Team Talen is Essential
By Willis Triplett, Rock-Pond Solutions
To gain leverage to optimize your operation, the most critical ingredient is the talent level you have on your team. One way to improve your talent level is to remove your weakest, least-focused, least-dedicated workers. The other way is to recruit, hire, retain, and train stronger workers who are more likely to work well with you.
1. Know yourself
Often times, the people who impress us the best in an interview are people who share a lot of our characteristics. Analyze your own style and assess your own strengths and weaknesses, and intentionally hire people whose strengths are different from yours, but who can augment your weaknesses. For instance, if you are very “big-picture,” consider surrounding yourself with people who are very detail-oriented, and “to-do list” driven. If you are extremely introverted, consider hiring people who are more verbal and more extraverted, or vice versa. If you are extremely sensitive and feeling, hire someone who is more more influenced by the facts – or vice versa. Use their very different styles, talents, and perceptions to round out your own approach to the problems you and your business face.
2. Know what the job needs
Take care to hire people for specific jobs whose personalities are better suited for those jobs. You will suffer if you hire reality-based people for task-based jobs, or success-type people for structure-like jobs. You’re not pigeonholing people and you’re not typecasting and you’re not restricting people’s opportunities. Instead, you are matching people to the jobs that are most likely to make them happy, and you are filling your openings with the people most likely to succeed for you and your organization.
3. Do not fail to hire brilliant talent when it becomes available
When you know that someone has become available who could take your organization to a new level, consider making a place for that person, even if you’re not sure what that place is. Talent is nearly as rare as time, and when you can get more of it, you should almost certainly take it. Jim Collins refers to this tenet as getting the right person(s) on the bus, even if you’re not sure where they’re going to sit. It’s a lot easier to think you’ll do this than it is to do it when the expenditure is “not in the budget.” Nonetheless, the game often goes the those with the courage of their convictions.
4. Examine your training
In our industry, we hire bright, eager people and we bring them on board and we promptly fumble those critical first few weeks because we don’t have a well-conceived training program. We generally train by assigning our best worker to talk to the new hire while they work. Far too often the only training the new hire gets is on-the-job. A great operation seeks to reduce/remove variability in how process is followed, but by having one “preceptor” do all the teaching for the new hire, any/all variability that preceptor has will simply add to the variability that will exist when the new employee comes on line. It is difficult and time-consuming to build a comprehensive training program, but the long-term rewards in reduced variability are probably worth the effort.
5. Provide feedback to employees
Jack Welch believes that regular, frank performance review is the most important ingredient in talent development. You should regularly challenge your workers to reassure you that they really believe the job they are in is still the right job for them. If that is not true, you and they should recognize the facts as soon as possible so that you and they can make the decisions that help you both to get on with your lives. Welch points out that conditions change over the years and that the same managers that were top notch three years ago, may not be top-notch today. Their priorities may have changed or their energy may have ebbed. The performance review is a mutual opportunity to examine the premises that keep us working together.
Performance reviews should be held each year at a minimum. More frequent ones with a focus on team goals and personal goals is probably even better. It is easy to let them slide when we’re busy. We know they are important, but they often rank fifth when we’re only going to accomplish four things that day. I’ve made this error myself, and I urge all managers to realize that their highest priority to reach team goals and deploy the corporate vision is to do their evaluations right on time.