Archive for the ‘Industry Thought Leaders’ Category
Safety Management: Newsletter for Parking Professionals December, 2010
Safety Management: Newsletter for Parking Professionals November, 2010
Parking association offers free anti-terrorism training for parking employees
2010- A very active year for mergers and acquisitions
SECURITY OF A HIGHER LEVEL – UNPARALLED SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE WITH THE ENTERPRISE CLOUD
2011 Workforce Challenges
Leading With Questions – The Non-Agenda Meeting
Meetings are often seen as a necessary evil: A way to get everyone together and on the same page, perhaps, but not good for more than that. In his book, “Good to Great,” Jim Collins talks about the use of the non-agenda meeting as a way of achieving an enhanced understanding of reality.
The ask questions, non-agenda meeting is one in which the senior party comes together with team members to gain a clearer picture of their viewpoints. Rather than come in with an agenda or a presentation, the members come and answer such simple questions as, “What’s on your mind,” “Is there anything we should know,” and “What are your concerns.”
By asking questions and being open to where the discussion takes them, a leader can learn about the realities of daily operations. The idea is not to ask questions that force your subordinates to agree with you. The idea is to ask questions that bring you a deeper understanding of a function or problem.
To lead in this way, you have to be confident in your ability to keep the meeting on task. You also have to be self-assured enough to hear things you might not like. Perhaps one of your initiatives to improve productivity is actually hampering productivity because of an unforeseen glitch. You may not want to hear it, but the sooner you do, the sooner you can take actions to remedy the problem.
Leading in this way also ensures that all voices at the table are heard. It brings you information from all corners of your organization, giving you a broader picture than you’d have if you only received information that had been filtered on its way to you.
Collins says that, “good-to-great leaders made particularly good use of informal meetings where they’d meet with groups of managers and employees with no script, agenda, or set of action items to discuss.” These meetings were effective because they “became a forum where current realities tended to bubble to the surface.”
Why not give it a try?
Insurance Purchasing 101
Over the last 5 years security, investigation and electronic security agency insurance costs have been in a soft or down market cycle. This soft market differs from past soft markets in that costs insurers are providing to security agency businesses appears to be market capacity driven not claim experience or profit driven. Unless insurers plan on denying or disclaiming claims it may be hard for the current pool insurers to make any kind of underwriting profit at current market pricing levels.
To prepare your business for the next hard market (market when insurance costs go up) we have learned over the last 20+ years that professionally completing an insurance application can and usually does lead to a favorable result when the market for insurance is trending cost upward.
Underwriters want to see fully completed applications, claim reports with summaries, supplemental information relating to quality control, training and pre-employment screening and the background owners have in the security industry. Taking the time to fully complete an application for insurance will help you protect your business and your bottom line by giving your broker or agent the information they need to evaluate your exposures to loss and match up insurance coverage to your exposures. It also tells insurance company underwriters that you are serious about your business and protecting it from lawsuits, employee injuries, auto accidents and employment related grievances.
Leadership: Company and Competition Analysis
During any persuasive executive presentation on security programming or initiatives, you can count on being asked how your idea or proposal compares to others in the industry and how the cost compares to your peers. For decades this has been a problematic because of a total lack of industry common benchmarks and information sharing. There is no area where this lack of common or shared definition is more evident than in determining cost of security. To complicate matters even more there has never been more intense interest on managements part for understanding and comparing these costs. This is due in part to the significant increases in total security budgets (often due to consolidating functions/services into security) in many companies over the last 10 years. To make matters even more complex no two companies are even organized alike. Security departments are organized in a wide variety of manners and their costs accounting methods are even more complex. Many times costs associated with security are decentralized to the business unit, the product line or the country in which the services are provided. Even when they are centralized and all costs are in the Corporate Security Headquarters budget, companies are not organized the same. In some companies physical security hardware costs are in the real estate or facilities budget. Pre-employment screening is often in the human resources budget. Computer and information security might be in the information technologies budget. So how can we get data to compare the cost of security in multiple companies. There is now an opportunity to participate an initiative underway to define and establish benchmarks for the “Total Cost of Security”. It will be the first to account for costs associated with individual programs and services by facility, location, country, business unit, differing cost centers, and other organizational variances. To receive the results of this ground breaking research you must participate. To do so you must contact the Security Executive Council at Contact@secleader.com and request the link to take the Roles and Responsibility Survey. It takes about an hour and results will be sent out when enough surveys are received to validate the research. I hope you take part. You can also visit our website at https://www.securityexecutivecouncil.com
Bob Hayes
Managing Director
Security Executive Council
202-730-9981
404-502-1600
bhayes@secleader.com
Authors
- Adam Stark
- Albert P. Corvigno
- Alex Passantino
- Bob Hayes
- Bob Perry
- Cameron Hamilton
- Carolyn D. Richmond
- Dana Wright
- Gary Levy
- Jay Ethridge and Joe Jezior
- Jim Pirraglia
- John Bauer
- John McHugh
- Jon Levin
- Karen Bucks
- Kathy Phillips
- Katie Meeker
- Lisa Brauner
- Matthew Gilley
- Michael Busch
- Mike Lehner
- Natalie Runyon
- Nick Fishman
- Rich Wilkinson
- Robert Munao
- Stephanie O'Rourk
- Steve Amitay
- Valiant
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