Archive for March, 2011

Stimulate Your Thinking – Building A Great Team

Monday, March 21st, 2011

By: Mark Thompson and Brian Tracy

Ask any experienced executive or business owner about their biggest challenges and one item is always near the top of the list: selecting the right people. As a manager, you always have two choices. You can either do it yourself personally, or you can get someone else to do it. Your ability to choose the “someone else” is the true measure of your competence as a manager in the first place.

Peter Drucker said, “Fast people decisions are usually wrong people decisions.” Perhaps the smartest thing you can do is to hire slowly and carefully in the first place. This dramatically increases your likelihood of making good choices and decreases your likelihood of making expensive mistakes. Hire as much for attitude, personality, and character as for job skills.

Your job as the hiring manager is to find people who will be effective in the specific context of the job they will be doing. If you do not believe the person will be able to do that, don’t hire the person in the first place.

The Art of Selection
The best executive recruiters engage in “behavioral interviewing.” The first thing they look at in the hiring process is how people have behaved in their prior jobs. The best predictor of future behavior is past performance.

Don’t ask people questions with “yes” or “no” answers. Ask them “how” and “why” questions. Invite them to describe a time when they had to handle a particularly difficult challenge. How did they work with difficult people? How did they solve problems and get results?

“I never hire someone who hasn’t made a very big and memorable mistake. I want to hear what happened, what it meant to them, who it hurt, and what they did about it,” said legendary banker Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase. “If they’re a high performer, they’ve swung for the fences; and when you do that, you’re going to miss plenty of times. The key is to know how people behaved in the past. That will tell you how they’ll do in the future.”

The Law of Three: Test Drive Your Candidates
As Harvey Mackay said, “Hire slow, fire fast.” Take your time in hiring. One of the best ways to do this is to use the “law of three.”

Always interview at least three people for a position. Even if you like the first person and feel that individual is suitable, discipline yourself to interview at least two others. Many large companies will not hire a person until they have interviewed ten or fifteen candidates for the spot. The more people you interview, the better sense you will have for the talent that is available. The more people you interview, the greater the selection of choices you will have, and the more likely it is that you will make the right choice.

Interview the candidate you like in three different places. It is amazing how the personality of a person can change when you move the interview setting from your office to a coffee shop across the street. One of the reasons you want to interview people three different times in three different places is that candidates will usually be at their very best in the first interview. After that, if they were pretending, the veneer will quickly come off in subsequent meetings.

There is another important reason to change venues for each meeting. That’s exactly what many employees need to be able to do to be successful in their jobs: They will have to work with many different types of people in many different locations.

Have the candidate interviewed by at least three different people. A practical method is to invite the candidate to go around the office and meet the different staff members. Afterward, all of the staff members get together and vote. If even one person disagrees with hiring the candidate, the person is not hired and the file is closed. Brian explains:

When I was a young business owner and manager, I felt that I was smart enough to make all my hiring decisions by myself. I ended up spending half my time compensating for having hired the wrong people in the first place. As soon as I began involving my staff in hiring decisions, the quality of the decisions went up to about 90%. And there was an additional bonus. When you have your staff interview a prospective team member, and they all agree that this person would make a good choice, they all lock arms and go to work to help this person become a valuable and productive member of the staff. By being involved in the hiring process, your staff has a vested interest in this person becoming successful.

Excerpted, with permission of the publisher, from Now…Build a Great Business! 7 Ways to Maximize Your Profits in Any Market by Mark Thompson and Brian Tracy. Copyright 2011, Mark Thompson and Brian Tracy. Published by AMACOM. For more information: www.amacombooks.org

About the Author(s)

Mark Thompson and Brian Tracy are coauthors of Now…Build a Great Business. Mark Thompson is coauthor of the best-seller Success Built to Last and is a serial entrepreneur who sold his last company for $100 million and today coaches executives on how to lead growth companies. Brian Tracy is one of America’s leading authorities on the development of human potential and personal effectiveness.

 

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Stimulate Your Thinking – Are You Getting in the Way of Your Message?

Monday, March 14th, 2011

By: Jeff Schmitt

My peers had gathered, pitchforks in hand and conspiracies on their minds. Six months into the year, we received a two-sentence e-mail from our director. In it, he announced we wouldn’t receive a sales contract this year.

This change was alarming to everyone. For years, we’d signed a contract, specifying our revenue targets, bonus tiers, and terms of payment. Already reeling from a disappointing sales year, our team had many reasons for concern. Our ‘Worrier’ wondered if layoffs were imminent. The ‘Hothead’ predicted management was out to stiff us again. While our ‘Veteran’ warned us not to read anything into the announcement, she quickly tapped her network to gather intelligence.

The director certainly delivered the wrong message. On the surface, our team was asking the same questions: will we get paid or keep our jobs? Beyond that, we interpreted the news differently based on our perceptions of practices and management. Worse, the message – cropped, one-way and impersonal – failed to address key details, leaving the director’s intentions open to interpretation.

In the end, we’d jumped to conclusions. After being stampeded with questions, the director clarified the previous contract terms would also apply this year. However, this blip illustrates a larger theme. Too often, managers take communication with their reports for granted. They devote their energies upwards, catering to their superiors, focusing on big picture efforts and communicating top-down. They grow distant from their front line staff and day-to-day operations. In the process, they fail to take their team’s pulse and solicit feedback.

It’s a story as old as business. Managers intuitively know they can’t trust what gets back to them. And employees justifiably worry any questions or criticism will place their jobs in peril. You could say managers and employees are more like enemies. Each side politely smiles and engages in small talk, all while warily eying the other, neither saying what they’re truly thinking.

In this environment, words and gestures take on greater meaning. Without understanding the history, aspirations, and institutional barriers weighing on their employees, managers risk being misinterpreted. Even more, managers must understand how they-as both company ambassadors and flawed individuals-are perceived. Otherwise, an innocuous act can easily distract or enflame.

For example, managers decide as necessary to quickly marshall resources against a competitive threat. However, their employees may fault them for again failing to solicit their opinions or weigh alternatives and consequences. Here, management may consider themselves decisive, but their reports may view them as cloistered.

Employees bring their personal experience, including baggage and bias, with them to work. No surprise there. So it’s equally understandable that messages-particularly context and delivery-can quickly tear open old wounds. So how do you reduce the potential for your message being distorted or symbolizing everything wrong with your operation? Consider these lessons:

Communicate Face-to-Face: As children, we’d arrange ourselves in a circle and whisper a message from person-to-person, and we’d giggle when the words and meaning would change when they reached the last person. It’s no different as adults. Announcements like major changes require two-way communication. Words and intentions can easily be misconstrued before they’re spread, particularly without tone and body language to reinforce them. Fact is, how you deliver the message is a message in itself. Moreover, physical distance and verbal one-sidedness can potentially make your message ominous or insulting.

Know Your Team: Sure, you have to be tough sometimes, and you can’t always care what people think to get work done. However, there’s a time and place for that. When formulating a message, anticipate how your team will react and what questions they’ll have. Know what issues are important to the collective group…and the key personalities who can make or break you. Address both early, so they don’t assume the worst. Most important, candidly look at the assumptions you hold. For example, do you view your people as partners-or simply a means to an end? If it’s the latter, it’s probably seeping into your message-and your employees have already picked up on it.

Get Issues into the Open: Unresolved issues often lead managers and employees to perceive situations differently. Managers may be oblivious to issues plaguing their department-or be a root cause behind them. When issues aren’t addressed-or dubious practices are treated sacrosanct-you create an environment where any message is tainted by the messenger. Clear the air. Accept the feedback-even when you’re tempted to justify (let alone retaliate). Act on it. Someday, you’ll need your employees’ buy-in when the stakes are higher. Create an atmosphere where the message willl be is understood for what it is, not interpreted according to what could be.

About the Author(s)

Jeff Schmitt is an online columnist for Bloomberg BusinessWeek (www.businessweek.com). He has spent 17 years in sales, marketing, project management, training, legal compliance, and recruiting. You can reach him via e-mail (jschmittdbq@mchsi.com) or follow him on Twitter (jefflschmitt).

 

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Food For Thought: Levels of Performance

Monday, March 7th, 2011

Food for Thought is our way of sharing interesting concepts on corporate leadership and management with others who might find it useful.  The thoughts offered are intended to be controversial and thought provoking.  They always follow our motto of helping develop logical leadership.

 

Performance management seems to focus predominantly on non-performers. We are not suggesting that you need to manage the performance of the high performers. But, how about those who are good performers but not as good as you had once thought? We harbor this intrinsic assumption of Aristotle’s Law of the Excluded Middle: something is either right or wrong; good or bad; an employee is either a good performer or a bad performer. The fact is that there is a large middle – between somebody who is a good performer, i.e., somebody you wish to have on your team, and somebody who is a bad performer, i.e., somebody you would rather let go.

 

To explain this concept, we offer a new approach to assessing employees’ levels of performance. Per this approach, an employee is said to be performing at a “Selectable” level of performance if their level of performance is such that, should their position become vacant and that employee be available in the market, knowing all you know about that employee, you would voluntarily select that individual to fill that position. An employee is said to be performing at an “Incumbent” level of performance if their level of performance is such that should their position become vacant and that employee be available in the market, knowing all you know about that employee, you would NOT select that employee for that position. But, given that that employee currently occupies that position, and there is a cost associated with getting rid of that employee, and additional costs associated with hiring a new employee, training that new employee, etc., and taking into account the probability that the newly hired employee is going to be any better than your current employee, you conclude that it is in not in your economic interest in letting go of your current employee. In other words, the current employee maintains their position only because they are the incumbent. Finally, an employee is said to be performing at an “Unacceptable” level of performance if their level of performance is such that it is in your economic interest to expend the energy, time and cost to get rid of that person and find somebody else.

 

Most performance management systems focus on employees at or near the Unacceptable level of performance. Our claim is that you should begin the process the moment they leave the Selectable level and enter the Incumbent level. To illustrate this, consider a newly hired employee. By definition, your estimate of their anticipated level of performance is at a Selectable level. If, at some future date – many months down the road, maybe – they should end up at an Unacceptable level of performance, they must have traversed from a Selectable level through the Incumbent level into the Unacceptable level. Then why wait until they reach the Unacceptable level? Why not catch them as they enter from the Selectable level to the Incumbent level?

 

If you believe this argument, you should be willing to have that candid conversation with an employee, who just entered the incumbent level of performance – whose departure in not in your economic interest – and let that employee know that, should you reconstitute your team, you would not voluntarily hire that person. We offered exactly such a tool, called the Parking Lot Exercise in our July 2010 Food for Thought. Are you willing to have that conversation?

 

Most managers avoid that conversation in the fear that the subject would, as a result of that conversation, begin to look elsewhere and possibly leave. “After all,” the manager argues, “it is not in my economic interest to have that employee leave!” But, as a result, they tolerate an employee that they would not voluntarily hire into that position. By having that conversation the manager accomplishes one of two outcomes: either the employee internalizes the gravity of the situation and makes amends, or the manager shortens the time constant of the employee moving from the Incumbent phase to the Unacceptable phase.

 

 

Balaji Krishnamurthy

LogiStyle, LLC

P.O. Box 91182

Portland, OR 97291

(503)789-1338

balaji@logistyle.com

www.logistyle.com

 

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Vistage – Issue Processing

Monday, March 7th, 2011

In any business where can you find a group of executives that question your answers?  Challenge is good and thoughtful challenge is better.

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Stimulate Your Thinking: What relationships contribute to an individual’s career success?

Monday, March 7th, 2011
“When your family is behind you 100 percent, you don’t have to worry…”
– Frank Robinson, Baseball Hall  of Famer

What relationships are key to an individual’s career success, and how do they contribute to it? A study in the current issue of The Academy of Management Journal probes those questions in an ingenious and unusual way — by analyzing the speeches of baseball stars when they are inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. In the process, the researchers make some surprising findings.
For example, in a group that achieved extraordinary career success in a field demanding the highest physical skills, Hall of Famers’ words of appreciation were mostly for individuals who had provided psychological and social support as distinguished from those who gave practical career assistance. Thus, almost two thirds of the thanks bestowed by inductees (about 63%) were for things like emotional support or friendship or inspiration, while only slightly more than one third (about 37%) were for coaching or other important kinds of utilitarian help.
Comments Richard D. Cotton of Appalachian State University, who carried out the research with Yan Shen of Boston University and Reut Livne-Tarandach of Boston College, “Although we thought that psychosocial support would be an important part of these success stories, we wouldn’t have guessed it to be as predominant as it turned out to be. Interestingly, too, most of it comes from outside the organization – from family or friends or individuals who had a powerful influence from afar as role models or sources of inspiration.”
Equally surprising, the professor says, was the marked difference between the amount of thanks bestowed by Hall of Famers who were elected in the very first year they became eligible (described by Major Leaguers as the “ultimate honor”) and by those chosen at a later time. First-ballot inductees acknowledged others’   support about twice as often as later inductees did, giving thanks for emotional support an average of 8.11 times, compared to 3.09 times for later inductees, and citing friendship 4.85 times compared to 1.6 for later inductees. On average, the first-ballot inductees identified support networks of 22.44 people, almost twice the size of the 11.71 average among later inductees.
Is this sharp difference attributable to some extraordinary attractiveness or magnetism of the sport’s top stars? Prof. Cotton demurs. ”While that may be true to a certain extent, it is not likely to be true of players’ families — and first-ballot inductees thanked their families about twice as often as later inductees did. In general, the richer support networks of the first-ballot inductees probably reflect an ability to get the most from potential support-givers and developers of all stripes, whether family members or coaches or others.”
Ironically, the difference between the two groups was more pronounced in the size of their support networks than in some important career statistics. Both groups had about the same career batting averages, slugging percentages, games played, and fielding percentages. Where they parted sharply was in the incidence of single-season honors: 19 of 27 first-ballot inductees were chosen most valuable player at least once, compared to 8 of 35 later inductees, and 23 of 27 won a major batting title at least once compared to 18 of 35 later inductees. Comments Cotton: “Our findings suggest that career success is strongly related to the depth and variety of support networks but also that those networks likely make more difference in short-term achievements than in long-term baseline statistics.”
The study’s findings are based on all available speeches, 62 in total, made by former Major League position players inducted into the Hall of Fame between 1956 and 2005. Among the many speeches quoted were those of Joe Morgan, Reggie Jackson, Stan Musial, Carl Yastrzemski, Dave Winfield, Hank Greenberg, Ernie Banks, Wade Boggs, George Kell, Robin Yount, Frank Robinson, Paul Molitor, and Mike Schmidt. Pitchers were excluded because, in the words of the study, “a pitcher’s performance criteria are fundamentally different from those of position players.” Analysis of speech content identified all individuals whom the inductees cited for contributing to their career success, with contributions categorized either as psychosocial support or career support and further divisions being made in each of those broad categories.
By far the largest type of contribution cited by inductees was emotional support, which accounted for 323 citations, about 22% of the total of 1,464 for the entire sample. Families accounted for about two thirds of that emotional support, suggesting, Cotton says, that “extraordinary career achievement depends largely on the support you get from your family. Choose your spouse wisely.”
The second largest contribution was friendship, accounting for 187 citations, most often of Major League teammates. Next came role modeling, cited 163 times, with about half the role models being star ballplayers from an earlier era and most of the rest being contemporaries of the inductees. The fourth largest contribution, cited 156 times, was coaching, mostly by Major League managers and coaches.
The research responds to a growing sense among management scholars that new approaches to understanding career success are required in an era of what management scholars call “boundaryless” careers, a time when, in the study’s words, ”career mobility is often no longer bounded within organizations or occupations and where individuals are challenged to continuously learn and gain access to information and resources from multiple sources within and outside their employing organization.”  Major League baseball, in which pressures for performance and creativity coexist with frequently shifting commitments between employers and employees, serves as a likely model in the context of today’s careers.
Cotton sees lessons in the study for both individuals and employers. ”Individuals,” he says, “benefit when they view their career success as an outcome of life in all its breadth, something to which family and friends and all manner of role models can contribute. Employers, for their part, benefit from evaluating workers not simply on the basis of performance but on their developmental networks — whom they relate to in the company and beyond and whom they might benefit from relating to. Performance appraisals, in other words, should focus not just on the what but on the who.”
The new study, entitled “On Becoming Extraordinary: The Content and Structure of the Developmental Networks of Major League Baseball Hall of Famers,” is in the February/March issue of the The Academy of Management Journal. This peer-reviewed publication is published every other month by the Academy, which, with more than 18,000 members in 103 countries, is the largest organization in the world devoted to management research and teaching. The Academy’s other publications are the The Academy of Management Review, The Academy of Management Perspectives and Academy of Management Learning and Education

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