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

What Makes Leaders Successful

If you missed my appearance on MYOB Radio on Sunday (or if you heard it and can’t wait to hear it again 🙂 ), you can listen to my interview on what makes successful leadership here.

On MYOB Radio this Sunday!

I will be appearing on the “Mind your Own Business” Radio Show this week. The show provides advice, information and connections for entrepreneurs, service providers and established companies. Tune into MYOB this Sunday between 9-11 AM to hear my segment!

Local Stations:

WBNW 1120 AM – Needham, MA
WPLM 1390 AM – Plymouth, MA
WESO 970 AM – Southbridge, MA
WSMN 1590 AM – Nashua, NH

or stream online @ MYOBTheRadioShow.com

The more things change…

I have a fondness for old time radio podcasts. Indeed, one of the big advantages of the iPod is that it created a whole slew of opportunities for those of us who want to listen to such things.

One of my discoveries was a podcast of the Avengers radio show. Yes, there was one, although it didn’t really come from the Golden Age of radio, rather being adapted from the TV show. Nonetheless, listening to episodes of the Avengers pointed up four very important points:

1. Russian accents are only the second most villainous sounding accents. British accents are the most villainous, probably because they always sound like they have anti-social personality disorder.
2. British accents also sound heroic.
3. Old time commercials in a British accent sound like something out of Monty Python.
4. When word “helpless” is said immediately before “Emma Peel” you know someone is in for a very nasty surprise.

I’m not entirely sure what this means, although the first might reflect my image of Boris Badenov as the quintessential Russian villain. Since this year is the 50^th anniversary of Rocky and Bullwinkle, perhaps Russian accented villains will make a comeback. I’ll leave that to James Bond (or Moose and Squirrel).

What has, apparently, made a comeback is a modern “duck and cover.” Remember that? When I was a kid, we had atomic bomb drills and went to the special basement hallway with the yellow atomic stickers. I didn’t really understand why that particular hallway was better than any other, but it was on the way to the school library.

Attending my son’s kindy orientation today, I’d just finished listening to a cold war episode of the Avengers, and thus nearly choked when they said that they do lock-downs and that when that happens they “hide under the tables.”

What I find interesting is how this “duck and cover” mindset, and the belief that somehow it’s safer to hide under a table, is still around. I guess we all did it and we won the cold war, so it must be useful :). Cultural memes stick around and they come back in the oddest and most unexpected places. Somewhere, at some time, the idea of hiding under large pieces of furniture became associated with safety, and now it emerges as a stress reaction when danger threatens… even when it doesn’t actually help.

I wonder what John Steed and Emma Peel would do… (or maybe Rocky & Bullwinkle would be a better bet).

Baker Street Irregular

Fans of Sherlock Holmes might remember the occasional scene in which a scruffy urchin appears out of nowhere, speaks briefly to Holmes, and then disappears again. Holmes then solves the case, and explains to the stunned Watson that he cultivated the urchins as sources of information. They are his “Baker Street Irregulars.”

For those who prefer a more recent image, fans of James Bond movies will remember the endless parade of agents who show up long enough to give Bond some critical piece of information or equipment. Unlike Holmes’s informants, the mortality rate amongst Bond’s “irregulars” tends to be awkwardly high. Star Trek, of course, was famous for its “Red Shirts,” the red uniformed security officers who would always die within minutes after appearing on camera. In all these cases, the character shows up on camera just long enough to move the plot forward and then disappears. In a very real sense, they have no existence before they are needed and no existence after their function is fulfilled.

When they are present, they exist only to meet the needs of the story, or at least of the hero.

Of course, these examples are all fiction. What bearing could they possibly have on reality? When I run predictive scenario management training exercises, a type of serious game, I find the same behavior manifests: many participants tend to assume that the other players in the scenario are only there to support their goals. They don’t quite recognize that each participant has their own goals and their own needs that they are trying to meet. As a result, conflict often erupts between different individuals and groups who each assumed that the other individuals and groups were present only as “red shirts.”

Read the rest at the American Management Association

Friday’s Appearance on Business Insanity Radio

Last Friday, I was on Business Insanity Talk Radio speaking on the five components of effective leadership. If I’ve done this right, here’s the segment I was in:

SteveOnBusinessInsanityRadio20August

Book news

I just got the word from McGraw-Hill: My book, The 36-Hour Course on Organizational Development, went to the printer today! Although the official release date isn’t until mid-October, pre-orders should start shipping by the end of September.

Here’s a brief excerpt:

Why Are They So Unmotivated?

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard about some “impossible to motivate” employee who is busily training for a marathon or something else that requires a tremendous amount of dedication, focus, energy, and, you guessed it, motivation.

What you’re looking for are those employees who approach their jobs with the same level of dedication and focus that they approach training for a marathon or other activity. It’s very hard to find those employees. It’s easier to create them.

Motivation comes from many sources. It starts with the culture you’ve built, the vision you’ve created for your company, the goals you set, and your hiring process. Those elements make up your foundation.

Ultimately, motivation is a strong desire to do (or sometimes not do) something. That desire can be imposed from without, or it can come from within and be supported from without. You want the second.

Remember, no one becomes an Olympic athlete for the money, although some Olympians might end up making a great deal of money. Top athletes succeed because they are driven to perform at a high level. The money and the adulation only reinforce that drive. The ones who are out solely for the money are the ones who are most likely to give up.

Push, Pull, or Get Out of the Way

In the Japanese martial art of jujitsu, the practitioner learns to not respond to a push with a push or a pull with a pull. Meeting force with force only creates opposition. While you might be strong enough to win some conflicts, eventually they take their toll. When someone pulls, you push. When someone pushes, you pull or you get out of the way. You don’t oppose.

In jujitsu, the harder you make it for someone to stay on his feet, the harder it is for you to make him fall down. The goal is not to make it hard for your opponent to remain standing; the goal is to make it easy for him to fall down. The workplace is not all that different. Force creates opposition. Threats, fear, even many incentives, only lead to resistance. The very act of trying to force people to do something causes them to become suspicious and reduces their willingness to do it. It doesn’t matter how much they might want to do it.

To be fair, I do hear from managers who insist that force works: they make sure their employees know who is boss and what will happen if they don’t toe the line. There are problems with this approach. Constantly pushing people means that you can’t see where you’re going. All of your effort is going into the act of pushing. Sometimes they’ll feel like you’re going too fast. Sometimes they’ll mistake an attempt to change course as a shove and resist, or they’ll go too far and step to one side, leaving you to fall on your nose. The more you push, the harder it is to hit that moving target.

You want the employees who know where to go and why they should go there—and who understand how to get to their destination without you constantly having to force them to do it. You want a team so dedicated that if you don’t get out of their way, they’ll run you over.

Understanding motivation is the first step to getting such a team.

Reverse the Polarity of the Neutron Flow: The Magic of Neuroscience

I was recently quoted in an article called “Brain Training.” The article is on applying neuroscience to the workplace, and all the great benefits this would bring about.

I was skeptical. My comment was this:

“While it’s certainly possible to gain some improvement in decision making abilities by better understanding how our brains work, I question how significant the improvement will be “in the field.” It strikes me as rather like trying to learn jujitsu or tennis through a detailed study of body mechanics. Will it help? To some degree, but ultimately, if you want to become skilled in those sports you have to get out and practice under the supervision of a good coach.

To the extend that brain sciences can help us develop better training programs, they are a big plus. But they cannot replace practice.”

The author didn’t quite use all of this, but he kept the general point.

Today, I read about a study out of Harvard that found that simply referring to neuroscience as the explanation for a phenomenon increases the likelihood that people will believe the explanation, even when the explanation has no inherent meaning: “the effect is due to frontal lobe circuitry.”

In its own way, it is no more meaningful than the famous line from Doctor Who: “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow!” which Jon Pertwee famously made up after he forgot his technobabble.

And yet, it works. Businesses are spending tons of money using neuroscience to explain employee behavior instead of looking at what’s happening in front of their eyes!

Why are they so convinced that neuroscience will find the answer, and that the answer will then be easy to apply in the office? Must be due to frontal lobe circuitry.

Chutes and Ladders (Airplane edition)

For some reason, I’m having trouble getting out of my head the image of a game of Chutes and Ladders played with pictures of airplanes and flight attendants.

I was asked to comment recently on whether stress  might have played a part in the story of Steven Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who slid down the emergency chute, beer in hand. The beer part might not be a good addition to the kid’s game, even if mild alcohol consumption is supposed to reduce stress. Here’s what I wrote:

There is no question but that the current economic situation has increased the stress level for everyone. Unfortunately, one of the places where showing this is considered socially acceptable in on an airplane, where flight attendants are often not viewed as the professionals that they are. Furthermore, the struggle over overhead bin space seems to have only increased as more and more airlines charge to check bags; this, of course, increases the stress level of the passengers.

Why is this story getting such play? As Americans, we appreciate noble gestures: there is a huge difference between going postal with a gun and doing something dramatic to make a point. Slater’s actions hurt no one (which is not to say they were without risk; at the superficial level, though, it appeals on a very visceral level), which puts it into the second category. When we see someone act in such a dramatic fashion, we are reminded of our own stress and frustration at work, and admire someone who is willing to stand up to authority.

However, that doesn’t mean that Slater’s actions were a good long-term career move! It really depends on how JetBlue and other airlines might react. The standard, stodgy, reaction is to refuse to give him his job back. A more daring airline might choose to play up the adventure/daring angle of his actions and build a marketing campaign around it: “At XYZ Airlines you won’t need to do this!”

Of course, if you want to avoid situations like this, it’s important to pay attention to what’s going on in your company. Are employees excited about working there or just showing up because they have nowhere else to go? Is the CEO out in front of the employees demonstrating her excitement over the future of the company, or is he sitting in an office somewhere issuing vague directives? Do employees look for reasons to not come to work? What is the company doing to help manage stress: providing sufficient time off? Exercise facilities? Quiet space? Opportunities to have fun on the job?

At a very broad level, I’d also have to wonder how this fits with JetBlue’s image, or brand, as a fun airline? When you think about JetBlue’s advertisements, they try to present an image of flying, sorry, jetting, being a fun activity. In an odd sort of way, this incident can either reinforce that image or damage it, depending on how JetBlue handles things going forward. No, it’s not entirely rational: after all, when flying we want to get safely to our destination; at the same time, the idea of the trip being fun is appealing.

If this story fades out, then probably nothing happens to JetBlue’s image. But if the story hangs around, the focus can potentially make or break JetBlue’s brand: pressure cooker work environment or fun place to be. The answer will affect how travelers view the airline, and that influence, subtle though it may be, will affect whether or not people fly JetBlue.