Category: General

My baby started kindergarten yesterday.   Actually, he’s not the baby, he’s the oldest. But sending the first one off to “real” school, though exciting, causes a momma to reflect on how quickly the first five years of his life have gone.

And I realized that many of those first five years have been captured in the inspiration he has created in the way of blog posts.  So here’s to Andrew and all the lessons he helped inspire before he even launched his formal school learning….

Do you want to go to timeout?

M&Ms or Timeout?

Leadership Lessons from a 4 year old

Flexibility to Reduce Workplace Stressors

Where have all the Good Boys Gone?

What lessons have your kids taught you?

“We have rules.” Was one of the first things a CEO of a highly innovative company that has also won several best place to work awards, said to me when I asked him what the secret sauce was for a best place to work.

Honestly, at first thought, I wanted to say, “Really?”

He went on to site some examples, but it took me a while to digest and understand, in my please-throw-out-the-employee-handbook type mindset, what he meant and why he was right.

And rules don’t have to contradict the need for a certain amount of freedom that is necessary for innovation to take place.

Let’s rely again on the analogy of America. Despite the political rhetoric these days that says we are all going to you know where in a hand-basket, America has a rule book, the Constitution, that governs the land and seems to work pretty well.   (I’m making the assumption as I made in an earlier post that the USA is the most innovative country in the world as measured by producing goods and services that people value as measured by GDP.)

The rules we find in the Constitution are designed to uphold core values/culture.  Because of this imperative the rules are:

1. For the most part, timeless and
2. Non-negotiable
3. Few (7591 words and 27 amendments, or rules, to be exact)
4. Above all, written to preserve freedom and autonomy of all, not just a select few, which pushes power down to all

So what do you do if you want to foster a rulebook for innovation in your organization? Take some cues from the Constitution that are also upheld in other literature on innovation by asking yourself two questions:

1. “Can I directly tie this rule back to one of our company’s core values that creates our competitive advantage?” What my intelligent and wildly successful business owner friend told me about his company’s rule book is there are processes and “rules” that they follow. And they are non-negotiable.  They are needed to the extent that they align with the company values that allow them to create value for the customer.

For example, many manufacturers we work for have a core value of safety.  Makes lots of sense.  Therefore, there are rules that govern working safe.  In this case, dress code, such as wearing steel toed boots and other PPE (personal protective equipment) is a rule and it a non-negotiable one.   Dress code in another industry and in another company may not be needed in your rule book at all.  Remember, is it helping you create value?

2. “Does this rule push authority down, treating people with a sense of freedom over their work?” My friend told me that his company has policies and procedures that encourage people to create.  They do this by giving them the freedom to come up with ideas, on the company’s time, that will help meet customer needs.  There is a “rule” that if you do this, and the idea goes to market, you get a share of the royalties.   Pretty cool.

In the book Work Rules! Laszlo Bock spends a good portion of the book describing Google’s rules to ensure that dictators can’t arise, or as he describes it, in one chapter titled, “Let the Inmates Run the Asylum: Take power away from your managers and trust your people to run things.” Here’s a list of things managers at Google can’t do on their own: hire, fire, rate someone’s performance, determine compensation adjustments, determine who wins an award, promotion decisions, final design of a product and when to launch it, and determining if code is sufficient in quality.  Man that’s a lot, but it mirrors the checks and balances system our founding fathers put in place when they created our nation, hmm…

While America isn’t perfect (just turn on the TV and you can get an earful on that these days), its structure provides some insights into two things companies desire in today’s business climate in order to create competitive advantage:  1) innovation and 2) attractiveness.  While I’ve heard some people say they are moving someplace else given the two presidential candidate options, they and I both know they aren’t being serious.   And they aren’t because they know that no president, even the one elected in the still most powerful land in the world, can single-handedly take a way two things- the core values that govern this nation and their freedom.

What questions do you ask yourself when you want to create a new policy or rule?

“At Google, we front- load our people investment. This means the majority of our time and money spent on people is invested in attracting, assessing and cultivating new hires.”  – Work Rules!

Let’s face it, hiring is where your organization starts. It’s where HR starts its job and quickly proves or disproves its value, and it is where, as I saw through digging through lots and lots of research and writings by those who are winning in business, where you need to be focused on intently if you are going to be able to have an innovative workplace.

But we’ve all made a bad hire and we know it.  Sometimes we feel like we are playing Russian roulette when we hire, despite our best efforts, never knowing if we are picking up an A player or a bench warmer at best.

If you want to innovate in the workplace and you want to win at being a best place to work, you need to start by being the best at whom you let in the door.

Here’s how to do it:

1 DEFINE.

• Clearly define your culture.  I recommend you do this through values.
• Clearly define what makes your A players- A players across the organization and in particular roles.  For example, A players’ characteristics across the organization are probably going to be directly linked to the values you’ve defined.  They may even be competency based.  Characteristics that define A players for particular roles may be more specific to the knowledge, experiences and/or skills they have that lead to success. These could be different from position to position.

2. DESIGN and MEASURE your hiring process against the standard you’ve created in the first step. 

Many often tie this standard to FIT. As Laszlo Bock, Author of Work Rules! says “Superb hiring isn’t just about recruiting the biggest name, top salesperson, or cleverest engineer.  It’s about finding the very best people WHO WILL BE SUCCESSFUL WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF YOUR ORGANIZATION, who will make everyone around them more successful.”  (emphasis added).  Google calls it “Googleyness” and with that, I’m not sure I’d be a fit there.  Would you?

3. Look at the research to understand what selection methods predict work performance and employ them in your hiring process. Check out this gem of 85 years of combined research on the topic here.

In case you need the quick cliff notes version, it found that work sample tests (29%)- which also could be called realistic job previes- are the best predictor of job performance followed by cognitive ability (26%) and structure interviews (26%).  Employing these, except in the case of cognitive ability, only works if you’ve been able to do step 1 by defining what these methods should measure.  However, a combination of these methods, or a multiple hurdles approach, is better than any single method.  So stack them up in your process.

4. GO find the best.

Actively go and find the best talent; don’t post and pray.  This starts with building your social capital.  If you need help doing this, check out these posts:

• 6 People You Need to Build Social Capital With
• Social Capital How-To: 5 Steps to Build the #1 Competency You Should Be Developing
• 3 Reasons Why Social Capital Should Be the #1 Competency You are Developing
• Don’t Network, Develop Your Social Capital

5. TRAIN people on how to interview for Pete’s sake. And its no one’s fault that they don’t know how to do it, this isn’t a born trait. Interviewing is a learned skill that gets better with research grounded guidance and practice. Provide tools, like structured interview formats and the scoring mechanism that goes along with them, but train people on how to use them.  Use case studies, examples, and data to back up your points so that hiring managers want to use the tools you are giving them instead of feeling like it is one more hassle to fool with.

6. Use DATA.  Track your hiring against performance and see what trends arise.  Do you need to change your process? More clearly define your standards?  Train a certain department or group on better hiring practices?  Constantly improve what you are doing by seeing what your outcomes are and how you can let that inform your inputs.   And as you will see below, this data should also include benchmarking for diversity goals through hiring.

What about diversity?

But “whoa, whoa, wait a minute,” you say. This all sounds all well and good, but I thought the title of this post said to hire for fit AND diversity.  You’ve read (and if you read the gem of a meta analysis linked above, you caught on to this) that some of things I am advocating for, like cognitive ability tests often discriminate against anyone that isn’t white and male.  And there’s a lot of information out there about how hiring for fit limits diversity.  Even Harvard Business Review said such, and who argues with them? Ouch.

But I believe where there is a will, there is a way, and you can hire for fit and diversity. And you need to because the combination of the two leads to innovation.  You don’t get it without them both.

Here’s some ideas on how to make sure your intentional about hiring for diversity:

1. Create collaborative hiring teams. Teams that are made up of different people along different traditional diversity lines (age, gender, race, etc.) but also along departments, tenure with the company etc.  No one person should be able to make a hiring decision alone.
2. Just like you need to train people on how to interview, you need to talk and train openly on unconscious bias. What it is, how to spot it, and how to avoid it.  You also need to teach and train on the value of diversity and how the topic can be much deeper than how society plays it.  Some things to look at to help you do this are:

• Microsoft unconscious bias training
• Diversity Inc
• com
• Implicit Association Test (IAT)
• Privilege Walk Activity

These lists may seem overwhelming, but you may be able to check off some of the things you are already doing.  Once you’ve done that, start with one thing at a time and work from there.  It’s worth it.   Innovate or die.

Like this post?  You may also like:

• Your Match Made in Heaven… Organizational Fit Trumps Job Fit
• Tech Hiring Trends Right Now
• Why You Should Hire for Culture Fit, Not School Credentials
• How to Hire for Culture Fit
• Samantha Bee has the solution for Hollywood’s diversity problem: “Just hire people”
• How Tech is Changing the Game for Diversity Hiring