How To Choose Your People Chapter 20

Chapter 20 — Meanwhile, Down at the Office

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE OFFICE

I was shown into the sales manager's office. Briefly I described the product I wanted manufactured, and asked for an estimate on price and delivery. He seemed to be worried about how I was going to sell them all; he asked me to repeat all the specifications again. He rambled on about production problems. It took me more than thirty minutes, and much persistence, to get him to tell me that it would take at least three months (and possibly longer) for delivery. After juggling papers and charts around for a while, he admitted he couldn't yet give me a rough estimate of costs.

I left after extracting his promise to mail me price quotations as soon as possible.

Whew! If the rest of his company operates in such a low tone band, I thought, my product will die of old age on the assembly line. Better try someplace else...

I called on another business and was turned over to the company president. I told him my requirements while he took notes. He asked one or two questions, and said: "Fine. It'll take us three weeks to deliver them and I'll have a price for you in a minute."

While I was recovering from this shock (three weeks; not three months!) his fingers flew over the keys of a calculating machine on his desk. He made a brief phone call, punched a few more keys and gave me the price. Just like that.

Immediately, I placed my order with him and left the office fifteen minutes after arriving – and everything was done. What a relief. And what a difference from the first company. I'd found a topscale man, and there are few experiences so gratifying. My trust in him was not betrayed. He delivered as promised.

One week after my product was received and in distribution, I received the price quotation from the first company I visited. It was twice the cost I paid. Just as an individual's tone relates to his survival, the tone of a company's leaders influences the survival of an organization. Within a year, the first company I called on was out of business; the other one is still expanding.

I placed dozens of orders with this firm over the years. All were handled with cheerful efficiency. At one time I spent a week working in the company's plant on a special project connected with one of my products. Observing the routine and the personnel I could see that the high-tone leadership influenced the entire place. The staff was cheerful; but their good-natured banter did not interfere with the output of work. On the contrary, that's what high-tone is all about. When a person feels happy and light-hearted he will accomplish twice as much as when he's down.

Whether you're buying or selling, whether you're stock boy or president, choosing the right people has everything to do with your success in the business maze.

CHOOSING A JOB

When you take a job with an upscale company, work can actually be fun and the climate will encourage the growth of your talents and ambitions.

An entire organization reflects the tone level of its leadership. So, maybe you can't judge a book by its cover (especially these days when even a treatise on the life style of an aardvark would sport a naked woman on its jacket); but you can judge a company by its reception room.

In a high-tone firm you will see employees moving briskly; but there's always time for a little in-joking as they pass through. When you see staff members trudging by in grim silence, ignoring each other, bickering or speaking in whispers, you can be sure the leadership is heavy-handed. Employees who lounge through gossipy day-long coffee breaks are the result of lax leadership (to use the word loosely), probably around Propitiation or Sympathy.

Let those first impressions influence you. And remember that a high-tone boss is worth more than a dozen fringe benefits.

AS THE BOSS

An application form can tell you almost everything you need to know about a man except the most important: what is his emotional outlook on life? When you're hiring, it's smarter to choose a high-tone person with no experience than a low-scale one who knows every nut and bolt of the business, because you can teach an upscale person anything (if he's interested) more easily than you can teach the low-scale person to change his tone. I'm talking about a person who is chronically low. He can be raised up by a skilled professional, of course; but if you're trying to run a productive business you don't have time to spoon-feed emotional infants.

Efficiency experts claim that you can raise morale and production somewhat if you paint the walls old swimming hole green, pipe in some lilting supermarket music and install pretty blond secretaries. An aesthetic atmosphere is certainly tone raising; but in the long nun, it's better to select upscale people right from the start and treat them well. No amount of music and fancy paint will offset the destructiveness of a highvolume, low-scale person who's really working at it.

A talented woman started a partnership with a personable young man in an advertising agency. She took care of getting new accounts while he managed the administration. They became well-known and prosperous. She frequently raved about his brilliant business acumen.

Later their partnership broke up and she assumed full responsibility for the business. Sometime afterward, still bewildered by the experience, she said: "He was so incredibly charming; but it was only a facade. He never could follow through on things. He'd start a project and then he'd tire of it and be off on something else. He was never around to follow up on things he got going. When he wanted out of the business, I couldn't understand it; but I bought him out because we had an agreement to do that."

Only after he left did she discover how run-down the company was. Because of poor management, they'd been losing money steadily for five years, and she found it necessary to rebuild the company herself in order to recover her investment. She started by cleaning out the deadwood – friends of her former partner who were drawing salaries over fifty thousand dollars, but contributing nothing.

Even when she first learned of the tone scale, she found it hard to believe he was a 1.1 because he was so "brilliant." (Need I mention that you shouldn't confuse intelligence with emotion?)

You could study most business failures and discover a low-tone person somewhere on the scene. There is one certain rule on the subject: You will never run an efficient, cheerful and productive organization with a staff of low-tone individuals. You'll spend most of your time handling personal conflicts, apologizing to customers for goofs, replacing personnel, soothing disgruntled staff members and trying to plug the holes in the sieve before all your profits drain out.

THE LOW-TONE EMPLOYEE

Downscale types can do more to sabotage the success of your firm than you can imagine in your wildest nightmares. They'll filch everything from nickel blotters to million-dollar ideas. They may talk big deals with all the confidence of lemmings racing over the edge of a cliff while leading your company toward corporate suicide. They'll stop all the best ideas from reaching you. They'll garble messages and orders. They'll misfile important papers. They'll tell you everything is great when the place is collapsing, and when things are picking up they'll paint such a picture of gloom that you'll contemplate hara-kiri. They'll goof up jobs, delay orders and enrage customers.

If a few downscale people in an organization only messed up their own assignments they could be tolerated. But, unfortunately, they labor diligently (both wittingly and unwittingly) to halt the production of efficient people as well. For this reason, I consider it more efficient to run a business on a skeleton staff of highscale people sincerely working for the benefit of the enterprise, rather than a large staff of low-tone people pulling in the opposite direction.

One upscale person is capable of incredibly high output – if he can maneuver without interference. You can do any job more quickly and accurately when you give it your undivided attention until it's finished. However, a few low-scale types in the vicinity (dedicated to the destruction of your goals), can find an abundance of methods for distracting your attention. They call you when a memo would be more efficient. They check back to confirm an order which already has been clearly stated. They drop in to borrow a stapler (their own equipment always breaks down with alarming ease) and try to stay for an hour of idle chatter. You ask them to type a report and they come back to inquire about the size of the margins. They bring you a problem that should be given to Jones.

When you're trying to complete your own tasks, just one low-scale person can be real ulcer fodder.

CHOOSING EXECUTIVES

Most of the "secrets of success" books that catalog the characteristics of selfmade millionaires are saying (although they don't know it): be high-tone. With the top tones goes a magnetic drive that never stays down for long. We find responsibility, persistence, good humor and love of work.

If you're in a position of hiring or appointing executives, choose with the tone scale in front of you and your credulity locked away in the bottom drawer.

That "nice" man everybody likes may be so understanding that nothing gets done. And especially watch out for that brisk, let's-get-things-moving-around-here Anger type who looks like a leader but, with his low boiling point, only attempts to handle people by force, threats and punishment. Man responds to being led, but not to being driven. Heavy-handed pressure appears to work at first; but the fear-ridden person loses all confidence and creativeness and becomes a hopeless bungler. At best, he gets covert revenge by doing only the bare minimum of work.

Some years ago a group of psychologists and sociologists studying behavior of business people learned that performance was critically related to the quality of inter-personnel associations, particularly the relationship one had with his own superior. They found that people worked more efficiently (and felt better) if their boss was not too officious, didn't interfere with social alliances built up on the job and was not demanding production in an impersonal and callous way. In other words, employees don't produce well for bosses between 1.2 and 2.0 on the scale.

The psychologists decided to train the supervisors in one large company in an attempt to instill the good traits necessary to greater efficiency. Testing before and immediately after, they launched a two-week program in which they tried to teach supervisors to show concern and consideration, and to treat their employees as human beings. Immediately following the course, most of the supervisors rated significantly higher in their attitudes. However, when tests were made six months later (against a control group), most of the men had not only reverted back to their original behavior, but in many cases were less considerate than the supervisors in the control group. Interestingly, the men who maintained a more agreeable attitude were those who worked under better-natured bosses themselves. Thus we see the contagion of low-tone (and high-tone) leadership as it spreads down through the ranks.

So even though an individual can be brought upscale to some extent, he won't stay there if he is under the influence of a downscale boss. He not only doesn't stay up, the chances are pretty great that he won't even stay with the company. Whenever you find an exceptionally high turnover in an organization, or in one department, you can bet your slide rule there's a low-tone boss in charge.

RESPONSIBILITY

You can predict a person's level of responsibility on a job if you examine the quality of responsibility he shows in other areas of his living. The responsible person takes good care of himself physically. He'll be clean, well-fed and well-groomed. His personal possessions will be orderly and in reasonably good condition. He does his best to adequately support and assist his family and to provide them with a promising future. He's loyal to any group he joins. Since he's concerned about the improvement and the survival of mankind, he may belong to groups devoted to such causes.

His responsibility may extend to raising plants or animals because such a person prefers living things in his vicinity. He never want only kills other life forms, although he will use them when necessary for his own sustenance (the person who will not kill for food he needs is actually on the Propitiation/Sympathy level of the tone scale). He'll revere and respect religion, whether or not he's an active churchgoer himself.

INVESTING

Use the tone scale in all business dealings whether buying, selling, hiring, firing and especially when you are shaking all your savings out of the cookie jar to invest in a "can't lose" business venture. Your tone scale evaluation will be more reliable than the apparent qualifications of a fast-talking entrepreneur.

A number of years ago I knew a No Sympathy person who clawed, wheedled and blackmailed his way to a high position in the entertainment field. Men who were victimized by his chicanery maintained no illusions about this man; but his prominence continued to open new doors for him. At one time he convinced several moneyed men to invest in a restaurant chain which he would run. They responded because he was well-known and "obviously" successful (after all, everybody's heard of him). However, as usual, he acquired more enemies than friends. The operation was soon doomed to failure because of his petty feudings with everyone from his biggest investors down to the customers he needed to survive. To the amazement of those who originally trusted him, it was necessary to sell the operation at a huge financial loss. That the weakness was not in the business itself, was proven by the new owner who went on to build it into a multi-million dollar operation.

RELAY OF COMMUNICATION

Nearly every function in an organization involves relaying of communication in one form or another, and probably ninety-five percent of an executive's headaches are caused by the break-down of these communications.

The moment a salesman writes up an order, he starts a series of communications that must be relayed from sales to production to shipping to accounting and so on. There are multiple opportunities for mistakes along the way (as any businessman can attest).

An individual's ability to relay communication is another aspect of tone. The low-scale person garbles messages, introduces alterations or negligently (sometimes deliberately) fails to pass them on at all. If you dictate a letter to your secretary, will she take it accurately? Having done so, will she dispatch it without delay?

In my own business, I find it easy to identify a customer who employs lowtone help. The customer sends an urgent order requesting immediate delivery. We notice, however, that the order was not mailed until three days after it was written. In one case we received an "urgent" overseas order which was sent turtle-speed by surface mail instead of air. It arrived six weeks after it was written.

Send a company representative to a convention and his report will depend more on his tone than on the program. The low-scale person will bring you all the bad news. He'll tell you about the companies that went bankrupt, government cutbacks and new competition that will probably ruin your market. He may entirely forget to mention the hot, new prospect from a giant company. He may alter the report on a new product so thoroughly that you fail to see its potential value. The Boredom person won't bring you so much bad news; but he won't tell you anything exciting either. He'll pass on amusing, but irrelevant, anecdotes. Mostly it's "just the same old thing." Conservatism will give you a more valid report, although he'll tone down anything extremely new and different.

Wherever he is on the scale, the person does not realize that he is altering facts. Ten people witnessing an accident will give ten different versions of it. The lower a person goes, the more imaginary his memory becomes, although he believes it to be authentic. People at 1.1 get reality and imagination so mixed up that even their small talk is untrustworthy; but they will swear they are telling the truth. Of course, the wildest perversions of memory occur down at the bottom of the scale where we find fantasies and hallucinations.

AROUND THE CONFERENCE TABLE

The board meeting, sales conference or a brainstorming session are all excellent opportunities to study the tone in an organization. If someone presents an idea for a bold, new program, tones show up in the various responses. A person at the Grief/Apathy level automatically considers the whole project hopeless and, if permitted, he'll drag up old losses and tell you how things used to be better in the old days. Propitiation or Sympathy will probably profess some enthusiasm for your idea; but he'll immediately offer plans for wasting it (perhaps by advocating a tremendous amount of research or worthless advertising and promotion). The person in Fear will introduce every conceivable worry, "we'll probably lose our shirts." The 1.1 invariably pretends the idea is great, but will immediately attempt to undermine it, "Well, the idea sounds good..." The 1.5 usually tells you bluntly that it won't work (or he'll try to find another way to stop it). Antagonism, of course, will want to bicker about a few things whether he likes the idea or not. Boredom will shrug and take the course of least resistance. Conservatism may try to delay it, "Why don't we sleep on it? Let's kick it around a bit. We don't want to be too impulsive." He probably won't stop it; but he'll have the brakes on. If there's a 3.5 or 4.0 in the group, he may get fired up with the idea (provided it was a good one) and offer constructive suggestions, methods for implementing, additional uses, promotion and production plans.

THE SALESMAN

The salesman who understands the tone scale can correctly spot his prospect and bring him up-tone to the point of interest where he makes the sale. (This technique is discussed in a later chapter.) He not only gets the sale, he leaves a happier customer behind.

A salesman also can save himself much stress by knowing when not to sell. He's working in a shoe store. A Grief lady comes in; he shows her ten pairs of shoes and she complains about every one of them. If he cannot bring her upscale, he's better off not selling her. She'll be back within a week complaining. Grief suffers a low pain threshold. Where someone else might feel a little pressure, she says, "It's killing me; it's excruciating." Grief considers most everything painful. That's the way it is to her. Furthermore, she is only satisfied when she's been betrayed. The Apathy customer will say, "It's hopeless; there isn't any product that will solve my problem."

The best of salesmen run into a few unsatisfiables. If you do sell to such types, expect most of them to come back with complaints and requests for refunds or replacements. They not only consume time, patience and profits, they frequently undermine the salesman's confidence in his product. A smart salesman will simply skip these customers whenever he can.

Everybody fumbles through an occasional day when he should have pulled the pillow over his head and stayed in bed in the first place. Such a day is particularly demoralizing to a salesman. After several turndowns he may start to believe that the economy is pretty shaky these days, there's too much competition, nobody's buying anything, or any of the other consolation prizes with which discouraged salesmen reward themselves. It's so easy to go one step further and say, "I give up."

The salesman who understands the tone scale, however, will recognize that he has dropped tone and he won't take himself too seriously while in this dark mood. The main difference between the successful salesman and the failure is whether or not he believes the low-tone ideas which come to him on the bad days.

Most important, the informed salesman will not decide (just because he's in a slump) to quit and go get a job flipping flap-jacks at the nearby beanery. Instead, he should push himself to call on one more prospect, and then another, until he makes a sale. He (and everyone) should try to quit the day on a win. Revitalized by a night's sleep and a sturdy breakfast, he'll probably be courageous enough to get out there and pitch again the next day.

The selling field offers unlimited opportunities to an ambitious person; but it is essential that he sell only a superb product. He must be convinced he's doing the customer a favor when he sells. Because man is basically ethical (down beneath the flim-flam), he won't let himself succeed if he thinks he is taking advantage of others. The salesman who cons his way along may be able to acquire money, but he'll never enjoy it because he can't go uptone as long as he's being dishonest.

Sales managers will benefit by selecting high-tone distributors and sales people. Many companies with salable products fail because of the common belief that if you recruit enough people some of them will work out well (this fallacy is particularly popular in the direct sales field). The detrimental effects of a few low-tone representatives can cancel out most of the benefits of this method because word-ofmouth advertising can also work to bad-mouth a product. Mary tells her bridge club, "I just bought a marvelous new Whoosh vacuum cleaner and I love it."

"Oh, no!" screams Phyllis, "My next door neighbor was telling me that a friend of her cousin's ordered one of those from a salesman and she never got it. He just took off with her fifty-dollar deposit and the company says they have no record of her order and the salesman has quit."

Emotional tone being what it is, this bad news spreads faster than chicken pox in a nursery school. Now the whole bridge club seeds the story out through the city: "Don't get taken by those Whoosh vacuum cleaner salesmen. They're a bunch of crooks."

Everybody forgets that Mary is happy with her machine. So one unethical salesman can virtually ruin the entire market for the industrious men in the same organization .

Low-tone people are predictably unethical. Some knowingly deceive both customers and company. Others simply fail to learn their product well; they make false claims (sometimes out of sincere but misguided enthusiasm), tell unwitting lies, sell incorrect sizes and recommend the wrong products. There are innumerable ways to-lose customers – and low-scale salesmen know them all.

WORK

Before we leave the office, we should make certain we take the curse off the word work. Contrary to popular opinion, pleasure is not found in idleness or wastefulness. An up-tone person finds work exhilarating. The successful industrialist is a man who enjoys overcoming the obstacles to management. The greatest pleasure a composer can achieve is in composing. The pianist prefers playing the piano to doing anything else. The active businessman only goes downscale if he's constantly stopped, distracted or if he has some lowscale person trying to spare him (and thus destroy his greatest pleasure) by telling him he should not work so hard.

SUMMARY

No person can be truly successful and low-tone at the same time. The terms are contradictory.