thousands of dollars to tell you about how to market yourself. You are going to know how to position yourself for incredible success—in life and in your job—in the following way: First, I am going to tell you how to get jobs that more highly qualified competitors do not get. Second, how to get jobs you are not even qualified for. Third, how to appear to be the most logical choice to be interviewed when you apply for a job. Fourth, how to make every interviewer talk about you enthusiastically after interviewing. Sound impossible? It’s not. However, it requires that you know something about marketing and that you really understand one marketing concept: the USP, or whatever you want to call it. It is not hard to understand, but you do need to think through the idea a bit to really grasp it. I have been getting up and leaving lots of conferences lately. I left one last weekend, and I left one a couple of months before that. The reason I am leaving these conferences is because very few of the people at conferences have any idea what they are talking about. What these people typically do at the conferences is learn some marketing ideas about this or that, create a horrible course, and then try and get people to pay hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for them. In addition, most of these people are not just clueless; they’re completely clueless. I usually end up leaving when I hear them pronounce some famous marketing person’s name incorrectly or call some marketing concept by a name it should not be called. The reason people keep showing up to these marketing conferences and paying all these gurus money to listen to them bastardize marketing concepts they do not even understand is this: When a marketing concept really works it can be incredibly effective.

I know one guy in his twenties who came out with a brand of liquor and created some buzz around it and a couple of years later sold it to some giant liquor company for hundreds of millions of dollars.
I know of another guy who did the same thing with a stuffed animal. I represented him when I practiced law. He made several hundred million dollars.

How effective is this marketing stuff? People who really understand it at a deep level can make hundreds of millions of dollars. If people can make hundreds of millions of dollars with a simple marketing concept pitching a bottle of booze or a stuffed animal, imagine what you can do with this stuff in your career. The most effective of all marketing weapons out there is the USP. The term USP has been around a long, long time. I would define USP in the following way:

Your USP is that unique aspect of yourself that sets you apart from every other “me too” employee and job seeker in the market.

Your entire career can be built almost exclusively around your USP. The key word for your USP, however, is “unique.” Your USP is what differentiates you from your competition and makes you a must-have hire and employee in the job market. You should be able to explain, in a single phrase, why someone should hire you and want to work with you and not someone else, or why they need to hire you at all. For job seekers, the USP is among the most important things you need to have, even before having a resume, in my opinion. Your USP is what you are offering, and it is what you want to stick out and be memorable about your candidacy. Your USP is that important. The possibilities for creating your USP are unlimited; however, it is best to adopt a USP that dynamically addresses something that a potential employer is probably not getting that you can give them. (Be careful, though, because you need to be able to fulfill whatever it is you are promising in your USP.) Before telling you how to go about creating your USP, let me first describe something that characterizes most job seekers. First, when I ask people I am interviewing why I should hire them and not someone else, most of them have no decent response. Why? Because most people have never thought through their own USP. Most people have no USP and instead, have only a rudderless, nondescript candidacy that depends only upon the momentum of the market. For example, if the market is doing well and there are lots of jobs available, they may get hired. If the market slows down and these people need another job, then they will wait for the market to pick up again. Most people offer no real benefit to employers and nothing distinct or unique. No great service or value is promised either implicitly or explicitly—just “hire me,” for no explicit reason. It’s no surprise, then, that most careers are merely average and not exceptional. People accomplish only a small share of what they could accomplish in their job searches and careers due to not fully developing their USP. Why would you want to hire someone who is just average with no unique benefit? Or would you prefer someone who is the absolute best at what they do? Let me tell you two quick stories. Some time ago I hired an assistant whose former job had been to be an assistant to uneducated, has-been movie and rock stars and others who were on tight budgets and needed to keep their secrets out of the limelight. I reviewed her resume and saw all of the famous people she had worked for over her career and felt very privileged to have this person working for me as well. However, she had never actually been hired by these people. She had been hired by their business managers. The job of business managers of stars and others when their clients get late into their careers is to make sure they (1) do not run out of money and (2) are not featured in the press in unflattering ways. This is what they looked for in her when they hired her. Her job had been to be an assistant; however, more than this, her job had been to babysit these people and make sure they did not spend too much money or get into trouble in various ways. In addition to this she was an assistant; however, her real skill was running peoples’ lives and keeping costs down. Her USP on her resume when I interviewed was something along the lines of “effective in controlling confidential clients’ spending and keeping them out of media in a variety of challenging circumstances.” I found this bizzare at the time, but she was extremely personable and interviewed exceptionally well. In fact, I hired her during the interview. Once she started work she started shaping up everyone around her. She demanded that they not gossip and recommended in the harshest possible manner that I fire certain employees who were gossiping. She looked around the office and determined everyone from the person who came in to water the plants to the cleaning woman should be fired and replaced with cheaper alternatives. When I travelled she rented me ridiculous little Asian cars I could scarcely fit into and put me into the cheapest hotels she could find, that were miles from where I needed to be, just to save money. I did not like this. When I protested she would talk to me like a child. “It only costs an additional $3.00 a day for a regular size car,” I might protest. “Now, what did I tell you about behaving?” she might respond. She was incredible at what she did, but it was not for me. Had I been a spendthrift, out-of-work actor on a fixed income, this would have been exactly what I needed. The people around me would not have gossiped about me to the press, and I would not have run out of money. This woman had a USP and she stood for two things (1) saving money and (2) keeping the person she worked for out of the press. She did this instinctively, and this is why she is someone who was probably never unemployed in Los Angeles for more than a few days. Ever. The reason for this is due to the fact that she had an incredible USP and it was exactly what business managers and others wanted in someone doing a job like she did. She was absolutely perfect in every way for the particular job that business managers needed for – older, non-working entertainment clients. This is the example of a USP in action. Imagine if you were managing a former movie star and had the two goals of keeping the person’s dirty laundry out of the limelight and also making sure that the person did not spend money. The person I hired would be the absolute first person you would hire. This person stood for something and followed through on what they stood for. I am sure she will never have a difficult time finding a job in Los Angeles, no matter what the economy is like, as long as she has this particular USP. Can you see what an appealing difference a USP can make in establishing someone’s image to a potential employer? It is ludicrous not to have a clear, carefully crafted USP that is in the very fabric of your candidacy with any firm. The next story I am going to tell you about USPs is so ludicrous it is hard to believe. But it’s true. When I was growing up there was a guy down the street from me who was incredibly wild. He once got suspended from elementary school for throwing a desk at a teacher. As he progressed through high school and then college he continued to get more and more wild. One time he was over at a friend of mine’s house, and he had used so many drugs that he sat on a chair for what I understand was something like 36 hours staring at a wall. He was a wild guy, and he still is pretty wild. However, despite all this wildness he is actually extremely uptight. His mind works like a vice grip, and he is so detail oriented it is hard to believe. When you are around this guy when he is not spaced out on drugs it makes you uncomfortable. He perceives every little detail about everything, and these details make him visibly agitated if anything is ever out of place. He starts sweating sometimes if anything seems off too much. His face turns red. This guy is way, way too wound up and always has been. He almost flunked out of college because he was using drugs and partying all the time. However, he still ended up getting tons of jobs. Employers meet this guy and they know that absolutely nothing whatsoever will ever slip by him. It is difficult for me to even describe how uptight this guy is in words. His mind is like a trap. This guy has never been unemployed. His resume says something like “unbelievably detail oriented” and it is absolutely true. The guy is considered one of the top quality-related guys in the United States. He works for a big company and makes a hell of a lot of money studying something like quality control. He gets calls from recruiters all the time. He was rich by the time he was 30. He works in a labcoat in ridiculously expensive production lines that make things like computer chips. He is an absolute star at what he does. This guy’s entire identity is based around being incredibly detail oriented on the job. He is incredibly detail oriented, and people truly understand this around him. This is what this guy does. He does this well, and everyone who comes into contact with him knows this. The point is that you need to focus your USP on one gap, niche, need, or segment of the market that the market needs. The market needs guys who are detail oriented and assistants who control the spending and public perception of people in the entertainment industry. You need to come up with a USP and have something that sets you apart in the market. Before you can incorporate your USP into your resume and interviews and work style, however, you need to figure out what it is (or what you want it to be) and then refine it and make sure you focus it as cleanly and directly as you possibly can. You should be able to articulate a crystal-clear USP in less than a paragraph. Your USP is the nucleus around which you will get a job and define your career, so you better have one and you better be able to state one. If you cannot state a USP, the people you work with and/or whom are interviewing you will not be able to define it either. Clearly conveying and marketing your USP will make your success in the job market close to inevitable if it is a strong enough USP. But you need a USP before you do anything. When you create a meaningful USP you are taking the vast details of all of your experience, education, and character and putting in one or a few sentences. More importantly, these sentences typically have the force of salesmenship in practically every single word. You do not need to care how this USP reads, either. It does not have to sound good. What it needs to do is stand out and create positive tension in the employer’s mind. The biggest test if you have adopted a really good USP or not is if it could be adopted by another job seeker without being modified. Here are some examples of meaningless USPs:

Well-educated teacher.
Hard-working employee.
Team player.

These USPs do nothing to separate one person from another in the job market. Lots of people are well educated and professional. Lots of people are also hard working. Lots of people are also team players. None of these things are really that unusual. If an employer puts and advertisement out for virtually any job they will receive applications from people claiming to have these various “unique” qualifications. The truth is, however, none of these qualifications is unique at all. None of these things is really going to make you stick out in the employers’ minds when they are reviewing your resume, interviewing you, and considering hiring you. You are well educated? What does this mean? You are hard working? What does this mean? You are a team player? What does this mean? You need to go deeper and deeper. You need to push harder and find something that make you stand out. How about:

“Students in my classes get so enthusiastic about learning they often come to me for extra reading assignments to learn more,” “Oxford educated teacher,” “Former high school valedvictorian teacher who speaks Latin and four other languages and makes students incredibly enthusiastic about learning” (for well educated teacher).
“My supervisors always tell me not to work so hard,” “Known at every employer I have ever worked at as the last one out at the end of the day,” “I am the guy supervisors tell to take a vacation” (for hard working).
“Am I too friendly and well liked by other people at work?” “When employer’s hire me morale rises because I am always the guy who organizes softball leagues, basketball teams, and so forth for the employees,” ”Pizza parties at my house are a regular occurrence” (for team player).

I am showing you these examples and want you to think about them. Each of them is memorable because each of them makes the person stand out. The imagery is vivid, and we can sense and understand what is being talked about and referred to in the statements. My greatest and most favorite skill is being a legal recruiter. As a legal recruiter I have written hundreds of profiles for various attorneys out there that I use to help them get in the door at various law firms. At first glance, every attorney is pretty much identical to the others out there in the market. For example, they all go to good law schools, they all work hard, and they are all very ambitious. I have to work pretty hard to differentiate each attorney I work with out there from the rest. I am not going to tell you I am the best legal recruiter in the United States; however, I may well be. I’ve made more than $1,000,000 in fees personally from doing this sort of work virtually every single year I’ve done it. I can honestly say that nothing I do to help my candidates get jobs is more important than helping them have a strong and incredibly persuasive USP. That is why I sit on my ass at all those shitty marketing conferences: I know that the more I learn and understand this sort of stuff, the more I can help various people get jobs. I have been able to change people’s lives by crafting powerful USPs for them and sending them into interviews. One year I actually placed every single candidate I worked with and I can say it is almost entirely due to having a good USP for them. Every attorney and every person has a USP that can be used with employers. Sometimes it is the obstacles the person has overcome. Sometimes it is their unique writing ability. Sometimes it is their passion. Sometimes it is their character. The point is that everyone out there has a particular USP. You are different from other people and there is something different about your candidacy and experience than everyone else’s out there. You need to say so, and you need to be as upfront as possible about this. Have something in your USP that no one else out there offers. And tell your story. ”I learned the importance of hard work because I grew up on a farm and got up at 4:30 am to milk the cows from the time I was 7 years old until I went off to college at the age of 18 and never missed a single day. If you are looking for an attorney who works hard ,you are never going to find someone more dedicated, hardworking, and consistent than me.” Persuasive, right? Who would you hire to be an attorney? Some four-eyed, upper middle-class arrogant law school graduate, or a guy who came in with a story like that? I think you would interview the kid of a farmer just for the novelty, and hire him as well. This is the power of an awesome USP. Why are you the right choice among all the other choices employers have out there? If you truly want to get a job, you will get in touch with your USP and start standing out to employers. You will be a standout person whose resume and so forth sticks out to the employer and who is memorable. People will be buying you as a concept and not just hiring an employer. When you interview with employers, everything you say should clearly reinforce your USP. Think about your own past buying examples. When you are in the market for a product or service don’t you tend to favor the businesses that strongly presents a USP? Of course you do! You need to understand one thing, though: You are not going to be able to appeal to everyone out there. In fact, certain USPs are only going to appeal to certain employers and not others. However, this is part of what a USP is: It is a market differentiator. Differentiate yourself in the market, create a USP, and you will never have a difficult time finding a job. THE LESSON Just as a Unique Selling Position (USP) is important to sell a product, your own USP is vital for marketing yourself to potential employers. You must define your USP before even creating your resume, as it comprises the basic product that you are trying to sell in your interview. Focus your USP on a specific niche, for which there is market demand, and make it thoroughly persuasive.