Personnel Problems That Kill Your Marketing Ambitions

How else can having the “wrong people” or “right people in the wrong seats” make or break your marketing efforts? Here my motto that “it’s all marketing” comes in to play. The following example shows how all these ideas are related. One day I received a complaint call from a patient. The night before they had showed up at my center injured just a couple of minutes after the business closed. When they knocked on the door they could see the staff and physician “attempting to hide.”

To how many friends, family and other physicians do you think this person told that story? The list of possible ways your people can make or break your business is endless. As leaders it is ultimately your responsibility to get it right, to make sure you have the right team and make sure they are in the right positions. You can’t blame them; it is your responsibility, which leads me to the next potential marketing and business killer, a close cousin to the first.

My next potential business and marketing killer is you: the leader, owner, CEO and manager. Patrick Leoncioni wrote a book on “The Five Temptations of a CEO.” Two of the most common are “putting the need to be liked ahead of accountability,” and its close relation: “Putting the desire for team harmony ahead of allowing a robust discussion of the issues.”

Are you willing to really confront the issues we’ve discussed? What do you do when you realize you may have some wrong team members, or right team members, but in the wrong positions? Do you just live with it? There is a funny saying I often use because it makes such a clear point: Do you know what happens when you try to teach a lobster to sing? It annoys the lobster and frustrates you. How many lobsters are you trying to make sing?

Many times you may have the right people, in the right seats, but you have systems or incentives that are misaligned with your goals and objectives. Often I see incentives for different teams that are misaligned with each other, which means key parts of your business are working against each other. How does your staff react when you get busy? If they are not ecstatic, that is an indication of misalignments in your teams, systems, pay plans, and/or incentives.

As leader, are you willing to be brutally honest with yourself and others to confront these issues, to have the hard discussions, and to make the hard decisions, necessary to find and implement the best solutions? Do you purposely “go slow” on critical changes so you don’t upset anyone on your team? This has nothing to do with “being mean” or “hard nosed.”

The best leaders attract people around them who enjoy being a part of a high-functioning and winning team, who appreciate being held accountable, and are inspired by a leader with a clear vision, who treats them honestly and fairly. If you are reading this journal you have already demonstrated your commitment to excellence. Here’s to your continued success.

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