Chuck Terry’s Blog

One of my most popular blogs of the last year is titled “Low Morale in the Workplace- Causes and Cures.” Apparently, many companies are still struggling with righting the morale ship coming out of a tough recession.

Given the popularity of the subject I decided to expand upon the theme by writing a series of blogs on the subject of building morale in your company through proactive means. This week’s topic will be based upon putting the right people in the right place with the right leadership. It could also be subtitled “Don’t Send Your Ducks to Eagle School.” While neither of us coined the phrase, the preceding link to Jim Rohn’s excerpted article of the same name is a good read on the subject as well. The basic point is simply this, if you want motivated people working for you, hire motivated people.  You can’t motivate people, they have to motivate themselves and you can’t “train in” skills where potential doesn’t exist.

Don't Send Your Ducks To Eagle School

My company, Carew International, is a professional training and development company that specializes in training customer facing employees in client organizations on the skills required to succeed in areas such as sales, service, and leadership. We have a great track record of developing the skills essential to increase sales, customer satisfaction, and employee retention but we can’t develop skills where adequate potential isn’t there in the first place. We work closely with our strategic partner H R Chally to assess our client’s sales, service, or leadership organizations prior to a training initiative to ensure we are applying the right training to the right people with the right potential. The reason is simple, because sending ducks to eagle school just doesn’t work and it ends up causing morale problems with both the ducks AND the eagles. Often times a predictive talent assessment can identify where the ducks in one job role have the potential to become eagles in another.

In the ground breaking book “First Break All the Rules” authors Buckingham and Coffman conducted extensive research to learn what drives share value in publically traded companies. In the appendix of the book you will find a graph that identifies the three root elements of driving value as having the right people in the right place with the right managers.

As we are coming out of the recession and preparing our organizations to prosper in the coming months NOTHING is more fundamental to increasing morale than ensuring we have the right people in the right places with the right leadership. Aligning your resources to maximize eagle potential while re-deploying or de-selecting the duck’s will do wonders for company morale. It will also do wonders for business growth and profitability 

Chuck Terry is the Executive Vice President and CSO of Carew International and is regular contributor to Carew’s blog – Executive Insights

Carew International is a leader in sales training and leadership development; specializing in comprehensive, proven training programs for sales, sales management and customer service excellence. For over 30 years, Carew has earned its reputation of delivering increased productivity and profitability to our valued clients world wide.