How Well Do You Know Your Direct Reports?

Posted November 7, 2014 by The Metiss Group
Categories: Leadership, one-on-ones, Performance Acceleration

It’s an established fact that people who have personal relationships have greater trust and are more willing to extend themselves for each other than those who have lesser relationships.  It should stand to reason then that leaders who want extra efforts from their direct reports will want to have stronger personal relationships.

How well do you know your direct reports?  Can you answer these questions about each of your direct reports?

  • What is the name of their spouse or significant other?
  • What are their hobbies or interests?
  • What are the names and ages of their children or grandchildren?
  • What is the breed and name of their pet?

Leaders don’t need to be overly personal with their direct reports but they should know a little about them.  A personal relationship can come from casual water cooler type conversations.  Regularly scheduled weekly one-on-one meetings are a great way to develop this relationship.  In our experience, there is no more important leadership technique than one-on-ones.

Empower your team to participate in regular one-on-ones and you’ll develop a deeper personal relationship which will lead to more success. 

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Make Personal Development A Group Effort

Posted October 31, 2014 by The Metiss Group
Categories: Leadership, Performance Acceleration

If you’ve ever embarked on an exercise program, you know how difficult it is to stay committed.  Unless you have health issues, it’s one of those “important, not urgent” activities that frequently doesn’t get the proper attention.  Personal and professional development is another “important, not urgent” activity.  Like exercise, you know you are supposed to do personal development, but often don’t get around to it.  Similar to exercise, some are better at it than others and everyone feels better when they have finished.

Most regular exercisers will tell you that having workout buddies is what keeps them going and that is the key to effective personal development. Encourage your team to commit to working on similar developmental opportunities.  Group accountability is a great motivator.

One of the easiest development approaches is for the group to all read the same book.  The synergies and sharing coming out of the group as they recount parts of the book are amazing.  One leader we work with had his whole team read/reread Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” then as a group talked how to apply the principles to their business.  The individuals benefited from personal growth, the team developed a greater bond, and the organization became more efficient – win-win-win.

Empower your team to grow together and you, your direct reports, and the organization will all experience more success.

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Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast

Posted October 24, 2014 by The Metiss Group
Categories: Leadership

Peter Drucker is credited with coining the phrase “culture eats strategy for breakfast” and successful organizations have been striving to create a winning culture ever since. Here’s a great example of Google’s culture recounted by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg in How Google Works:

One Friday afternoon in May 2002, Larry Page (Google’s co-founder) was playing around on the Google site, typing in search terms and seeing what sort of results and ads he’d get back.  He wasn’t happy with what he saw.  Larry was horrified that the AdWords engine, which figured out which ads worked best with which queries, was occasionally subjecting our users to useless messages.

He printed out the pages containing the results he didn’t like, highlighted the offending ads, posted them on a bulletin board on the wall of the kitchen by the pool table, and wrote THESE ADS SUCK in big letters across the top.  Then he went home.

By the time Larry arrived Monday morning the problem was fixed.  And the kicker? The team that fixed the problem weren’t even on the ads team. They had just been in the office that Friday afternoon, seen Larry’s note, and understood that when your mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful, then having ads (which are information) that suck (which isn’t useful) is a problem. So they fixed it over the weekend.

Every organization has a culture whether leadership creates it or not. As Drucker has been professing for almost half a century, leaders must define an intended culture, live it, breathe it, demonstrate it, and champion it or no strategy will be successful.  What’s your culture?  Would everyone in your organization agree?

Empower your team with a defined purposeful culture and you’ll have a more successful organization.

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Reference Checks Are Invaluable To The Selection Process

Posted October 17, 2014 by The Metiss Group
Categories: Selection

We are not sure who has less respect for reference checks: hiring managers or candidates.  Today, hiring managers rarely conduct effective reference checks and, as a result, candidates have little motivation to maintain those past relationships.

Brad Smart, the author of the popular book “Topgrading: The Proven Hiring and Promoting Method That Turbocharges Company Performance”, describes an approach to reference checks called TORC – Threat Of Reference Check.

The TORC approach informs candidates at the beginning of the selection process they will be responsible for arranging reference check conversations with the hiring manager before they will be hired.  When confronted with this requirement, unqualified candidates immediately drop out of the process.  Smart claims 25% of the initial candidates withdraw from the selection process when they learn they have to reach out to their references.

Additionally, Topgrading interviewers remind candidates before interviews they will be checking their answers with references. This ensures more truthful responses in the interview and allows for making better hiring decisions.  Reference check conversations become much more insightful.

Empower your hiring managers to use effective reference checks, and you will make more successful hires.

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Make Recruiting Everyone’s Responsibility

Posted October 10, 2014 by The Metiss Group
Categories: Leadership, Selection

When leaders are asked what their greatest talent challenge is, most will say it’s finding “good people.”  Regardless of the economic conditions, hiring managers can never find enough top talent.

Human behavior dictates talented people normally hang around other talented people.  If you have top performers on your team, there is a very good chance they know other stars and some of those stars could be the “good people” you are trying to find.

Google is known for attracting and hiring great talent. In their book How Google Works, Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg describe Google’s approach:

“… why let only recruiters handle recruiting? If everyone knows someone great, why isn’t it everyone’s job to recruit that great person?

The simple way to keep recruiting in everyone’s job description is to measure it. Count referrals and interviews. Encourage employees to help with recruiting events, and track how often they do. Then make these metrics count when it comes to performance reviews and promotions. Recruiting is everyone’s job, so grade it that way.”

Empower your top performers to recruit other top performers and you successfully find the “good people” you are looking for.

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Rest Easier With A Succession Plan

Posted October 2, 2014 by The Metiss Group
Categories: Leadership
Tags: ,

When we ask leaders “What talent concern frequently keeps you up at night?”, one of the most common answers is they are concerned they will lose their superstar.  No one wants their key producer to leave, but hoping they stay or showering them with pleasures won’t make you feel less exposed.

Every key position should have a succession plan.  An effective plan brings peace of mind to the leader as well as the incumbent.  The leader can rest easy knowing if their superstar leaves, for whatever reason, they have a plan to fill the role.  The leader also feels less trapped knowing they have a plan (this applies to positions with poor performers as well).

The direct report feels better knowing the organization is not stuck should they move on and allows them to pursue growth opportunities — even within the organization.  A direct reports feels completely trapped when they hear “You are so wonderful at your work, we could never have anyone else in your role.”   This essentially tells them their career is over.

An effective succession plan should include:

  • sources for filling the position,
  • job accountabilities,
  • job function documentation.

Empower yourself and your superstars by putting in place a succession plan, and you both become more successful.

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Beware Of The Anchoring Bias When Making A Hire

Posted September 26, 2014 by The Metiss Group
Categories: Leadership, Performance Acceleration, Selection

We all have biases, those unconscious inclinations, that affect our decisions.  These mental shortcuts allow us to get through our day without having to analyze every thought, but often times prevent us from making sound decisions.

Wikipedia defines the anchoring bias as the common human tendency to rely too heavily on the first pieces of information offered (the “anchor”) when making decisions.

We have seen hiring managers make poor hires when they let the anchoring bias affect hiring decisions.  One hiring manager we worked with, Bob, needed to fill a key role and was initially presented with many poor candidates.  After many lousy interviews, Bob met with an “okay” candidate – Steve.  Compared to the earlier candidates, Steve looked like a star.  Though Steve wasn’t what Bob had envisioned, when anchored with the other candidates, he stood out enough to be offered the job.

You know the rest of the story: Steve didn’t work out and Bob had to let him go.  Had Bob been aware of his tendency to rely on the first pieces of information, to be anchored, he probably wouldn’t have made the hire.

Empower yourself to understand your biases and you make more successful decisions.

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When The Job Outgrows The Employee, It’s Best To Replace The Employee

Posted September 19, 2014 by The Metiss Group
Categories: Leadership

If your company is growing, the complexity of the jobs in your company is growing.  If your employees are not growing at a faster rate, the jobs will outgrow them.  This doesn’t mean those employees are bad.  It just means that as jobs become larger and more complex, some individuals won’t be able to keep up.

One of the biggest mistakes a leader can make is knowing that an employee cannot be successful in his or her current job and not doing anything about it.  This doesn’t necessarily mean letting them go.  It’s possible to find another “seat on the bus” for the individual where he or she might be able to succeed.  Though it makes you feel better, there is almost no return on investment in spending time trying to fix poor performers in a role that has outgrown them.

The worst scenario is when a leader knows the individual won’t succeed, but justifies keeping the person on, thinking it’s better to have someone, anyone, in the position than having no one at all.

Keeping under performers around means a leader is sending the message to everyone on the team that he or she either doesn’t recognize the problem, or is afraid to deal with it. Either way, it sends a message of weakness that every employee can see.

Empower yourself to move employees in jobs that have outgrown them and you’ll be more successful.

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It’s Okay To Be A Passive Participant In Your Interviews

Posted September 12, 2014 by The Metiss Group
Categories: Leadership, Selection

Most leaders admit to being poor interviewers.  Interviewing is a learned skill and is something hiring managers seldom do and typically have had little or no training.

Those leaders who conduct their own interviews often miss much of the candidate’s response (verbal and non-verbal) as they prepare for their next question or process the answer to a prior question.  Also, hiring managers tend to spend too much time talking and not enough listening.  We recommend hiring managers use an experienced interviewer to conduct interviews while they observe the candidate being interviewed.

The hiring manager learns much more watching and listening to the candidate when they are not leading the interview because they have the opportunity to use the critical thinking skills they’ve honed while processing the answers from candidates.  The leader may contribute occasionally but the majority of the interviewing should be done by someone else.  You’d be surprised how much more you are able to evaluate a candidate when all you have to do is observe them.

Empower yourself to have an experienced interviewer lead your interviews and you’ll make more successful hires.

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Take Time To Sharpen The Saw

Posted September 5, 2014 by The Metiss Group
Categories: Performance Acceleration

Habit #7 in Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is called “Sharpen the Saw.” Covey describes a woodcutter who is sawing for several days straight and is becoming less and less productive. Cutting dulls the blade and the solution is to sharpen the saw; however, the woodcutter is too busy cutting to take time out to sharpen his saw and is stuck in an unproductive cycle.

Many leaders believe taking time off or going on vacations sharpens the saw; this is putting the saw down not necessarily improving yourself.  Sharpening the saw requires an activity that is targeted at self improvement.  Here are some saw sharpening activities we’ve seen:

  • Embark on an extensive exercise program
  • Take a class (cooking, economics, leadership, etc.)
  • Eat at least one healthy meal each day
  • Volunteer at church, Rotary, Lions or other industry committees
  • Meditate for ten minutes each day
  • Organize your work area
  • Read a literary classic

Let us know what have you done to sharpen your saw lately.  Empower yourself to take time for self improvement and you’ll be more successful cutting down your trees.

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