Our people are our most important asset!!

I had seen this poster a hundred times, but for the first time, it struck me as odd. I was working with the management team to find a new Senior Project Manager. The last one didn’t work out so well and by the time they figured it out, they almost lost their biggest customer. I was having difficulty getting them to spend the right amount of time on the job description, defining the management skills necessary for this position. The last guy had the technical skills, but none of the management skills.

As I entered the conference room, I asked the management team if they agreed with the poster in the lobby. Being politically correct, they were quite enthusiastic in their support.

I reminded them of Collins book Good to Great and asked them again, “Are our people our greatest asset?”

This team has been around me for a while, so they know when I ask a question a second time, their first response may need some rethinking. As I looked around the table, I could see the wheels churning. Finally, someone took a stab at it.

“Our people may not be our greatest asset. The right people are our greatest asset. The wrong person may be our biggest liability.”

“Good,” I replied. “Sometimes it takes a bad hire for us to realize how important this up-front work is. So, let’s get to work. What is the capability required for the level of work? What are the skills, knowledge and behaviors necessary for success in this position?”

“The skills required are easy enough to teach, and you have a good training program,” I agreed. “But how will you interview for attitude? Specifically, what attitude will you interview for?”

“Oh, that’s easy. I want someone with a sense of urgency. I am tired of hiring people who feel like they can take all day to produce a single unit when I need 15 units produced. I am tired of people who feel like we push them too hard. We work hard here. I want someone who likes to work hard.”

“I think I understand,” I nodded. “Just exactly what questions will you ask to find that out?”

Jena looked stumped and then smiled. “I have no idea.”

“Well, that’s a start. If you did have an idea, what question would you ask?”

Jena shook her head and chuckled. “I guess, I could ask them if they like to work hard?”

“And how do you think the candidate would respond?”

“Unless they are an idiot, I guess they would answer – yes. And if they were truly an idiot, they would not have made it to the interview. That means every candidate will answer – yes.”

“Then, is that a helpful question?” I probed. “Can you think of a better question? A more specific question? A question about something real? A question about a behavior that you can observe?”

“But, I am trying to hire for attitude. You can’t see attitude,” Jena protested.

“I know you cannot see attitude, but ask yourself this question. How does someone, who likes to work hard, behave? How does someone, with a sense of urgency, behave? Then interview for that behavior.”

“Someone who likes to work hard, shows up early,” Jena started. “And they work at a pace that gets the work done. They are aware of pace. They don’t stop every half hour for a smoke break. They keep working until the job is done. They don’t quit, they don’t leave a project half finished thinking someone will come along behind and complete their work.”

“Now we are getting somewhere. You cannot see attitude, but if you can connect attitude to specific behaviors, you can certainly ask questions about those specific behaviors. So, let’s hear some questions. First establish the project.”

Jena gathered her thoughts. “Tell me about a time when you worked on a project where the deadline was very important. What was the project? What was the purpose of the project? What was your role on the project team? What made the deadline so important? How did your team respond to make sure you met the deadline? Step me through the pace of the project? How did you know you were ahead of schedule or behind schedule? When you were behind schedule, what did you do? When you were ahead of schedule, what did you do? As you got to the end of the project, what planning did you do to button up the last stages of the project? Step me through that plan? How did you know you had completed all the final details on the project? How was the project reviewed, by your manager, or the client? Step me through the review process?”

Jena stopped. “Okay, I like those questions,” she said.
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“So, you want to keep him guessing? You see, surprise works both ways. As his manager, you are surprised when he under-performs, fails to meet a deadline or turns in work with mistakes. What happens to your trust, when you, as a manager, are Surprised?”

“The trust level goes down,” Rachel replied. “It’s at the point now, where there is almost no trust at all.”

“So, as the manager, you are surprised when your team member fails to meet a deadline, and your team member is going to be surprised when you have an accountability conversation with him?”

Rachel nodded, silently, her eyes darting back in her brain. Finally, she spoke. “And we don’t trust each other. So, how do I prevent surprises when I go into this accountability conversation?”

“Pretty simple, really. No surprises, no ambushes. When you schedule the conversation, tell him the subject of the conversation will be about his current performance on the Phoenix project and the improvements we need going forward.”

The blood was draining from Rachel’s face. The truth does that, sometimes.

In 2001, I was introduced to the research of Elliott Jaques, and those of you who know me, describe this research as a near obsession for me. I have collected most of Elliott’s early manuscripts, which, over the decades transformed into more polished writings. One book, in particular, caught my attention, Executive Leadership. It was written almost as a manager’s handbook by Elliott Jaques and Stephen Clement. Elliott and Stephen met during a project with the US Army, under the direction of General Max Thurman. Stephen was assigned to the project from the military side to assist in the compilation and interpretation of data collected during the research period.

Following the US Army project, Elliott was summoned by Sir Roderick Carnegie to travel to Australia to help the CRA Mining Company (now known as Rio Tinto) in its organizational struggles. Because CRA would have access to some of the findings from the US Army project, Max Thurman assigned Stephen Clement to accompany Elliott on his assignment down under.

Knowing that he and Elliott would be spending several months together, parsing data over dinner, Stephen invited his son, Chris Clement to join in the excursion. It was out of these projects, that Executive Leadership was written.

Fast forward a few decades. Elliott passed away in 2003. Stephen Clement is now in private consulting. You can see his client list by reading the testimonials on the cover of their new book, Office Depot, Textron, Con Agra Foods, Ford Motor Company, Pepsi. I can imagine rekindling the conversations between Stephen and Chris revisiting the principles established in Elliott’s research and how they have been applied in both large and small organizations.

While some may think that these principles are only for the large organization, I think they are even more important for the small organization. Standing outside the shadow of this research, Chris Clement has run several small businesses and is able to demonstrate how they apply to the manager in the trenches. Large organizations, when faced with a problem, can throw budget and people at the challenge. Small organizations typically have only one chance to make the right move.

My book Hiring Talent focuses specifically on identifying levels of work in the hiring process. It’s All About Work provides more of the backstory and how levels of work operate in the overall structure of the organization. Here is the link, buy it now – It’s All About Work.

“How so?” I prompted.

Personal Effectiveness

“There’s more?” I pressed.

“Yes. I have one salesperson, in the top of the top half, that needs leadership training. In another year, I want to move that salesperson into a more complicated product line, with a longer sales cycle, working with a special sales team.”

“And?”

“And,” Roger stopped. “And I need to terminate five out of the seventeen people I have on my team.”

“How did you reach that conclusion?” I asked.

“Again, it wasn’t difficult. I have been making excuses for them, sent them to training, tried to motivate them, offered a bonus. Funny, paying people more money doesn’t make them more competent. Once I did the analysis, it became very clear. I made some very poor hiring decisions.”
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“Yes, they will talk. And they will talk about money. And money will appear to be the only reason to work at one company versus another. In what way can you, as a manager, put this in perspective for your team. In what way can you effectively communicate, effectively remind people about the other reasons people work, the other reasons people work here?”

Ray was shaking his head, then nodding his head. “So, it turns out that our team culture is really important after all.”

“Yes, when we sit and talk about job satisfaction, matching people’s talents with job requirements, matching people’s capability with the challenge level in the position, creating a trusting work environment, you think I am talking about being warm and fuzzy. The reason that stuff is important, the reason you have to pay attention, is to win this war against competitors. And you can’t win it with money.

“And if all your competitor has to offer is money, then you will make it very expensive for them. And in the end, their cost structure will be out of whack, and you will still win your customers. Culture eats the competition for breakfast.”
____
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“Not a chance. Most of the people on my team, we were able to get during the recession within our pay structure. But now our competitor has come back strong, they have a new owner willing to pay much higher wages,” Ray replied.

“Then you will lose them,” I nodded.

Ray was quiet. “There’s nothing I can do?”

“No, with that pay differential, you are going to lose them.”

“But, I could lose my whole team,” Ray protested. “There must be something I can do.”

“Accept the fact that you could lose your whole team.”

Ray sat back, his eyes slowly went to the ceiling, staring at a corner. “Okay, so what do I do?”

“First, look at your roster, this list of people on your team. Would this other company really come in here and hire every one of them with an offer to double their compensation? For real?”

“Well, no, there is only one person, who worked for them before,” Ray was ticking through the list. “And they are truly an A performer. They probably deserve what they were making at the other company. We just couldn’t match it here.”

“So, let’s say your team does become a target, the offers are likely to be competitive, let’s say 3 percent better. What can you do to retain your team?”

Question:
Here we are again. I thought this was the best candidate, but, now only three weeks into the job, I think I made a mistake. Turns out, I misinterpreted things that were discussed in the interview.

Response:
Why do interviewers constantly misinterpret candidate responses? Simple reason. Interviewers misinterpret because they ask questions that require interpretation. Any question that requires interpretation is a poor question. Worse yet, now the interviewer has to do something with that interpretation.

“Tell me, how important was planning in your last company?”

Terrible question. Any response to this question requires the interviewer to make an interpretation, an assumption or a leap of faith. Do we depend on the person to be telling the truth, or do we take it with a grain of salt? None of this is helpful.

Here is a better set of questions.

• Tell me about a time when it was important for you to create a plan for a project you were working on?
• What was the project?
• What was the purpose of the project?
• How long was the project?
• What was your role on the project team?
• Step me through the planning process on that project?

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When Can You Start?
by Paul Freiberger
Career Upshift Productions, 2013.

Most often, I sit on the employer side of the table, talking with hiring managers and HR specialists about the hiring process. When Can You Start? is written for the job seeker, so it was interesting to see things from the other side.

Most of the book is predictable advice -

• Show up on time for the interview
• Practice answering questions to common interview questions
• Never throw the first number in salary negotiations

But there were some insights I had never considered. “The fact that interviews have not been shown to have much predictive power in relation to subsequent job performance has not made the interview less important or less popular among employers.” I had to close my eyes and do some soul-searching on that one. Freiberger cites a 1994 paper published in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

Does throwing darts at a resume board yield better candidates than a job interview process? Now, that is an interesting question.

My first instinct is to discount the observation, but admittedly, after watching the interview process in a few hundred companies, I am thinking about some dartboard practice.

Freiberger’s book is to prepare the unwitting candidate to endure an interview process that is largely broken, in most cases, dysfunctional. He admits the interview is full of traps and in some cases advises the “smart candidate to play the game by answering the question without actually answering the question.”

Hiring managers don’t interview candidates often enough to get good at it, are seldom trained to conduct effective interviews and rely on faulty assumptions throughout the entire process. Most managers are unprepared. They ask the wrong questions and allow stereotypes to get in the way. They end up making a decision within the first three minutes of the interview, based on misinterpretations and incomplete data.

So, When Can You Start? is a decent primer for both the first time job seeker and the veteran job seeker who forgot what it was like sitting across the interview table.

“How do you explain their underperformance?” I pressed.

“Bottom line, I think they were successful, before, because things were easy. We made sales because people called us. No one had to knock on doors, ask for appointments, do needs analysis. My salespeople are clamoring for more leads, but they squander the leads we give them.”

“So, when you look at your team, how do you rate their effectiveness?”

“You mean, on a scale from 1-10, or A-B-C?”

“Think about it this way. Given what you expect in their role, are they working as effectively as someone in the top half of the role or the bottom half of the role?”

“Well, each person is different,” Roger replied.

“Good. So, you can make that judgment for each of your salespeople?”

“Yes, absolutely. When you put it like that, it’s easy to see.”

“And then, in that half, are they as effective as someone in the top, middle or bottom of that half?”

“Again,” Roger was thinking. “I could do that for each salesperson.”

“So, you could make a judgment, as a manager, for the top half or bottom half, and then in that half, the top, middle or bottom. That creates six bands of effectiveness related to your salespeople.”

Personal Effectiveness