Here is a great article on leadership for today by Henry Mintzberg.
We have this obsession with “leadership”. Its intention may to be to empower people, but its effect is often to disempower them. By focusing on the single person, even in the context of others, leadership becomes part of the syndrome of individuality that is sweeping the world and undermining organizations in particular and communities in general. Read the full article
http://tinyurl.com/aaxcoz
What drives your potential new employees and your existing team members? Knowing this before you hire is extremely important for job fit and to keep people engaged and motivated in their work.
How can you find this out in a one or two hour interview? Most small and medium size businesses people and managers do not interview everyday and often do not have a well planned interview approach that gives answers to everything you need to know in order to make the best decision.
The focus is usually on skills and work experience, which you can easily get from their resume, so why spend a lot of time asking questions about this. As I suggested in a previous article about hiring star employees, prepare a simple skills test to see how they can handle that task.
I remember working with a small business owner who had interviewed a person to be his executive assistant. Her resume showed that she had the skills for the job and after the interview he was ready to hire her. I intervened and asked her to compose a business letter to a supplier on a frequent business matter that required a simple understanding of the business that her research should have provided.
The candidate had difficulty formatting the letter and articulating the message and was clearly not fit for the job. Yet my client would have been ready to hire her because he liked her and believed what was on the resume and what she was saying.
Once we have checked for skills and company fit we want to verify job match and this requires another type of test to measure thinking style, behaviour and occupational interests.
People usually list their interests on their resume. But this does not tell you what their occupational interests are. General interests can be misinterpreted and often we don’t pay enough attention to their job interests.
The Profile XT assessment provides six occupational interest fields and determines the candidates top three interests and matches them to the profile of the job. When the most important activities we must perform for job success meet our top three interest area needs, we feel motivated and passionate about our work.
On Thursday March 12th at 1:00 PM EST I will make a presentation by webinar on hiring and developing star performers using the Profiles XT assessment and explain all the components of this tool including the occupational interest fields.
Using assessments for hiring can save you big bucks by reducing turnover because you will have people better fit for the job. This saves you valuable time that can be put to more productive use. Also hiring and training new employees today is very costly and it usually takes three to six months before they fully understand your systems to become fully productive. The more complex the job the longer it takes.
To attend the webinar you must send me an email request to sgoldberg@optimusperformance.ca and I will send you the details.
Shuffle the Deck and Win
Sometimes just shuffling the deck is enough to put new life in the cards and change the direction and feel of the game.
The same may be true for a winning team. Changing the makeup of a team by bringing in new talents and skills can often provide a much needed spark to booster overall performance.
Diversity in teams is vital to growth, creativity and sustainability. Different points of view and work styles are vital and superior to one-way of thinking and doing things.
It is essential that the team members are able to help the new person integrate into the team and that they get to know one another. This is best done using the typology approach that Fritz Glaus has developed into a team training program called My Team and I, which is based on his book CrazyZoo, Know Thyself Made Easy. However this approach is not easily used by the novice person for hiring new staff and additional resources are needed.
Just knowing the talents and skills a person has for a position is not enough. You need to know more about the person and the behavioural traits they bring to the team and role. Otherwise you can end up in destroying what the existing team has built by adding the wrong person.
Besides talent and skill you need the appropriate attitude, thinking style, specific personality traits and work interests for the specfic job. For example, the required behavioural trait for attitude for a finance comptroller would most likely be more on the ciritcal side. This would be in contrast to a customer service person who would need have a more positive outlook. But imagine the comptroller candidate coming for an interview and in the interview they display both behaviours equally. How do you really know what the true person is like?
That is why the use of an assessment tool is so vital to making good hiring and promotion decisions. You need good reliable information quickly and the Profiles assessments from Profiles International is a world class provider of these tools.
On March 12th at 1:00 PM I will be presenting a webinar on hiring star employees using the Profile XT assessment tool. I will cover the various components of the tool including creating job patterns for the role.
Please email me for details on how to join the webinar on March 12th.
Last week I was speaking with a business owner who told me that one of his short term projects is to hire new talent to replace people who have not lived up to his expectations. He said that the current economic crisis that has caused large employers to reduce their workforce has created opportunities for him to build a better team.
He said that when the job market was hot he could not replace people because he could not find and afford people that would do a better job. Now that more people are out of jobs and ready to work for less than the large employers were paying, he now sees himself in the position to make the moves he wanted to for some time.
Those that are looking to hire to either replace staff or to act on new opportunities must go through a hiring process that will end with a decision of who is the best candidate to choose. This is a process than can be very tricky and is not always easy and never foolproof. And if you are not careful you can make the same hiring mistakes as in the past and end up with no improvement.
Imagine going though the whole hiring process, which can be quite costly and time consuming and then finding out six months later that the new person is no better than the person you replaced. Or your new project opportunity is not getting on track and it is draining your resources because the new hire is not getting up to speed fast enough.
Let’s take a quick moment and review the hiring process to make sure you maximize the opportunities to hire that star performer.
Assessing the person for total job fit is comprised of matching knowledge and skills, along with attitude and value and as well, thinking style, personality and interests. This can only be determined with any accuracy using assessments.
The The Profile XT from Profiles International measures thinking style, personality in terms of behavioural traits and six occupational interests. It also matches the person’s scores against a customized job profile for the position. This is the most powerful kind of assessment because you are matching someone to the requirements of the job.
On Thursday March 12th at 1:00 PM EST I will be hosting a webinar to present how to hire star performers and make the best hiring decisions using the best resources available today.
Please register for the webinar as space is limited by sending an email to info@optimusperformance.ca. You will receive the log in information. By email.
This webinar is essential if you want to make better hiring decisions and build a high performance team for the future.
Stephen Goldberg
Be Free to Work Less, Earn More, Enjoy Life