I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to lead others and how this gets measured in the interview process.

Two recent things have caused me to really ponder this issue about leading/managing/coaching a group of people.

First, I am high school girls basketball coach. In my first 5-6 years of coaching at the high school level I obtained mediocre results. The last couple of years, I’ve obtained extraordinary results. The quality of the kids coming into our program is no different in the last few years that it was 5-6 years ago.

So, if player quality is essentially the same, what’s the factor that accounts for the performance difference. I believe it’s my understanding of how to coach a high performing team. How do I extract a level of results from a team or group that exceeds their individual capability – the SUM is greater than the individual parts? It took me 5-6 years to get to that place.

Layered on top of those epiphanies of how to lead high performing teams comes a burning desire to “sharpen the saw” as Steven Covey called it when he wrote his book on the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. I am a life-long passionate learner. I can’t go to enough workshops, seminars, conferences about leading and coaching. I can’t read enough books, blogs, and magazine articles about leadership.

My current leadership focus is on teaching mental toughness. I just finished the book Jay Bilas, the ESPN commentator, wrote on the same subject. I am continually watching, observing, and documenting what other coaches and leaders do. I reading everything I can on resilience, ability to overcome obstacles and challenges, and handle criticism and negativity. I want to MASTER the process of teaching my team mental toughness. I’ve actually put a plan together of how I’m going to teach mental toughness to me team this coming season.

Completely different perspective: My son is taking an AP World History class in high school. We’ve been having lots of discussions about leadership styles since reading about all the failures of dictators and autocratic rulers. Suddenly, it set me to thinking about all the CEOs and “C” level executives I’ve worked with over the past 30 years. What’s their dominant style: are they passive, dictatorial, or coaches of outstanding teams?

Take these two divergent areas of thought, and I’m re-thinking: how do we measure great leaders of teams in the interview process? What do the very best leaders DO that the average and mediocre leaders DON’T do? How can translate that understanding into specific interview questions that yield strong, quantifiable, rich, detailed, and specific examples?

I’ll be sharing some of these personal observations -  from the basketball court to the executive suite – over the course of the next few months.

Here’s what I would like to hear from the readers of our blog:

When was the last time you became deeply introspective about your style of leadership?

How much time do you spend “sharpening the saw” for your own capability and impact? What grade would you give yourself in the leadership department?

What’s the ONE thing you could be better at as a leader – more importantly, what are you doing about it?

Your capability to hire and retain a great team is directly correlated to your capability as a leader. Average leadership capability yields an average team.

Let’s work together in the framework of this blog to wrap our arms around the issue of measuring “real leadership” in the interview process.

Barry Deutsch

The best companies have extensive recognition programs that make it IMPOSSIBLE for their best talent to leave.

Best practices in recognition include specific programs at the individual, team, department, and team level.

Recognition and non-monetary rewards should be a key element of your culture, where you celebrate individual, team, and company performance. The rewards should include praise, feedback, opportunities for learning and development, and achievement awards.

Do you have an extensive set of recognition and non-monetary rewards that bring outstanding talent to your organization, AND prevent recruiters from poaching your best people?

Have you benchmarked what comparable companies do for recognition?

Do you collect competitive information when interviewing candidates? Do you ask them what recognition programs they are eligible for – and which ones they’ve been awarded?

Have you posed this question about “what other companies do” to your HR and benefit consultants, or labor law attorneys?

Have you researched the on-line libraries in your trade group or association for best practice information around recognition programs?

There is a wealth of content on the web, including in our website, various HR portals, bloggers, and associations on how to craft, design, implement, and execute an outstanding non-monetary rewards and recognition program.

Perhaps, in my next few blog postings, we’ll break down each of the key elements of a great employee recognition program, and I’ll identify some of the best resources I’ve discovered over the last decade.

In my conversations with thousands of professionals and high school athletes (I coach high school girls basketball), everyone wants to be recognized for a job well done. Are you providing this most basic human need?

Barry Deutsch

Have you used our 8-Point Retention Matrix to verify you’re doing everything you can do to keep your best people?  If not, click hear to download this self-assessment tool for checking your retention capability score.

The primary method you use to attract candidates is guaranteed to bring the bottom 1/3 of the candidate pool to the table.

The primary method is posting job descriptions as job advertisements on job boards. Then we wait for those “fish” floating near the surface to pop up and come forward. We rarely consider fishing in deeper waters for candidates who not aggressively waiting for the fishing hook.

Here’s the typical job board posting experience: You post your ad. You receive 300 resumes. Of the 300, you cannot figure out what keyword 298 of the applicants clicked to apply. This group was so far off the mark, not only did looking at those resumes waste your time, but you’re now angry because you missed the lastest installment of “Dancing with the Stars.”

2 of the resumes in the group were outstanding. When you emailed/called those two candidates, you discovered they had gone off the market in the blink of an eye. You could have predicted that was going to happen when you saw their backgrounds – many others found their backgrounds attractive also.

This approach tends to bring the unemployed, useless, worthless, non-productive, toxic, poor performer to the table. Occasionally, you get lucky and find a “needle in a haystack”. Usually, the process of collecting resumes from job ads based on posting a job description is a complete waste of time.

What do you do now? Traditionally, you would have either re-run the job advertisement on a different job board, hoping you might see a different group of candidates. What you got was the same group of candidates you attracted the first time.

Your other option is to look at the 298 candidates from your initial job ad response and pick someone from that group. You’re probably thinking: better a warm body in that seat that no body.

Imagine you considered the first group to be the entire universe of available candidates for your open position (complete fallacy – but I’ll address the issue of candidate pools and how to fish deeply for the best talent in another blog post).

You know deep down that none of these candidates can get you the results you need, but now you’re desperate. You take the top 3, interview them, and pick the “tallest pygmy”, crossing your fingers hoping your deadbeat candidate makes it through the 90 day probationary period.

Does this sound dysfunctional?

What if there was a better way to attract candidates? Let’s tackle those “hiring best practices” for sourcing and finding great talent in our next post.

Barry

Studies show that employees perform at a higher level when praised for doing a great job, or going beyond the call of duty.

I don’t want to play closet psychologist, but we all know this to be true. When playing a sport in high school, we wanted to do well so that our coach would praise us in front of our peers, we would get recognition from our teachers, our parents would give us a pat on the back and a heartfelt “I’m proud of you.” Who wouldn’t want to be praised?

We can look to the work done by Abraham Maslow on the Hierarchy of Needs that employees have – one he pointed to was  recognition from superiors/authority on a job well done.

As a high school girls basketball coach over the last decade, I’ve noticed that my teams perform at a much higher level when players are praised for doing things well instead of making mistakes. Just today this point got driven home again:

I asked one of my former players who had graduated from my team to a higher level team in our program She had gone from being a rock star on my team to the bottom of the totem pole on the higher level team. I asked her why she had become so quiet, reserved, cautious, and timid when playing on this new team.

Her response:

Coach Barry, my new coach yells at me every time I make a mistake. I’m afraid of making a mistake. He scares me because he gets so angry. All he ever does is criticize what we do. I’ve never heard him tell me in the last year anything positive.

Doesn’t that story want to make you cry? What if that was you? What if it was one of your kids? Imagine how your employees feel when all you do is criticize them and seek out every little mistake to call to their attention, humiliate them in front of their peers, and basically rip them a new one by threatening them about their job security.

Do you think maybe their confidence might be down a little? Do you think they’re going to give you their best effort?

If they are good performer, they’ve already got one foot out the door since top talent doesn’t need your job. And when they lose respect for their immediate boss, they can’t wait to leave. They always have great opportunities knocking on their door.

If they are below the top talent level, they just become ROAD Warriors: Retired On Active Duty. You’ll never get an ounce of productivity from them again. They basically shut down.

So, here’s my key question:

What type of formal programs does your company have in place to provide praise as the most important element of a non-monetary reward and recognition system?

If your company is like most other companies, then praise is something that’s basically left up to each individual manager to do as he/she sees fit. We all know that being crowned with that manager title, instantly makes you a great motivator of people.

Okay, if you don’t believe that – why is praise, recognition, and non-monetary rewards systems absent in most companies?

When will you start researching, benchmarking, and implementing praise into your recognition programs to start raising employee motivation?

Have you used our 8-Point Retention Matrix to verify you’re doing everything you can do to keep your best people?  If not, click hear to download this self-assessment tool for checking your retention capability score.

Barry Deutsch

Could you define employee engagement?

Can you measure it?

Do you have specific programs and initiatives in place to improve or build employee engagement?

If you answered NO to any of these questions, you’re in big trouble with your workforce.

I define employee engagement as employees who are excited to come to work, are learning new skills and capabilities, are intellectually stimulated through challenging work, expectations, and assignments. They get praised when they do an outstanding job, and they are recognized by their peers for going above and beyond the call of duty. They wouldn’t think of leaving your company for greener pastures, even if they got a 10-15% salary boost. They have a clear understanding of your well-articulated culture and vision, and buy into with all their heart. They are passionate about what your company does, and the role they play. Your employee surveys, 360 degree reviews, and monthly performance coaching confirms that you’ve got an engaging culture.

How do you define it?

If you have a large percentage of your workforce, especially your better performers, who are not engaged – then prepare yourself for the upcoming flood of talent leaving your organization.

Companies that recognize the importance of an engaged workforce have specific programs in place. They can talk about during an interview. They can reinforce to retain great talent. It allows them to “recruiter-proof” their company.

What employee engagement programs, initiatives, and tactics have you implemented to create an engaged workforce?

Barry Deutsch

I was conducting our Speaker Program on retention titled “You’re the Person I WANT to Keep” and we were at the section on discussing how training and development is a powerful element of employee satisfaction and engagement.

One of the CEOs in the room blurts out “Why should we train our people – we’re just preparing them to be stolen by our competitors”

I was so stunned at this remark, I was for once at a loss for words. Then, an even bigger shocker took place: Some of the other CEOs in the room actually started nodding their heads in agreement.

What have to come to where we are so afraid of our employees leaving, that we’re willing to lock them in the basement, put our thumb down on top of them, and crush their future capability?

Is this perspective dysfunctional or what?

NOT training your employees is a sure way to lose them. NOT providing opportunities for learning, development, and personal growth is one of the major reasons 50% of your workforce is logging onto job boards trying to see if the grass is greener somewhere else.

Training the heck out of your workforce is one of the best ways to “recruiter-proof” your company. I know you’ll lose a few people over time to competitors; however, you’ll keep a far larger group.

Perhaps, most importantly, the value training brings extends far beyond just keeping people. Your workforce becomes more skilled, knowledgeable, and capable than all your competitors. Productivity goes up. I can’t begin to quantify the value of a well-trained workforce.

What’s your training investment? How much of every revenue dollar goes to training? Does every employee have a personal development plan for formal training, e-courses, webinars, projects, on-the-job skill training?

When you are planning on making training one of the core elements of your culture?

Barry Deutsch

The primary tool that most companies use to attract professional or management candidates is classified job advertising through posting a job description on a major job board like Career Builder or Monster.

This technique stinks!

This technique works great when you really want to attract the bottom 1/3 of the candidate pool.

This technique works great when you feel like wasting 2-3 months finding a candidate, and then restarting the whole process over again.

This technique works great when you want your next important hire to be a function of luck and hope.

Stop using methods that are useless, worthless, a waste of time, and yield poor results based on luck and hope.

Instead, we recommend diversifying your search efforts into 3 main categories to attract selective candidates. Check out our blog post defining the various categories of candidates and why “selective” candidates are the “sweet spot” to recruit for most companies. Click here to read this popular blog article on Hiring Mistake #7: Fishing in Shallow Waters.

Referrals to find great candidates

First, employee referrals are your most valuable tool to bring great talent to the table. Research shows these folks tend to be better performers and are a better fit within your culture.  I’d like to move beyond the concept of just leveraging employee referrals. I’d like to recommend we call it “stakeholder” referrals and look at customers, vendors, and suppliers – in addition to employees.

Step 1 is to create a Compelling Marketing Statement. Read the Chapter in our free e-book titled “How to Attract the Bottom 1/3 of the Candidate Pool” for the lesson on how to craft a Compelling Marketing Statement. The link to get a FREE digital copy of our popular and best-selling book can be found on our IMPACT Hiring Solutions home page by clicking here. Send the Compelling Marketing Statement to your employees, vendors, suppliers, and customers via email with a short message. Perhaps, you could say something like:

Attached is a Compelling Marketing Statement for a role we are recruiting for right now. Could you please pass this along to others in your network (former business associates, contacts, connections, neighbors, alumni) who you think would be compelled by the opportunity and able to achieve some of the success factors we’ve described.

The ten you sent it to send it to ten they know who send it to ten they know – and so on until two weeks it’s now in the hands of other 1,000 appropriate and targeted candidates. You’ve just leveraged the natural networks of your employees, vendors, suppliers, and customers – without randomly picking strangers off generic advertising.

Your minimum goal for using referrals should be that 50% of your hires from this point forward come from referrals.

On-Line Job Boards to find great candidates

It’s not that the job boards stink – it’s your method of using them. Posting a traditional job description is worthless. It gets lost in the clutter since 99.99% of the ads look exactly the same. Most candidates hunting on the job boards are in the “aggressive” bucket and desperate to get out of their current situation or they’ve been unemployed for a very long time. Finding a great candidate using this approach is like the proverbial “looking for a needle in a haystack”.

To top it off, a job description posted on a job board is not an advertisement. It’s a job description MASQUERADING as a job advertisement.

Have you ever read a job description and been compelled by it? It’s the most superficial, meaningless, conglomeration of bureaucratic terms and buzzwords you’ve ever come across. It’s a complete turn-off.

We call this technique of posting the job description as your ad “Drill Instructor Advertising”. It reads like a drill instructor at army basic training screaming at you on the first day when you step off the bus. We DON’T want you if you DON’T have 3 of these, 4 of that, 2 of those! It’s negative, demeaning, and degrading to read these. Here’s the basic problem with allowing your job description to MASQUERADE for your ad: Top talent DOES NOT give a darn what you want as an employer – they don’t care! They want to know WIIFM. What will I learn in this role, what impact will I have, and what will I become for having been in this role for a period of time.

Remember, early in this article I mentioned that the most common technique of posting the job description brought the bottom 1/3 of the candidate pool. It’s even worse than that if that’s even possible. Top caliber candidates are so turned-off by the traditional job description MASQUERADING as your advertisement, that they take their hand and pull it down. You never get to see these candidates in your ad response since they self-select out after reading the first sentence. They are disgusted, repelled, irritated, and feel like screaming when they see jobs posted using job descriptions.

So, even though I am not a huge proponent of job boards to find and attract great talent, you should still use them because they are so cheap and the exposure to your potential universe of candidates is so large. However, instead of posting the traditional job description as a weak MASQUERADE for your ad, instead post the Compelling Marketing Statement. We’ve got some samples in our book and on our website under the FREE Resources tab.

Networking Through ONE Degree of Separation

You’ve heard the old adage that we’re all connected to Kevin Bacon through 6 levels, or you can reach anyone on the planet through 6 phone calls.

B.S. – If I had to go through six individuals to get one referral, I’d retired before the job got filled.

I would like to recommend a tactic of “ONE DEGREE” of Separation.

Let’s say Bob is the candidate we would like to recruit. Where does Bob hang out with others just like him?

• Alumni Groups
• Trade Association Dinner Meetings
• Continuing Education Programs
• Seminars and Workshops
• Online Discussion Groups and Forums
• LinkedIn Groups

Now we reach into each group and connect with Bob who is not the perfect candidate. However, Bob refers us to through one degree of separation to the person on his right or his left. I’ve found this technique of using ONE DEGREE OF SEPARATION – both on-line and off-line to be one of the most powerful sources of great candidates. In over 25 years of executive search and over 1000 search assignments, I’ve probably placed over 90 percent of the candidates through using ONE DEGREE OF SEPARATION.

If would like a quick 15 minute phone review of how to use ONE DEGREE OF SEPARATION in finding your next hire, shoot me a note through LinkedIn that you would like to take advantage of our “I could have had a V-8 to find better talent review”, and we’ll set up a quick 15 minute call where I’ll show you 3-4 ideas you’ve probably not thought of yet to find that ideal candidate.

Barry Deutsch

Employees with initiative hit the bulls eye all the time. Frequently, they exceed your targets and expectations. Is Initiative one of the major areas you focus on in an attempt to hire top talent – great employees – outstanding performers?

We’ve discovered that INITIATIVE is a primary element of success.

Top talent has extreme levels of initiative:

They anticipate what needs to be done

They go above and beyond the call the duty

They are proactive

They are step ahead of their peer group

They don’t wait to be told what to do

Who do you have on your team that demonstrates initiative? What if you could get another one or two? Measuring initiative is actually quite easy.

Initiative is a life-long pattern of behavior. You don’t wake up at 25, 32, or 47 and suddenly declare that you’re going to be proactive for the rest of your life.

The candidates who have it will share example after example with you in the interview. The ones who don’t – they’ll struggle to come up with a few substantive examples.

As many of you know, I coach high school girls basketball. We can predict the future success when a freshman (freshgirl?) enters our program from middle school/junior high. What is this one trait that separates average and mediocre performance from exceptional? You guessed it – initiative.

Have you ever played a high school sport or had children that played a sport? How do most kids treat their high school sport? Like a part-time job. They clock in seconds before practice starts and clock out seconds after it’s over. What do the very best do? They consistently show up early and stay late to work on their skills and competency.

I can observe a freshman for a few months and predict with a high degree of accuracy what she’ll be like 4 years later on our varsity team if she sticks it out for 4 years. How can I do this? By observing initiative that is an obvious pattern of superior performance. She may lack the skills, strength, and knowledge when she enters our program, but by the team she’s a senior – she’ll be a rock-star – primarily by applying herself at a much higher level than her peer group.

You can easily see this among potential applicants – regardless of the level of the job. Initiative is that one trait that acts a multiplier. Individuals without the right experience, education, missing skills, and lacking knowledge – can frequently overcome those deficiencies through initiative.

Do  you have good examples of members of your team demonstrating initiative? Do you believe this initiative is a one-time anomaly OR a pattern of consistent behavior?

This is the one trait that stands “head-and-shoulders” above other success-based behavioral traits. We find it in all top performers and we find it missing in average and mediocre employees. This is why we consider the “INITIATIVE” question to be the first question in our 5-core question interview approach.

To learn more about our 5-core question interview approach, and specifically in measuring initiative, please feel free to download one of the audio programs from our extensive library of Internet Radio Programs. You can view the different free audio programs on hiring and retaining top talent by clicking here.

Barry Deutsch

Over the last 15 years I’ve presented to well over 25,000 CEOs and senior executives. One of my favorite questions to ask is:

Of all the hires you’ve ever made, what percentage hit or exceeded your expectations? What percentage missed missed your targets?

Almost all these CEOs and Senior Executives claim that if they were hitting 50% they feel they would be doing a great job. Most readily admit they’re somewhere around 25%-33%.

Amazingly, this statistic is borne out through a lot of the research that has been done studying the accuracy of interviewing. Most studies, at best, show successful hiring less than 50% of the time.

Does this sound dysfunctional? Why do you except results in hiring that are basically random?

We call this CRAPSHOOT hiring since the success rate is essentially equal to rolling dice on the craps table in Las Vegas.

You don’t accept this level of random results anywhere else in your business. Why then do you accept in when it comes to hiring? You would never accept random accuracy and results in the payroll checks you write or the invoices you send to customers. What rationalizations do you use to justify accepting random hiring results among your team?

There are many reasons that hiring fails in the vast majority of companies. However, the one that stands above all the rest is that the person or team conducting the interview lacks the skills and knowledge to do a decent job of interviewing.

In most companies, hiring and interviewing is not a process. It’s a set of arbitrary events predicated upon each individual executive or manager. Each one does it differently based on their life experiences.  This random, arbitrary, and poorly trained effort leads to random results.

Another one of the questions I pose in my workshops, seminars, and hiring manager training is:

When should you make a hiring a systematic and rigorous process – not unlike any other key process in your business?

The intuitive answer to that question is RIGHT NOW. Reality then sets in and you recognize that to move hiring from a random effort to a systematic, rigorous, and reliable process requires behavioral change among your executives and managers. Putting forms in place, sending managers to training, and giving out a list of questions to ask in the interview (this would actually exceed what most companies do) is not enough – you actually have to change the hiring behavior of executives and managers that when it comes to hiring adopt the philosophy of “you can’t teach old dogs new tricks.”

When will stop accepting poor hiring decisions in your organization – hiring people who either can’t deliver your expected outcomes or can’t fit in the culture of your business? When will you become so disgusted with your current approach to hiring that you’re finally ready to implement best practices to raise hiring accuracy? Discover some of the most common best practices in hiring and the most common mistakes by clicking here.

Barry Deutsch

The vast majority of high-performing, top talent candidates consider your ads to be repulsive. The are disgusted, aghast, turned-off, repulsed, and consider your company’s attempt to hire to be an utter “fail.” They literally want to vomit when they read your job ads.

I see thousands of job ads on a weekly basis. Over 99% possess the same common element – the content of the ad is either the entire job description or a modified version of it.

Let’s be clear about two issues once and for all:

• First, using the job description for your ad is not an ad! It’s a job description masquerading as a job ad.
• Second, top caliber job candidates couldn’t give a darn about what you want as an employer.

Top Talent is motivated by a different set of criteria than desperately getting a paycheck. They want to be in a role where they’ll learn something new, have an impact, and become something better for having been in that role.

Traditional Job Descriptions masquerading as a Job Ad miss the mark entirely. It’s like shooting arrows at a target and purposely trying to miss. If you can’t hit the bulls eye on why candidates would want to leave their existing job and come to work for you, finding and attracting candidates becomes a random activity focused on luck and hope.

When a top performer reads your job description as your attempt to recruit them, they immediately TURN-OFF! They think “I couldn’t give a hoot that XYZ Company wants 4 of this, and 8 of that, and 12-14 years of whatever. I just don’t care” The next step is that they take their hand and pull it down. You never even get to see these candidates since they are REPULSED” by your inability to capture their interest and passion.

When do you plan on putting a stop to the traditional and tribal hiring cycle of using job descriptions masquerading as ads, and begin to craft more attractive marketing-oriented statements of work?

As you may know, in our executive search practice, and hiring manager training programs, we call this document a Compelling Marketing Statement, one that gets to the heart of our LIB Curve of Candidate Motivation. Check out some of our FREE examples of Compelling Marketing Statements by clicking here.

Also, make sure to read our previous blog article on the LIB Curve of Candidate Motivation by clicking here.

Once again, I ask the question:

When will you stop using outdated, tired, old, and inadequate recruiting techniques like posting a job description to attract good employees – when the evidence is overwhelming that it doesn’t work?

Here’s a better question:

Why do most companies keep doing the same thing over and over hoping for a better result when they know nothing will change or be better than the last time they attempted to use a job description as their advertisement?

I’d love to hear in the comments how you’ve used a more Compelling Marketing Statement instead of the traditional job description to attract great talent to your organization.