Grow Your Business

Sitting in my exit row seat in a plane next in line to take off I hear a phone ring behind me. The man in the center seat didn’t turn off his phone as instructed and proceeds to carry on his phone conversation. The lady beside me says to the flight attendant sitting in the jump seat right in front of us, “The guy behind me is talking on the phone!”

The flight attendant shrugs his shoulders, shakes his head, and throws up his hands and says, “Nuthin’ I can do.” As we turn onto the runway he adds, “It usually never affects the plane anyhow.” USUALLY???

Have you ever noticed bad employees stay with you for a long time (because they have nowhere else to go, which is an article in itself as to why you allow them to say!) while your best employees are being poached and given opportunities by your competitors even in these challenging economic times?

Like the best companies in every industry, your organization should be on a constant search for better talent to strengthen your team. The talent wars will determine the success of any organization competing in this new economy. Before trying to attract and hire top talent you need to ask yourself three critical questions that will determine the quality of the talent you can attract and more importantly, get to stay. Are you really ready for top talent?

Question #1: Why do you want top talent?

When I ask this question of audiences I get responses such as, “They will make my team better. They will save me money. They will produce more. They will help my bottom line.” Every one of those answers is true from a manager’s standpoint, but not one of them will get that talent to stay with you. The correct answer to that critical question – Because I want that employee to have a life-changing work experience works for us.

What does a life-changing work experience look like from a top talent’s point of view? As one human resources director told me of an actual experience she witnessed; when the employee is leaving because her husband was transferred and she is crying in her exit interview saying things like, “I will never find another place to work as good as this one.”

A life-changing work experience is about how connected the employee is to the work she does, the people she works with and the opportunity to exercise her talents. She wasn’t crying over a lost paycheck, she was crying over a lost work-experience. This is why you want to hire top talent so you can provide them with that type of connection to what they will get paid to perform. If you can’t provide that experience, your top talent will not stay and frankly you have some things that need to be done to create that work environment.

Question #2: Are you hiring talent or filling jobs?

Filling jobs means you are interviewing when you have a job opening. Hiring talent is bringing on board a person who has talents you highly value and finding a place for them to fit your organization. When you are filling jobs you have a box you need to put someone in. It’s restrictive and based on a job description that has more to do with the mechanical aspects of the jobs rather than the fit of the person to the workforce or the culture of the organization. A job reports directly to a boss, has specific duties to accomplish and after a short period of time the owner of that box refuses to perform duties outside of the job box created for them to fit in.

Talent is more free-flowing in top talent-attracting organizations. When they hire talent they hire an individual to perform that talent anywhere in the organization that can benefit from those skills. Find someone who has a knack for solving complex problems with simple solutions? Why limit them to a box of one job title? Let them roam the organization as a solution-provider for anyone that has a need for that skill. The company is better off, the employee is better off doing that thing he is best skilled for, and everyone benefits!

Question#3: Are you willing to change the hiring and retention process to keep your top talent?

Top talent should be hired based on a talent description, not a job description. Recruits should be asked to demonstrate their talent, not submit a resume. Do you really care how they look on a piece of paper? As fast as business is changing, you want to determine how they are going to perform their talents for you in the future. Request a demonstration and conduct a team interview to see how well they are going to fit.

To retain top talent you will need to abandon a recent pillar of managerial structure: Treat everyone the same. One size does NOT fit all. Top talent expects to be managed and lead differently than the middle of the road talent employee. Managers need to be taught how to manage the elite and yes treat them differently than the rest. (Again this can and will be an entire article later.) When you insistent on managers treating everyone the same you appeal to the lowest common denominator which means you dumb down your organization and you lose the elite talent.

If you want to attract and retain the best of the best, you have to provide the work environment to keep them on your payroll. So the next question is: Are you ready for top talent to work for your company?

Looking at the large collection of liquids still being confiscated by TSA at airports made me wonder where travelers had been hiding to be oblivious to the size restriction rules, which have been in effect for years.

So I asked one of the agents the other day as I was getting redressed after inspection what was the most common reason people gave him for the oversized liquid containers.

He smiled and said most everyone tells him either they didn’t realize the item was in there or that the rules were still effect. He went on to say, “People just don’t pay attention.”

I had to ask about the unopened bottle of vodka and the bottle of Bloody Mary mix. He said the man told him in-flight drinks were too expensive so he was bringing his own. He kept pleading that it was OK because the seals hadn’t been broken. It didn’t matter. That was an expensive detail that passenger overlooked.

Later that day I received a free restaurant meal because the waiter failed to give the kitchen the correct order.

At the bar at that same place, two men and two women waited on tables to open. The ladies asked for the bar check, signed for it and went to their table. The bartender came back to see the two guys still sitting there and realized she thought all four were together. The ladies were charged for the drinks of the two guys as well. The lady paying didn’t even notice the error!

What is going on?

Our brains process information differently than they used to. We take shallow bites of information from the internet and the news channels. We multi-task to the point of distraction. We are doing things so much faster that we don’t go as deep in our thinking as we once did. Therefore, we are confusing details such as travel rules, order specifics, who is on what check AND paying a check without checking it!

To become known in the workplace is to be able to do something of value others don’t do well. As our society becomes more shallow in how it processes information, as it becomes less focused on the details, the person who is a detail dynamo becomes a significant asset.

Details are where great innovation begins. In the details are where problems can be prevented. In the details of every organization are significant savings waiting to be found. Become the Detail Dynamo or hire one on your team of talent to have a disappearing commodity that will become even more valuable as business moves even faster.

I worked with a fast growing company that had an ex-steelworker for a CFO. Growing up in the rust belt and working in the mills of the late 60′s he developed his management style and approach to employees and life in general: Work hard, play hard and just deal with me being “rough around the edges”.

It was the “rough around the edges” which caused his steel company employer to send him to sensitivity training because of the complaints with his approach. To this day the CFO refers to that as the time he was sent to charm school. When I was hired to work with this new company in developing leadership, I heard this story from him over lunch on the first day I was there. I asked him how charm school worked out. His reply was, “It didn’t do me a G’dam bit of good.” Followed by a hearty laugh. He later confessed he did learn how to better understand how people see things differently and that he needed to have different approaches to managing a workforce, but he was still a man with his rough edges permanently in place, and proud of them.

Focus on Strengths

The old farmerism of “You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” also applies to leadership development. You can’t make someone be who they are not. People can modify behavior and learn new techniques and skills to becoming a better leader. The key is setting up the proper expectations and clearly defining the expected outcome. When I coach executives or work on leadership development programs with my clients I concentrate on this piece of leadership wisdom:

People can only change so much

Someone who is not a people person is not going to attend a class and suddenly feel the need to embrace the world and give everyone a hug at the end of the day. These type transformations only happen in the movies, or with celebrities going to rehab (cough, cough) or over decades of therapy. Can someone that is xenophobic learn to appreciate differences in people and modify how to approach them for pinnacle performance results? Absolutely. Just don’t expect it to be accomplished with a completely different personality than the one they currently have. The key is to focus on results and progress toward the desired outcomes.