[James Flawith]

I wrote this in my Business Journal but thought it would be valuable here as a “how to” to follow after reading The Power of People Skills (POPS). And you should read POPS. After I did, something “clicked” for me with regard to employee hiring and management. I’ve been pounding on my company values hard since starting O&P in Feb/March 2018. If you asked me to recite the values I made up, I would get maybe 2 or 3. This is not good. Not if you want your employees to remember them and if you want to actually I use them for something.

Here’s what my values looked like prior to my POPS revision. Skip to the *** if you get bored:

Precision Core Values

“Performance. Professional. Precision.”
Success at Precision is being:

Love
We love our work because we prevent kids from getting electrocuted and we help people by keeping their power on.
We care because lives depend on the quality of our work.
We love challenging ourselves physically and mentally.
We always have fun and never get bored.

Effective
We are Industrial Athletes, true professionals.
We are dedicated to leveraging technology to do more work with less effort.
The best in the world push themselves to get better every day. We want to be the best, so we push ourselves to get better every single day.
We have nothing to prove, but everything to prove.

Dependent
I’m your left leg. You’re my right leg. We depend on each other to win.
The closer we work together, the more freedom we have to reach our true potential.
One team. One dream. Own the work where we live.

Responsible
We take ownership of everything that happens in our lives.
We own our reality. We control our destiny.
At Precision Tree, we are all self-employed. We all work for ourselves.

Disciplined
We do not need managers, we are all disciplined enough to manage ourselves.
We set the bar for professionalism in our industry, holding ourselves to the highest standards.
We will do the things others do not want to do.
Discipline = Freedom

Grateful
We appreciate the opportunities life provides us.
We are courteous and show respect for ourselves and our customers.
We are thankful for our work and always strive to do the best job possible.

***Looks great, right? Just like something you could print off and hang in your office with some nice graphics, eh? And how many people would ever actually read it? Did you even read it? Honest! Right, point proven. Now, our revised values post POPS:

Precision Core Values

GROw with Precision

G
Give a shit. About the company. About our team. About yourself. Do you give a shit?

R
Ready. Show up to work ready for work. Leave work ready for work. Are you ready?

O
w
Own it. Own up to mistakes and problems by taking responsibility for them. Do you own it?

Or GO from Precision

Sorry for the language, but daaaaaamn! Did that wake you up? How many ways can you measure that??? Can’t remember the values, I bet you’ll remember that you either GROw with Precision or you GO from Precision, right? What if you’re late for work? Well, I guess you don’t give a shit, do you? Forget your lunch? I guess you weren’t ready, eh? Did you go home without doing your Mandatory End of Day Checklist? GOD HELP YOU.

Right about now you’re probably thinking, “this is frigging amazeballs but what do you do with it?” Well, POPS tells you. You use your values to assess your employees and plot them on what’s called a STAR CHART. This chart uses 2 axes (“Right Attitudes” vertically, “Effectiveness” horizontally) to determine she is a “star” (or “potential star”) OR if she’s a “wrong fit”/”productive-but-difficult” giving you and your employee a super valuable REALITY CHECK on where she’s at. Hint: you want a company full of STARS. Here’s a GSheet link to a template I made for a Star Chart.

I found this axis thing a crazy coincidence since I was already graphing values vs technical skills when looking at new hires. If you get down to it “Values” and “Right Attitudes” as well as “Technicals Skills” and “Effectiveness” are really the same. Fascinating.

I’ve already shopped the Star Chart and Coach and Connect Session to my employees as a replacement to our monthly worker assessments and they were stoked. Here’s a link to a Google Doc to what the POPS calls a “Coach and Connect Session” that I made based on the POPS. It’s interesting to note that the Coach and Connect format also incorporates some The Coaching Habit-type open-ended questions and the Star Chart to give your employees a reality check (aside: The Coaching Habit is a super-wicked book and you should read it).

What does all this mean? Well, I think of the simplified values as a sounding board to measure decisions against. By continually reviewing and comparing decisions and actions from the field to the values the company is based on, you’ll be teaching and training your people to act in the best interests of the company without actually having to tell them what to do. Kind of like passing along your Commander’s Intent. You’ll also be able to detect when your new hire is turning out to be a “tree guy” before it bites you in the ass, and give you the tools to help them improve (GROW) or leave (GO) with plenty of fair warning and minimal cost to the company.

Ok, the short version of both of these posts is: you need to read The Power of People Skills. Just do it.