The Business Sensei

The Challenges of Hiring Slow

In an upcoming Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership I talk about the perils of “hiring slow” and “firing fast.” As I’ve been doing, I wanted to give you just a taste of the “hiring slow” part here.

A company can hire slow for two major reasons: because they know exactly who they’re looking for and are willing to wait for the right people to apply, or because they don’t know who they’re looking for and believe they’ll know when the right person applies.

The first is more useful. If you’ve done your homework and figured out the characteristics of the employees you’re looking for, and if you’ve trained your interviewers to recognize those people, then by all means hire slow. Take your time and wait for the right people or, better yet, go out and attract them to the company.

Read the rest at ERE.Net

The Taboo of the Bananas: Organizational Culture and Recruiting

Once upon a time there was a company known as Robotic Chromosomes. Don’t bother Googling it; it’s no longer in business, and besides, that’s not the real name. Robotic Chromosomes had a way of hiring programmers that isn’t all that unfamiliar to folks in the software industry: logic puzzles. Like Microsoft, and various other companies, Robotic Chromosomes put every potential engineer
through a series of logic puzzles in order to determine if those engineers were qualified.

There is, in fact, no actual correlation between programming ability and the ability to solve logic puzzles.This did not stop the folks at Robotic Chromosomes, who were convinced of the validity of their methods and were not interested in allowing facts to get in the way.

Even within the logic puzzle method, though, there were some definite oddities and idiosyncrasies that distinguished Robotic
Chromosomes from other companies.

For several years, no one skilled in visual presentation or user interface development was ever good enough to solve
the logic puzzles, or at least they could never satisfy the solutions that the existing engineers believed were correct.

Read the rest at the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership

8 Questions About Your Hiring Process

What is the most important factor in successfully recruiting top candidates? If you said things like salary, benefits, or the economy, you’d be wrong. It’s your organizational culture. I have a longer article in the upcoming Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership about the role of organizational culture in the hiring process. To give you a taste of it here … let me first say that when you start to throw around terms like “organizational culture” you may think that it’s academic, or that it’s abstract. It’s not.

Read the rest at ERE.Net

Communicating With Retention In Mind

Some years ago, I was working at a high tech company during a recession. Granted, it wasn’t a Great Recession, but it was bad enough. There came a certain point where an employee who had not had a raise in two years, went to the CEO and asked for a raise. The CEO’s response: “I agree that you’re one of our top performers. But, in this economy, you have nowhere to go, so I’m not giving you a raise.”

The CEO had forgotten one little point: when we least expect it, economies get better. It’s exactly when things are looking worst that the opportunities start to appear. In this case, the employee left and had a new job with a 50% raise within a couple of weeks. He told me later that if he’d received almost any raise, he’d have stayed. It wasn’t about the money.

Now, when I tell this story in training exercises or when I’m giving a talk, someone always says that if the CEO and the employee had only communicated then the situation would never have come up. That’s a nice sentiment, but not one that quite makes sense. The two people in this little dance were communicating. Unfortunately, the content of their communication led them down a path that did not benefit the CEO or the company at all; in fact, the loss of that employee at that time set product development back six months.

Read the rest in the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership

7 Things You Should Communicate

This is the short version of an article that was accepted for publication by the Journal of Corporate Recruiting Leadership. The full version will probably be out in a month or two.

It’s not enough to say that if you want to keep the best people when the economy improves, you just need to communicate more. It matters what you say and how and when you say it. Communication occurs in the context that you’ve created over time, and how your communications will be received will depend a great deal on that context. If you want to keep your best people, then you need to do your homework. (Or, conversely, if you want to recruit someone else’s key people, find companies that did not do the homework suggested in this article.)

Read the rest at Ere.net

The Godot Effect

Personally, I wouldn’t even know him if I saw him.  –Estragon,Waiting for Godot

Some years ago I was sitting in a product design meeting. The discussion kept circling around some particularly knotty issues that no one in the room actually knew much about.

In one sense, this wasn’t a serious problem given that the company was still actively hiring and there was a recognition that more people were needed. Someone finally commented that we’d have to make sure to hire someone with the particular expertise in question, and in one fell swoop, that task was assigned to a non-existent person. Again, this is not necessarily a problem … yet. It became a problem, however, as the meeting progressed:

“We don’t have anyone on the team who can handle […technology…] either.”

“That’ll be the next hire.”

“Wasn’t the next hire supposed to be […original problem…]?”

“We’ll need someone who can do both.”

Read the rest at ERE.Net

We Multi-task Here

The Northern Lights have seen strange sights,
But the queerest they ever did see … – The Cremation of Sam McGee

While they may not quite compare to the sight spoken of by the nameless narrator of Robert Service’s famous poem, nonetheless some of the tales I’ve heard lately of interviews certainly give Cremation of Sam McGee a run for its money.

By far the most dramatic was the interviewer who spent the entire interview reading email. When the candidate tried to get the interviewer’s attention, the response was, “We multi-task here.”

Read the rest at Ere.net

You might also want to read another article I wrote on recruiting, “How you hire just as key as who you hire.”

Surviving Rapid Growth

I was recently invited to contribute some tips on how a business can survive rapid growth (and hopefully thrive along the way!). You can find my response here:

http://budurl.com/wahx

-Steve

Slip Slidin’ Away

Here’s one just published in the CEO Refresher:

“You know the nearer your destination
The more you’re slip slidin’ away”

— Paul Simon

Some twenty years ago, I had a rather odd experience while working for a Silicon Valley software company. As we came closer and closer to shipping the product, more and more problems would crop up. Not problems with the software, as one might expect, but interpersonal problems. There was an increase in argument, bad feeling, and ineffective conflict at exactly the point where it would seem the most likely and logical that people would be feeling the greatest sense of unity and triumph. I experienced the same phenomenon at other companies, both in and out of high tech. In more than one instance, the team would successfully snatch defeat from the very jaws of victory.

In each of these situations the problem was simple; unfortunately, the solution was not. The team in each circumstance had never truly learned to work together, to handle disagreement, or to tolerate variations in working style. The only thing the team had ever agreed upon was the necessity of getting the product out by a certain time. The strength of that agreement was enough to forge sufficient common ground for the team to work together. Unfortunately, as the project drew nearer and nearer to completion, the glue holding the team together became weaker and weaker. Would the team hold together? Would everyone start fighting again? Would people leave the company? After all, working with people you don’t always agree with is often easier than working with complete strangers: as the old saying goes, better the devil you know than the devil you don’t. Ironically, then, people would engage in the very behaviors they were most afraid of in order to delay the completion of the project and keep the team intact.

Sounds ridiculous, does it not? Why would trained professionals make such a mistake? Managers and CEOs tell me over and over that this would never happen in their teams. In a couple of cases, they’ve said this even as it was happening around them. Wishful thinking is not a good strategy.

The great benefit of teams is that they provide a variety of skills and perspectives. The great weakness of teams is that they provide a variety of skills and perspectives. In order to reap the benefits of having a team, the members of the team need to learn to work together. This involves more than just agreeing on a set of goals, especially since agreement on goals is difficult to get when team members cannot even agree on how to work together.

The solution is to recognize the importance of the early days of the team’s existence. How many professional sports teams go into competition with a team that’s just been assembled? Very few. Of those few, how many win? Even fewer. Basketball fans might well remember the Olympic Dream Team of a few years ago: some of the best basketball players in the United States all playing on the same team. While they were certainly competent, they did not demonstrate the level of brilliant basketball everyone expected: despite their individual excellence, they never really came together as a team.

In business, the only difference from the sports world is the belief that a team can be assembled and instantly jump to performing at a high level. It simply does not work, no matter how much we may want it to. A team in this situation is particularly vulnerable to cracking under stress at exactly the moment when it most needs to be working together.

So what can the manager or the leader do to build a strong team?

Start by fostering common ground and appreciation of one another amongst the team members. What’s the vision of the company? What are you trying to accomplish? Get everyone excited by the outcome you’re after and help each person understand how they and their colleagues fit into bringing that outcome to fruition. If you can’t figure out how each person fits in, then perhaps your project is insufficiently well defined or your team is too big.

Create as much freedom for people to work according to their own styles. Think in terms of mechanisms that permit maximum autonomy while still enabling the team to communicate and be aware of one another’s progress and needs. Allow for autonomy to increase as the team gets better at working together. Encourage the use of email as much as possible, minimize meetings, and have clear checkpoints where you can easily monitor progress.

Approach problems with the attitude of “evaluate and adjust” not “judge and punish.” There will be false starts and mistakes made, especially in an early version of the product. If people are afraid to be wrong or make mistakes, they will also be less willing to advance different ideas or experiment with novel solutions. Set aside time for brainstorming.

What roles do the members of the team take on? Are those roles truly taking advantage of each person’s skills? As the project advances, are you prepared for roles to change or for team members to take on different roles in the project? Frequently, the roles people start with are not the best ones for them; being able to change as the project develops helps build team cohesion and increases productivity.

How do you recognize status? Everyone on the team is good at something; otherwise, why did you hire them? It pays to find ways of building up the status of your team members and developing the strengths each person brings to the table. The more each person can demonstrate their competence and apply their expertise, the more motivated they will be and the stronger your team will become.

What’s happening when you get nearer your destination?

How You Hire Just As Key As Who You Hire

Where you start is what you get. I regularly hear managers say:

• “An unexpected problem arose and the team didn’t step up.”
• “I can’t figure out how to motivate them.”
• “No one goes above and beyond.”
• “They are just so passive!”

Alternately:

• “They won’t stop arguing!”
• “People complain about being interrupted all the time.”

Businesses like to describe their culture in positive terms, as “can do” or “fun-loving, but hard working,” or “highly motivated, team-driven atmosphere,” and so forth. Unfortunately, as the comments above illustrate, this is often wishful thinking. Culture is a complex construct and actions taken early in the company’s history can have far reaching effects. And while everyone knows that who a company hires can make a big difference, what is less obvious is that how a company hires can be even more critical.

Read the rest at the Indus Business Journal