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.

Working on the People System

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“You are right,” Kristen relented. “I really am too busy. My priorities are focused on short term fires. I feel like all I do, all day long, gets consumed with management issues and keeping people motivated. I don’t have time to work on basic stuff like writing role descriptions. When I look at doing that, it is so far down my urgency scale, I almost think writing a role description is silly.”

“What would be the payoff?” I asked.

“The payoff? I can’t even think about the payoff. I could write a role description and then I would have a role description, but I would be further behind dealing with all the crap,” she explained.

“Kristen, you are not unlike most managers,” I nodded. “If you could truly focus on getting the right people, most of the crap you deal with would largely go away. Stop working on crap and start working on systems. Your life will only improve when you start working on systems. And the most important system is the people system.”

Make the Offer Without Due Diligence

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“So, let’s call her right now, offer her the position, straight away,” I suggested.

“But, you haven’t even read the profile,” Kristen protested. Even she could see the absurdity of making an offer before proper due diligence.

“I don’t need to read the profile,” I replied, pressing the absurdity.

“But if you don’t read the profile, how can you know if this person will be able to do the job?”

“Excellent question. How can we know if this person will be able to do the job if we don’t have a role description to help us read the profile?”

“Well, we have the job posting.”

“Kristen, I read the job posting. There is more on company benefits than there is on expectations. It appears to me that you are trying to shortcut the work required in this hiring process.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to do the work, I just don’t have the time. I have a lot of other important things I need to be doing,” Kristen insisted. “Writing a role description takes a lot of time, and I am sure HR has one that is pretty close.”

“It’s not that you don’t have the time. You have as much time as you need. It’s just not a high enough priority.”

Before You Look at the Profile

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“I think we have a good candidate, here,” explained Kristen. “Profile looks great. I think it’s exactly what we are looking for. Let me show you.”

“The profile assessment, the one about dominance, influence, sociability and compliance behavior?” I replied.

“Yes, the profile looks great,” she repeated.

“Before I see the profile, can I look at the role description?”

Kristen stopped, a puzzled look on her face. “Yes, the role description. I know we have one, but, it must be in my office. Here, you can look at the profile while I go see if I can find it.”

“Tell you what? Why don’t you go see if you can find it, while I go get a cup of coffee.”

“You don’t want to see the profile? This looks like a really good candidate.” she urged.

“Not really, not yet.”
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Quality in the Talent Pool or a Matter of Focus?

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“Of course, we have a clue,” Ethan was getting defensive. “I know a good candidate, when I see one. I always get a good feeling in the first few minutes of the interview.”

“So, you make your decision about a candidate in the first few minutes of the interview?” I asked.

“Well, no, I don’t make my decision, but I can tell pretty quick.”

“What can you tell pretty quick, if you haven’t written the role description?” I pressed.

Ethan knew he was getting backed into a corner. “The ad we place, on Craig’s List, it’s pretty detailed. It’s really close to the job description. I really do have a good idea what I am looking for during the interview.”

“Okay, let’s say I buy your job posting as a role description, and where the posting is ambiguous, you plan to make that up in the interview. So, let me see your list of prepared questions, that you have going in to the interview?”

Ethan was getting edgy. “Look,” he started, “I don’t even have an interview scheduled, yet. I will make up some questions before I get in the room.”

“Ethan, we started this conversation when you said that it was hard to find good people these days. If you can’t find good people, it’s more about you, as a manager, than the quality of your talent pool. It’s a matter of focus.”

Two Ads Running and 400 Resumes

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“What do you mean, I haven’t focused on it,” Ethan protested. “I spend a lot of time, in between projects, thinking about hiring for this position. I have two ads running right now. Believe it, or not, we’ve had more than 400 responses.”

“Congratulations, on getting responses to your ad,” I replied. “Almost like getting email spam?”

“You got that right!” Ethan chuckled.

“Look, it’s easy to get resumes,” I continued, “but focus on hiring talent takes more than a bunch of resumes. Let me see the role description.”

“We haven’t written that, yet,” Ethan squirmed. “We wrote the ad, and we will write the job description before we actually hire the person. We just want to make sure we have a good fit, before we commit too much in writing.”

“Oh, really?”

“Of course. I mean, you never know who we are going to extend the offer to, and who, in the end, will accept the position. If it’s somebody good, we may want to upgrade the job description.”

“So, you have no clue, who you really need in the role, related to skill set, or time-span capability?”

Candidates Talk the Talk

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From the Ask Tom mailbag –

Question:
I’ve conducted interviews where we’ve asked behavioral questions, like “Please share a specific example in your last position where you led a team in accomplishing a specific task. Share what steps you took and any processes you put in place to be successful. What were any of your challenges?” These questions did help us see how the candidate thinks and leads and whether s/he’s innovative. But in the end, we have had some candidates who are really great at interviewing and talking the talk but when they get in the position they are not effective. So, are there any other questions or exercises we should use in interviews to further test the veracity of the candidate and their experience?

Response:
It’s all about the work. I see three possible problems.

Failure to Identify the Level of Work
The biggest mistake most companies make is underestimating the level of work. I see this over and over, so much so, that I finally wrote a book about it, Hiring Talent, Decoding Levels of Work in the Behavioral Interview. There is a level of problem solving and a level of decision making in every role. Here is my fast list of problem solving levels –

  • Level I – Trial and error
  • Level II – Experience, best practices
  • Level III – Root cause or comparative analysis
  • Level IV – Systems analysis, reinforcing and balancing systems
  • Level V – Internal systems and external systems analysis

Your candidate may have solved a problem in a former role, but what was the level of work required to solve the problem?

Failure to Get Specific
The manager-once-removed and the hiring manager have to spend time to truly think through the work. If the critical role requirement is to be the leader of a group of 13 software engineers, the interviewer has to listen for details, like how many people on the team? Full-time managerial role or limited project length? Match the details in the candidate’s experience with the details in the critical role requirements.

Failure to Practice
Most managers don’t get enough practice. They don’t interview candidates often enough to get good at it, and are seldom trained to conduct effective interviews. The candidates they face have been coached by headhunters, trained through role play, and are intent on beating the manager in a game of cat and mouse. Practice, practice, practice.

The Likelihood of Success

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From the Ask Tom mailbag:

Question:
So, how do you interview for someone with the capability to think into the future?

Response:
Capability is like attitude. I cannot interview for attitude and I cannot interview for capability. I can only interview for behaviors connected to attitude and capability.

First, is the capability to think into the future, a requirement for the role? Most supervisory and managerial roles require this capability, so this is a fair area for exploration.

My bias is to ask ONLY questions about the past. I do not want the candidate to speculate or make stuff up. No hypotheticals or theories. I have enough trouble deciphering real facts from the past.

  • Tell me about a time when (my favorite opening question), you worked on a project that took some time to complete, one that required several steps with a number of moving parts?
  • How long did the project take?
  • What was the purpose of the project? The goal for the project?
  • How many people were involved?
  • Step me through the planning process?
  • Was the plan written or just in your head?
  • How was the plan shared with the project team?
  • What was your role in preparing the plan?
  • As the plan was executed, what factors pushed the plan off course?
  • Tell me how the plan accounted for factors that pushed the plan off course?
  • How did the project team respond to changes in the plan?
  • How were decisions made in response to changes in the plan?
  • How did those changes impact the budget for the plan?
  • How did those changes impact the schedule for the plan?
  • How did those changes impact the overall results of the plan?

The responses to these questions will give the interviewer insight into behaviors connected with capability to think into the future, not just think, but make decisions, solve problems, execute into the future? These responses are fact-based and do not require interpretation, yet provide evidence, which can be verified in a cooperative reference check.

The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. All I have to do, as an interviewer, is to find out how the candidate behaved in the past. There is great likelihood the candidate will behave the same way when they come to work for you.

Don’t Go to Hope Island

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From the Ask Tom mailbag –

Question:
Yesterday, you talked about looking for evidence of potential. I followed the explanation, but I am still looking for some sort of instrument to help measure a candidate’s capability or more importantly, a candidate’s potential for higher capability. I get that I can measure the level of work in a candidate’s current or former role and match (or not match) that to the level of work in our open role. I can assume that if a person was effective in that level of work somewhere else, they are likely to be effective in that level of work with us. But I still want to know if they might have the potential for higher levels of work now, or sometime in the future.

Response:
There is a temptation in this discussion for managers to visit a place called Hope Island. Hope Island is a wonderful resort destination with luxury accommodations at the Assumption Hotel. The five-star Assumption Hotel has a water theme park sporting a replica of Egypt’s Denial River and a water flume ride where participants ride down the steep Pitch of Performance into a pool of reflective water.

As long as we are not going to Hope Island, we can continue this discussion.

Kevin Earnest replied to yesterday’s post to discuss some specific tools that may be useful to the manager and the manager-once-removed. “As we know from Human Capability, when an employee, manager and MoR “calibrate” to a person’s CPC (current potential capability), they are placing a dot on the Talent Pool Maturation Data Sheet and making a hypothesis about the person’s potential development. If you follow the trajectory on the Data Sheet, we can foresee their anticipated long term potential development. CEOs and managers must continue testing the hypothesis with additional tasks or special projects (real talent pool development) to determine if, in fact, the person is maturing as anticipated.”

So, there is an instrument, a chart that can be useful to the manager and manager-once-removed. This chart is documented most thoroughly in a book first published in 1994 called Human Capability, by Elliott Jaques and Kathryn Cason. This chart is a visual representation of how a person’s natural capability matures through time. It shows different trajectories as each person, in their own life, is on their own path.

Talent Pool Maturation Data Sheet

Talent Pool Maturation Data Sheet

But here is the critical part of Kevin’s response. While the chart may be helpful, it must be tested continually with projects and tasks. Stay off of Hope Island. The only measure of performance is performance. Lee Thayer said that.

Greatest Evidence of Potential in a Team Member

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From the Ask Tom mailbag –

Question:
Is there any way to determine the long term potential of someone early in their career? Based on your workshop, I assume the answer is “no,” although I am hoping the answer is “yes.”

Response:
Your assumption is correct, a manager’s pursuit of the crystal ball related to a person’s potential is misguided. But your interest in long term potential is absolutely necessary for every manager-once-removed. While the manager is most often focused on productivity, the manager-once-removed must spend time thinking about the long term health of the entire team, and that includes the potential in individual players.

Stephen Clement taught me to remember, “It’s all about the work.” Focus on the work. If you want to see a team member’s potential, look at their work. Work output related to the task assignment will reveal hard evidence of potential.

Does the team member exhibit any of these characteristics.

  • All work is completed on time and within the quality spec of the task?
  • The team member appears to take minor problems and challenges in stride?
  • The team member recognizes larger problems quickly and reports possible solutions along with the problem?
  • The team member appropriately experiments with task elements and work sequence that produces effective changes in processes?
  • The team member volunteers for tasks beyond their current role?
  • The team member remains appropriately optimistic in the face of minor setbacks of task difficulty, and describes the learning that occurs from a failed task?

The greatest evidence of potential is evidence of potential.

Spoiling Truthful Responses in the Interview

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Hiring Talent has been in pre-release for this past week from CreateSpace, but is now listed in the Amazon catalog. I want to thank all of my pre-release buyers. Here is the new link in Amazon for the softcover edition of Hiring Talent. Look inside.
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From the Ask Tom mailbag –

Question:
Do you believe in team interviews?

Response:
Most companies, these days, create interview teams, to put extra eyes in the process. The participation of interview teams can be very effective or can turn the process into chaos. Participants on the interview team must be chosen with purpose and given specific assignments in the process. Technical specialists on the interview team can bring great value by asking questions about technical skills.

While the interview team is a team, I expect each member to play one at a time. Some companies conduct 2-on-1 or 3-on-1 interviews. More than one interviewer in the room puts artificial pressure on the candidate and may spoil candid (truthful) responses. My preference is to have one interviewer at a time, with one candidate in the room. Occasionally, I will allow an observer, maybe two, to take notes, but only one interviewer.