Well Managed

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.

Hiring Great People Under Pressure (part 1)

My current company hired me six years ago to build a new division. This would require setting up a number of specialized departments and the operation would have a substantial impact on the company’s profitibility, so there was a lot on the line.

I started out with only about a dozen employees. Fortunately, three of them were gifted individuals who became my management team. However, to build the division we needed to do a lot of hiring.

We faced three challenges in hiring:

• Quality. Our goal was to create the best operation in the industry so we set our hiring standard very high.
• Skills. Our industry requires employees with strong technical knowledge as well as skills in communication, decision-making, and planning.
• Speed. Our business was growing rapidly so we needed to hire a lot of people in a hurry.

We initiated an aggressive nationwide recruiting campaign for experienced employees. At first we got lucky and hired some superb people with great experience and skills. Then the talent pool went dry for a while and we kissed a lot of frogs. (Is that a mixed metaphor or just a slightly flawed one?)

When we hired our first employees we told them their workloads would be lower than at other companies but the expectations for quality and results would be extremely high. They enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to do their jobs right rather than just churn work. Unfortunately, as we went through the hiring drought our business grew a lot faster than our staff and our employees’ workloads started to climb above the level we had promised them.

Several times we went to them and said, "Look, we know you’re carrying some really heavy burdens, and we want to keep the workload commitments we made to you. When it gets too tough just give us the word. All we need to do is lower our standard one notch and we can hire some pretty decent people to help you out and bring the workloads down." Every time, our employees told us the same thing: "Don’t ever lower the standard, not even a little. We can take it. Keep looking for the right people."

That’s one of the reasons we have such a great staff today. It’s also why I think of those folks, many of whom are now in supervisory positions, as not just my employees but also my heroes.

But at the time, we were in a tight spot, caught between our need to staff up in a hurry and our commitment to maintain a high hiring standard and build a selective organization. I can tell you we managed to pull it off. How? For the answer to that question, tune into episode two of this series.

Here are part two and part three of this series.

Pull the Anti-Love Filter Out of Your Head

One day, years ago, when my children were very young, I walked by one of my daughters, who was playing on the floor, and felt an impulse to give her a kiss, but I didn’t kiss her, I just kept walking.

And then I thought, "What just happened there? I felt an impulse to kiss my little girl but I stifled it. Why?"

As I thought about it, I realized that we all have filters in our minds that sort out our impulses from our actions. We feel many impulses every day and of course we can’t act on all of them, so we have these subconscious filters that screen most of them out and turn a few of them into actions.

It’s a good thing we have those filters! After all, many of our impulses are foolish or malicious. But it bothered me that I had a filter in my mind restraining me from showing love to one of my own children. I resolved at that moment to remove that particular filter – the anti-love filter – so that every single time I felt an impulse to hug or kiss one of my children, or tell one of them "I love you," that I would do it. And that’s exactly what I did from that day on. Up until they reached the age where that sort of thing has to be restrained a bit in front of friends and so forth, of course.

But this is a blog about being a good manager, so why am I telling this story? Because of what happened at work the very next day.

I had just arrived at work and was walking down the hall toward my office. Coming toward me was an employee who was transferring from one position in our company to another. We had been interviewing candidates to fill her old job but couldn’t find anyone who would do the job nearly as well as she had.

Without thinking about it, as we approached each other I said, "You know, you’re a great employee and a wonderful person, and it’s going to be incredibly difficult to replace you." She smiled and maybe had time to say, "Thanks" before we passed each other.

I didn’t give it another thought until the end of the day. I’m generally one of the last people to leave so as I was in my office getting ready to go home the building was quiet and empty. That same employee suddenly appeared in my doorway. She didn’t look at me; she was staring at the floor with an intense expression. She said, "I don’t want to talk about it, but I want you to know this is a difficult time in my life. A really hard time. I’ve been feeling really bad about myself and I've been very depressed. And when you said that this morning, that was the first kind thing anyone has said to me in a long time, and this is the first happy day I’ve had for quite a while. Thank you." Tears had started to roll down her face as she spoke. As soon as she said, "Thank you" she darted away.

I respected her wishes. We never spoke about it.

But I’ve never forgotten that day. After she left I sat back down in my chair, emotions sweeping through me. At first, I was utterly perplexed. What was she even talking about? Then I remembered the little compliment I had given her that morning. My God, it had just been an impulse, it had just popped out of my mouth, I hadn’t given it any thought at all. I could just as easily have said nothing. In fact, why had I said anything? It wasn’t the sort of thing I normally did.

Then I remembered the day before and the filter I had removed from my mind.

Folks, each of us is a single individual. We are who we are at home and at work. Make a change in one part of your life and you will see the effects of that change everywhere in your life. Learn to be a great parent and you will be a better manager. Learn to be a great business partner and you will be a better spouse. Learn to show love to your children and by golly you will show love to your employees.

As for me, I’ve been darn sure that filter has never been reinstalled in my head. Life’s better without it. Every time I feel an impulse to express appreciation to an employee, or to pay a compliment, I do it. I think this has been one the main reasons for my success as a manager.

Plus, you just never know, do you, when one kind word might make all the difference for someone.

Never Give Anyone a Promotion (part 3)

Here are part one and part two of this series.

In the first two parts of this series we saw that rather than give a promotion we should offer a promotion. This post is about the nuts and bolts of offering a promotion.

I’ve provided a basic outline for conducting a promotion offer meeting on the Free Resources for Managers page. You can print the outline and use it as a reference when doing your own promotions. (You’re welcome!) You might want to open it or print it now, because in this post I'll be commenting on a few aspects of the outline.

Reading the outline might make it sound like the promotion offer meeting is kind of dull. But that’s just because outlines naturally tend to have a bureaucratic tone. In reality, the meeting should be lively, engaging, and energetic.

Remember, your goal for this meeting is to do everything you can to help the promotee succeed in her new position. At the end of the meeting, she should feel energized and enthusiastic but she should also be taking the situation seriously. She should be happy to have the opportunity but also prepared for the challenges ahead of her.

Here are some comments on a few key aspects of the meeting:

Greeting. Deliver the good news as soon as possible to put the employee out of her suspense. Some managers seem to take a perverse delight in drawing out the suspense while the employee squirms, not knowing whether the news will be good or bad, but that’s no way to build a relationship of trust with a member of your leadership team. When she comes in, you give her a big smile and before she even sits down you stand up and say, "I have good news: we're offering the promotion to you!" and shake her hand. Once the congratulations are done, you can all sit down together to discuss the particulars.

Appreciation. This is a great opportunity to reinforce good behaviors and make a good employee feel recognized and appreciated. Some people find giving and getting compliments to be awkward but this meeting creates a natural excuse for being open with your praise.

Improvement. If the employee doesn’t have any performance or behavior problems you can skip this step. But think hard about it. This is a great opportunity to address the kinds of things that might not come up in a performance review.

For example, a few years ago I had an excellent employee who, in brainstorming meetings, would sometimes make a frowny face and lapse into a sort of tired and downbeat tone of voice. It looked and sounded like he was giving up on solving the problem but I suspected that he was actually just thinking deeply, and that the expression and voice were just a behavioral habit. When I offered him a promotion to supervisor I described this behavior to him and he was shocked to hear it. We agreed he could not act that way as a leader and he kicked the habit very quickly.

Risk. This part varies widely. I recall one candidate who had potential but also had a lot of learning and growing to do and who didn't seem to be taking the promotion very seriously. I ended up pointing out to her that we would fill her old job, that it was the only position of its kind in the company, that there were no other positions suitable for her in the company, and that therefore if she did not succeed in her new job she would be unemployed. It was tough medicine but it sobered her up in a hurry. She took the challenge seriously and came through with flying colors.

However, there was another employee who needed the opposite approach. We were absolutely sure he would make a great supervisor but he didn't want to leave the comfort zone of his frontline position and wanted to turn down the promotion. We ended up pointing out to him that there were plenty of positions for his frontline work and promised that if he didn’t like being a supervisor after a few months he could have his old job back. He took the promotion, loved his new work, and to this day is a very successful supervisor. He and I still laugh together about the experience.

Conclusion. Make the employee sleep on the decision. This reinforces the idea that it's an important decision that must be taken seriously. If the employee says, "I don’t need to sleep on it, I accept." Just say something like, "It’s great that you’re feeling so enthusiastic about it and I’ll bet you’ll feel the same way tomorrow morning. Let’s talk then."

I'll have more to say about the nuances of the promotion offer meeting in future posts, but that should be enough to get you started. Happy promoting!

Never Give Anyone a Promotion (part 2)

Here is part one of this series.

So picture this: a supervisory position opens up in your organization and you post it internally. A bunch of your good employees apply for the promotion, you interview them all, and you pick the right candidate. You know you’re going to have to break the bad news to the unsuccessful candidates, but first you get to do the fun part: delivering the good news to the lucky person who’s getting the promotion.

This part’s a no-brainer, right? You just call her into your office, give her a big smile, offer a hearty handshake, and say, "congratulations, we’re giving you the promotion!" Then you give her a raise and a new title, go over a few details, and bingo, you’re done.

Wrong! Rewind the video my friend, because if that’s how you’ve been doing promotions you’ve been fumbling one of your greatest management opportunities.

In the previous post we looked at the goodies that come with promotions. Those are the things that make people want to be promoted. Now let’s look at the other things that come with a promotion, the things that determine whether the newly-promoted individual will succeed in her new position:

• Shifting Responsibilities. Succeeding in a higher-level position requires the candidate to clearly understand and accept the new responsibilities that come with the position. Just as important, she must commit to letting go of and delegating the responsibilities of the previous position.
• New Skills. You need to spell out the new skills the candidate will need to acquire in order to succeed in the new position. The candidate must acknowledge that she will need those skills and currently lacks them, and make a commitment to acquire them.
• Need for Growth. This is the time to candidly address any current deficiencies in performance or behavior that the candidate must remedy. Again, the candidate must acknowledge them and make a commitment to remedying them.
• Recognition of Strengths. Just as important as the need for new skills and for remedying deficiencies, you must review with the candidate all of her great strengths and fine characteristics, all of the wonderful things about her that earned her the promotion. Personally, I really enjoy this part of the promotion meeting, but many managers have a hard time doing this with sufficient detail and emotional sincerity to truly make it sink in for the candidate. However, it is vital that the candidate acknowledge her strengths and commit to continuing and developing all those wonderful things after the promotion. One of the most common reasons that previously successful employees fail after a promotion is that they change in negative ways, abandoning some of the behaviors that could have helped them succeed.
• Risk. No matter how successful the employee was in her previous position and no matter how confident you are that she'll do well in the new position, there is a genuine risk of failure. If you're running a selective organization, you must tell the candidate that in your position you absolutely cannot pretend that anyone is succeeding who is not -- even a person you like very much -- and what will happen if she doesn't succeed. Don’t let an employee just slide unthinkingly into the new position with all her attention focused on the raise and the cool new title. An honest assessment of risk is sobering and conveys to the candidate that deciding whether to accept the promotion is not a decision to be made lightly.
• Join the Leadership Team. Every one of your employees who has supervisory responsibility is part of your leadership team. (Hopefully, you’re actually treating all those folks as a true leadership team!) A frontline employee moving into management must be welcomed to the team and agree to genuinely join the team. This may require a shift in self-identity that is subtle but important.

Notice that each item on this list requires some kind of commitment from the employee. When promoting, your goal is to do everything you can to ensure the future success of the promotee, which in turn will contribute to your success and to the success of your organization. In order to maximize the likelihood of success you must gain the employee’s commitment to each of the above items. You do that by putting these items together with the goodies from yesterday’s post and offering them as a package deal. To say "yes" to the goodies, she also needs to say "yes" to all these commitments.

In the next post on this subject, we'll review the nuts and bolts of how you can successfully conduct the promotion offer process.

Here is part three of this series.

Never Give Anyone a Promotion (part 1)

Okay, I admit that once again I’m having a little fun here, coming up with a deliberately provocative way to present an idea. But this truly is an important concept for managers: you should never give anyone a promotion. Hopefully this dramatic way of phrasing the idea will make it memorable for you.

Hint: the key word here is "give."

Let’s take a step back and think about what a promotion means. There are two desirable things that come with a promotion. The first is money. A promotion usually includes a raise. In fact, in some companies a promotion is the only way to get a substantial raise. More money always has high value and is a concrete, quantifiable reward.

The second desirable thing that comes with a promotion is a set of rewards that are somewhat less tangible than money but are nevertheless very valuable. They include power, status, pride, recognition, opportunity, and a sense of progress and achievement. Let’s review these a little further:

• Power. An employee promoted into a supervisory position is being granted the authority to tell other human beings what to do and how to do it, and also to judge the value of their work and the appropriateness of their behavior. That's no small thing!
• Status. In our culture, for better or for worse, our self-identity is tied strongly to our work. A more prestigious title confers elevated status.
• Pride. There are few things in life more fulfilling than the sense of pride that comes from working hard to achieve a goal and then achieving it.
• Recognition. When you promote an employee you're giving that employee recognition for all the achievements and skills that earned the promotion. Receiving recognition is very rewarding.
• Opportunity. For an individual who wants to achieve great things, a promotion provides an increased opportunity to create, build, nurture, encourage, challenge, learn, and discover.
• A sense of progress and achievement. Most people want to feel that their lives aren't stuck but rather are growing and improving. Earning a promotion is one great way to feel that you're getting somewhere.

When you think about it, a promotion is really a big deal!

So then the question for you as a manager is: are you going to give all that money and emotional fulfillment away for nothing? Are you really just going to hand over all that financial and emotional booty as a gift and gain no managerial advantage from it?

I hope not, because that would be a terrible waste of a rare opportunity to exert a positive influence on an employee’s future success. The only other opportunity this good is when you're hiring a new employee.

Recall that there are three critical issues in hiring, firing, and promoting: who, when, and how. We're talking here about the “how” of promoting. Even if you promote the right person at the right time, if you just give the promotion to the employee you'll be missing a wonderful opportunity to help that employee succeed in her new position. It’s in your interest as a manager (and also as a human being who cares about your employees) to use all the leverage at your disposal to give the newest member of your leadership team the maximum opportunity to succeed.

That’s why you never give a promotion, you always offer a promotion. And what you offer is a package deal. The goodies we discussed above are part of that package. In my next post we’ll talk about the rest of the package and then we’ll go into the nuts and bolts of how to make the offer.

PS: Trust me, the difference between giving and offering is not a semantic trifle. It’s huge. Stick around and see for yourself!

Here are part two and part three of this series.

"I love my job"

How can you tell if you have succeeded in creating a good workplace culture?

Well, sometimes it's pretty easy. Sometimes people just tell you.

I have an employee, a very successful supervisor, who periodically sticks his head in the door of my office and says something like, "I've said it before and I'll say it again: there's no other company like this out there. I could never go back to working for the kind of companies I used to work for. But some of the young people here don't know it, they don't know how special this place is because they've never worked anywhere else."

I have another employee, a really bright young guy, who also periodically shows up at my door just to stick his head in, smile, and say, "In case I haven't told you lately, I love my job."

Now, these fellows aren't happy because I baby them. Far from it. I've given both of them many tough challenges, and they've come through for me again and again. Both of them are held to very high standards for the work they do, and they have both consistently met and exceeded those standards. However, when we work together we enjoy it. We laugh a lot, we come up with a million ideas, we try new things, we brainstorm like crazy. I suppose it's hard work, but most of the time it doesn't feel like work at all.

Do you have employees who spontaneously tell you how much they love their jobs? If so, add a comment to this post sharing at least one thing you've done to build a great culture. If not, you've come to the right place. Start building your great workplace culture today, and start with selectivity.

Set out to be the best

Six years ago I was hired by my company to create a new division. Work that was then being done by a number of external vendors would all be brought in-house. It meant recruiting employees, creating forms, designing software, outlining processes, mastering regulatory compliance, setting strategy, building a training program, defining our workplace culture, and so forth. The whole ball of wax.

I only had about ten employees to start with. Early on, I started telling everyone, "We're building the best operation in the industry, and not by a little but by a lot." It just sort of popped out of my mouth and I’ve been saying it ever since. Once I started saying it, of course, we had no choice but to make it true. I had painted us into a corner.

This turned out to have several good effects. First, of course, it was inspiring and energizing. It’s always exciting to strive for the top. It provides a sense of mission and commitment. Second, it turned out to be clarifying and, in a way, relaxing. We've never had to wonder what our quality standard is: at a minimum we have to do everything better than anyone else.

I recommend making this commitment with your staff. When you say, "We're building the best team in the department," or, "We're building the best company in the industry," you immediately put your organization in an elite class. Now you’re just competing with the few other managers who have decided they will be the best. The vast majority of managers simply don’t have the guts to make that commitment, so they're out of the running from day one.

If you're willing to go out on a limb and set this goal with your staff, you may make an interesting discovery: the other managers who are "competing" with you to be the best are as likely to become your friends as your enemies. After all, you have something rare and important in common: a true commitment to excellence. I’m aware of one other organization in my industry that appears to be operating at our level of quality. (In fact, they probably still have the edge on us, but we're the new kids on the block and we’re coming on strong!) I know the guy who runs it and we’re friends. We met each other a couple years ago at a conference. When I got home from the conference my wife asked how it was and I told her, "Mostly just the same old stuff, but I met this guy there who is really a standout." Recently his wife told my wife that she asked him the same question when he got home from that conference and he gave her the same answer about me. Everyone at that conference had essentially the same job title, but we spotted each other and recognized kindred spirits. It's a nice club to belong to. Wanna join? There's always room at the top!

The Walk of Fear

I like to get input from people, including my employees. Often, when I’m in a planning meeting with my managers that involves a particular work process, I’ll call in some frontline employees who handle that process so I can get the benefit of their perspective. I do the same thing when I’m in my office trying to figure something out.

Ideally, of course, one would recognize in advance the need for input and invite the employees to the meeting ahead of time, giving them a few days to think about the topic and put their thoughts in order. I do that too. But sometimes when an issue is being discussed or I’m working on a problem, it suddenly strikes me that a frontline perspective could be quite illuminating. So then I pick up the phone and call a couple people.

If you do this sort of thing, I'd like to share a little tip with you. If you follow it, your employees will appreciate it very much. Here it is:

When you call your employees and ask them to come to your office, tell them why.

I had to learn this lesson the hard way. My first title as a manager was Chief Operating Officer. I went from having never supervised anyone in my life (as an attorney I hadn’t even supervised my own secretary!) to being a bigwig in the executive suite. Shortly after I was elevated to this lofty post I called one of my best frontline employees and asked her to come to my office. A few minutes later she rather tentatively poked her head in the door. I asked her to have a seat and started talking to her about the problem I was working on that I wanted to get her insight on. She seemed a little odd and wasn’t saying anything. Finally, several minutes into the conversation she let out a big breath and blurted out, "Oh, thank God."

Well, that got my attention. I asked what was going on. She said "When you called and told me to come to your office I thought I was in trouble. The whole time I was walking to your office I was trying to figure out what I’d done wrong. I’m just so relieved that I’m not getting disciplined. Now, what were you saying?"

I tell you folks, hearing this was like a dagger in my heart. I had worked with this woman regularly in my previous position as legal counsel, we got along well, she did excellent work, and she was a person I liked and admired. Which is why I was seeking her advice. But I had unwittingly subjected her to the Long Walk of Fear to the Boss’s Office. No wonder she had seemed so tentative when she showed up at my door. I felt pretty awful about it.

Now on a rational level she had no reason to worry: her work was excellent, her behavior was exemplary, and she and I had a good working relationship. But rationality has nothing to do with the Walk of Fear. It’s like when you show up at the office one morning and your keycard doesn’t unlock the door. For a moment, you can’t help wondering, "Have I been fired?"

Maybe this goes back to childhood experiences of being called to the principal’s office. For many of us, that was our first experience with the Walk of Fear. Again, it does not have to be based on any rational concern. When I was a kid I was a great student: I got good grades, did not cause trouble, and generally enjoyed being in school. But whenever I got called to the principal’s office I couldn’t help but worry as I took that long walk down the hallway, even though it always turned out to be something innocuous.

If you're trying to build a positive workplace culture, you do not want to unwittingly inflict this unpleasant experience on your good employees. I was lucky that, early in my career, I had this experience with an employee who was so open and honest about being worried when I called her. The vast majority of employees, of course, will never mention that they had been worried when you called them to your office. They will just play it very cool. So it tends to be an invisible problem.

I recommend doing the same thing I have done, which is to develop the habit of telling employees what you want to talk to them about when you call them. I might say something like, "Are you free for a few minutes? We are discussing when to do an AME and when to skip right to a panel exam and we would like to get your input." That’s the best way to do it, because then they can actually warm up their thoughts on the topic as they walk over. However, sometimes the topic is too complicated to easily summarize, and then I’ll just say something like, "Could you help me out? I’m working on a project and I’d like to get your advice on it." That, at least, makes it clear that they are not in trouble.