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How to Hire
It should be a given that you only hire people who clearly possess the necessary skills to fulfill the position. The optimum approach should be for you to always hire the best people for the position at hand (subject to required salary ranges provided).
But how do you most effectively assess their core competencies and past performance and accomplishments to determine if they're best equipped for your team?
1. First, recognize that it's a waste of time trying to evaluate potential hires based on the references that they provide to you. Of course those accolades will be from friends who will hardly be objective. Nor can you rely on the candidate's former employers to share reliable input-- because to avoid potential future litigation from employees who may have been dismissed or who left under unfavorable circumstances, personnel departments are unlikely to provide you with anything more than confirmation of their previous employment and dates of service.
2. Instead, focus on querying others in their field of work that may be their peer competitors—both within and outside the organizations for whom they've worked. Probe their professional opinions about the person you're considering.
3.Next, check out the candidate's volunteer and public service record. Few do this, but it'll be an excellent indicator of their personal drive, passion and social commitment.
4. Don't hire political hacks. Sometime during your career, you're going to be asked, as a favor, to hire someone connected, or "political." This could be a friend of the boss, maybe a stakeholder, or someone simply who is owed a personal favor by others in high places.
Do everything you can to avoid this no-win situation. Because if they're incompetent—and many will surely be-- you're screwed three times: first, they won't be capable of accomplishing your mission; secondly, other competent employees around them will resent their presence, the inequity of paying them for non-performance and, most of all, you for employing them in the first place; and third, you won't be able to easily extricate them from the office in the future.
I succumbed to this situation only once and it turned out to be a hellish experience. The employee wasn't nearly as qualified as I had cavalierly surmised. And to make matters worst, wasn't trained to supervise others either. The department she administered resembled an ongoing Keystone Kops police drill. Things then got even worse when her department transposed the telephone number of our visitor information center with that of a sex shop. The error wasn't discovered until after tens of thousands of tourism brochures bearing the sex club number had been printed and distributed –and then we had no choice but to go behind the scenes to pay thousands of dollars to buy that sex operation's phone number and take it out of circulation.
If you absolutely have no way out and are forced by management to hire a political crony, try to buffer your daily emotional well being by positioning them between a manager and you.
5. Have a game plan established for this position—Not just a general job description, but also a review of how you envision this person playing a key role on your team. Remember, every single employee is special. Demonstrate that fact in the hiring process.
Provide a list of personal, ongoing performance objectives: not what the individual will do, but what they will specifically achieve—in other words, how they will help the team score points and win games. Include the percentage of time you anticipate each personal performance objective to take, and their specific role in an ongoing collaborative team effort of integration.
6. Above all, seek out self- motivated people to join your team. Know this: You can't motivate employees. If you don't believe me, then consider all the ways people try to motivate others and still fail miserably:
We promise stiff penalties for crimes against society, but our prison systems keep building more cells to incarcerate the guilty. And while we try rehabilitation to motivate positive behavior, the rate of recidivism hasn't dramatically improved. We provide positive feedback to employees; deliver incentive compensation, training, employee assistance programs and other benefits. Yet job retention throughout corporate America is still a major employment issue, with people changing jobs more often than ever before. And that's expensive in retraining and retooling.
Just look around you at the people who aren't as happy and apparently as socially adjusted as most others—You can usually see it in their demeanor, their carriage and in their eyes. They're the pessimistic ones who appear to be most dissatisfied with not only their work, but their lot in life—and it's displayed consistently in how they interact with others, their personal relationships, their perception of society and government, etc. I submit they also lack motivation.
These are the very people whom you must identify and then avoid during the candidate-seeking process. Instead, be on the lookout for only those who are self-motivated. They'll be best suited to be a part of a winning, productive team where almost anything can become possible.
7.Before you hire, test candidates.You should always evaluate by pre-testing candidates—or at least the top three for any given position-- through a third party process. One proven method is to use a series of case histories to assess their abilities to make reasoned judgments in several what-if scenarios.
(Continued click here.)
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How to Fire
No, you obviously can't and wouldn't even think about emulating Donald Trump's "You're fired" approach on television's popular "The Apprentice." (Well, maybe you would think about it, depending on how badly you wanted to terminate a poorly performing employee who's wreaking havoc in the office.)
Here are my recommendations to effectively deal with employee terminations.
1. Make a habit of removing unproductive, unhappy people. As I said earlier, most employees who are capable of good work but just aren't fulfilling their responsibilities are in most cases, unmotivated, unhappy individuals. These people are toxic. And you need to focus on eliminating them from your organization by whatever means feasible. Early in my career, I knew a National Executive with the 17 million-member Triple A Motor Club, who had inherited a senior manager with severe morale and performance issues. He tried a half dozen approaches to encourage and motivate this person, but finally realized that like so many cases of this nature, this person just simply wasn't very joyous about anything—certainly not his job. And so that's what the executive focused on—the person's unhappiness.
"You just don't seem to want to be here, doing what is required in this position-- and I sympathize with you. It's just not the right fit for you, is it?" The recalcitrant employee reluctantly agreed and left the company. That's just the type of discussion you need to have with unmotivated, unhappy employees who are adversely affecting the morale and performance of your team. Sometimes, during their transition out, you'll need to help them with financial assistance or extended benefits. Don't hesitate to consider providing these conciliatory offers because in the long run, they will be well worth the price and costs vs. the alternative.
2.Take unproductive employees through steps of progressive discipline—When there's no possibility of separation of service based on the first scenario, you must provide ongoing personal monitoring and feedback to the employee about what they are doing that's unacceptable and why—specifically, how they are not fulfilling their Personal Performance Objectives or the terms of their Performance Contract (a recommendation I make in the next section on How to Manage).
If you don't do this, and instead give them o.k. annual evaluations, you won't have documentation of their failings. And you will be on shaky ground when you later decide to take corrective action.
Progressive discipline requires you to: a) consistently document your notes about employee's poor performance, b) to personally review these issues with the employee and c) to offer counsel and support whenever they request it--that's when they request it: it's not up to you to spoon-feed them, but to make yourself available for coaching and counseling. Progressively, these warnings should escalate from verbal to written, with attendant penalties that can eventually lead to dismissal. (And here again, I believe you will eventually need to revisit point one above about removing unproductive, unhappy people).
3. If you don't have the wherewithal to handle the separation of service alone, you can get help through an independent, third party staff validation of the employee's incompetence. The process, known as a 360 Degree Review, involves the confidential evaluation of managers by their peers and immediate subordinates. This is sometimes referred to as a "one up"
and peer evaluation. If you have a bad apple, this technique will lay bare all of their weaknesses. This is a great management tool as well--but let's be fair; they should assess you, too. In all cases, you should validate these approaches with legal counsel and, whenever feasible, with other senior management who can responsibly support the best course of action.
How to Manage
I warned earlier that you can't motivate employees, but what you must do is provide a constructive environment that allows for an individual's self-motivation. This includes:
1. No surprises. Above all, this means to create a workplace of transparency, candor and openness, where there are no surprises for anyone.
2. Full disclosure. Everyone should know the ground rules about all issues, with the exception of proprietary competitive information. A well-designed, up-to-date Personnel Policy and Procedures Manual that all employees have is a must.
3. An ethics policy should be publicly posted and signed by all. It should state what is unacceptable and won't be tolerated; from nepotism to favoritism, to violations of honesty, trust and respect for individuals. The policy shouldn't be written by management, but by the rank and file employees who comprise the core of the organization. Use an outside professional facilitator if needed.
4. Give employees a Performance Contract. An Employee Personnel Manual should never be designed as an implied contract with an employee that guarantees employment come rain or come shine. Nor am I suggesting a written document that binds the employer in perpetuity to the employee. However, I favor the use of an individual contract, or written and signed commitment between the employee and employer, that asks for the staffer's best ongoing efforts in fulfilling the Personal Performance Objectives of his/her position. And the employee should agree to abide by both the Personnel Policy Standards and its Ethics Policy.
5. Develop an Office Operations Committee comprised of a self-chosen representative handful of rank and file employees who should meet regularly to discuss and advise management on employee concerns and questions.
6. "Three P Meetings": Your most effective tool for employee management. I said at the beginning of this chapter that there mustn't be any surprises among your team. The most effective process for avoiding them is through ongoing, regularly scheduled, productive but brief, "Three P meetings" (plans, progress and problems). In fact, I firmly believe that 99% of all meetings should conform to this "Three P" approach. They should be held weekly. Each meeting should be no more than ten to fifteen minutes in duration. . So whether you're managing up or managing down, here is how you should structure these meetings, prepared in writing, on a single sheet of paper:
Begin with Plans, prioritizing and summarizing the agreed upon plans or assignments that you're now undertaking, or that your staff is initiating as previously confirmed with you.
Next, review the progress of project completion, detailing the step-by-step work to date, concluding with anticipated timeline completion dates as they conform to the agreed upon schedule.
Outline any problems you are facing in carrying out your assignment. (Here's where most fail; in being willing to candidly assess and report concerns, challenges or impediments to management) You must be willing to fairly appraise this situation. And it's also important to be prepared to offer suggested solutions. But you can also ask for collaborative advice, assistance and management support at this time. New, agreed upon timelines may then be established.
7. Establishing deadlines. This may come as a surprise to you, but as a manager, you should avoid setting project deadlines for employee assignments except in rare cases when there are unusual time constraints imposed by you or your senior management. Instead, you should require staff people assigned to the task to set and adhere to their own deadlines, which you should merely approve and monitor as part of ongoing Three P Reports. After all, they are best equipped to know how much time it will take to best fit the operational requirements for this work into their own delivery of additional commitments. To supersede their judgment in forecasting timelines, over time, will minimize their responsibility, authority and resulting morale.
8. Fulfilling deadlines. Timelines established by the staff are meant to be kept. It's a commitment to everyone on the team. However, if and when, they're missed, employees are responsible for giving everyone advance notice that there will be a delay—along with a new firm date for project completion.
9. Policies, procedures, implementation outlines. A company is measured by the how-to-do-it documents it keeps and follows. All programs and policies, like numbers 7 and 8 above, should be memorialized in writing for the entire staff. Remember, no surprises.
Program implementation outlines should include: program objective, steps to completion, manpower and financial resources required, methods for evaluating program success, and sign off from all involved.
Are you the problem?
Finally, pay attention to how you behave and whether negative situations in your office are due to your previous inattention to personnel needs; you just might be the problem, and the future solution.
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