Well Managed

Broken Glass

I just spent a few hours picking up broken glass.

I’m fortunate to live in a lovely home on a large lot. The yard is about the size and shape of a football field, 1.2 acres to be precise. It’s like living in a park that happens to be right in the middle of the city.

About a quarter of the backyard is a small forest. It was there when we moved in, a tangle of trees and brush. It had obviously been allowed to grow wild for years. I thought it was pretty cool and my son and his friends loved it. After I cleared out the dead wood they used the forest for playing "airsoft" which is kind of like paintball without the paint. They also used the huge back lawn to practice launching the competition catapults they built each year.

Well, the kids are in college now and suddenly a huge yard seems like a lot of work for no good reason. (Especially since now I’m the one who has to mow it!) It’s time for a smaller yard. We’re moving into our new house this week.

But before we move, I’m doing a final clean-up in the woods. Off in one corner, years ago, someone dumped some windows which, of course, broke into several thousand shards of glass. Over the years the shards have become imbedded in the soil. I’ve spent quite a few hours over the past several weeks picking them out.

My son thinks I’m a little nuts to be spending hours picking broken glass out of a yard we’re about to leave behind us, but it makes perfect sense to me.

People can be categorized in many ways, and here’s one of them: there are three kinds of people in the world: those who break glass, those who see broken glass and do nothing, and those who pick up broken glass.

Years ago, when my kids were toddlers, it struck me that just about the most pure and beautiful sight in the whole world is little kids running around barefoot, laughing and playing. It could be on a lush green lawn or on a warm soft beach or pretty much anywhere. It’s just sweet. Which means that just about the saddest and nastiest thing in the world is for some little kid to cut her soft, pudgy little foot on some broken glass. So I made up my mind that any time I had the opportunity, I would pick up broken glass. I’d do my part to make the world a safer place for bare little toddler feet.

I’ve noticed that it’s the same way with a lot of things in life, for example in the world of business management. Can you think of managers who are the "glass breaker" type? Picture the kind of person who gets a destructive, ugly thrill out of smashing glass, whether by throwing a beer bottle out the window of a car or by throwing a rock through a window. Now picture that person as a manager. Have you ever worked for one of those people? It’s not pleasant. What they leave behind them is worse than broken glass. What they leave behind them is broken people.

Early in the process of building my division, we went through a time when we were continually interviewing candidates from all across the country. The management horror stories we heard from many of those people were an education for us in how not to treat employees.

The truth is that we all have within us the capacity to be destructive, to be indifferent, or to be constructive. We have all felt the momentary rush that comes from smashing something just as we have all been guilty at some time in our lives of an unnecessary cruelty. But we can and should seek to turn away from those impulses and embrace the deeper rewards that come from building, creating, challenging, and encouraging. We all have choices to make about the kind of managers we’re going to be and the kind of lives we’re going to lead. So let’s make best ones we can.

Make Sure Your Employees Don't Talk Like a Pirate to Your Customers

I didn’t have much time for lunch today, so I zipped over to the local Jimmy John's sandwich shop to pick up a sub. Free plug: they make a darn fine sandwich. The bread is good, which I think is the secret to a tasty sub. It’s lightly sweet and has just the right chewiness.

Anyway, I ordered my usual, the "J.J. Gargantuan," which basically means they take every single ingredient they can find in the shop and stuff it into a bun. I paid for the sandwich and walked down to the pick-up window.

After a few minutes, the woman there looked at me and said, "Aarh?"

It was a noisy shop and I assumed I had missed something. I replied, "What?"

She repeated, "Aarh?"

Now I was really stumped. I felt kind of stupid, because she clearly felt that she was asking me a perfectly reasonable question, but I had no idea what she meant. The thought crossed my mind: "Is it Talk Like a Pirate Day? I thought it was next week. And if it is today, what does ‘Aarh?’ mean in Pirate talk?"

What I said out loud was, "I’m sorry, what?"

She leaned toward me and, making an effort to speak a little more loudly and clearly, said, "Gar?"

Now the light dawned: she was referring to my "Gargantuan" as a "Gar" and was inquiring whether I was the fool who’d ordered the monster sandwich. So I said, "Yes," hefted my sub off the counter, and headed back to work.

This is a minor example of a major problem: employees using internal jargon when communicating with customers. They make sandwiches fast at Jimmy John’s, everybody’s hustling, so it’s perfectly reasonable that they’ve developed short nicknames for their sandwiches. If I had to say "Gargantuan" twenty times a day I’d get tired of it too. But insider lingo is no good when you’re talking to an outsider. Even if the sandwich-making person next her said, "here’s the Gar" when she handed the sandwich to her, she should have been trained to turn to me and say, "Did you order the J.J. Gargantuan?" She could, in her own mind, add "you unspeakable glutton" if she wished. The key thing is, I would have understood what she was saying.

Just last week I experienced this same problem in my own organization. I’m creating a new program to do spot checks on telephone skills, which are very important in my business. We taped a few samples of employees talking to customers to get a sense of what the issues might be, how to set up the evaluation process, the best way to turn the tapes into positive learning opportunities for the employees, and so forth. Mostly what I heard was smart, friendly, talented employees communicating very effectively with customers. What I also heard was smart, friendly, talented employees using too much insider jargon. Like, "The PTP put your PD at 32 but the QME came back at 18 so we’re offering 25."

I don’t really blame them. It’s demanding, fast-paced work and all day long they’re talking to each other, their supervisors, and lots of other industry folks using terminology that’s familiar to all of us in the business. So it’s not surprising that when they’re on the phone with industry outsiders sometimes they’re going to use those same terms and forget to explain what they mean. They stop hearing the jargon as jargon, so when it comes out of their mouths it doesn’t occur to them that they’re not actually communicating.

So I’m going to create some refresher training that will sensitize them to the problem and provide them with some techniques for remembering to speak in plain language when they’re on the phone. If you have any employees who speak to industry outsiders, you might want to do the same.

The only other thing I have to say is, "Aarh, matey, that was a sandwich fit for a pirate king!"

Reward the Right Disasters

Years ago, when I was working for another company, we sent one of our team leaders to one of the big annual conferences for our industry. We would do this periodically to give our team leaders a broader perspective on the business and maybe pick up a few new ideas.

This particular team leader, let’s call her Rosie, came back from the conference very enthusiastic about a program she had heard about there. A company had presented a seminar that was basically a sales pitch for their program and she thought it could increase our quality while decreasing our costs.

We agreed it seemed promising and put her in charge of implementing the program at our company. (I’ll have to talk more about this particular technique for rewarding initiative and testing leadership potential in a future post.)

Long story short, it was a huge disaster. Customers hated it. Didn’t save us any money. Generated massive negative publicity. Some people were so angry they complained about it to the Governor. I'm not kidding.

So we promoted Rosie to a higher-level management job. In fact, we created a brand new managerial position for her with responsibility for a number of critical company functions.

Were we crazy? Why would we promote someone whose first pet project turned out to be such a flop?

Lots of good reasons, actually:

• Initiative. We had sent lots of team leaders to conferences. Rosie was the first one to come back with a project proposal.
• Effectiveness. Rosie was very effective at guiding the implementation of a complex program, which included coordinating the work of multiple external and internal players.
• Responsibility. The fact that the program went bad was not really Rosie’s fault. We all thought the vendor seemed good and the program looked promising. Only with 20/20 hindsight we could see the flaws that led to the disaster. But Rosie accepted full responsibility for the consequences and never tried to point the finger at anyone else.
• Composure. However bad it got, Rosie never lost her temper or got down in the dumps. She dealt with the situation professionally, recognized early that the situation was not salvageable, conducted effective damage control, and wrapped up the program promptly.

Hmm. Someone who takes initiative, implements new programs effectively, accepts responsibility, and keeps her composure in difficult times.

Sounds like a good manager to me.

And she was. Rosie thrived in her new job. She had been an okay front line employee and a pretty decent team leader. But with this promotion she hit her true level. She was a terrific manager.

So here’s the tip: look past the consequences at the actions. A good result doesn’t always mean the leader was good and bad result doesn’t always mean the leader was bad. Promote people whose demonstrated habits of thought, emotion, and behavior mark them as potential leaders.

Hiring Great People Under Pressure (part 3)

Here are part one and part two of this series.

When hiring, never, ever, compromise on character, personality, and aptitude.

If a candidate has extensive, directly relevant experience and several degrees from prestigious universities, but has poor character, a lousy personality, or weak aptitude, don’t hire him. You’ll be so sorry if you do. Experience and education simply can’t make up for those flaws.

On the other hand, if a candidate has excellent character, a great personality, and strong aptitude, you can often overlook scanty experience and a lack of education. Ideally, you’ll compensate by creating your own in-house training.

Consider carefully what kind of character, personality, and aptitude you need in each position in your organization. I’m lucky that my business needs require me to hire people who are honest, diligent, curious, verbal, smart, likeable, and energetic. It makes for a delightful working environment.

Not all organizations need people like these. I’ve heard of companies, for example, who administer standardized tests to candidates for sales positions to determine whether they’re sufficiently immoral to perform the job successfully. They reject candidates whose test results indicate they are too honest to do the work. I’m glad I don’t work in an environment like that, but at least they know what they’re looking for.

So, for example, if you need people to perform repetitive, routine work, don’t hire inquisitive social butterflies. Think carefully about what your actual needs are and how to identify candidates who will meet those needs. Don’t kid yourself.

Let’s wrap up this series by addressing the four potential objections to this strategy that I noted in the previous post:

1."This doesn’t help me, because I can’t set up a year-long fancy-pants training program."

I think training is hugely important. I still meet every week with one of my directors and the training manager to continually expand and improve our training program, and I still personally present some training topics to new hires. I understand that not all managers are in a position to create an extensive formal training program, but you can certainly provide new hires with an experienced mentor, a how-manual, and your own personal training. Make training one of your highest priorities and create the best solution your circumstances allow.

2."I require college degrees because I’m committed to excellence, and I thought you were too, Pufall."

My father was a college professor with a PhD and my mother has a Master’s degree. Higher education is a big value in my family. So when I first became a manager I "knew" that employees with more education performed better work and I set out to prove it so I could justify raising the educational requirements in our hiring standards.

Try as I might, I could never make the numbers match my theory. The truth is, every time I’ve done this research, I’ve found little or no correlation between education and performance. I manage by facts, not by personal prejudice, so now I set low educational requirements and focus on aptitude. This is not compromising quality at all. In fact, by paying less attention to pedigree I’m able to hire higher-quality people. Many of them have bachelor’s or graduate degrees and some of them don’t. They all do great work.

3."How the heck do you hire for character, personality, and aptitude? They don’t show up on a resume."

Well, it’s hard.

That’s why most companies focus on experience and education: it’s easy to do and it makes them feel like they have high standards. A manager who wants too feel like he has high standards can slap a "must have ten years of experience and an MBA" onto a job description in about two minutes if he doesn’t take the time to figure out whether those requirements actually matter. This is a prime example of what I call "False Selectivity." It’s a lazy substitute for the real thing.

I’ve been looking for a standardized test that reliably predicts character, personality, and aptitude but so far I haven’t found one that works very well. My company uses a couple of screening tests in our hiring and they help a little but you can’t rely on them.

The best solution I’ve found is to identify people who have the knack for spotting these qualities in others and including them in conducting interviews. I’m pretty good at it myself and I have a few people working for me who are also good at it. Some of my best managers don’t have the knack at all; they’re willing to hire even obvious turkeys. So just because someone is a successful manager doesn’t mean he should be involved in hiring.

(I should confess that I’m quite spoiled in this regard. My company has an excellent recruiting department that fills most of our positions and they send us a steady stream of great new hires. It’s much better to have a professional recruiter doing your hiring than relying on a mechanical HR process. A good recruiter can spot personality and character problems with a fair degree of accuracy.)

The other thing you can do is to realize that the hiring process doesn’t end when the candidate accepts the job. I’ve trained my managers to view new people as "candidates" for the first 90 days they are with the company. The supervisor assesses the new person’s behavior at frequent intervals and if we see red flags for poor character, personality, or aptitude during that time we promptly "unhire" them. This gives you an excellent opportunity to assess the new person thoroughly and accurately. It’s much better to nip these problems in the bud than to have to deal with a lousy employee a year or two later after they’ve caused a lot of trouble and maybe poisoned other employees with their bad habits and attitude.

4."Sometimes you need all six items on the list. For some positions education and experience are important."

That’s true. I have some positions like that. That’s when you just have to recruit diligently and creatively until you find that one great candidate. We have a job for which extensive experience and a specific degree are truly necessary and we’ve been trying to fill it for about a year and half!

Well, that wraps up this series. I hope I’ve given you some useful nuggets. Good hiring!

Hiring Great People Under Pressure (part 2)

Here is part one of this series.

When you’re trying to hire great people under pressure, you need to think strategically. You’re competing with other employers in the recruiting marketplace. You’re also working against the clock. You can’t waste your time and energy looking for people who have characteristics that your new hires don't really need to have. You have to focus on finding what truly matters.

Let’s break down the factors we all look for when recruiting new employees:

• Character. Traits such as honesty, reliability, maturity, work ethic, and tenacity.
• Personality. Whether a candidate is fun-loving or serious, gregarious or shy, optimistic or pessimistic, and so forth.
• Aptitude. The innate strengths a candidate possesses, including things like general intelligence, mathematical ability, or a gift for music.
• Skills. These are the abilities a person gains through experience or education, such as writing advertising copy, working with Excel, or playing the flute
• Experience. Whether the candidate has previously done the same job for another company.
• Education. What degrees or certifications the candidate has earned through formal education and from which schools they were earned.

If your company is like most, your recruiters are probably focusing too little on the items at the top of the list and focusing too much on the items at the bottom of the list. There are two problems with this:

1. Almost every other company in the world is also focusing too much on the items at the bottom of the list, because most companies place far too much weight on credentials and pedigree. So you’re competing with everyone else for the same limited supply of candidates with experience and education, making it harder for you to hire good people quickly.
2. The items at the top of the list are way more important than the items at the bottom of the list. So even when you finally do hire experienced, educated employees, you may not be hiring the people who can best help you succeed.

In a nutshell, the smart strategy is to focus your recruiting efforts on the first three items on the list, and then, as much as possible, substitute your own excellent training program for the bottom three items.

Let’s take a closer look at the factors to see why:

Character, Personality, and Aptitude. This is where your focus needs to be in hiring because hiring is the only way you can get these traits into your organization. The only way to get sound character, delightful personality, and strong aptitude into your organization is by hiring it. You can maybe improve your employees’ character and personality a little bit through coaching, preaching, and role modeling, but if you hire poor character and negative personalities you’ll be fighting an uphill battle, while if you hire sound character and positive personalities everything you do as a manager will be far easier and more successful. And aptitude is a fixed trait. You simply can’t increase an employee’s baseline intelligence and ability through coaching and training. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Skills. These are handy in a new hire, but they are less important than the first three in recruiting because they are not fixed qualities. You can add skills to your employees after you hire them by providing your own high-quality classroom and on-the-job training. This was the primary solution we used in the situation described in the previous post. We built an extensive training program of exceptionally high quality. It combines classroom, mock office, and on-the-job training over a one-year period. It took a lot of work to build and we suffered through some short-term sacrifice while we built it, but it has proven to be the foundation of our long-term success. It allows us to focus on hiring people with outstanding character, personality, and aptitude. This gives us a huge advantage over our competitors in building an excellent staff.

Experience. Previous experience in a similar position is less important than skills. If we happen to hire someone who already possesses relevant skills it’s a bonus, but usually those skills were acquired doing a very different job. For example, even though we're not a medical provider some of our positions require medical knowledge, so if someone previously worked in a clinic or hospital that's an advantage. However, previous experience doing the same job we're hiring for is often a negative. In fact, for certain positions we're extremely reluctant to hire anyone with directly relevant experience. It’s easier for us to train someone from scratch. They aren’t full of lousy ideas and bad habits from previous employers.

Education. It’s highly likely that you and your company are currently placing too much emphasis on educational credentials in your hiring, because almost all companies do. You can immediately start hiring better employees for most positions by requiring less education. It’s painful for me to say this because I’m a big supporter of higher education, but it’s true. I’ve done my own internal research and proved it to myself. When my competitors require college degrees to even apply for certain positions I’m delighted, because it means there's a huge pool of smart, hardworking, wonderful people who can only work for me.

You may be thinking:

• "This doesn’t help me, because I can’t set up a year-long fancy-pants training program."
• "I require college degrees because I’m committed to excellence, and I thought you were too, Pufall."
• "How the heck do you hire for character, personality, and aptitude? They don’t show up on a resume."
• "Sometimes you need all six items on the list. For some positions education and experience are important."

These are all good points. Tune into the third and final installment of this series of posts, in which I'll address these and other items of interest.

Here is part three of this series.