Your best employees are your best recruiters. Why? First, who knows the job and what’s required to be successful better than your best people?
Second, “winners run around with winners!” With high levels of employee engagement, you will increase your odds of attracting those prospective employees who are experiencing success in their own careers but weren’t aware of the wonderful opportunities awaiting them at your company. I always loved to disrupt people’s lives by making them aware of what they were missing by not being at Berry!
To quote Aristotle, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
1 OBSTACLE Poor Selection
As the journey began, we ran into our first obstacle in addressing our first priority, people. We were guilty of poor selection. We had developed two bad habits that impeded our efforts to re-build the division. The first is something I call “the body count.” Under the pressure to get the work done on time, we would forsake all we knew about making quality hires and simply hire “bodies.”
In the yellow pages world, the only thing as important as meeting our advertisers’ and telephone customer’s revenue expectations is getting the directories published and distributed on time. We backed into our sales schedule by determining market penetration, productivity standards, and the number of salespeople required to meet those publication dates. Even though we didn’t have the sophisticated assessment tools available today, we had the ability to hire those who offered the most potential… when we were patient.
Every business has its own deadlines and commitments. You know yours and probably feel that same pressure when facing a crucial deadline to make certain you have someone in place to get everything done. You seek someone with “experience and a proven track record.” As the dates grow closer and that position remains unfilled, the criteria for candidates becomes “experience preferred… but not necessary.” Soon it becomes “just need a warm body.” This is a recipe for eventual disaster. Deadlines have a funny way of warping our vision.
The second problem is what I describe as the “You haven’t worked for me yet” syndrome. Back then, I thought we could change people. I would even sign off on hiring direct descendants of Charles Manson and say it’s going to be okay because they haven’t worked for me yet!
Of the hundreds of case studies, business publications, journals, and articles I’ve been exposed to, none is more appropriate in supporting our first truth than the work done by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman at Gallup and published in their best seller First, Break All the Rules. In their chapter “The Decade of the Brain,” they confront this most important issue of attempting to change people:
How much of you can be changed? If you hate meeting people can you learn to love icebreaking with strangers? If you shy away from confrontation, can you be made to revel in the cut and thrust of debate? If the bright lights make you sweat can you be taught to thrill to the challenge of public speaking? Can you carve new talents?
Many managers and many companies assume that the answer to all of these questions is “Yes.” With the best of intentions, they tell their employees that everyone has the same potential. They encourage employees to be open and dedicated to learning new ways to behave. To help them climb up the company hierarchy, they send their employees to training classes designated to teach all manners of new behaviors—empathy, assertiveness, relationship building, innovations, strategic thinking. From their perspective, one of the most admirable qualities an employee can possess is the willingness to transform themselves through learning and self-discipline. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
The world’s great managers according to Gallup share quite a different approach, which leads to this mantra:
“People don’t change much.
Don’t waste your time trying to put in what was left out.
Try to draw out what was left in.
That is hard enough.”
The research was compiled by Gallup from interviews with eighty thousand managers. It validates what we learned in 1981, both intuitively and out of necessity, and has become the single most important lesson any parent, leader, coach, or friend can ever grasp: I can make you more than you are, I just can’t make you something you’re not!
Poor selection is far too often associated with managers and leaders spending precious time trying to change others and not recognizing that
People don’t change!
More importantly, even if they could, we don’t have the time or skill to change them.
What are the qualities and attributes that our very best people possess? What is the common thread running through all of our talent? A few years ago, I read this line: “It ain’t about who you are or what you are, it’s about what you do with what you’ve got.” I disagreed with that quote then, and still do, because it is about who you are! The “who you are” is another way to say “character.” And it only makes sense that every hiring decision has got to start with character.
Webster’s Dictionary defines character as, “possessing those attributes of ethics, integrity, and morality that distinguish one individual from another.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Although he was speaking primarily to spotlight racial issues, the baseline is the same: character.
When I teach the NCAA-required Life Skills course for freshmen athletes at the University of Dayton, I constantly remind the students to be more concerned with their character than with their reputations. Character is what you really are. Your reputation is what people think you are.
I’m quite often asked the question:
Can I change my character? My answer is—we certainly can improve it because we own it. It is who we are and we influence it every day by all of our actions. It represents everything we think, everything we say, and everything we do!
Every hiring decision must start with character and it’s not negotiable.
What you do with what you’ve got is about “talent.” Talent, according to Buckingham and Coffman defines the “why” and the “how” of a person. They go on to say, “Your own skills and knowledge are relatively easy to identify. You had to acquire them, and therefore they are apart and distinct. They are ‘Not you.’ But your talents? Your talents are simply your recurring patterns of behavior. They are your very essence and they are the “what.” It takes a rare objectivity to be able to stand back from yourself and pick the unique patterns that make you You!”
The next question that had to be answered as we rebuilt our sales force was: What were the attributes, qualities and behaviors of our most talented employees?
The first attribute is competitiveness. It was an absolute requirement in our selection and hiring. I could make a strong case for organizations requiring people with a competitive spirit, in most positions. While being competitive is often associated with athletics and testosterone, I’ve found it in academics, business, and a myriad of other circumstances where there was recognition, a prize, or profit associated with the results.
One of my greatest surprises and proudest moments as a parent came when both of our sons were members of the John Carroll Catholic High School Concert Choir in Birmingham, Alabama. Though both boys were athletes, each would tell you unequivocally that the greatest coach they had in high school was Ken Berg, the choir director. The competition in and around that experience was intense, from tryouts to international competition. Not only did they learn how to make beautiful music, they learned what it was like to compete and win in the most beautiful of circumstances.
The person you hire need not be an athlete or have played competitive