In This Issue:

• Effective Performance Reviews
• Profile
• Woman Talk
• Managing Diversity
• Management Tip of the Month
• Book Nook
• Ethics Dilemma

LEADING EDGE WEBINARS

For information on our webinars "Effective Performance Reviews" on November 8th and “Realizing Value through Affinity Groups” on November 14th, click here.

PROFILE:
Victor Benoun

Each month we will profile someone in the business, non-profit or government sector who has shown superior leadership or management skills. If you know someone who should be profiled, please send the person's name, title, organization and contact information to edgeline.

NAME: Victor Benoun
TITLE: President
COMPANY: The Mortgage Source, Inc., Studio City, CA

Victor Benoun, president of a multi-million dollar mortgage company, is a nationally recognized leader in the industry. Benoun, the author of “Your Castle No Hassle, How to Buy a Good Home Get a Good Mortgage…And Keep Your Sense of Humor,” has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune and CNBC.com.

What is most exciting about your current role?
I love working with people and helping them fulfill their dream of home ownership. Lending is more difficult today than ever before. There are so many programs as well as rules and regulations. I can help simplify the process, thereby making things as easy as possible.

What is your biggest challenge?
The biggest challenge is saying “no” to someone who really wants to purchase a home. I don’t want to put someone in a home that can’t afford one. At times debts need to be paid off, or the borrower needs to work on money management. In the long run they appreciate the advice.

Briefly describe an experience that taught you a lot about leadership or management.
Having worked in Fortune 100 companies, I learned and experienced the frustration and bureaucracy of a large company. When I opened my mortgage company, I wanted to make the home buying process the best experience possible.

Describe someone who is a hero to you, or mentor or role model?
My father is a great role model. He left a company as a paid employee to begin his own business, with a wife and three kids at home, and no other source of income. He understood there is never a good time to take a calculated risk and open a business. Now almost 80 years old, he is still actively involved in the company. He will probably never retire because he doesn’t want to be deprived of doing what he loves.

What two or three traits or qualities will leaders need to be successful in the future?
Kindness, respect and vision.

What personal strengths have led to your success?
I am highly principled and honest. I do what I think is right for me and for my client.

Tell us about your outside community interests, hobbies and activities.
I love spending time with Anngel, my wife of 27 years, and Sammy, our Golden Retriever, writing and working out.

What are three tips you would offer to aspiring managers and leaders?
Treat others as you want to be treated, have fun and love what you do, and be true to yourself.

---

Victor Benoun

Born: November 27, 1955 in Los Angeles

Education: BA, California State University, Northridge

Other companies where you've worked: HFC, World Savings, First Nationwide Bank

Family members and pets: Wife Anngel and our Golden Retriever, Sammy

Favorite quote: “Never, ever give up.”—Winston Churchill

Favorite book: “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill

Movie you found inspirational on the topic of leadership: “The Legend of Baggar Vance”

Management Tip

Are you afraid of commitment? This is not just a problem in your love life, but may be reflected in your workplace as well. Clarity and sincerity are key. If you are truly committed to a goal or project, listen for words that speak of action rather than ambivalence. There’s a big difference between “I promise to take on __” and saying “I’ll try,” or “It all depends.”

—Rebecca Kuiken

 

Effective performance reviews
turn anxiety into opportunity

By Larry Olmstead

For many supervisors – and their employees – the annual performance review is a time of great anxiety.

It should be seen as a great opportunity.

Supervisors need all the tools they can get to influence performance. Evaluations provide feedback that employees expect and can count on. Done well, they measure performance on legitimate criteria and on a timeline. They can help to initiate developmental activities. And they answer for employees an important question: “Where do I stand in this organization?”

Fortunately, the same steps that ease the daily burden for supervisors create better performance reviews.

Do the heavy lifting on the front end.
Take care to initially establish clear and precise performance expectations and developmental activities, and make sure you and the employee agree on those expectations and activities. They should link clearly to the goals of both the work unit and the overall organization. Make adjustments as necessary during the year. If you take these steps, the annual evaluation will pretty much write itself, based on whether the individual achieved those goals.

Maintain ongoing feedback.
Be a good coach, reinforcing performance that ties to agreed-upon expectations, and constructively guiding improvement. Give informal feedback often – daily, if appropriate. When you have key conversations, write a brief note for your file that you can refer to at review time. An axiom of performance reviews is that the best ones contain no surprises.

In writing the review, keep it simple..
Think: “What is the most important thing I want the employee to take from this review” – and make that the top priority. Then emphasize no more than two or three other key points. Anything else can be saved for informal coaching at a later time.

Play to people’s strengths.
People often leave reviews thinking about how to shore up their weaknesses. It may be more important to leverage employee’s strengths. Roberta, a sales rep, has issues turning in her reports on time, but she is a whiz at building relationships. In the review, spend time talking about how to better utilize the relationship-building skill. Set an expectation for timely reports as well – but you and the organization may be better off by providing Roberta administrative support to get that task done.

When writing reviews, be courageous. Put key issues on the table. Otherwise the whole exercise is a waste of everyone’s time. It certainly does an employee no favors to avoid confronting an important performance issue; how can she improve or succeed if she doesn’t know there is a problem?

You will feel more comfortable confronting tough issues in a performance review if you remember these guidelines around criticism:

- Limit criticism to things that are relevant to work and to your organization’s goals and mission. James may be a sloppy dresser, but the issue is, does his appearance have a tangible impact on the business?
- Focus on things that can be fixed.
- Be specific about behaviors, both expected and observed.

Good employees are grateful for reviews that point them towards real growth and an improved contribution to the organization. The feedback from their supervisor is what matters most – you owe it to them to provide it in a way that is fair, informed, thoughtful and useful.

Larry Olmstead president and executive consultant with Leading Edge Associates.

 

WOMAN TALK: Take Back Your Time Day

By Dinah Eng

Started by members of The Simplicity Forum, a think tank of authors, educators, entrepreneurs and activists dedicated to promoting simple and sustainable ways of life, this yearly event encourages Americans and Canadians to stop work for a moment and savor their life.

“People are working longer hours, have stress related to this, and no one was working on this issue,” says John de Graaf, president of “Take Back Your Time” (www.timeday.org) and the author of “Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America.”

“We chose October 24 because it falls nine weeks before the end of the year, representing the nine extra weeks of work that Americans put in each year over their Western Europeans counterparts. It is also the date that the 40-hour work week was established by the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1940.”

DeGraaf ‘s organization encourages people to hold potluck dinners on October 24th to both talk about their vacations, and to advocate for more time. Participants talk, and write postcards to their Congressmen requesting their support of legislation to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to include a guarantee of three weeks vacation for anyone who’s worked at a job for at least a year.

Over the years, various activities have occurred on Take Back Your Time Day, ranging from family dinners in communities to a teach-in at the University of Iowa that attracted 1,000 attendees.

The Massachusetts Council of Churches participates by asking people to “Take Four Windows of Time” between October 24 and the end of the year where they do not schedule anything, and take a day to slow down and reflect on their lives.

“We’ve become a society that has all this productivity,” says De Graaf, “but do we just use it to produce more things, or do we use it to have a better quality of life?”
De Graaf suggests managers might use October 24th to hold honest discussions with employees about time pressures and people’s ability to balance their family, work and their health.

Encouraging something as simple as taking a real lunch hour, rather than eating at their desks while working, could make a real difference in reducing stress in the workplace, he says.

“We have this idea of keeping our nose to the grindstone because we have no time to take daily breaks and vacations,” he says. “But we need to understand what this really means. Invite a doctor in to talk about the health effects of taking breaks and a vacation. In Sweden, people stop at 10:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. for 15 minutes to have tea or coffee with cookies, and talk to each other. It makes such a difference.”

MANAGING DIVERSITY: Diversity vs. Inclusion?

By Jacqui Love Marshall

An Edgeline reader asks: “Should I steer clear of the term ‘diversity’? At a recent management class, my professor said ‘diversity’ was no longer his preferred usage because it suggested simple representation—get one white person, one black, one of this and that in recruitment. He said ‘inclusion’ was preferable, meaning that everyone could be present at the table. I don't disagree with the concept of inclusion but I was concerned that diversity was equated with simply a ‘quota system.’ Now I’m confused.”

Here’s the good news: Despite articles to the contrary, the diversity dialogue seems to be alive and well!

Leading diversity consultants constantly redefine and ‘wordsmith’ terms related to their work, as they observe clients’ businesses and recognize gaps between “achieved” realities and “ideal” constructs. Terms like ‘diversity’ come to mean different things to people or can become “loaded.” Particularly when overused and unattached to real results, these terms can take on negative connotations.

Instead of focusing on terminology, leaders committed to a diverse and inclusive workplace keep their attention focused on the entire arena or universal backdrop of activities that help a company progress forward. One diversity model used for assessment outlines the following steps or phases:

Achieving Compliance
This is where most companies enter the diversity arena – addressing anti-discrimination laws and compliance issues or correcting unfair workplace practices. No company should aim to stay in this phase indefinitely.

Seeking & Valuing Diversity
This phase goes beyond compliance to respecting differences among current employees, intentionally seeking out people who represent untapped resources and learning how to value those differences. In this phase, there is an emphasis on encouraging dialogue and understanding within, between, and across diverse groups.

Assuring Inclusion & Full Engagement
This phase involves viewing people as multi-dimensional and not representing merely one kind of difference. It aims to include and engage people in business discussions/decisions so that they can deploy the full range of their experiences to do their best work.

Leveraging Diversity
In this stage, the company employs specific business strategies based on the diverse skills, talents, insights and ideas of their employees to address the needs, interests and expectations of diverse customers in a diverse marketplace. Creativity and innovation are unleashed, as a company draws upon diversity to generate new business goals and plans, and new products and services.

What’s next? As more companies maximize their diversity strategies, new concepts and strategies will emerge and older concepts will get abandoned or re-defined. Where would you place your company along this continuum today? Perhaps your company will help shape the future of diversity work.

Over the years, terms like “multiculturalism” and models like “the salad bowl vs. the assimilation pot” have helped us to envision and carry diversity work to new levels. Used constructively, they serve a purpose until new concepts replace them. Let’s not get hung up on the terms. The real diversity work is based on action, not talk.

 

BOOK NOOK

ETHICS DILEMMA: Company loyalty at any price?

Jerry Ceppos will answer questions about ethical issues every month. Along with two others, he received the first Ethics in Journalism Award of the Society of Professional Journalists. Write Jerry at jerryc@leadingedgeassociates.net .Tell him if you don't want your name used.

Q. My boss sometimes seems to think that loyalty to the company surpasses everything else, including truth-telling. What do I owe my employer?

A. We're old-fashioned, so that means you owe no public criticism except for the very most egregious situations. On the other hand, loyalty to yourself as well as the company also means that you shouldn't ever lie for the boss.

What about gray areas? We think they are fewer than most people say they are. But, if there's really a situation in which the truth is muddy, use a simple test: Would you or the company be embarrassed if all of the nuances about the situation became known? If so, refuse to compromise yourself. Tell the boss that, if the full truth came out, the company might actually be hurt.

To our traditional mind, public criticism is OK only if the situation is egregious —say, theft of shareholder money. If you feel compelled to comment, don't hide behind anonymity. If you feel compelled to resign, do it—but don't grandstand.

 

Edgeline is published the second Tuesday of each month by Leading Edge Associates, a consulting firm engaged in management training, organizational change, succession planning, executive coaching, diversity and media. Rebecca Kuiken, managing editor of Edgeline, can be reached at (408) 960-9472.