Talent Tea Leaves Moving Notice

This is the final post for this site.  The Talent Tea Leaves blog has moved to a new server.

The new URL for Talent Tea Leaves is http://executivetalentassessments.com/talenttealeaves/

Thanks for following.  Enjoy us at our new home where we’ve redecorated and re-arranged the furniture.

We apologize to our RSS feed subscribers and will work to make it worthwhile for you to continue following our posts.

Seduced by Stardom?

The Denver Broncos football team recently announced the re-hiring of their former star Quarterback John Elway to a new position, Executive Vice President of Football Operations.  In announcing his new hire, the team’s owner Pat Bowlen optimistically proclaimed that Elway’s “leadership, competitiveness and passion for the Denver Broncos will position this team for long-term success through his work leading our football operations.”

A Trap?

Assuming that this new hire will actually be accountable for improving results, I wonder if the Broncos are falling into the same seductive trap as so other organizations of all kinds by attempting to turn a super producer into supervisor.  As a player, John Elway’s most valuable asset was his strong, accurate right throwing arm.  His athletic prowess offers little help to him in his current responsibility for rebuilding a struggling team and winning more games.

Michael Jordan deja vu?

The Broncos are not the first team to be seduced in the hiring process by past athletic stardom.  The Washington Wizards basketball franchise appointed another Hall of Fame athlete to a similar position.  Michael Jordan’s performance as a General Manager demonstrated that Wizardry as a player does not provide all the skills required to succeed as an executive.

Is this a fit?

I would agree with Mr. Bowlen that leadership, competitiveness and passion can serve John Elway well in his new position.  But might the job require more than that? Is the owner so star struck that he has overlooked other elements that are critical to John Elway’s success as an executive?  To address the question of fit, we need to ask, can Mr. Elway the executive…

• Objectively assess talent?
• Effectively delegate responsibility?
• Interact with superiors?
• Communicate with those who have different styles and interests?
• Make timely, rational decisions?
• Manage his time without a running game clock?
• Influence others when he is not the only voice in the huddle?

He will need to both possess and develop these skills to be more than just another figurehead.

Time will tell if John Elway becomes another Michael Jordan as an executive.  Or will he be the next Jerry West who succeeded both on the basketball court and in the executive suite?   It will depend on his ability to develop the necessary skills to support his existing passion and love for the Broncos.

New Recruiting Media Attracts More Passionate Candidates

A local specialty retailer recently discovered an effective new media for recruiting new store sales associates.  Their initial results are fantastic as candidates attracted by this media come to them with an invaluable intangible.  They already have a passion for the store’s products.

What is this new media?

It’s FACEBOOK!  They had already built and nurtured a sizable, loyal fan base for their Facebook business site. Now they simply post their openings on their Facebook page.  It enables them to recruit from their base of bona fide fans of their stores.  The cost?  It’s free.

There are No “I”s on Our Team

In the language of “DISC” behavioral assessments, High I”s are those Influencing type of folks who are optimistic, enthusiastic, trusting, magnetic, persuasive and convincing.  In the interest of full disclosure, I resemble that remark.

I described these traits while debriefing a DISC assessment with an executive coaching engagement. The client responded “We don’t have many of those here.“  And then asked in jest: Would you like to join us? After taking a couple seconds to envision their world of skepticism, I respectfully and decisively declined.

While I continued to ponder what it must be like to function in their world,  I imagined drudgery and a general absence of fun.  So I asked:  “Doesn’t it bother you to have so few people like me? “  The answer was an equally decisive “no”.

How Could This Be?

My personal style bias took a productive hit as I understood the explanation.  As it turns out, their industry generally doesn’t have much use for the likes of me.  And I’m OK with that.  They’re in the News Publishing business.  They mostly recruit and hire journalists.  And over-trusting, potentially gullible, detail agnostic folks like me don’t make very good journalists.  As their journalists advance and get promoted to management positions, the percentage of “I“s on their team rarely increases.  This inbreeding results in more than the usual amount of suspicious and critical types where trust is rarely assumed.

In considering the dynamics of high and low “I“s within a team, there are potential pitfalls with an overabundance of either.  Simply stated, low “I”s are the realists while high “I”s are the optimists.  Realists can excel at finding flaws. Optimists tend to gloss over them.  So when it comes to meeting deadlines, driving innovation, taking risks like any business, I-balance is important element to the success of a team.  While low “I”s make good journalists, out-of-balance realism can potentially take its toll.

Consider the business axiom…

“It’s not the big that eat the small. It’s the fast who eat the slow.”

How much has the demise of newspapers and magazines can be characterized as the fast eating the slow? It makes you wonder:

• Have management teams of publishers been overpopulated by inherently skeptical promoted journalists?

• If so, has that effected their agility?  Their inability to anticipate or recognize the shift in news consumption?

Shift happens.  As it does, there are advanced tools to help  you assure that you have the right people on the right seats of your bus and maintain critical balance in your decision making.

True or False? Employees Leave Managers, Not Jobs

While it is true that managers can drive job defection, this is not a universal truth.

Employees will still leave jobs even when they like and respect their manager.   This occurs when the fit between their talents, interests and skills isn’t good enough to give them quality of life on the job.  How many of your people are struggling in a job where they spend Sunday night dreading going to work on Monday?  This is a primary symptom of  a poor job fit.

All jobs have a unique profile of distinct skills, attitudes and behaviors that are required for best performance, just as people have their own unique profile, too. When a person is matched to a job that requires the combination of behaviors, skills and attitudes that come naturally to them, achieving superior performance isn’t a struggle, it’s a challenge they can win.

Conversely, when we have to extend extraordinary amounts of energy on duties we are indifferent to that don’t match our skills, we are easily worn down and performance suffers.

What’s an employer to do?

There are valid assessment processes for both jobs and the people who do them.  In a job mismatch situation, you can have a brilliant, talented person who is simply poor match for the job.  Assessing both the job and the people is an underutilized and valuable solution to the misuse and potential loss of talent.

Fostering Behavioral Diversity

When considering the concept of workplace diversity, most think in terms of ethnic, gender or cultural differences.   There is an equally important perspective to consider: Behavioral Diversity.  Within every ethnic group, gender and culture we find diverse behavioral styles.  These differences in style can result in synergy and/or conflict. Most likely both.

What is Behavioral Diversity?

Here are some examples.

• Some people are more more comfortable with other people than with things and data.  For others, the reverse is true.
• We know people who can be forceful and sometimes angry while other are patient and reserved.
• While we have those who are optimistic, enthusiastic and trusting vs. the their skeptical counterparts from the Show-Me state.
• We have those anal folks that tend to the most minute of details while their counterparts fly above at 30,000 feet.

Are any of these styles especially good or bad?  Are any unnecessary?  It depends on their job requirements and their surrounding culture.  Is your organization or your team dominated by any one type of behavioral style?

Why Foster Behavioral Diversity?

We can likely agree that an over-dominance of any of these different styles has potential downside.  Untethered cautiousness or optimism or forcefulness can lead to either flawed decision making or vacillation.  Behavioral diversity provides an oft needed tether for effective execution.

The Challenge

In mixing people with diverse styles, there is inherent conflict that is difficult to overcome.  The result is can be draining expressions of  emotions that range from anger to fear to impatience to frustration to indifference.  In order to make behavioral diversity to work for us instead of against us, we need to help our people to understand and value the need for diverse styles and viewpoints and realize that conflict, when properly managed, conflict is a vital and necessary component to achievement for any team or organization.

Enhancing Your Awareness

• How well can you describe the behavioral styles of your team’s members?
• How do their attributes serve to enhance decision making and team performance?
• To what degree to the members of your team respect and value those with opposite tendencies?
• If you could improve your answers to these questions, how would things be better or different?

RSS Added

You can now subscribe to Talent Tea Leaves through RSS. Simply click the RSS icon at the top of your browser.

Sorry for my previous omission.

A Work Behavior Lesson from the Meltdown

Brilliant, financially savvy minds have pondered the events that led to the credit market meltdown and wondered: How could this happen?

Here’s my take non-financial observer. My analysis comes from looking through the lens of my understanding of how human dynamics affects how things do and/or don’t get accomplished. At the risk of dating myself (again), I’m reminiscing about a parody from my childhood, Alan Sherman’s Camp Granada and his description of summer camp conflict.

“All the counselors hate the waiters And the lake has alligators” – Parody Performer Allan Sherman from Camp Granada (link to lyrics)

I don’t know if this makes me a counselor or a waiter. I admit to being one of those people who’s able to get things done despite the rules, not because of them. When I have encountered people of the opposite persuasion, I admit to occasionally losing my patience and naturally finding ways to circumvent these highly compliant, regulation loving types. I’d prefer not to work with those who I consider bottle necking naysayers. I suspect that the feelings are mutual.

And so it was with those highly educated financiers who developed a creative new product they called Credit Default Swaps. These financial instruments were designed to indemnify the shaky, shell game sub-prime mortgage products that investment bankers also created. As I understand it from the video below, Credit Default Swaps were represented to be “like” insurance policies while designed to avoid the scrutiny of the highly regulated insurance industry. Unlike insurance policies, there are no reserves created to pay the claims. Now those claims are due and taxpayers are footing the bill for this Enron Déjà Vu. So the savvy financiers avoided the scrutiny for those bottle-necking naysaying federal regulators.  The rest is history.

Lessons for Rule Benders and Breakers: New Tolerance for Style Diversity

We say this about both customers and the opposite gender: Can’t live with ‘em and can’t live without ‘em. Now that we’ve again see what can happen when the rule breakers prevail without restraint, perhaps we should add those highly compliant rule mongers to the “can’t live without ‘em” category. Wherever your sympathies might side in the ongoing case of Rule Lovers vs. Rule Breakers, try to think of it in the same light as customers vs. suppliers or men vs. women. Despite some inherent conflict, we need to improve our tolerance and understanding of each other and find ways to work together. What better example do we need than a global financial meltdown?

I heard a former regulator said that “blaming the credit crisis on Wall Street greed is like blaming gravity for a plane crash.”  Like gravity, greed is ever present.  In language of DISC, those rule monger High Cs play an important role in any system of checks and balances.  Their value to the system should not be ignored.

And you want to be my latex salesman.

Seinfeld fans will remember the line that Jerry delivered to George as he ran from the washroom with his pants at his ankles in a futile effort to accept a verification phone call from the unemployment office.  He had claimed to have applied for a sales job at latex manufacturer, Vanedlay Industries.

All Sales Jobs Are Not Created Equal

After studying the assessments of hundreds of sales candidates for a variety of different sales jobs, we hold this truth to be self-evident. The talent required for selling is dependant on the job situation.   We’ve all seen examples of a previously successful person who flopped in a new environment.  So how can you predict a fit?

Are there some universal rules?

We had a client who had completed interviewing and reference checking a previously successful candidate with a 10 years of selling experience.  He would be held accountable for acquiring new customers in a completely new geographic territory where the company was unknown.  They were about to pull the trigger on the hire.  But just to be sure, they had him take our talent assessment to validate their positive fit beliefs.

Recognizing Hunters

This position called for a hunter (vs. a farmer) approach.  In the process of pioneering a new company and acquiring new customers, a salesperson needs to approach a lot of strangers and encounter a lot of rejection.  Claiming you have the right stuff to do this in an interview is one thing.  Just because a candidate has handed out business cards with a sales related title, doesn’t make him or her a hunter.   With this candidate, his natural high-D, DISC behavioral profile indicated enough assertiveness for hunter potential.  However there are other warning signs that convinced us that he was better suited for an Account Manager position where he primarily nurtured existing relationships.

The Research on Motivators

Research shows that top performing sales people are motivated by results and financial rewards. So we look for high utilitarian scores when assessing their success potential.  They also are high individualistic that are driven to influence their own destiny as well as others.

Our hunter candidate’s talent assessment showed that his drive for results (utilitarian) score was below the mean (as shown by the yellow bar below the black line).  His individualistic score (black bar) is OK.  However his primary drivers are not typical of high performing sales people:

1. Social/Altruistic: the desire to help others (turquoise bar on the chart)
2. Traditional: The belief in a system for living. (gray bar)

Based on his motivators/values chart (right), I compared this person to Ned Flanders, Homer Simpson’s devout, caring, compassionate next door neighbor. In fact, the assessment also revealed a high level of active empathy.  So he is highly attuned to the feelings of others and is inclined to act on those feelings.  This typically admirable trait does not serve those who are regularly involved in negotiations of pricing and contract concessions as these folks tend to cave in and struggle to stand firm.  In my discussions with the client, I suggested that “Ned” likely would gain his fulfillment by doing church volunteer work.  That analysis proved to be a moments of clairvoyance for me.  It was then that I learned that “Ned’s” interviews had to be scheduled around his church volunteer activities.

I suggested that while “Ned” likely had achieved success in a previous account manager’s role, he was unlikely to excel in this position.  In wrapping up our discussion, I advised that while there is every reason to believe that Ned was destined for heaven, hiring him for a hunter type sales position would be a potential hell for all parties.

…becasue we’ve always done it that way.

We had a client that struggled with high turnover for a mission critical position that titled Customer Service Representative.  We were hired to create a job benchmark for the position and subsequently assess candidates.

To Avoid Confusing Activity with Achievement

Our Job Benchmarking process works with company subject matter experts who know the job and culture.  With this group we determine the job’s key accountabibilities.  These take the form of three to five achievements as we seek to define the service model and desired outcomes for a specific  job.  In effect, we define star performance for the position. Then we methodically survey our subject matter experts to generate a Job Benchmark that prioritizes attributes, skills, behaviors and motivators of a potential star performer for this job in this culture.

In our facilitated discussions with the client’s  job experts for this Customer Service position, we started to collect some responsibilities that were un-common to a typical customer service role.  Profitable sourcing of customer requirements was at the top of the accountability list.  The group agreed that the job potentially provided great fulfillment for a proactive, results orientated person as the job was an opportunity to run a business within the business.

Moment of Discovery

Upon hearing all of this, I was compelled to ask:  Why are we calling this a “Customer Service Position”? Their answer  is the title of this post.  “That’s what the prior owners of the company called it ten years ago.”   One of our job experts had joined the company eight years ago in a customer service capacity and had grown along with the position.  Upon reflection, she candidly admitted that if she had started in the position as it is today, she would have lacked the skills to do the job and could never have done the job.  Indeed, all too many other successful candidates for the job that the skills that served them in other Customer Service positions did not translate to success in this job.  The result was a revolving door of frustrated workers that resulted in under served customers and untold lost revenue opportunities.  And the ongoing turnover related costs of re-recruitment and training.

Resolution

So the client discovered the cause of their turnover problem. They created an new, more appropriate job title and defined and communicated the jobs proactive attributes and key accountabilities up front. We surveyed the job experts to generate a prioritized list of attributes, behaviors and values: the Job’s DNA.  We could then match the DNA of their candidates with the newly discovered DNA of the job.  The metaphoric revolving door to their customer sourcing department is gone.  Their customers are better served.  Their turnover bleeding has stoped.