Category: Beyond Leadership

We’ve had two young men as career coaching clients lately. Although pursuing different types of opportunities, they are both in their early to mid-twenties and are having a hard time finding a job in their respective fields- both of which, by the way, are in demand.   Both have been getting called for interviews, but something seems to fail in the interview every time and they haven’t been offered jobs.

So, we’ve been working with them to help improve their interviewing skills. Both of these guys are technically minded. They are smart, good, hardworking people. But they are introverts. Situations like interviews are not their strong suit. In reviewing the little bit of feedback they have been given by those who have interviewed them, they get comments like “You need to be more animated.” Or “You need to be more excited and passionate.”

I’m all for finding people who are passionate about the field they are pursuing, but I sometimes want to say to employers, come on, you are hiring an engineer, not a sales person.   Do they really need to be Mr. Personality or do they need to be technically competent and, yes, personable enough to get along with others, but couldn’t being introverted actually be something that is desirable for a role like an engineer?

While we need to help people become better at conveying who they are and why they would be a valuable asset to an organization, I think we rely on interviews entirely too much when making hiring decisions. Yes, they are necessary, but I think we establish a certain set of criteria for interviewing that seems to always judge people on their gregariousness or lack thereof and of course a person’s physical appearance instead of what is actually needed for success in a role.

In light of this, we are going to look at some innovative ways and tools to make screening better in order to hire right:

1. Implement a pre-screening assessment that assesses people for organizational fit. You automatically screen out those that would not fit with the organization’s values and culture, because as we wrote about previously organizational fit is more important than job fit. There is more here on how to select the right screening assessment.

2. Implement a mechanism to see if the person can actually perform the job like a skills-based assessment, in-basket exercises, assessment center techniques or a realistic job preview (more on this next week). Many of these tools also involve some type of interaction with organizational stakeholders that gives you an idea of how well they will work with their potential team. A cool company that is combining many of these tools is Shaker Consulting Group and it’s virtual job tryout.

3. Consider if competition based recruiting could be a viable option for your organization or certain types of positions within your organization.

More here on this new trend:

Contest Recruiting

Competition Based Hiring Whitepaper

4. Improve your interviewing tactics.

Some innovative tools for this: Hireology and Hirevue

Some other thoughts on improving your hiring process: Hire Slow

What have you found to be the best hiring practice?

With a growing need to manage project based work coupled with the need to vet an individual’s leadership capabilities, organizations are assigning hi-potentials with informal leadership roles, or project manager roles, before giving them the positional and formal leadership authority over others.

As a chance to prove capabilities, those given project management roles need to understand how to succeed at both the task of getting the project done and the priority to get work done through others. Often these two priorities seem to be conflicting, when in reality they are not. Informal leaders often fail when they see the only goal to be getting the project done, and neglect to realize how the imperative of getting the project done will only be accomplished through the work others. This necessities strong people management, not just task management skills.

If you’ve been given an informal leadership role you should:

1. Know and understand the members of your project team. Meet one-on-one with members and ask:
   1. What motivates them?
   2. What strengths to they have that they bring to the team?
   3. What are their stressors? In other words, what points of resistance or skepticism do they have about this particular project? What do they think should be done to help mitigate these potential issues?
2. Build buy-in by creating a game plan as a group. Bring the group together and based on feedback gathered in one-on-one meetings, create a game plan together that includes timelines for implementation and project meetings, assignments and ownership for each team member.
3. Practice what you preach. Set the tone for the project by following through on your assignments and commitments per the project plan and staying true to a meeting schedule that is set.
4. Realize that providing support for others to get work done is your number one priority.  If a team member needs you, that is your first priority, not the list of tasks on your to-do list. This helps to take the first three steps to the next level.

Most hi-pos know how to get stuff done. That’s why they are hi-pos. But what will set you apart is being able to transition your focus on getting work done to getting work done through others. This is even more of a challenge when you do not have positional authority. But if you take the time to know your team, build buy-in, practice what you preach and provide support for others, you’ll prove that you have what it takes to be able to transition to a formal leadership role, because true leaders don’t need a title to lead.

One of our key questions around this idea is: What characteristics are most important in terms of employment marital bliss? Dating sites have isolated key variables leading to marital satisfaction by matching people correctly, can’t we get better at doing the same thing for employers and employees and save us all a lot of time and headaches?

In all the reading we’ve been doing around this idea, organizational fit seems to matter more than almost anything, but what does this mean? Consider how Jennifer Chatman who is a Professor at the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley, describes this:

“Those who fit well with the [organizational] culture stayed longer, were promoted faster, and demonstrated greater commitment to the firm. Interestingly, these outcomes of person-culture fit mattered more for performance than did the more typical person-job fit we think of which is how well people’s knowledge, skills, and abilities fit the specific job.”

What this means for employers:

• You need an organizational “job description” that defines your organizational culture. We suggest driving this by defining your organizational values (which lead to your competitive advantage).   For example, seven organizational values for defining organizational culture that a prominent research theory suggests are:
  • Innovation
  • Stability
  • Respect for People
  • Outcome Orientation
  • Attention to Detail
  • Team Orientation
  • Aggressiveness
• Assess and select candidates based your organizational job description more so than on individual job descriptions.
• If you do these two things, you’ll get more satisfied and engaged employees who will produce better business results for you.
• Define who you are through your values. There are a lot of good career card sorter activities based on values. The Work Importance Locator is one tool you can use for free.
• Vet potential job opportunities for a fit with your values. For example, if value teamwork and collaboration and the organization recognizes and rewards individual contributions, it may not be a perfect marriage for you. Neither is right or wrong, it is just the way you and the company are “wired” which is hard to change.
• If you do these two things, you’ll be happier in your work life, which will lead to more happiness in all aspects of your life.

Do any of these values contribute to a competitive advantage for your company?

What this means for employees

• Define who you are through your values. There are a lot of good career card sorter activities based on values. The Work Importance Locator is one tool you can use for free.
• Vet potential job opportunities for a fit with your values. For example, if value teamwork and collaboration and the organization recognizes and rewards individual contributions, it may not be a perfect marriage for you. Neither is right or wrong, it is just the way you and the company are “wired” which is hard to change.
• If you do these two things, you’ll be happier in your work life, which will lead to more happiness in all aspects of your life.

Have you found your employment match made in heaven? If so, why is it a perfect match?

Read more about Chatman’s research here: http://amj.aom.org/content/34/3/487.short

We’ve been getting a lot of questions lately related to performance evaluations. Specifically, these questions center on how to structure evaluation forms in a way that supports priorities of the organization and drives individual and, therefore, organizational performance.

Of course, it’s really not about the form at all. It’s about knowing what drives the performance of your organization, translating that to individual metrics, then equipping leaders with the ability to focus on constant performance feedback.

1. Make it values based. Center your evaluation form around the values of your company not individual characteristics like “dependable”, “initiative”, “communication” etc.   If you don’t have company values, facilitate a workshop with your leadership team to define your values (and mission).

Values should translate into what creates your competitive advantage as a company, therefore, they are a way to communicate to employees through their performance evaluation how and if they are demonstrating the values that contribute to sustainable competitive advantage for the organization.

In fact, every talent management process or form (your selection process, onboarding, training, compensation, etc.) should link back to your organizational values.

2. Avoid overlap of dimensions.  Make sure each dimension measures only one thing. Structuring your form around values instead of individual characteristics should help with this.

3. Less is better. Having said #2, in terms of dimensions and in terms of the scale, less is more.  Make it as simple as possible while still ensuring you are measuring everything that could impact job performance which impacts competitive advantage.

4. Use a 3 point scale:

1. Doesn’t meet expectations
2. Meets expectations
3. Exceeds expectations

5. Require ratings be back up with behavioral based examples. This helps to avoid subjectivity. Every rating should be supported with at least one behavior based example. Consider training raters on how to write good behavioral based examples and then get your team together to calibrate each other on what constitutes which rating on the scale. In other words, make sure that if manager A sees employee A behave in one way, and manager B sees employee B behave that same way, employee A and employee B both are rated the same.

6. Make it clear what a score results in. For example, if a person exceeds expectations overall it leads to x% of a raise, or x amount of dollars in the form of a bonus. In reality, you need to think through this recommendation and be prepared to back it up from a budgetary standpoint before even implementing the other recommendations.

Plain and simple! Having large scales leaves room for different raters to interpret things differently and brings more subjectivity into the process.

How well are your performance evaluations working?