Welcome to The Fordyce Letter:
Ten Deeply Destructive Mistakes That Suggest the Answer Is No (and How to Stop Making Them)
Editor’s note: John Hamm explains in his new book, Unusually Excellent: The Necessary Nine Skills Required for the Practice of Great Leadership, why your employees may not see you as a leader — and what you can do to capture their hearts and minds. As recruiting business owners, the “business owner” part is the most important, because it’s the core ownership fundamentals that allow you to make decisions, often difficult ones, that make your recruiting efforts fruitful. Among these are good leadership skills. Management and leadership are often intermingled in people’s minds, and good managers SHOULD be good leaders.
I hope you will read about these mistakes that are excerpted here from Hamm’s book, and think about where your own strengths and weaknesses are. Leading a team or a company isn’t easy, often requires hard choices, and isn’t for the faint of heart. But as you well know — the risk is worth the reward of being your own boss and calling the shots.
There are people in every organization you know whose titles indicate they are leaders. Often, and unfortunately, their employees beg to differ. Oh, they don’t say it directly, not to the boss’s face, anyway. They say it with their ho-hum performance, their games of avoidance, their dearth of enthusiasm. Leaders — real leaders who have mastered their craft — don’t preside over such lackluster followers. If reading this makes you squirm with recognition, you may have a problem lurking.
You’re really just masquerading. You haven’t yet earned the right to lead.
When I first accepted my recruiter “trainee” position in November of 1987, I was hired by a CPA/MBA Deloitte “Big 8” audit manager who had a then-recent position as a financial officer of a W.R. Grace division. Being somewhat naïve, along with possessing an insatiable appetite to savor success and affluence, I actually went on doing what I was told I could do during my first two years and savored initial success.
How many times have you heard one or more of your clients state:
This is a time when many organizations are scrambling to produce sales. Some will be successful and some will not. Sales success and trust-building skills go hand in hand; yet, a salesperson’s ability to develop and maintain trust often goes unmeasured in the pre-hire phase.
Recruiting is a tough business; an activity oriented phone- and Internet-based business where statistics indicate that nine out of ten new recruits don’t survive their first calendar year. It’s also one of the only businesses where the product can tell you “no.” Add to these inherent challenges the fact that research shows the average US worker wastes 26% of their day on socializing and personal Internet use (Malachowski, 2005), which is probably closer to 40% now that social media has taken over with Facebook and Twitter. The ability for a manager to develop a strong culture of performance is extremely difficult, if not outright impossible.
When things wind down past mid-season in baseball, separating the teams in the pennant race from other teams is not a difficult task. It seems year after year the same teams are vying for the top and showing strong performances, as many others are struggling to remain competitive.
A few weeks ago, some friends and I went out to dinner. and when we left we agreed: “It was OK.” Translation: we were slightly disappointed. There wasn’t anything wrong. Just nothing noteworthy or exceptional. Just little things like the fact that the table wasn’t clean when we sat down, that we had to summon the waiter several times, and we weren’t attended to as frequently as we’d like, etc. Nothing singularly mind-blowing, just a combination of mediocre events.
Editor’s Note: Jeff has covered this topic for us in the past, but as he has said, it needs to be addressed again, and more thoroughly. 
Yesterday, we posted 
