The Employee Junk Drawer

Everyone on your team can be and should be strategic to your organizational objectives. Period.

After meeting with a few of our key people and members of our Client Experience Team (they're much more important than simply calling them "admin"), I'm finding schedules and activities full of good, well meaning stuff but missing the mark strategically in their roles.

5 quick things:

• Much of the stuff on your to be delegated to someone else list should simply go away. Don't push your garbage to someone else on your team.


• Make sure everyone on your team understands the answers to these 3 questions:

1. What is our organization trying to accomplish?

2. What are the top 3 components of my role that best moves our organization to its goals?

3. What's on my plate now that doesn't have any effect on these top 3 components?

• Most people on your team will need help in knowing what to stop doing and pruning their activities. Schedule a meeting with your team members to review their top 10 tasks and bring out the hatchet.


• Sometimes the boss or owner is the biggest problem. People tend to "drop everything" when the owner speaks, your managers/owners may need some coaching on how they communicate their needs. (Yep, tread carefully...)


• Good employees are artists at keeping (or looking) busy. Pull the plug, chop the list, and refocus the bullseye.

The Employee Junk Drawer: Busy activities that seem to be important, often delegated by others, but simply cause drag to your organization.

One Great Employee

It's been said that one great employee is more valuable than three good employees. Agree?

We've got some great employees on our team, here are some of the lessons I observe from them:

• Seek accountability rather than run from accountability. Good employees have good reasons why things don't get done.
• Embrace Change. With good employees, you find yourself having invest more time to sell the change.
• Understand the goals of the organization and align their activities to them. Good employees get a lot of stuff done, but regularly the wrong stuff.
• Great communicators and fill in cracks within their teams. Good employees know their jobs pretty well but miss opportunities to keep others in the loop.
• Have integrity and build others. Good employees have integrity and build themselves.

You probably know who these people are at your organization. Your stress level goes down when the walk in the room, they're a breath of fresh air, and you find yourself thinking he/she has it covered... Got great?

Sidenote: The "metrics" on this works as well... Think profitability over a fixed cost, not revenue.