- Feature Article: Personnel Development: 7 Keys to Aiming Your Talent in the Right Direction

- Note from the Author: Get in Shape for Fall!

- Special Message: Are You Laying the Building Blocks for Success?

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Get in Shape for Fall!

As the summer winds down, how fit is your business to leap into fall?

Did you use time in the slower months to exercise ideas for pumping up your personnel? How about seeking new types of professional pushups for yourself, or toning, flexing, and stretching your business vision?

Getting in shape for fall means setting and focusing on "business fitness" goals, and creating circumstances in which you can continue to fine-tune your business results. Since the people in your organization are such a big part of the equation, you can't go wrong by strengthening your personnel muscles!

I hope you enjoy today's feature article, "7 Keys to Aiming Your Talent in the Right Direction." I look forward to hearing from you!

Here's to your business prosperity,

Adele Sommers, author of the "Straight Talk on Boosting Business Performance" success program

P.S. If you missed any previous issue, visit the newsletter index!

Are You Laying the Building Blocks for Success?

Business and human accomplishment go hand in hand. Is that a surprise? People need certain conditions in order to do their best. If people can’t do their best, an organization, business, company, operation, or team won't achieve its goals.

The term "business performance" relates directly to a series of cause-and-effect relationships within your enterprise. So, you could say that your business success depends on designing the circumstances under which people work most effectively. The better you set the conditions, the more profitable your business will be!

It's also important to become an astute observer of cause and effect, because no matter how well you think you might have set the conditions, you will not know for sure if they're set correctly until you observe how well they're shaping or influencing what other people are doing, saying, and feeling.

Those conditions can be very obvious ones -- such as those you set via company policies to guide personnel development. On the other hand, many cause-and-effect relationships aren't very obvious. In some situations, you'll need a keen sense of awareness to detect their effects!

Personnel Development: 7 Keys to
Aiming Your Talent in the Right Direction
by Adele Sommers

When businesses invest in their personnel, they're taking a far-sighted view of success. Continually increasing the expertise of your staff can help your enterprise remain flexible, energized, and profitable. This article reveals seven ways you can help your personnel grow, beginning with aiming their talents in the right direction. In so doing, you can make "co-visionaries" of your employees by enabling them to:

• Turn their strongest aptitudes into their most valuable expertise
• Understand cause-and-effect relationships in the business, and
• Learn to use highly effective performance-building techniques

Don't Depend on Luck!

In good, plentiful times, it might seem reasonable to "hire and forget" -- either when gaining new employees or utilizing contract help. With this approach, you would hire or contract someone to fill a particular need, apply a dollop of orientation and maybe a dab of training, send them into action, and presto! Problem solved! Or is it?

Certainly, a short-term advantage of a "hire and forget" philosophy is that it's a fairly fast and convenient way to plug a human being into a socket of temporary need. But with this perspective, you're not considering the negative effects of high turnover.

When significant turnover or downsizing occurs, it means that many of the company's intellectual assets -- people with precious, even priceless knowledge and expertise -- are simply walking out the door, perhaps not ever to return. Some organizations don't recover from such losses, and suffer the painful consequences.

Here's a More Proactive Approach

Rather than depending on assumptions about whether your labor supply will remain plentiful, you can adopt a more insightful position. You can realize that conditions in existence today can evaporate tomorrow. You can also recognize that the invaluable assets you have in the form of personnel can best serve the company's goals when their talents are nurtured. The key is to aim these talents along each individual's greatest strengths, since these will provide the ultimate benefit to the company.

Indeed, assuming that your organization can survive and thrive without a program to bring out the best in its people can have long-term ripple effects. And personnel can include both regular employees and contract workers recruited to fill fluctuating needs. Therefore, obtaining the payoff you desire from your people, products, and services may depend on considering the needs of the entire staffing picture.

Companies sometimes fret about whether to invest in training their personnel, since those people might later leave with their newly acquired skills.

I heard Rick Barrera, author of "Overpromise & Overdeliver: The Secrets of Unshakable Customer Loyalty," propose the following rebuttal. He said, "Some companies worry, 'What if we train people, and they leave?' The more important question should be, 'What if we don't train people...and they stay?'"

Here are options for encouraging the development of expertise in your organization:

In conclusion, your staff will be much more productive, and your customers more satisfied, when you apply far-sighted personnel development instead of shortsighted luck. Your personnel comprise your greatest intellectual assets, and you can nurture their strengths into potent specializations using a variety of learning resources and support systems. In this fashion, your staff can become a formidable force capable of catapulting your business far beyond your competition.

Copyright 2006 Adele Sommers

A Nonconformist Recipe for Personnel Development

"First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently," by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. These researchers from the Gallup Organization present their unprecedented findings of a massive, in-depth study of what makes great managers successful across a wide variety of industries and situations.

The study found that the greatest managers seem to have little in common. They differ in gender, age, and race; use very different working styles; and aim for different goals. Yet the world's great managers all share one common trait: They break the rules of conventional wisdom.

These managers don't attempt to train people to do "just anything." Nor do they urge people to focus on overcoming their weaknesses. Instead, they nurture their employees' talents, and help them turn those talents into strengths.

Adele Sommers, Ph.D. is the author of "Straight Talk on Boosting Business Performance" -- an award-winning Special Report and Workbook program.

If you liked today's issue, you'll love this down-to-earth overview of how 12 potent business-boosting strategies can reenergize the morale and productivity of your enterprise, tame unruly projects, and attract loyal, satisfied customers. It's accompanied by a step-by-step workbook designed to help you easily create your own success action plan. Browse the table of contents and reader reviews on the description page.

Adele also offers no-cost articles and resources to help small businesses and large organizations accelerate productivity and increase profitability. Learn more at LearnShareProsper.com.

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