When I am assessing a client’s corporate culture and the strength of their managers, I analyze their commitment to hire the best and invest in their employees. I ask the owner the series of questions listed below. The answers to these questions indicate whether the company has committed to hire only the best possible employees and invest in training and personal development for the company’s management and staff.
What are the company’s mission and vision, and is management focused on living up to their corporate culture statements?
Does the company have written corporate goals that connect to these cultural statements?
Does the company have timely, accurate, and simple-to-read weekly or monthly financial and operational reporting?
Does the reporting give the president and senior management team accurate information to measure employee productivity?
Does the company have well-documented policies, procedures, and goals for recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and evaluating new employees?
Is the company recruiting top-tier management and employees who have the skills and ability to advance the quality of the management team and their staff?
Can the managers make sound business decisions for each functional area of the organization by using the information in the financial and operating reports? Or, on the contrary, does the finance department issue monthly reports late that get filed in a binder and stored on the manager’s credenza. Are the financial statements never reviewed because they are too long, overly complicated, a cosmetic mess, and impossible to read and understand?
Are the managers willing to leave a vacancy open for months, if necessary, until they find the right outstanding candidate?
Is the human resources department investing the time and money to recruit qualified top-tier candidates? Or are they similar to most companies who delegate that function to the managers who have no idea how to recruit and hire high-quality candidates? Or is the company hiring the first warm body that shows up at the front door? You know, the candidate who needs a job and has a résumé that lists their professional experience saying that he or she qualifies for the position, whether or not the information on the resumé is accurate.
Does the company maintain consistent demanding standards for everyone in the organization? Or just the opposite: Is management willing to tolerate a weak division manager, a floundering sales force, or a poorly functioning department head?
Does the president formally review the results of each manager’s performance semiannually or annually? Do the managers evaluate the performance of their direct reports to determine if each employee is meeting their individual goals?
Does the company make progress each year with the management team for each department? Or is the next year going to have the same old managers doing the same old boring things and producing the same lackluster, mediocre results?
What is the company’s budget for employee training and development?
As we all know, times have changed, and the old-style methods of managing an organization have also changed. The process of recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding, and developing employees has transformed in the past decade. An organization that promotes employees based upon job seniority no longer works, as it used to years ago. With businesses being more competitive due to the internet, companies must now have a top-tier management team to be successful in today’s business environment. Internet marketing, technology, and price pressures from companies like Amazon demand a strong management team—or the company will fail.
About the Author
Robert S. (“Bob”) Curry - Bob Curry is an Author, Keynote Speaker, Seasoned Business Coach, and successful Turnaround Specialist. Earlier in his career, he served as President and CEO of three different companies, the largest with annual sales of more than $1.3 billion dollars - all which experienced successful turnarounds under his management. After turning around three companies as the President/CEO, he started his turnaround consulting firm, and for the past twenty years, he has turned around more than eighty distressed companies in many different industries helping each to establish a strong management team and become profitable. He has published three books: From Red to Black, The Turnaround, and The Turnaround 2. He resides in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, with his wife, Esther.
All three books are true stories about the turnarounds of real companies that I have turned around during my career. In each book, I shared my (“PIR’s”) Profit Improvement Recommendations which helped turnaround the companies from Losses to Profits. PIR’s help to grow sales, reduce expenses, improve cash flow, increase profits, and most noteworthy, strengthen the management teams. All three books are on sale on Amazon.com in paperback, kindle, or audio.