The word pop conveys energy and impact.  Nothing brings more energy and impact to your business than the people you choose to hire.   According to a recent article published by the Harvard Business Review, the need for companies to have a recruiting plan as well as robust employee retention strategies is more important now than ever before.

HBR research and our experience with our clients is consistent.  Multi-national companies are already experiencing bottlenecks in recruiting employees in emerging markets, and they are also struggling to find and/or develop talented young managers to replace baby boomer retirees. These issues are compounded by the fact that many companies slashed HR budgets and personnel in an effort to hunker down and survive the economic upheaval.  Thus, personnel selection practices are more disjointed and ineffective than ever.

So, whether you are contemplating a relationship with an executive recruiting firm or you are trying to tighten up your own internal process for recruiting employees, I recommend the following tips for ensuring that your personnel selection practices POP rather than FLOP as the economic dust continues to settle around the globe.

• Create a job profile before you start recruiting.  Many personnel selection decisions are made without a clear picture of what success looks like in the job.  Job descriptions are outdated and performance metrics may or may not exist.  Take the time to quantify WHAT the job holder will be held accountable for doing as well as HOW the job holder should behave for maximum positive impact.
• Utilize a behavioral assessment.  The Predictive Index® tool is both reliable and valid for use in the hiring process.  The use of PI® builds objectivity and rigor into the often highly subjective and haphazard process of recruiting employees.  The PI® system allows you to quantify the behavioral requirements of the job BEFORE you begin assessing candidates.  Check out how other companies have improved their personnel selection through the use of PI®.
• Create questions that differentiate the best candidates from the rest.  The best interview questions are those that force candidates to be specific about how they have done or would do a particular task that is critical to the job.  Probe deeply for specific details and press candidates to quantify the impact of the actions they took rather than just describe what they did.  Eliminate fluff questions that don’t yield answers that highlight real differences in breadth and depth of experience as well as intelligence.  Better questions yield better information; better information leads to better decisions.

The revenue engine of our business is fueled by the efforts of 8 individual management consultants who work remotely to sell and deliver our products and services to their portfolio of clients. Our products and services are aimed at improving employee morale, how to supervise people, improving executive teambuilding, managing difficult people, and developing sound strategic planning methods among other business results.  Given the nature of their work, the management consultants enjoy a great degree of autonomy and freedom, as the majority of their work happens independently and directly with their clients.  Most of them are really terrific at what they do and they earn a very nice living as a result.

However, as our business grows and evolves, the need for real collaboration and organizational alignment is rapidly increasing. In order for the business to grow and prosper, we need to break down silos and people need to start working together to bring custom, more complex solutions to our clients. This kind of environment requires general sales consultants to work in tandem with our specialist consultants to plan sales call objectives and most efficiently meet client needs.  Our greatest opportunities require rolling up our sleeves and getting in the trenches to help our clients actually implement our tools to achieve verifiable business results. ”Getting in the trenches” often requires in depth, on-site, long term work which is best done by those specialists (with specialized skills and experiences)so sales consultants have the time to focus on higher level work. Thus, positive, productive internal interactions between our product specialists and general sales consultants are no longer just “nice to have” they are a “must have.”

So, how do we start to change the culture?  First, leaders must clarify what is desired and why before people will commit to work in new ways.   People resist working in new ways when they don’t understand why change is necessary and when they don’t see what’s in it for them.  Thus, it’s the leaders’ job to make the case for change explicit and then seek input from those affected in terms of how to achieve organizational alignment and commitment.   Becoming a more collaborative company is not going to happen by mandate.  It’s going to happen by employing sound strategic planning methods to identify how to get from current state to desired state, and by clearly articulating the valuable role each individual plays in acheiving new success.

We’ve all heard the saying, “Beatings will continue until morale improves.” This familiar axiom, while providing levity to those of us who care about how to supervise people, does prompt a vexing question.  How DOES an organization work toward improving employee morale?  It’s a noble and important goal, but it’s not for the faint of heart.  It’s noble because it’s ethically right and good to create a work environment where employees feel engaged and engergized by their work.  It’s important because engagement and morale contribute to employee productivity, and productivity to profit. It’s not for the faint of heart because improving morale requires sincere willingness and commitment to change and change is hard.

So where does a leader even begin?  I suggest you begin by examining internal communciations.  After all, workplace communications, while aimed at exchanging information for the purpose of doing work, are the  primary source of misunderstandings between people.  These misunderstandings lead to serious conflicts and morale issues.

Consider the concept of intent (what the communicator meant) vs. impact (what the recipient heard or felt) and how this affects employee productivity, staff motivation and ultimately morale.

Meanwhile,  Joe has no idea that he’s been anything other than supportive and helpful to Sid in this exchange, and Katrina is completely oblivious to the negativity building around her.   Look at how much damage has been done in one small, short exchange.  And, what are the odds that Sid will actually confront Joe with how he’s feeling and get this all sorted out?

You get the idea.  Communication matters.  Circumstances, word choice, tone and delivery matter - not just to the morale of the people involved, but also to the bottom line.  If, in fact, Katrina is instrumental to helping secure the project in this situation, then the business just lost out because Sid’s not likely to invite the “favorite one” into his deal so she can take all the credit.  The costs of this communciation exchange (and others just like it) are huge when you start to extrapolate them out.

So, if improving employee morale is a goal for you in 2011, be thoughtful and pay close attention to your internal communcations. Create safe opportunities for people to express how they’re feeling, and ask people directly if you’ve done or said anything to damage their morale. You might be surprised what you learn and it just might change how you supervise people and communicate overall.

A colleague recently sent me a note referencing Marcus Buckingham’s remarks at an international conference. As you may know, Marcus Buckingham is one of the authors of the world-renowned management books First Break All the Rules and Now Discover Your Strengths. The basic theme in both books is that people perform better (and organizations perform better) when people are cast in roles where they get to use their strengths. Buckingham’s research and work with companies around the globe has substantiated the importance of employee motivation and engagement to bottom line results.

What I found most interesting that my friend shared was that 10 years ago when Marcus worked for the Gallup organization, he asked Americans if they could improve themselves more by increasing a strength or improving a weakness.  Only 24% said increasing a strength; and now 10 years later, there is only slight improvement. Further, the average American only spends about 14% of their time each day using a strength.

So, what is the implication of this? Why is this concept of using our strengths at work so hard to grasp? Is it that companies don’t have the organizational alignment of talent to business objectives? Is it that most strategic planning methods and continuous improvement methodologies ignore the importance of motivation and employee engagement? Is it that leaders and managers don’t care or understand the foundational importance of this truth?

Whatever it is, I hope you’ll take a moment (as my friend encouraged me to do by sending her email) and reflect on what it is that you do best. Then, think a moment more about how often you get to do that very thing. Chances are, it’s not often enough. If that’s the case, I encourage you to speak up, take action and seek out opportunities to put your best self out there. Your employer will thank you, your family will thank you, and you, yourself, will be strengthened and energized by the natural high that results when we get to use our strengths to accomplish something. We, at ADVISA, believe that understanding our strengths and using them is the root of confidence, and that confidence is the currency of success.

My 5 year old daughter takes swimming lessons. I swam competitively, coached youth swimming and still love the sport. Thus, it was important to me that she learned to swim as early as possible – both to keep her safe around the water and to develop her confidence and physical fitness.

There is a lot involved in learning to swim. You must:

1.       Trust your instructor in order to overcome fear of the water

2.       Master a series of physical skills including floating, kicking, breathing, arm strokes, starts and turns.

3.       Perform combinations of those skills simultaneously using proper timing and form.

4.       Practice your strokes until the movements become automatic and you can focus on developing speed and strength.

Put those 4 things in any other order and it doesn’t work. You can’t learn to relax and float face down in the water until you overcome your fear of drowning. Similarly, you cannot improve speed and strength if you don’t have the right timing and proper form. And so on. The progression in learning to swim can’t be re-ordered. Each skill builds on the previous one.  Interestingly, the phrase “sink or swim” doesn’t paint a realistic picture of the progression that must occur to go from unable to keep one’s head above water to real swimming. You can’t just flip a switch and “be a swimmer.”

Similarly, you can’t just flip a switch and become a high performing organization.  You can certainly survive with a successful product or service that meets a market demand, but creating an environment where success is predictable and sustainable is an entirely different process.

The good news is that if you find yourself in a desperate “sink or swim” mode, this blog post will serve as a life preserver of tips and recommendations for making real progress toward organizational success.

·         Successful Strategic Planning – While there are a variety of strategic planning methods out there, the bottom line is that every successful organization has a sense of where it’s headed into the future and why. This vision guides future action and serves as a touchstone for organizational alignment.   Clearly articulating where you’re headed, where you’re not and getting people aligned behind that vision is what makes a strategic plan “successful.”

·         The Importance of Motivation – People do the work. Motivated people do better work. Better work leads to customer loyalty which is a sustainable competitive advantage in any economy. Getting the right people in the right roles and training managers to create an effective, engaging work environment is paramount to long term success. The importance of motivation is that it directly impacts the bottom line. High performing organizations are made up of employees who trust their supervisors, have the resources to do their best work and are encouraged to grow and develop.

·         Balanced Scorecard Metrics – What gets measured gets done. Identify performance metrics and/or success indicators at the business, department and individual level. When individuals know what targets they need to hit, they perform better. When managers know what targets their team needs to hit, they manage better. When organizations know what targets they need to hit to achieve their goals, they are more profitable. The best companies define success in measurable terms and then assign clear accountabilities and deadlines. This and only this can create the organizational alignment that’s essential to thrive long-term.

Click here to learn even more about how to progress from a “sink or swim” reality to a confident, high performing organization.

We are in the hyper-information age.  More information is not always better.  Information overload leads to confusion, analysis paralysis and bottlenecks in decision-making not innovation and creativity.  Today’s best and brightest excel and innovate because they are more selective about what data is relevant and meaningful, and they are more rigorous about defining what problem/issue they are trying to solve in the first place.

So, let’s be clear.  What data is essential to high performing organizations? Data about their most important asset, THEIR PEOPLE.   Personnel assessments / hiring assessments provide information about how people are driven to behave, and subsequently perform, at work.  View this Predictive Index® case study to catch a glimpse of how a valid personnel assessment provides clarity to managers about engaging their employees in their work and how to supervise people for maximum performance.

Clarity is an accelerant.  Take hiring, for example.  Often we are clear about the knowledge, skills and certifications someone needs to do a job, but we haven’t considered the BEHAVIORAL expectations for someone to truly excel.  A personnel assessment / hiring assessment like Predictive Index allows us to clarify how much tolerance for risk, or attention to detail, or sense of urgency we need someone to have.  Using the Predictive Index tool as a hiring assessment helps you better define the performance target for success so you can better determine which candidates bring the right mix of professional and behavioral assets.

If you want more clarity and relevant information about taking your orgnaizaion to the next level, click  to download a free whitepaper.