Author Archives: Tom Foster

About Tom Foster

Tom Foster spends most of his time talking with managers and business owners. The conversations are about business lives and personal lives, goals, objectives and measuring performance. In short, transforming groups of people into teams working together. Sometimes we make great strides understanding this management stuff, other times it’s measured in very short inches. But in all of this conversation, there are things that we learn. This blog is that part of the conversation I can share. Often, the names are changed to protect the guilty, but this is real life inside of real companies.

It’s All About Work

2 Replies

Good friends of mine, Stephen and Chris Clement have been working on a new book for the past couple of years. It’s All About Work is now available. Here is why you should buy it.

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.

Who to Promote, Who to Let Go?

Leave a reply

“Yes,” Roger nodded. “Grading my sales team into these six bands of effectiveness helps me see what to do next.”

“How so?” I prompted.

Personal Effectiveness

Personal Effectiveness


“The temptation is to keep all the people in the top half of the banding and terminate the people in the bottom half. But now I have more judgments to make, as a manager.”

“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.”
____
Barnes and Noble picked up Hiring Talent. Matching Amazon’s promotion pricing.

How Does Culture Retain the Team?

2 Replies

Ray was looking at his list. “So, I can count on losing this person. They already gave their notice. And I know they will continue to have contact with the other team members, so I know they will talk with each other.”

“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.”
____
Amazon’s promotion on my new book Hiring Talent continues. Special pricing.

How Do You Match the Offer from a Competitor

Leave a reply

“Can you match the other offer?” I asked.

“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?”

How to Interpret Responses in a Job Interview

Leave a reply

From the Ask Tom mailbag:

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?

____
Amazon is currently running a great promotion on my new book Hiring Talent. Get it now, before they change their mind. No coupon required.

When Can You Start?

Leave a reply

I don’t do a lot of book reviews, but this book caught my eye. First, the details

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.

Key to Evaluating Salespeople

Leave a reply

“How do you tell?” Roger asked. “When we had to make decisions to lay people off in 2009-2010, we thought we were choosing to keep our best people. Maybe, it’s just harder now. But some of the people we kept are not making the grade.”

“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

Personal Effectiveness

Five Biggest Mistakes in Hiring

Leave a reply

I started this series last week, the five biggest mistakes in hiring.

1. The manager underestimates the time span capability required for success in the role. To effectively make the hiring selection, the manager has to identify the level of work related to problem solving and decision making.

2. The manager uses the resume as the central document during the course of the interview. Using the resume allows the candidate to tell brilliant prepared stories that may or may not relate to the critical role requirements. The central document during the interview should be a list of specific written questions directly related to the work in the role.

3. The manager fails to write a complete specific role description organized into Key Result Areas. Most managers shortcut this step by substituting a job posting, using a generic job description or using a job description that was prepared years ago and stuck in a three ring binder. Organizing the role description is one of the most critical steps in the hiring process.

4. The manager fails to prepare a written list of questions specifically related to the role description, organized into Key Result Areas. Most managers think they know enough about the job, to wing their way through the interview, off the top of their head.

5. Without a list of intentional questions based on the role description, the managers asks a series of unproductive questions that fail to capture real data related to critical role requirements. This includes questions about favorite animals, hypothetical questions and future based questions.

At some point of frustration, I created a course and wrote a book to help managers navigate the interview process in building the right team. You can find out more information by following this link – Hiring Talent.

Fourth Biggest Mistake in Hiring

Leave a reply

My conversation with Graham about their hiring protocol was getting serious. “So, you don’t have a role description to guide you, how do you know what to ask about during the interview?” I prodded.

“Well, I spend most of my time going through the resume, but I do have some questions prepared. It’s actually a list of questions I have been using since I worked at my old company,” Graham explained.

“How many questions?”

“Seven,” he replied.

“Let me see the list,” I insisted.

“Oh, I don’t have them written down, just have them in my head.”

“Okay, what are they?”

“Let’s see,” Graham started. “Where do you see yourself in five years? I always ask that question. And I usually make up a problem to see how they would solve it.”

“So, that is two questions, not seven,” I counted.

Graham shifted in his chair. “Well, maybe I don’t have seven questions ready to go at the beginning of the interview, but I am pretty good at making up questions as I go along.”

“Graham, what would be different if you had several written questions, for each of the Key Result Areas in the role description?”

“That would be great, if we could find the role description. HR said they would get me one by the end of the week.”
_______

Take the course, Hiring Talent. It’s online. Buy the book, Hiring Talent.

Third Biggest Mistake in Hiring

Leave a reply

“Let me see the role description?” I asked. Graham shuffled through some papers and finally came up with a page printed off the internet.

“This is what we posted on the job board,” he grinned, proud that he could locate the piece of paper.

“This is a job posting, not the role description. Where is the role description?” I pressed.

“Well, I was waiting to get the role description from HR, but they are kind of backed up. They said something about health insurance renewals, whatever. But they looked in the file and this is what they pulled out,” Graham defended.

“But this is not a role description. This talks more about the company exceeding the expectations of its customers than it does about the work in the role. How do you expect to conduct a proper interview, and gather the data you need to make the hiring decision?”

“I know, I know. That’s why I use the resume to conduct my interview.” Graham nodded his head, feeling justified.

“What would happen if you re-scheduled all your interviews until after you write the role description?”

“What? I can’t do that. I promised to have someone hired by this Friday,” he protested.

“So, by this Friday, you are driven to hire someone, even if it’s not the right person, someone who will ultimately fail to meet the critical role requirements?”

“Yeah, you never know if someone is going to work out until they have been in the job for a few weeks.”

“So, what would it take, to find out enough about the person, related to the work, so that you have high confidence in their capability, on their first day?”