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Great businesses, great staff and great teams don’t just “happen” any more than an 80-storey sky-scraper just “happens” – there is vision, planning and skill in achieving either.
Here’s a little help on the planning side:
1. Build Better Specs
Always start with what you want to end up with! List the outcomes, the results that you want from anyone filling a position in your team.
Be specific; use numbers and dates where applicable. Specify the periods over which performance will be measured. Where ever possible, work out the value of this level of performance to the business so that you can apply some perspective to the salary package you may have to craft to acquire a person capable of delivering those results.
Use the 3:1 Rule as a test of your final cost/benefit assessment: The new team member should generate around three times their grossed up cost to the business, in gross profits. Their grossed up cost will be something like their pre-tax salary, plus 30% (to cover super, work cover, holidays, sick leave, etc).
2. Align Personality, Skill and Character With the Role
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that certain personality types are better suited to certain tasks than others. For example, if we simply divide people into “big-picture” and “detail oriented”, which of those two types would you like doing your bookkeeping or accounting? And which might be better suited to sales, strategy and marketing?
There are a number of tried and tested profiling tools that may help you to identify characteristics that will align with the results that you are looking for from your new team member. Two of those are the DiSC Analysis or Meyers & Briggs.
3. Write Your Advertisement to Your Ideal Candidate
If you write an average ad, you’ll get an average unemployed (our about-to-be-unemployed) person replying to it. Is that what you want?
Given that if you attract the wrong people to your position and make a poor selection, you could be weeks or months of salary and hair-tearing down the track before you terminate them and start again, is it worth spending time (maybe hours) and resources (maybe hundreds of dollars for a skilled copywriter) to end up with an ad powerful enough to pull the perfect candidate for your position, away from their current employment and straight to your door?
Tips for an excellent advertisement for a position:
- Start by writing a rambling letter to the ideal candidate about what you want and what you are offering them – start with money if you must, but then go all the way through “security”, “belonging”, “recognition and rewards”, and into “autonomy, responsibility, and opportunity for personal growth and expression” territory. The right person is going to join the dream that you so persuasively sell them, rather than selling their soul for the money you offer.
- Boil your rambling personal letter down to an elegant letter and put it on a page of your website, and link to it from your ad.
- Boil your elegant letter down into an advert that describes the ideal person in such a way as they would recognise themselves; and describes the job in terms of what they will gain from owning it. Link to the longer version on your (or a host’s website – if they are technology savvy, this will suit their style of communication).
- Rack your brains, take advice – do whatever it takes – to come up with a headline that will call out to your ideal candidate (and which will probably frighten, discourage or put off any less-than-ideal candidates) by being a challenge to growth and adventure.
- Do your research and find out where your ideal candidate is likely to read this (newspaper ads are all but dead, and the web is the thing, but don’t overlook your storefront window, your staff as couriers of the message, any communication your put out of the business, your vehicles, etc).
- Think about leaving the ad running even after you find your ideal candidate. After all, what’s harder to find: An ideal team member, or paying work for them to perform?
4. Sell Your Vision For Your Business
Do you want people who work (just) for money? Or do you want people who want to contribute to something fabulous, that’s bigger than themselves, into which they can put a piece of themselves and of which they can feel proud?
If you’re after the second lot, then you had better be very good at selling a crystal-clear vision of your dream for your business to them – otherwise you’re likely to attract drones!
What is your Vision? How will you share this in a way that will cause the right candidate to go, “Wow!”, and walk out of their current job to join you?
Yes, you can save yourself the brain fag and skip this step, but what type of candidate are you then likely to end up with?
5. Tailor a Quick Assessment Process
Sometimes it’s just smart to sit down with a professional recruiter at this point (and not before this point!) and have them take charge of the pre-selection process for you.
It can be a time-consuming task sifting through a number of candidates, and it is likely that a good professional will be able to grade a field of candidates against a clear selection criteria quicker and more efficiently than you can. Besides, it puts someone between you and the candidates until you are ready for that one-on-one meeting.
If you are one of those “hands-on” people who wants to run the selection process from end to end, it may still be a smart move to consult a recruitment specialist to develop a set of questions specific to your needs, that will sort the candidates into “As” (appear to have everything we want, right now); “Bs” (could qualify with a bit of development work on our part); and “Cs” – not for this position.
To these “standard” questions you’ll then add others to determine any objective or professional qualifications, background, experience, etc, that you require or desire in a candidate, by which time you will then have the basis for a quick, preliminary grading system that should avoid you wasting time on the “Cs”.
6. Discover Their Goals and Aspirations First
Give someone enough rope and they are likely to hang themselves so turn the traditional job interview process around by letting the candidate do the talking.
Use purposeful, open questions (ie, questions that can’t be answered with a single word); ask follow on questions based on their answers to explore some depth to better understand your candidate; occasionally use extending questions (“Tell me a bit more”) or friendly silence to encourage them to go on.
Ask questions to find out what they know about you and your business. If they are worth their salt they will have researched you before their interview (whether on the web, by walk in, or by talking to people who already work for you, know your business, etc).
Set out to discover what makes them tick, and why they would want to work for and with you. Discover what talents, experience, knowledge and ideas they bring to the table, and explore those a little. It is entirely possible that you could start out interviewing a candidate for one job but end up targeting them for another particularly suited to their talents or background.
Then invite them to ask questions of you. Form your opinions based on the quality of those questions, and the background knowledge from which they are asked.
Listen for the assumptions in their speech to gain a feel for how well their values and expectations align with your own, even at this very early point in your relationship.
Bottom line: You’ll learn much more by listening to them talk and having them ask questions about the job, than you ever will by telling them about the position.
7. Assess Their Commitment To Your Business’ Goals
This is an “imprecise measure” at the best of times, but what you are looking for at this stage in the assessment process is an indication as to whether this person is a “committer” or a “renegade”.
Committers are “joiners”; they like other people; they like working with others, collaborating and teaming to build projects larger than they can handle alone. The look for causes to join, visions to buy into, and goals to meet.
Renegades are “users”; they intend to use the business, its resources and the position almost solely for their own ends. Sure, they will “do the work” – they may even be highly productive – but they tend to view their work as the product of their efforts alone (or at least see themselves alone as deserving of credit for any results to which they contribute). The often have a poor opinion of the others in their crew, and seldom step out to lift, grow or assist others – unless there is a clear pay-off involved.
A simple test for this factor is to ask questions that explore about how they feel or felt about their last or previous positions. Committers generally convey a positive account of their experience; renegades tend to give the game away with comments that display arrogance, ego, negativity and lack of respect for others.
8. Clearly Convey Your Core Concepts
If you’re wanting someone to give more than their physical presence and base labour to your business you are going to have to sell them your Vision for the business (the “picture of perfection” towards which you are striving; your Mission (the path you are following to achieve that Vision); your Values (the boundaries of behaviour along that path); your Goals (the milestones on the path; dated measures of performance); and your Code of Conduct (the way we treat each other, our Customers, and the assets of the business).
When it comes to your Core Concepts, don’t make the mistake that many larger corporations make in spending huge resources on having a expert in semantics design great sounding concepts; having an artist render them under glass and hang them in the boardroom and reception area; and then never looking at or talking about them again – except to quote them in their Annual Report.
Your Vision, Mission, Values, Goals and Code of Conduct should be wound into the daily fabric of your business and the lives of those who make it work.
When you go out into the labour market seeking new team members you need to carry these Core Concepts with you both as a beacon (to attract those who resonate to them) and as a touchstone (against which to test each candidate’s personal core concepts for alignment with your own).
It’s going to be a lot easier and less costly to incorporate someone into the team whose core concepts already resonate with your own.
9. Craft A Powerful Investment Process
When you bring any new team member on board, you are faced with an inevitable investment of time and resources so as to enable them to come up to speed and meet your performance requirements as quickly as possible, so why not convey this process – explicitly – as the beginnings of your on-going “Investment in Them”?
Their first month or so on the job will set a tone that is likely to persist so invest the time and thought required to design an excellent process – a system – that provides each new team member with:
- A clear understanding of our “Investing in You” philosophy
- A detailed Job Description and/or Contract that is framed around results and outcomes, rather than activities and tasks, detailing all performance requirements, assessment processes, and any rewards associated with those.
- A clear statement of your termination process.
- An Organisation Chart that clearly depicts the formal lines of communication, support and command and their position, responsibilities and authority within that structure.
- An introduction to and (actual, verbal) discussion about your Vision, Mission, Values, Goals and Code of Conduct – and a written copy to which to refer thereafter.
- A Team Member Guide introducing each member with a self-written thumbnail sketch, to speed the development of relationships and integration into the team.
- Statutory materials – OH&S guidelines, employment mattes, etc.
- Position-related information (eg, for a salesperson, this would include background on key account clients)
- A duplicated sign-off receipt that verifies that all of this material has been received by and explained to your new recruit.
Consider your responsibility for, and the benefits of, creating and managing a social process that quickly folds new recruits into the team and promotes the relationship building essential to high productivity and staff longevity.
10. Design A Performance Assessment & Recognition Process
We’ll often ask staff, “Is your boss happy with your performance?”, only to be told, “She must be; she hasn’t fired me yet!”
Is this level of feedback likely to promote top performance among team members? Or could it be done better?
There are two key points to any assessment and recognition process: The period of assessment should be agreed and honoured (how many bosses do you know who keep putting off periodic performance reviews?); and the assessment criteria must be transparent, mutually-agreed between the parties (at the outset! – no point trying to change the rules mid-game) and as objective as possible.
The best way to achieve transparency is to agree on one or more objective measures of performance; for a sales person, that may be sales revenue or gross profit per period; for administration staff it may be a maximum turn around time for quotations, or the timely lodgement of tax or other regulatory returns. Whatever the measure, it should be directly related to the results required of the position, and progress towards it should be regularly discernable by all parties (that is, the assessed person should not find out the result during the assessment, but should have been progressively aware of their performance throughout the period of assessment).
One important factor in creating an effective review process is the frame of mind in which it is administered! If, in the understanding of the parties, the assessment is to determine “whether they have failed or not”, the process will be cast in a negative light – and will probably be avoided by all parties as well!
If, on the other hand, the assessment process is seen as part of the team member’s personal and professional development (a sort of periodic stock take from which their next course of support and development will be planned) it likely to be viewed in a much more positive light – and to be carried out!
11. Create An Investment Plan With All Staff
If you’re going to set yourself apart from the crowd and establish a truly brilliant business you are going to need one essential ingredient, and that is a truly brilliant team!
Truly brilliant teams don’t happen by accident, and they don’t come cheap! Not that they have to cost a lot of money, but they will require a significant investment of time and planning – mixed with a passion for excellence – if they are to form in the first place, and grow thereafter!
You’ll need to give some thought as to what you will need to invest in each of your team members to bring them to a level competence and commitment that will make them your strongest and most valuable asset. The obvious candidates are “training” and “positive work experience”, but the less obvious candidates can be as, or even more, important: “inclusion”, “security”, “recognition”, “belonging”, “personal and professional growth” and more.
Then you’ll need to develop a process for delivering both the invitation to growth and personal investment, and then the actual experiences, agreements, understandings, and culture that will make that growth a highly likely outcome.
You could always start this process with a briefing on your desire for and interest in their personal and professional growth, followed by an outline of the knowledge and skill training that you will provide, support or require them to complete, but it won’t stop there. In fact, the picture won’t be finished until you have created a culture where people learn and grow and support each other as a matter of course.
How would you do that?
12. Find Out What Makes Them Tick
We’d hope that you had a fair idea of what makes your new (and old) team members tick before you selected them, and this point re-iterates the fact that it’s nearly useless trying to motivate people with your “external goals” – ie, goals or rewards that you provide as opposed to their own internal, private or personal goals.
Much smarter to align the rewards you place on the behaviour you want, to a team member’s achieving their own, personal goals. For example, rather than talking about their hitting a sales or other performance target to qualify for a bonus, you might ask them what they feel they need to be doing to hit the performance goal that is going to put the deposit on their new car/house/boat/toy.
Ask yourself, which one of these approaches is likely to gain the most buy-in from John:
- “Come on John, how can I help you hit your sales goal for the month, and qualify for your bonus?”; or
- “Come on John, how can I help you get that deposit for your new sport scar?”
The second point in this step is to be aware that “people’s motives change over time” and to have in place a process for staying in touch with those changes as they occur in each member of your team. That process could be as simple as a weekly game of pool at the local pub, with plenty of opportunity for relaxed chatter about life and goals outside of work; or it could be a formal and dedicated day during which each team member gets to share their personal and professional gaols with their team.
Whatever your process, just ask yourself whether, by knowing what really matters to each member of your staff, would place you in a better position to help them to achieve their goals, and to grow them personally and professionally.
13. Rate Your Performance as Their Mentor, Coach & Guide
It has been said that “feedback is the breakfast of champions” so does it make sense, if you are really aspiring to have and to lead an excellent team of people, that you seek and welcome feedback on a regular basis?
Give some thought as to how you would measure your own success in your chosen role. I have one rather scary suggestion: Your score will be equal to the average of the performance of each of your team members!
You could also seek feedback through a “mutual performance review” during which you provide each team member with an assessment of their performance, after which they provide you with their assessment of yours.
And so we come to the $64,000 question: What would your business look like, function like, perform like the year after you implemented your own version of these 13 steps? And how big would the bag need to be to carry all those extra profits to the bank?
Peter Rowe is the Managing Director of ProfiTune Business Systems, one of Australia’s foremost Business Improvement Specialists whose clients include both multinational corporations and small private companies across every quarter of the business arena. Peter’s new book ‘Solving the People Puzzle’ is due for release in 2010.
Tags: developing staff, employees development, professional development staff, staff development, staff training and development
