How Much Money Did I Make?

Kristin Allaben
January 29, 2020
Business Coaching, Financials, Income Statement, Training

Most of us are in business to make a difference in something that matters. It may be making a difference in the health, life or happiness of another. It may be making relationships stronger, driving safer or even making the planet healthier. We do the work because it makes a difference.

At the same time, we are also in business for the money. We use the business to help support a lifestyle that matters to us. That means that we have to know our numbers – what creates them and how to use them to make wise decisions.

There are a few ways looking at the numbers can help us be better at business. The Income Statement, for example, allows you to organize the numbers to serve as a scorecard. This helps you literally visualize how your business is doing; the numbers are the financial representation of the quality of your decisions. You can use your Income Statement, when it is laid out wisely and the numbers in it are accurate, to get it to tell you a lot about your businesses – sometimes things you can’t see.

Numbers are critical to business success.

Business coaching is not just about hiring wisely or managing dysfunctional teams. A big part of what I do with my clients is to help them better understand the Income Statement to access its value and its power. As a previous financial executive, I help organizations see potential from their numbers. Here is what I share:

Learn the structure and flow of the Income Statement and align it to your business. Your business should dictate the way you create and manage your Income Statement. It should include income and expense captions that are both meaningful to the business and able to be used to understand the business. Follow the basic format of your industry. For example:

Net Sales – Cost of Sales = Gross Profit
Gross Profit – Selling and Operating Expenses = Operating Income
Operating income – Interest and Taxes = Net Income

Using this basic layout will help you clearly identify the income and expense captions that belong in each area. Pro tip: once you set it up, keep it consistent from period to period. This will help you have Income Statements that you can compare year to year because the components in each caption are the same.
Ensure your numbers are accurate by creating and supporting consistent operational policies and procedures. Numbers that are inaccurate or numbers that are put in one account one month and in a different account in another month make the numbers meaningless. Accuracy is critical. Create procedures to record expenses, bill customers, give credits, pay invoices and issue payroll, among the other things a business does, then train your people how to do it accurately and well. Garbage (i.e. meaningless numbers) entered into the Income Statement leads to garbage out.
Spend time with the numbers to get them to tell you their story. Numbers aren’t just a scorecard; they are also a storyteller. Your numbers, when you use them and review them can help you assess whether you pay too much for product, labor, services, insurance and even subcontractors. Your numbers can tell you how much you have to bill to cover your expenses and what amount of sales dollars each employee brings in. The options to dig into the numbers to get them to expand what you know about how you are doing are limited only by your creativity. Get in the habit of reviewing your numbers for what they tell and don’t tell you.

By creating a process to record your income and expenses in a way that is accurate and meaningful encourages better understanding of the decisions you made that generate the results. Train all of your employees to be effective at using numbers and understanding and managing how they impact your Income Statement. They can’t improve what they don’t know, so get good at sharing the meaningful income and expense captions on the Income Statement.

By Jay Forte

Consider reading Pay or Purpose – What Really Activates Employee Performance?

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How to Help Your People Improve

Kristin Allaben
November 18, 2019
Business Coaching, Employee Education, employee performance, Training

There is a lot on your plate. What happens on a daily basis at home, combined with the ever-evolving experience at work, can be a lot to manage. Take a look at work, specifically. The general description “work” has become more complicated and complex; few days at work are the same as the day before.

So, how can you keep your employees engaged and performing at a high level? Through skill development. Having the best skills enables an employee to be more engaged, more efficient and more effective. In my experience, the best way to build education and learning into an already busy workday is through active learning.

Consider these three ways to bring active learning into each of your employees’ days.

Create learning expectations. Add learning a skill, habit or other performance improvement idea to each employee’s weekly to-do list. Have a weekly check in on things done and things learned. This does two critical things. First, it creates valuable manager-employee relationship time and second, it draws attention to the urgency, need and importance of continual learning. This makes learning a cultural value.
Create teachable moments. In every moment, there is always something to learn. Think and act as a coach who uses interactions to ask key questions to help others think, consider, reflect and respond. Consider questions like, “What is another way to handle this?” Or, “What did this situation tell you about your abilities, about our culture, about our customers, about working effectively with others, etc?” Or, “What could you do to make this better?” Stopping for a moment to draw attention to or focus on a situation can help everyone learn from the moment.
Connect your people with internal mentors. Mentoring is the process of accelerating learning where a person with greater skills shares what they know with those who have lesser skills. Identify the skills the workplace needs and those on the team with these skills. Create the opportunity for a mentor to share what they know and feel is valuable and important. When done well and with intention, it leads to a wiser, more able and more connected team.

According to the Gallup Organization, today’s employees want to grow, learn and develop because they are aware that those with the best skills have the best opportunities. This benefits the organization because employees with great skills are more engaged which helps them be more efficient and effective. A true win for both employee and organization.

Take Action
Develop a cohesive active learning plan for each of your employees by defining their success and challenging skill areas. Be clear of the existing skills each employee can further develop, as well as the skills they each need help developing. Use this information to identify your skill mentors to make learning and performance improvement the responsibility of everyone in the organization. Not only does the organization become wiser, but employees build stronger performance relationships with each other.

By Jay Forte

Consider reading 3 Ways to Get Your Employees to Want to Do More

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Move Learning Off the Back Burner

Kristin Allaben
December 3, 2018
Employee Development, employee engagement, Employee Experience, manager, Relationship, Training

By Jay Forte

What employees really want and need in the workplace is the ability to learn and grow. However, this doesn’t always have to look like formal education. In fact, some of the best learning is done in the moment, on the job and within the conversations between manager and employee.

There was a time when the role of the manager was to control and direct. Issue orders. Tell people what to do. Be responsible for results. That type of strong central manager made sense in a workplace of repetitive tasks, where the manager’s primary role was to drive efficiency and effectiveness.

But over time, manufacturing moved offshore and left us with a service economy, one that requires employees to be more interactive with customers. Managers today are still held accountable for efficiency and effectiveness when it comes to their employees’ output, but the process by which to generate those results is much different. Employees shouldn’t be micromanaged to such a degree that they feel stifled when directed. Instead, to connect wisely with customers, employees need to be guided, developed and coached.

This is why there is such great value in making learning and development a daily event.

Because your employees are the visible brand of your organization (to both customers and fellow employees), they need your constant conversation and development to be effective and adaptable in a constantly changing world. The demands of their jobs are always changing. The needs and wants of customers are always changing. The role of technology is constantly changing the experience. In all of these places, you – the manager – are the key to interacting with your employees to assess their abilities to determine what needs development or realignment. It is your role to assess through dialog, discussion and interaction what’s working and not working with your employees’ performance so you can help them develop a plan to improve.

This is a trend that won’t be going anywhere soon. Millennials (now 50% of today’s workforce) share that what they want and need in their jobs are the following:

alignment (connect them to jobs that need what they do and like best)
relationships (increase meaningful time with their managers in a supportive and value-based relationship) and
development (help them constantly learn, grow and expand their abilities).

Making learning a daily event helps to deliver all three of what employees say they want and need to be engaged and perform.

Think about the learning opportunities you offer to your employees and ask yourself these questions:

What has to change in the way you engage with your employees to increase the frequency and focus on learning and development?
What skills do you need to develop and what self-awareness do you need to have to be able to be a successful manager for your people?
How will working with a coach help you become more successful with your employees – to help them become more engaged, more productive and more successful?

Take Action
Work with a coach to develop your greatest abilities, then transfer the lessons learned in your coaching to act more coach-like with your employees. This will help you make your daily conversations with your employees more focused on learning, growing and developing.

Move learning off the back burner and into your daily conversations.

Consider reading Leaders – Seek out, Accept and Act on Feedback

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Leaders – Seek out, Accept and Act on Feedback

Kristin Allaben
October 10, 2018
awareness, Employees, feedback, Leadership, Motivation, Training

By Jay Forte

Many of today’s leaders and managers still think they have all the answers, a way of thinking that remains from our industrial age. But in a world that constantly changes, it is important that all mangers and leaders be adaptive – that they be open to seeing things differently, be open to new ideas and realize being in charge doesn’t always mean they do things well.

Feedback, not constructive criticism, is critical for every manager and leader. The term “feedback” relates to commenting on both successful and unsuccessful performance. Providing supportive feedback can help any employee or manager do more of what’s working and address those things that are not working; it builds the employee-manager relationship. Avoiding or rejecting feedback creates strained manager-employee relationships, robs leaders and managers of the opportunity to see how their performance is affecting others and misses the opportunity for their development. All organizations should be able to provide meaningful feedback both up and down the chain of command.

In all of my mindfulness training with CEOs, I introduce a process to help them stop and notice what is effective and ineffective with their performance. If there are things about your management style, how you deal with challenging situations, your communication effectiveness or even your ability to share a clear and cohesive vision that are ineffective, you will benefit from the feedback. Solicit, accept and act on feedback. The goal is to constantly improve.

So, the question is, in your definition of manager or leader, are you open to feedback, not just applause?

If I were to ask your employees whether you are open to feedback, would they have the same response?

Here are three practical tips to seek out, accept and use feedback.

Give your team permission to openly share their feedback. Go ask for feedback. Share how you best process their feedback so they can deliver it successfully. Let them know you are focused on constant improvement and that their input matters. This goes for both things done well and things that need improving.
Accept, applaud and thank employees who deliver feedback successfully, wisely and professionally. This encourages them to continue to deliver the feedback. It also encourages a more successful manager-employee relationship as both parties have honest conversations that are results-based and committed to improvement.
Act on feedback whenever possible. Participating in feedback and actually using the feedback are two different things. Employees will stop providing feedback if they feel it is ignored or not used. If the feedback is meaningful, work to implement it.

Take Action

Have a meeting with your team to discuss the value of feedback for all employees, including management, and how to do it successfully. Make a point of ensuring that feedback is for both successes as well as challenges to encourage better balance in your feedback. Acknowledge when it is done well to encourage its continual use. Its goal is to encourage behaviors to do more of what works and to improve what’s not working – at any level.

Consider reading Are Your Employees Sitting on the Sidelines?

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