Windridge - Identify. Develop. Retain.

One of My Favorite Weeks of the Year!

2011-12-28T20:25:31-08:00

“Chronologically we’re at the end of the year but the beginning of the journey.”
Sarah Ban Breathnach

This week is one of my favorite weeks of the year! It’s the week between Christmas and the New Year and it’s a perfect time to take a short “time out” to pause and reflect. Even with family in town for the Holidays I’m still trying to spend snippets time thinking about the past year,what worked and what didn't, and then shifting my focus to the coming year and identifying what my “theme” for the New Year will be. When January 3rd 2012 dawns, after all the house-guests have gone home and the house is wholly mine again, I will sit in quiet reflection recording the challenges and successes of 2011 and all of my forward hopes and dreams for 2012..... Perfect!

If you don’t start, You won’t arrive… Anonymous

Use the questions below to map your course for 2012:

2011

For the past year what was your overall theme?
What were your three biggest wins personally?
What were your three biggest wins professionally?
What were the three top lessons you learned?
What was the one personal quality that you developed in 2011?
List the ways this quality helped you both personally and professionally.

2012

Looking forward, what do you want the overall theme(s) of 2012 to be for you?
What are your top three personal goals for 2012?
What are your top three professional goals for 2012?
What personal quality do you most want to develop in 2012?
List the ways that this quality will help you move forward both personally and professionally.

May you take the challenges of 2011 (and there have been many) and move forward into 2012 with confidence and courage!

"Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Authentic Leadership is Driven by Values - Measured by Results

2011-12-02T07:01:33-08:00

“The first responsibility of a leader is to define what can be. The last is to say thank you. In between the two, the leader must become a servant and a debtor.”
-Max DePree

People long for leaders they can trust, leaders who are authentic. These are the men and women who are willing to be real, who are willing to come alongside others and influence, empower, and encourage. Authenticity in leadership enables you to understand and feel the struggles of those who work for you.

Remember, leadership is about the people you lead, it is not about you!

Two questions to help you examine yourself:

1. As a leader, what does grace enable me to be?
2. Why does this organization need me?

Grace – a sense balanced perspective and a self-knowledge of what is right and proper builds authenticity. Grace enables you to admit: I am not perfect; I am here to help you succeed.

When we learn to share small pieces of ourselves, our wisdom and our mistakes, we then extend trust and authenticity to others. Sharing ourselves enables others not to feel so alone, and thus helps remove obstacles that limit productivity, communication, and trust. Sharing pieces of ourselves brings credibility.

Self awareness, trust, and communication are critical precursors for any successful organizational change. When openness and trust are extended a greater willingness to communicate about feelings and about problems will ensue.

Always strive to maintain open communication and authentic dialog in your day-to-day conversations with those around you. Remember, we can’t change others we only have control over ourselves, so we need to be conscious of how we verbally are acting, or re-acting.

Building trust comes from listening first, then focusing on how to help. Sometimes this will mean our opinions or fantastic ideas really don’t matter. What does matter is creating ownership and confidence in those who are doing the work—your direct reports. Helping these people develop their best ideas and applications will build a stronger workforce and will also make you a more respected and influential leader.

Before blaming or disciplining others, first scrutinize your own performance and contributions. You might find that you are consistently micromanaging, overriding or disrespecting the very people you are trying to influence. As a leader, please make sure to keep your ego in check!

Workers are successful when leaders have these three characteristics:

Properly equip workforce
The ability to pick the right people for the job
Model confidence and optimism

Look at the leadership responsibilities named above and ask yourself these important questions:

Proper equipping – Are you equipping your workforce with the tools and support they need to be productive and successful?
Do you make sure they have the training necessary for the job?
Do you communicate when work is done well?
Does your workforce know that you are there for them if they need you?

Authenticity coupled with grace lets you bring your best self to the work that you do. And grace coupled with competence, character, and intent will bring positive and productive results. Leaders who provide the necessary support and who have confidence in their people, will find that as trust increases - results will follow.

How to Make the Most of Pre-employment Assessments

2011-11-01T10:01:28-07:00

Guest Post by Martha Finney

Does this scenario sound familiar to you? An opening comes up for a key leadership position. Like everyone else you know, you’re not hiring many people these days. So every person you do hire has to be absolutely right. You spend thousands of dollars on executive search services. You bring busy employees into hours upon hours of panel interviews. You think you found the right person. You make the offer. You wait until you can welcome that person aboard. And then, what the heck? Did this person undergo a personality change between “you’re hired” and “welcome aboard?”

That congenial, collaborative, eager-to-please candidate has quickly transformed into another pain-in-the-butt employee with a bad attitude and an unmistakable streak of empire building. You now have the added job of having to manage that person – and all the people whom he’s offended. Including your customers. Including his supervisor, who is now wondering how you could have made such a mistake. This guy behaving badly is making you look very bad.

Because every new hire has to count for a lot, and each new hire must be found in an environment of dwindling resources, recruiters are under increasing pressure to get it right the first time. And fast. Is there any wonder that this pressure has resulted in a 48% spike in the use of assessment tools in the last year alone?

This spike made me begin to wonder if perhaps there are way too many “new drivers on the road.” Thousands of recruiters have this tool in their hands for the first time. Are these assessments being used properly? Or is it possible that their misuse is resulting in a whole new set of hiring mistakes? So I had a chat with Windridge Consulting founder, Lindsay Colitses, who is licensed in providing the Winslow Behavioral Assessment series of tests, as well as a certified coach by the Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara.

To differentiate Winslow from the other test services, she first describes the Winslow assessment as one that measures behavioral traits – those integral parts of who the candidate is that would affect the way the candidate performs while doing the work. This test doesn’t measure whether the candidate has the skills (which is determined in other phases of the selection process), or even whether the candidate is likeable. Winslow uses 24 traits to determine whether the candidate has the desired behavioral qualities necessary to “bring it” to the job – even when the heat is on.

Those qualities include very specific measurements around how well they’re likely to work with coworkers; their commitment to integrity; how they handle stress; how they organize their work; how they organize their thinking around their work; how likely they are to go the extra mile; how likely they are to lose their composure under pressure; can they work as part of a team.

“Internal recruiters find assessments extremely valuable in that they provide insight into a candidate that they’ve identified as someone they might want to follow up on and pass along to the hiring team,” she says. “They can spot potential areas of concern early in the process. This extra knowledge equips the hiring team to perhaps delve into additional questions to explore with the candidate. Or save everyone time and pass on the candidate altogether.

“What’s important to remember here is that the assessment test is just one piece of the selection puzzle,” she says. “But it is a very important one in that not only does it save recruiters and hiring managers time by spotting the unlikely candidates early in the process, I’ve also seen incidences when the assessment actually prevented the hiring team from rejecting really terrific talent who just didn’t do well in the interview process itself.”

To make the most of your investment in the assessment phase of the selection process, Colitses has these suggestions to offer based on her experience working with clients:

Look for performance, not perfection.This test isn’t a pass/fail situation. It’s about identifying potential strengths and weaknesses that could affect how well the candidate does on the job. Colitses says that every candidate will have a few areas of concern (“we’re all human”). That should be expected. The question for the recruiter is to determine whether those particular areas of concern would get in the way of the candidate’s being able to perform the work.

Areas of concern aren’t even necessarily indicators that the candidate is a poor choice for the job. “Obviously,” she says, “you don’t want an EMT who scores poorly on composure or conscientiousness.” But she also tells the story of a CFO candidate who scored very highly on the Assertiveness score. This wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that the CEO was also highly tough-minded. But otherwise the CFO was the perfect candidate. So the two used the insight that the assessment gave them to plan ahead for those inevitable times when they wouldn’t see eye to eye. The CFO got the job, and the two worked fantastically as a team, thanks to that advance insight.
Let the test validate your gut feeling. As practiced as recruiters are in quickly sizing candidates up, they’re not mind readers. Nor can they see into the future. But it’s common for a recruiter to get that certain feeling that the candidate isn’t right. But not be able to put his or her finger on the reason why.

Colitses tells the story of one candidate who was otherwise perfect for a position but was setting off vague alarm bells among the hiring team. No one could figure out why. Just some vague feeling that everyone shared. But the company really wanted this candidate’s package of skills and background. Then the results came in. The candidate scored low in trust, respect for management and conscientiousness – three traits that were critical for this job.

“It was a big triangle of ‘whoa’,” she says. As part of her coaching service with her clients, she discovered directly from the candidate that he was indeed bringing some personal anger issues to the potential job. “I told them that if they hired that person, they’d be bringing onboard a new hire with baggage. Maybe this candidate would be great for the company one day, but certainly not right now.”

They reluctantly, but confidently, decided to keep looking.
Let the test override your gut feeling with additional perspective. On the flip side, assessments can save great candidates who just don’t interview well. It’s said that in school settings tests don’t test much more than how well students take tests. The same can be said of face-to-face job interviews. Some people just don’t shine in the interview setting. Shy. Awkward (one recruiter tells the story of how one otherwise great candidate inadvertently kept flipping her the bird every time he used his middle finger to shove his ill-fitting glasses back up his nose). And unless candidates are interviewing for a job of interviewing people, how fair is it to really put so much weight on how well they perform in the face-to-face interview process? (And let’s face it, we all know some recruiters who aren’t exactly well suited for that job either.)

The assessments can help you override recruiters’ first opinions to find true diamonds buried under excruciating self-consciousness. The assessment scores will give recruiters some guidance around where to tap into that work passion that will make them forget themselves and talk about their excitement for the work instead.

Watch how the candidates behave around taking the test. Who likes to take tests, really? And who welcomes the opportunity to give potential employers a peek under the mental/emotional hood? Not me, that’s for sure. Still for almost everyone asked to take such a test, it’s their first assignment by their potential employer. Watch to see how cooperative they are when given the task. Are they resistant? Judgmental about the reliability of the test design and results? Just a little bit pissy?

Don’t overlook those behaviors. If this is how they treat their first assignment with your company before they have the job, how cooperative and team-spirited are they going to be when they’re confidently ensconced in their new position and don’t have to worry about appearing eager to please?

Cut the candidates a break.Assessment tests have control questions to see if the candidate is being objective and reporting accurately. Some testing services will advise that you disqualify candidates automatically who try to beat the system. Colitses says that Winslow’s protocol gives the candidate another chance.

“We’re all nervous when we take these kinds of tests and we want to look our best,” she says. “Give the candidate another chance to take the test, after you were able to identify that maybe he wasn’t as objective as he could have been. This is the candidate’s opportunity to settle down, take the test seriously and try again. If the candidate triggers those control questions yet again, that’s when you might want to consider searching for another candidate.”

Consider providing the tests to hourly workers as well as salaried candidates.Colitses says that behavioral assessment tests aren’t just for the senior level candidates. There are a variety of tests, levels of testing and price points. And even if you’re hiring hourly works en masse with the intention of getting the necessary skills on the job quickly, wouldn’t you like to know what kind of strengths and challenges come with each new hire? It helps you prepare for surprises – pleasant and un-pleasant. And, by offering this group of employees what might be their first opportunity for professional development, you could be securing their commitment to your company and the goal of achieving excellent results quickly.

Finally, schedule the testing between initial phone screening interview and the first face-to-face encounter. Having the results in hand will help you focus on aspects of the candidate’s background and strengths that are of most concern to you and the hiring team. Testing before you meet the candidate face-to-face helps you stay objective.

For assessment help, please contact Lindsay at Windridge Consulting - 425-697-2700.

Promote from Within

2011-10-25T10:43:48-07:00

During the recent downturn in hiring many of my clients have found that identifying their potential “candidates” from those who they already employ is a better tactic than looking outside the company. Handling this promotion or succession management piece is like any new-hire assignment. The internal “candidates” are assessed for both behavior and skills, and then training / coaching objectives and plans are implemented to help them develop into the new position.

A snippet from the article: “Why Companies Aren't Getting the Employees They Need,” by Peter Cappelli talks about promoting from within:

“Employees have useful knowledge that no outsider could have and should make great candidates for filling jobs higher up….These days, many companies simply don't believe their own workers have the necessary skills to take on new roles. But, once again, many workers could step into those jobs with a bit of training.

And there's one on-the-job education strategy that doesn't cost companies a dime:
Organize work so that employees are given projects that help them learn new skills. For example, a marketing manager may not know how to compute the return on marketing programs, but might learn that skill while working on a team project with colleagues from the finance department.”
(Full Article: WSJ)

Looking for solutions from within is never a bad idea, and creating a stronger internal workforce (one you are developing and investing in) will add strength to your external new hires.

Turning Performance Reviews into Coaching

2011-08-18T07:16:19-07:00

It’s a warm, sunny day and the first thing on my “to-do” list before the official “work day” begins is to water my garden. These little bursts of green and color bring such joy, and I’ve found over the years the only thing plants really need from me is consistent watering. Let’s face it, plants know how to grow, they typically do that well as long as they have water and sunshine. They don’t need me to set a schedule for them, plan their priorities, etc. As long as I water them and “dead-head” them (meaning keep the spent blossoms from draining their energy – another coaching analogy!), they will excel at what they do best, grow and produce wonderful color!

As I watered away, I kept thinking about a blog post by Kris Dunn on performance reviews and coaching. His words reminded me that people are much like plants. They typically know how to grow and what they need to do to achieve and reach their objectives; many times they simply need a listening ear and a safe sounding board (water) to help them have the strength and courage to do what they do best.

And so, here is Kris’ list of coaching skills for managers. Keep your annual performance reviews, and then do the following:

1. “Start an initial and recurring training program to build coaching skills in all your managers. You have to do this or nothing else really matters. (Using external coaches who can coach your internal coaches is a great way to do this. This approach brings skilled coaching practitioners who will provide a wide range of coaching resources, feedback and support to your internal coaches.)
2. To get your managers to use the coaching skills, work with your senior leaders to implement a system where managers are expected to do "one-on-one check-ins" with all direct reports once a month (note: some progressive companies do this weekly, but you have to walk before you run).
3. Be the coach for the coaches (see recurring training in point #1). They're going to need it.

Coaching is the replacement for the annual performance review. In fact, the lack of coaching skills is the REASON we have performance reviews. The one-on-ones should truly be "check-in" in nature, there's no rating scales, etc. The manager sets up a block of time, and the employee is expected to build a list of what THEY want to talk about. The manager is there to help knock down barriers for them. Once the employee is done with their list, the manager uses the coaching skills to talk about what's going well, and some areas of opportunity they want the employee to focus on.

No rating, just talking. Coaching. I know, novel idea.”

And now, back to watering my garden.

*** Read Kris' full post here - Fistful of Talent