How one sales team stands out: One group of 12 leaves low morale behind

By Bob Davis

Imagine being, as I was recently, in a 400-seat customer contact center for a major telecommunications company. The vast majority of the representatives do their work in a mediocre, robotic way. Their job is to handle customer service calls and transition them into sales opportunities, but they are demoralized because the last couple of years have been hard on them. They are required to do more with less. They have seen layoffs and wage freezes. Most remember better times and miss the good old days. Yet right in the middle of this sea of bad attitudes and below-par performance is a team of 12 people who shine bright. They exceed all of their goals, have fun at work, and have great attitudes about their jobs and about themselves.

How does this small group maintain positive attitudes and attain high performance despite the dismal atmosphere created by the other representatives? The answer to this question has powerful implications for any organization.

Let’s begin by noting that these top-performers work together as a true team. They are pleasant and upbeat with customers and each other. When one gets a sale, the others join in celebrating it. If one struggles to close a sale, the others do all they can to help. The team leader is very supportive and seems omnipresent. Recently, he worked side-by-side with a new team member for an hour until she won a sale.

The customer contact center in this case rotates representatives between teams every six months. The high-performance group has members coming and going but continues to do exceedingly well. When I was observing them, they had just welcomed three new members.

Here are seven practices that make this team stand out, even in an environment where other teams are achieving lackluster results.

1. Driving a sense of belonging
Maslow had it right when he said most people are motivated by a sense of belonging. Again, during the week I spent observing this high-performance team, three of its members had just joined from another group within the customer contact center. It was clear to the new members from day one that this team was different than their previous ones, and their biggest concern was how to fit in. They recognized right away that a competency model was at play within the team, and that they did not measure up. The team leader had created an environment that encouraged excellent behaviors. To have a sense of belonging, the new members knew they had to reach for excellence. They understood they did not have the sales skills to make it on their own, so they asked for coaching.

2. Setting crystal-clear, compelling performance expectations
The team leader was remarkable in this area. He checked in with everyone daily to see what their goals were for the day. He let his representatives set their own goals, but if the goals were not high enough, he told them his expectations. He has monthly one-on-one meetings with each representative to help them set monthly goals and break them down into weekly goals. It was clear to me during my time with them that all the team members knew their goals and where they stood toward meeting them at all times.

3. Providing timely and meaningful performance feedback
The team leader always worked closely with his people. He knew when they were following the call flow and when they were starting to drift. He was able to coach them on the spot because he was always there. “When do you do your email,” I asked. He answered, “Does a basketball or football coach do email while his team is on the field?” No, and neither does he.

4. Transferring essential skills
All team members have individual strengths. The thing that was remarkable about this group was that they helped one another and shared their strengths. They had brief daily meetings that included a skill-transfer process: One member who has mastered a skill teaches the others to do it just as well.

5. Inspiring high performance with urgency and motivation—from the top down
I found it interesting that the team leader drove success from the top down. He began each day working with his top-performers until each won a sale. This started the day off right with a sense of urgency and motivation for the entire team. He then coached everyone else throughout the day.

6. Leveraging the physical environment
The team leader had a huge scoreboard in the center of the work area, where everyone could see it at all times. It had all key metrics for every member of the team along with their achievement to goal updated daily. The entire team celebrated and recognized successes. And the workspace had balloons, streamers and other festive decorations—it looked like party central.

7. Demanding excellence
On this team, everyone knows what it takes to fit in. When the team leader finds someone not motivated on their own, he demands excellence, holds then accountable for their goals and eventually writes non-performers up if they don’t attain excellence.

In a separate case recently, I saw another good example of demanding excellence. I was working with one of our clients, a large newspaper that is building an outbound online advertising team. The company is committed to high performance and the steps outlined to make it happen. One goal set from the very beginning is that each team member is to make 200 dials per day. One new representative would not do it. Day after day, the team leader communicated expectations, but to no avail with this individual. After two weeks, the company let the representative go. This was unfortunate, but you are either serious about having a high-performance team or you’re not.

Back to our team of 12: These people are happy and positive, while most of the other employees in the customer contact center are not. Our organization will now work with these other teams to apply the seven practices to change the environment, boost morale, and take the entire customer contact center to a dramatically higher level of performance.

So belonging to a successful team is wonderful for morale—and creates another positive result. Faced with today’s business challenges, many companies today find morale at an all-time low. Building high-performance teams within these organizations using the principles demonstrated by our one small team is the answer to turning around not only morale but also profitability.

My consulting practice specializes in building high-performance teams from scratch or by transforming existing teams. Do you have a success story, idea or comment about this topic? Please share it by posting it below, and let’s keep in touch.

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net), a consulting firm in Alpharetta, Georgia, specializing in improving sales, customer service and retention results in customer contact centers across North America. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), a highly specialized outsource customer contact center serving the needs of business clients across the country.

A virtual Ellis Island: Selling online services to digital immigrants—and to new arrivals on the docks

By Bob Davis

Recently, the publisher and vice-president of advertising of a major newspaper sat down with me to listen to the recorded sales presentation by a 20-something online telephone sales rep in the newspaper’s multimedia sales center. It was an eye-opening experience. The prospect, a tire store owner, replied, “Can you send me something that spells all that out? I am having trouble following what you are saying.” In this case and countless others like it, the rep was a digital native speaking in a new lexicon—and the prospect was a digital immigrant yet to learn and understand the language. How can the prospect make a purchase decision when he can’t decipher the pitch?

My consulting organization has been helping clients deal with this challenging issue. The question is, how do you communicate your online value proposition to someone who did not grow up digital—an immigrant to the new world of online advertising—or to a business owner still on the docks of this virtual Ellis Island?

It is so easy for digital natives to fall into their own language when talking to a prospective advertisers. They use terms such as organic search results, pixels, RON, CPM, SEO and skyscrapers. These terms mean little or nothing to digital immigrants, and a prospect who is confused does not buy. If online advertising sales people are going to be effective, they need to communicate in a way that makes sense to their prospects.

So, what is the best way to communicate with digital immigrants? It is critical to remember that they tend to be smart business people who know how to make a profit and will be interested in the value proposition of online advertising—if we can just explain it in the language they understand.

Here are some tips:

Tell success stories. Nothing sells like success stories. Ask your online advertising sales people to share them. If they don’t have many on hand, insist that they go out and collect more. If your online offerings are helping other businesses, and you share the specifics with prospects, they’ll see how online advertising will drive desired results for them, too.

Talk in terms of the prospect’s interests. The discovery step of the sales process is critically important. It is the key to what I call the Quality Conversation. And, if handled correctly, discovery gives sales reps all the information they need to talk in terms of the prospect’s interests. Reps should ask discovery questions such as:

• Do you have a website?

• What did you hope your website would do for you when you set it up?

• How has your website lived up to your expectations?

• When the last time that you polled your new customers to find out how they came to do business with you?

When reps know what their prospects have tried, what works, and what hasn’t worked, they’ll be in a better position to relate online advertising offerings in terms of each prospect’s interests.

Make your sales presentation easy to understand. There are many market realities associated with online advertising that will resonate with advertising prospects and drive the sale. For example:

• Eighty-seven percent of all consumers research online before they buy, making a strong online presence essential to businesses. If businesses are not where their potential customers can find them, they will be out of the game.

• Online advertising prices are at low introductory rates. Their return on investment will be better now than at any other time.

• Online offerings are limited, so now is the time to get the best placement.

Prospects understand these kinds of value propositions for online advertising very quickly, and they respond positively.

We work in an industry that continues to adapt to the evolving world of online advertising, and innovative thinking reaps high rewards. So let’s keep the conversation going. I encourage you to share your experiences and ideas by leaving your comment below or sending me an email at bob@robertcdavis.net.

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net), a consulting firm in Alpharetta, Georgia, specializing in improving sales, customer service and retention results in customer contact centers across North America. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), a highly specialized outsource customer contact center serving the needs of business clients across the country.

Customer contact center performance: Better attitudes, better bottom-line results come in three steps

By Bob Davis

How many people who work with you really love their work, or for that matter, love life? Many of us work with people every day who hate their jobs. So the question is, what can be done to help them feel better about themselves, what they do for a living, and life itself?

Harvard professor William James once said, “The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.” Now, I realize that believing that this statement is true and being able to change one’s own attitude are two different things. It is even harder to change the attitudes of one’s employees.

I have given this subject a great deal of thought, because my consulting organization has a couple of high-profile culture change projects going on right now. How does one go about changing the attitudes of an individual, or the attitudes of many individuals, within an organization?

Maybe your company has gone through challenges such as layoffs and furloughs. These trying times can really drain morale from a company. Or maybe you are trying to transform the culture of your organization to drive higher sales or more proactivity in customer service and retention. In any case, I’ll bet the ideas discussed below will be of significant interest to you.

Hugh Downs once said, “A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.” Yet sometimes we think that to help our people love their jobs, we need to change the circumstances. Maybe if we just provided free snacks or other perks, or gave them all a raise, our people would be happier. This might help in the short term, but not for more than a few weeks.

So how do you move team members from “I hate my job” to “I love my job, and I love life?” One thing I have learned, having accomplished this in many organizations over the years, is that you can’t do it in one big jump. People need to move through steps to get to the point where they can say, “I love my job.”

Step one: Know you can control your attitude
The first step toward being able to control one’s attitude is to know you can do it. In my experience, many people have never thought about the fact that we are as happy as we make up our minds to be, and that it takes just as much effort to be miserable as it does to be happy. Once accepting this truth, a person has taken the first step toward loving his or her job.

Step two: Feel good about yourself
The second step is improving self-confidence. We could all use a little more self-confidence at times, but most people who hate their jobs could use a lot more. It is very hard to feel good about your job when you don’t feel good about yourself.

Step three: Have a positive group of peers
The third step to improving attitude is to have a positive group of peers. This is why changing a culture within an organization is so hard. We rely on our peers to support our beliefs, and if our peers hate their jobs, too, it is a vicious cycle.

My consulting practice addresses these three steps in head-on. We run workshops on attitude control and let people know that they are in the driver’s seat when it comes to controlling attitude. Many times this is truly eye-opening for the individuals in class.

Next we work on self-confidence. Our confidence comes from our successes and our successes come from our skills. For example, I am working with a call center now that specializes in handling customer service calls for several newspapers. As you might expect, they receive calls frequently from customers wishing to cancel their subscriptions, and these calls are hard to handle. One customer service rep was not very good at keeping these customers from quitting (winning saves), and this was just one more reason why she hated her job.

As we worked on her skills at winning saves, she had more successes. She started feeling better about herself. In fact, on my last visit, she bragged to me, “I am one of the top savers now!” She said this with a big grin on her face.

A powerful number for teams
I have seen the power of teams of three. Whenever possible I put three people together to work on a challenging problem. This process leads to everyone in the group feeling better about themselves. However, you have to be careful not to put more than one person with a bad attitude about his or her job in the group. For example, I was working with a division of a large national company helping them rebuild morale after rounds of layoffs and cutbacks. In one of my groups of three people, one person was feeling bad about herself and her life, while the other two were ego-driven individuals who had the attitude that they are great at what they do. The project at hand was to win an account that had eluded them for years. The results? The person who had the bad attitude blossomed around the two with the positive attitudes, and the team won the account.

I am sure that as a leader, you are always looking for ways to grow and develop your people. The techniques discussed in this article will make a huge difference. If you would like to discuss them in more detail, I will be happy to help. I can be reached at bob@robertcavis.net or 678-548-1775.

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net), a consulting firm in Alpharetta, Georgia, specializing in improving sales, customer service and retention results in customer contact centers across North America. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), a highly specialized outsource customer contact center serving the needs of business clients across the country.

Building a long-term customer relationship—and better bottom lines—starts with a Quality Conversation

By Bob Davis

I had a positive customer service experience on the telephone this afternoon that I want to share because I believe it is an ideal example of how a call center representative can make not only a short-term gain for the company, but begin a long-term relationship that kicks off with a great impression.

I wanted to buy a thoughtful gift for someone who is an avid sportsman, and I went to the L.L. Bean website to see what I might find, but I was overwhelmed by the number of choices. So I decided to call the toll-free number to see if someone could give me some guidance.

Within two rings, a man with a pleasant voice greeted me enthusiastically, thanked me for calling, introduced himself by name, and asked me how he could help. I found it so refreshing that my initial greeting was not in the form of a recorded message telling me what button to press to place an order. In fact, I felt like I was talking to a merchant behind a retail counter, not a call center representative.

“I’m hoping you can help me,” I said. “Thinking ahead to the holidays, I am looking for gift ideas for someone who is very involved in hunting and fishing, and I was hoping that you could give me some guidance on finding a small but thoughtful gift for him. I was on your website but was overwhelmed by the choices and don’t know where to start looking.”

“Sure, I understand completely. I can certainly help,” he said. Immediately he began asking me questions, such as, “First, were you able to find our special section on hunting and fishing on our website?” He continued to ask me great questions to better understand how he might be of service to me.

Instead of pushing me toward a certain group of products to try for an immediate sale, he said, “Soon, we will have a special holiday section on the site with holiday gift ideas, but since that’s not up yet, and you’re not sure what you’d like, it sounds like we should send you our special hunting and fishing catalog that will give you plenty of ideas.”

Then he gave me a great solution. “Since I’m sending you the catalog, what you might want to do is order a gift card and then send him the gift card along with the catalog, so he could look through the catalog at his leisure, choose what he’d like, and then use the card,” he said.

“Sure, I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. “That’s a great idea.”

“I’ll also send you our general catalog, which may contain other holiday gift ideas for you,” he said, and then he proceeded to get my mailing address.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” he asked.

“No, this is a big help. Thanks,” I replied.

“You’re welcome. And thank you for calling L.L. Bean,” he concluded.

He didn’t get an immediate sale, but he started a relationship with a pleasant exchange and a solution to my problem that I will remember when I receive the catalog. In all likelihood, I’ll be doing business with L.L. Bean in the near future and beyond. He has my mailing information so his company can stay in touch with me. And like many satisfied customers, I’m telling others about this positive experience.

I call this kind of interaction the Quality Conversation (a central concept for me, given the name of this blog), which has several key elements:

• Enthusiastic Greeting: It starts with a welcoming and appreciative greeting that makes the customer feel as though he found someone who is glad to help with a high level of personal service.

• Competence: The Quality Conversation continues with a representative who is competent—who knows how to do the job in a professional, quick and efficient way using all available tools and resources.

• Knowledge: Armed with thorough knowledge about what the company offers, the representative gives sound advice without hesitation or wasted time.

• Genuine Interest: The representative takes a keen interest in the customer and the problem to be solved. In my case, it made sense to help me even though it didn’t mean an immediate sale, but one down the road.

• Personal Recommendation: By listening and asking questions, the representative learns enough about the customer’s wants, interests and needs to make a personal recommendation that resonates with the customer and solves the problem in a meaningful way.

• Attitude Toward Objections: The representative views objections as concerns to work through in partnership with the customer. In my example, my objection was that the website overwhelmed me with options. The representative addressed my objection as a legitimate concern that he understood. Then, he came up with a solution that solved my problem and provided a positive experience that makes me want to watch for the catalogs and return to L.L. Bean time and again.

The thing is, the Quality Conversation doesn’t happen by itself. It requires the right training and coaching up front with supervisors and representatives, and complete buy-in by company leadership. Is it worth the effort? Well, I’ve seen the Quality Conversation approach add millions of dollars to the bottom-line results of client companies including USA TODAY, Cox Cable, America Online and yes, L.L. Bean. And much like what happened on my call to L.L. Bean, this approach yeilds long-term customer relationships that pay dividends for years to come.

What could a focus on the Quality Conversation do for your organization’s results?

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net), a consulting firm in Alpharetta, Georgia, specializing in improving sales, customer service and retention results in customer contact centers across North America. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), a highly specialized outsource customer contact center serving the needs of business clients across the country.

Non-traditional revenue sources could work wonders for newspapers

By Bob Davis

There I was, sitting in a customer retention call center for a major phone company listening to a top-performing customer retention rep talking to customers who wanted to cancel their service. The phone company was interested in my observations because of all the customer retention work I have done in the newspaper industry, but I was learning more from them on this day then they were learning from me.

Call after call would come in with the customer saying, “I want to cancel my phone line. I just have too many bills, I don’t use my land line that much, and I will just make my calls using my cell phone.”

This particular phone company is losing two million phone lines per quarter!

The top-performing rep I was observing was a joy to watch. He would take a call from a subscriber wanting to cancel land line service, and he would start asking questions.

“What cell phone provider do you use?”

“How do you access the internet?”

“How about TV service—who provides that for your household?”

Finally, he would say, “You know, if you let us provide all those services, you could save a lot more than the price of dropping your land line.”

Caller after caller would come in wanting to cancel their land line and they would leave with a bundle of services they’d had with competitors before the call. In fact, this 200-seat call center sells $28 million worth of extra services to canceling customers each year.

Now how does this apply to the newspaper industry? Right now, your average customer calls you three times a year. For a major metro, that adds up to a million calls per year or more. Right now, newspapers look at these calls as an expense and they try to get these calls done as cheaply as possible.

What if we changed our mind set? What if we took notice that we are getting a million opportunities to sell more services every year? Certainly if a phone company can sell a new TV service to customers who intend to cancel, we should be able to sell something to someone calling in with a vacation hold!

What if we formed a partnership with an insurance agency who is an advertising customer? What if we made a deal with that insurance agency that they would pay us $5 for every customer we transferred to them when they call in with a vacation hold? We could say something like, “Mr. Subscriber, we have a partnership with the Wonderful Insurance Agency. They are giving all of our traveling customers 50 percent off on their travel insurance. If you will just hold the line one moment, I will transfer your call so they can tell you all about it!”

Now a call that used to cost you $1 to take just made you $5 in revenue. Multiply that by your 100,000 vacation stops in a year and it starts to add up.

The opportunities for these partnerships are only limited by your imagination. For example, we could sell subscriptions for our delivery partners. Who better to buy another paper than current newspaper customers? We could do seasonal promotions with our advertisers, offering special prices for our subscribers for each gift-giving holiday. If we have an advertiser who sells snow tires, we could offer our subscribers seasonal discounts. Given recent weather patterns, my friends at the Washington Post might want to jump on this right away!

So the goal for 2010 is to find some non-traditional sources of revenue. Here they are. What are you waiting for?

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net). He specializes in creating custom programs that deliver measurable results for the newspaper industry. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), an outsource call center serving the needs of newspapers across the country.

The printed newspaper has all the value it needs to win back old customers—and win over the Internet generation

By Bob Davis

A few days ago my wife, Kim, and I were standing in the checkout line at a grocery store. The clerk asked the middle-aged woman ahead of us if she had any coupons.

“I wish I had some coupons,” said the woman, who was shopping with her two grown children. “But I canceled my newspaper subscription, and now I don’t have any.”

Kim asked, “Do you mind if I ask why you canceled your newspaper subscription?”

“I stopped it two weeks ago because they were just piling up, but now I miss it and I am going to order it again,” replied the woman.

“What do you miss most?”

“Besides the coupons, I miss the entertainment section.”

We then turned our attention to the two grown children, who told us that they don’t read the newspaper because they read online, to which their mother chimed in, “I hate reading the paper online. I miss my paper, and I am going to get a new subscription.”

People who read the paper love doing so. For them it is a visceral experience that is as addictive as the morning cup of coffee. And I learned years ago that when you get people talking about what they value in the paper, they are passionate about it and sell themselves on keeping their subscriptions going.

Despite the Internet, I believe that if non-print readers were to experience the daily routine of reading the printed newspaper for one month, they would be as addicted to the physical newspaper as the generation before them.

Bernard Baruch was an advisor to five Presidents, a self-made multi-millionaire, a leader in his church, and a leader in his home and community. When asked the recipe for success, he included his advice to “read the newspaper every day.” In the newspaper business, our noble cause is to bring that ingredient in Bourke’s recipe for success to as many people as possible.

I am writing this article on a Sunday afternoon, after spending a couple hours with the day’s newspaper. I read an op-ed piece about Congressman Paul Ryan from Wisconsin and the tax reform bill that he has introduced into Congress designed to reform our tax code while addressing the pressing issues of health care reform and keeping social security solvent. Now, I surf the web as much as the next person, but I have to admit that before I read about Paul Ryan in the paper today, I had never heard of him, and the format of the print version helped me discover him and become a better informed citizen.

In the same issue, I learned through paid advertising that the acclaimed musical “Mama Mia” opens in my city this week. And I discovered that the Leonardo Davinci “Hand of the Genius” exhibition is at a local museum. The print newspaper continues to deliver valuable information that I would have missed online, and I believe that the newspaper industry owes the citizens of this country the opportunity to stay informed in ways that only print can provide.

Many in our industry are asking, how do we turn the trend of declining print circulation around? How do we get the Internet generation reading the paper in print every day? It all starts with a belief that we can do it—we must believe that:

• If we can just get them to try it, they will like it and benefit from it.

• We offer a key ingredient Bourke’s recipe for success, and if we don’t get the next generation to read the paper, we are doing them a disservice.

• Our product has high value for the price. I pay less than 70 cents a day to get a world-class newspaper delivered to my driveway and filled with enriching information—plus coupons to save me money. Even if I paid a dollar per day, it would be a steal.

• Our online presence is an extension of the newspaper, not a replacement of it.

Once these beliefs are firmly ingrained at every level within the newspaper, we are ready to start turning things around.

Then there’s education. We must reinvigorate our newspaper in education (NIE) programs. We need to partner with high schools and colleges where they use our newspapers every day in the classroom. Ideas include:

• Sponsoring current events classes that require students read the paper.

• Running school contests with great prizes and scholarships students can win by reading the paper.

The bottom line is that industry wide, we need to start selling the paper based on its demonstrated value, not with the latest discount or promotional gimmick. The newspaper is at least as much a bargain today as it was 100 years ago—and probably more of one.

With this kind of approach, I believe we’ll win back subscribers like the woman we met at the grocery store. And as long as we focus on value and experience, we’ll win over the Internet generation, too. It’s a challenge, but we’re up for it.

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net). He specializes in creating custom programs that deliver measurable results for the newspaper industry. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), an outsource call center serving the needs of newspapers across the country.

Time to apply the power of prospecting

By Bob Davis

I was having dinner with a group of some of the best sales people in the world. The occasion was an awards dinner for the best sales people who worked at Morgan Stanley. I was the guess speaker, but as is often the case, I learned more from my audience than they did from me.

I sat next to one of the best of the best. Pete earned more than two million dollars in commissions in 2009, which was a tough year for most sales people, and particularly tough for the financial services industry. I had to ask, “What is the secret of your success?”

The answer came back in one word—prospecting. Although Pete has a large book of business and could spend most of his time servicing it as most of his contemporaries do, he disciplines himself to spend only 50 percent of his time servicing his existing customers. When he does talk to his existing customers, he always asks for referrals.

Pete spends the rest of his time prospecting. He told me this takes a lot of discipline, because there is plenty he could do each day other than prospecting. He also knows that without prospecting he will be just another average performer in the sales world.

The thought occurs to me that the same principles apply to the advertising department in the newspaper industry. Most sales reps spend most of their time servicing existing accounts and too little time prospecting for new business. What would happen if your people started spending 50 percent of their time prospecting for new business? I bet there would be explosive growth in your advertising revenue.

This is not going to happen without your leadership. People just don’t develop that kind of discipline by themselves.

They need you to set the expectations around prospecting activity and around prospecting results. What would happen if you:

• Required your sales reps to call 30 new prospects each day?

• Expected one appointment set with a non-advertiser each day?

• Expected one third of each rep’s revenue per month to be new revenue?

I believe that when you receive this level of prospecting in your organization, your ad revenues will be back to 2007 levels.

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net). He specializes in creating custom programs that deliver measurable results for the newspaper industry. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), an outsource call center serving the needs of newspapers across the country.

The task before the newspaper industry:Our own moon shot

By Bob Davis

In September 1962, John F. Kennedy was given a tour of Cape Canaveral. During the tour, he stopped to ask a custodian who was vigorously pushing a broom what he was up to. The custodian replied, “I am working to put a man on the moon!” The noble cause for NASA had been clearly communicated. Everyone including the janitor was motivated by the challenge.

We are at a crossroads in the newspaper industry. The challenges we face are as large as the challenge of putting a man on the moon. We need to rebuild on many levels, including ad revenue, circulation and the morale of our people. The latter may be the biggest job of all, because unless we rebuild morale, we are never going to accomplish the other important jobs.

On May 25, 1961, when John F. Kennedy said to Congress, “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth,” he showed great leadership. He put in motion a noble cause that the entire country rallied around. And, of course, we know the successful results.

The newspapers’ noble cause
Job one for newspaper leadership is to establish a noble cause. Maybe the noble cause is protecting our free democracy by promoting a free and prosperous newspaper. Maybe it is growing ad revenue in spite of the economy. Or maybe it is growing circulation at a time when other papers have accepted limiting circulation loss as the goal. Or maybe it is expanding audience from traditional print to other platforms.

As a leader, if you set the goal just as Kennedy did, the organization will follow.

The value of listening
Now more than ever is the time to listen to your people. Hold roundtable discussion where you invite in seven to nine employees to have an informal discussion with you. Listen to how they are feeling about things. Get their feedback on your thoughts about noble cause. See if your ideas resonate with them. Most importantly, really listen to understand what it is going to take to rebuild their morale.

How core values fit in
Next comes re-commitment to the core values from the top down. This is critical given developments of recent years within the industry. Ask yourself, what does your newspaper stand for? Is it fairness, accuracy, integrity and continuous improvement? Will you get 100 percent of the papers delivered in a readable condition every day by 6:30am without fail? What do your departments stand for? What values would you not violate, even if it meant shutting down the newspaper? These are also great questions for your roundtable discussions. Get your people involved in helping your fine tune the core values of the company.

I was recently leading a leadership seminar for a group of newspaper executives and asked the group to share with each other the values they observed and valued with the others on the team. The results were intense. It was clear, based on the mutual respect these executives displayed, that everyone is beginning to recover from the last two years. This is the mindset needed for what’s next: getting to work on solutions.

The value of goal setting in motivating your people
In his book One Small Step Can Change Your Life: The Kaizen Way, Dr. Robert Mauer says, “the way to bypass fear is to break goals down into tiny manageable actions.”

Think about what your people have been going through for the last two years. Think of how furloughs, layoffs, wage and pension freezes have affected them! They are expected to do more with less. They are still dwelling in the past and what has happened to them, and not thinking too much about the future. By getting your people to recommit to core values, you can re-engage them.

Have your team look at all the jobs that need to be done. Have them lay out the plan for how it will be accomplished and who will do it. This will start the process of turning your people from helpless victims to empowered problem solvers. Give teams jobs that are too big for just one person to do. This will start the rebuilding process. Set big goals—big enough goals to take their breath away.

What matters most to your people
The Gallup organization has researched and found the things that matter most to your people. As you read some of the items on the list below, consider whether they would consider them true statements:

• I know what is expected of me at work.

• In the last seven days, I have received recognition or praise for doing good work.

• My supervisor seems to care about me as a person.

• At work my opinions seem to count.

• The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important.

Given all the rebuilding the must take place, it is important to confirm that each member of your team considers the above statements true. When they do, they will be ready to respond to your leadership, work together, and make our moon shot successful.

Bob Davis is the president of Robert C. Davis and Associates (www.robertcdavis.net). He specializes in creating custom programs that deliver measurable results for the newspaper industry. Bob is also co-founder of Surpass (www.surpasscalls.com), an outsource call center serving the needs of newspapers across the country.