photo by jason lippa
RoundPegg held a roundtable on hiring this morning with some of Boulder’s most forward-thinking CEOs. Needless to say, it’s a topic where everyone has learned a lot from their failures and the conversation was a lively one.
While it was universally acknowledged that how one fits with the company’s culture is directly linked to success, how everyone got to the point of whether a candidate ‘fit’ or not was interesting.
Here are a few of the more intriguing approaches:
- Know what you’re looking for. Focus on those who are successful within the organization and find the commonalities between them all. What are the shared values, communication styles, personality traits etc. Once you know what makes one successful it’s much easier to identify that in others
- Lean on your high performers. Ask those same high performers to interview the candidates. We all naturally gravitate toward those who are ‘like us.’ If the high performers think highly of the candidate then the odds are better that the candidate will work out
- Listen between the lines. You’re asking questions about the person. But you learn more when they talk about others. Do their greatest successes involve anyone other than themselves? How do they reference others who contributed to that success?
- Watch them live. Get the candidate out of the conference room and observe how they handle various non-work situations. Travel with them (a stretch) or go out to a meal. See how they treat the waitresses, gate agents etc. People often let their guard down when doing the mundane. If you’re particularly sneaky you can set up a situation - e.g. ask the waitress to overcharge the table or give too little change. True colors will often come out.
- Role play. Put them through a scenario that your company is facing. Ask a product manager to spec out a new feature and lead a couple folks (e.g. engineers and marketers) to hone the concept and scope the work. With so little time to work on it, look beyond the thought that went into the specifications and pay attention to how they work with others to improve the concept and get buy-in.
- Interesting questions. A couple interesting questions arose. One was to define leadership. How they answer that illustrates the type of individual behind whom they would most likely throw their energy. Another was to identify their favorite literary character and to describe the values that character held. Again, you get a lot of insight into the types of values the candidate admires. Finally, asking about their greatest successes and failures has proved helpful when you listened to the amplitude of their feat/failure, how they described their role, the role of others and what they took away from it.
It was a fantastic hour of discussion that wandered down other paths on culture, managing people and the like. So I’m sure we missed a ton of great ideas. What specifically works for you?
photo by keela84
ChangeThis has posted another excellent set of presentations this month. One that deeply struck a chord is Flow, Flee or Fight.
As always, it’s worth the full read, but for those leading teams and running companies there is a lot to be gleaned by reading between the lines.
- Engagement is fluid and ever-changing. People are constantly evaluating the level of effort they should exert. The outputs will typically match the inputs. When they feel appreciated and when they feel their work is valued and valuable they increase their effort level. This is not saying people are lazy. Just that they work by the Golden Rule.
- People are present, but not there. Most of your workforce shows up every day and does what is expected of them. But most have a lot more to give. Your job is to extract that available effort. To do that you have to remember that effort is like a tap and you’re not in control of when it flows. You can only make sure that everything is in place for the tap to work. One place to start is by assigning work that may be just over the head of your employee and make yourself freely available to support.
- Change and disagreement is good. Often, those who push back are actually engaged. They push because they care (not always, but give the benefit of the doubt). So be cognizant of how you handle disagreement. Create the structure that gives people the ability to push back against the status quo. It’s your job to listen and figure out what is best for the company. Sometimes it’ll be necessary to have people move on, but having the value system in place so that people can voice what isn’t working for them is crucial. As is having the system in place to end the disagreements and get back to work.
Following the golden rule never hurts. If you start to treat people as you’d like to be treated and start listening to what they say, but also for what their actions are saying then you’ll be in a better position to harness effort and channel the ‘negative’ energy into something positive.
We all want to hire people who are going to make a difference. Who will drive our businesses forward.
We want people who will remain engaged long after the honeymoon period.
The circle of engagement is pretty clear. An employee likes her job so she works hard and does well which in turn produces rewards that matter to her so she tries harder still.
But where is the on-ramp? What fuels this virtuous cycle?
photo by robotography
It’s easy to put the onus on the employee by saying you’re paying well, you have free yoga classes and M&Ms. But none of those spin the wheel. Despite what you may think those are only ‘nice to haves’ for most people. People who are intrinsically motivated to do something amazing.
You’ve spent a lot of time and money to bring the new employee on-board. So why not suck up your pride and take that first step? Do everything in your power to ensure the people you hire succeed?
- Give your time liberally. Yes, you’re busy. But every minute you give to properly on-board someone will give you several in return in the long run. The new employee will appreciate it even if you don’t hear about it. You’ll be rewarded with more and more focused effort. Your team scales, you don’t.
- Praise early initiative. It’s tough for someone to come aboard, figure out how everything works and pay immediate dividends. Rather than being ‘constructive’ and honing output, focus on input. Few will be more motivated to put in solid efforts than when making the first impression. Do your part to encourage that same level of effort in the future.
- Listen. Find out what where they loving pouring their efforts. Ask for an honest assessment of their strengths and weaknesses. Their weaknesses will be the areas where they put forth less effort. Minimize those occasions. Similarly, find out what they want to get out of a job, what skills they want to pick up and what motivates them. They may have thought about it, but be persistent.
Engagement is a two-way street. There is give and take on both sides, but we far too often neglect the new employee and trust them to ‘quickly get up to speed.’
Take the lead in engaging your employees and that lead will be followed.
We’re all in the same business.
We may produce different things, but that doesn’t change anything. With off-shoring and 100-years to optimize the process, production is a commodity. Everyone can tap into efficient, quality production (lead-laden toys notwithstanding).
In fact, we’ve been in this business for a half-century and we aren’t getting any better at it.
We are all in the people business, of course.
Your job is to turn brain waves into cash (hat tip). If you thought you’d misplaced your competitive advantage, you’ll find it there.
photo by gilles chiroleu
In 1957 the U.S. hit the inflection point whereby we started thinking more than producing. White-collar workers outnumbered blue-collar workers for the first time. Since then the spread has only increased, but we haven’t changed our mindset about how we work.
We are still trying to get more from less by using the same approaches we used 100-years ago. Basically, work longer then work smarter then finally give up and off-shore everything.
But we’re left with an economy and business scenario that is entirely different. The job today is to optimize people’s thoughts.
Optimizing people is far different than optimizing people operating machines.
A couple starting points to keep in mind to make the transition from acting like a production line manager to a brain wave herder.
- How, not what. Anyone you’ll consider hiring is going to be smart. The difference in a few IQ points at the top end of the spectrum isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference in accomplishing your goals. The difference is how they put those smarts to use, not what they know. Is it in a way that aligns with how your company does business? Does it inspire conversation and even more brain waves?
- People aren’t independent. Our working systems are so intermingled that the lone wolf is indeed an endangered breed. When assembling your team look at it holistically. You don’t just need a marketer who has previously hawked your competitors product. You need a markter who knows how to communicate with the prima donna sales guy and knows how to extract good ideas from the introverted engineer. You need a marketer that raises the game of everyone on the team.
- Redefine ‘management.’ You’re job is to take seemingly disconnected thoughts and focus them in a way that a) makes money and b) doesn’t shut down future thinking. You’re job is actually far harder than you thought. You have to keep energy high, focus it, be able to recognize great ideas and keep the momentum going when conflict arises. You’re less a manager than you are a cowboy / cheerleader / psychologist.
- Rethink your relationship. Stop thinking that people are cogs in the wheel and are easily replaceable. Though it’s easy in this economy and it could be argued that it’s partially true (see above: there isn’t much difference in knowledge and skill levels between smart people), there is no faster way to shut down the brain waves you need to harness than to not appreciate what one brings to the table. You may not agree with what they’re bringing, but if you want the spigot of knowledge to continue to flow you don’t gum up the pipes with your archaic, century-old thinking that people a natural resource to continue to be exploited.
I could go on, but then I’d have nothing left to write about. Please add your own or challenge me on any of these. My thinking is always a work in process and it’s hard to do alone.
It never ceases to amaze that seemingly progressive companies still have, ahem, ‘guidelines’ for how long an individual must be in a particular role prior to being considered for a promotion. Unless you’re running a prison, time should have no bearing on your decision to move someone beyond their existing role. (Though in fairness, it may feel like just that to the people in the organization.)
photo by daniel james
I touched on how ridiculous this practice is by equating to the sports world several months ago, but I wanted to take a deeper look at why this practice is far dumber than it sounds.
- Weeding out your stars. The best people want to be challenged. They want to learn new things and be forced to step up their game in order to succeed. If you’re bright, highly effective at what you do but aren’t challenged and have no prospects of being challenged until you log the requisite service time then you aren’t going to stick around. Good people have options. Bad companies do not.
- Losing your edge. Service time often comes along with a checklist whereby various tasks need to have been completed. All this translates into stocking your company full of passive bureaucrats who accept that ‘that’s the way things are.’ If you’re looking to succeed within your industry you have to constantly be redefining the rules of the game in order to fit your strengths. Success is rarely bred from people who accept the status quo.
- Breeding helplessness. It doesn’t take too many repetitions for one to learn new behavior. If after knocking a couple projects out of the park and wildly succeeding there is no reward then that extra effort will rapidly diminish. Other than personal pride, what’s the point of doing excellent work if it’s not rewarded? Promotions based on service time are an implicit statement to your employees that it doesn’t matter how well they do so long as they do it for a long time. You’ve completely taken an employee’s control over their own destiny out of their hands. That helplessness rarely concocts innovative solutions, creates new ideas or pushes ahead. (See Motor Vehicles, Department of)
- Failing to develop home-grown talent. Why bother coaching your stars if they still have 24-months prior to even being considered for doing more? It provides such a convenient out for managers that they’ll inevitably grab it. Coaching is hard. It isn’t rewarded. And it takes time away from doing the ‘real work.’ In the long run you’ll feel as though you have to keep hiring from outside to fill the gaps in your organization because you didn’t spend the time early on to fill those gaps. You also don’t truly understand what you have in your talent pool because you haven’t pushed it.
Feel free to disagree and tell me how wrong I am, but this is a mindset that I just can’t seem to understand. The more I try, the more frustrated I get. Over to you…
