What’s Worth Reading

Clients always ask me for articles about their specific challenges, and in the past I would hunt through my old Twitter posts to find the best articles I’ve read and shared. But that was like throwing all my clothes on the floor of my room today, hoping to be able to find a clean shirt to wear next Thursday.

So over the past few months, I’ve “cleaned my room” to categorize the most useful and timeless articles I’ve read, where we can both read them any time. Here are links to the topics:

• Recruiting Advice for the Small to Mid-Size Organization
• Interviewing and Hiring Advice for Small to Mid-Size Organizations
• Leadership and Management Advice for Executives in Small to Mid-Size Organizations
• Maximizing your Productivity
• Perspective on the Washington Metropolitan Area Economy

My focus is on sharing what works, in this economy, for small to mid-size organizations.

I’m endlessly curious about how economic forces are reshaping our business environment. Fascinated by what makes change initiatives succeed or fail. Eager to learn what makes people engage and do good work. Over on The HR Examiner, I briefly summarized four books that have really changed my thinking about these topics. Although I’ve mentioned it before, no reading list is complete without including The Rare Find.

Happy reading!

“The Rare Find” is a Must Read for Hiring Managers

If you want to lock in a long-term competitive advantage for your organization, be among the first to read and apply the lessons of George Anders new book “The Rare Find:  Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else.”

Drawing on vivid examples from the U.S. Army Special Forces, Teach for America, Facebook, Hollywood, and professional sports, he shows how you can see what everyone else is missing in their hiring.

This is no vanity book. He’s not pitching his hiring system, or trying to sell you consulting services. Even better, he is not advocating that you “just do your hiring like we did at GE in the 1980′s.”

No, this book is the real deal.  Space does not permit me to cover all my favorite quotes, but here are a few:

“American social norms call for job candidates to tell a story of uninterrupted success. Previous experiences are burnished until they all sound like triumphs. Traditional resumes are set up so that resilience becomes invisible. That’s a horribly unfortunate distortion. At some point fate slams all of us to the ground. What happens next determines who we become. Some people are so bitter or dispirited they never fully recover. Others do whatever it takes to bounce back. The more you can learn about how people handle adversity, the more astutely you can judge them.”

or:

“…we’re in the midst of an enormous economic and technological upheaval that is redefining what it means to be enduringly successful. Long track records my be irrelevant or impossible to find in fields that are taking shape so fast the everyone is a newcomer. Competence is not enough anymore. The difference between growth and stagnation comes down to finding people with bold, fresh approaches, who can create opportunities that no one else saw before. That’s true not just in Silicon Valley, Hollywood or Wall Street; it’s the new norm in almost every field.”

From how to define what kind of person you are looking for, to how you should interview candidates, this book covers the landscape of talent spotting. I found no evidence of vague, sloppy platitudes or lazy thinking. For example:

“Take something as universal … as ‘work ethic.’ That’s a cherished value at almost any top tier organization (but) everyone’s definition of ‘work ethic’ calls for slightly different virtues. Some jobs call for people who can summon up extraordinary stamina and ingenuity in a crisis. Others require orderly souls who are totally comfortable with the tireless preparation for a challenge that may be months or years away. The work ethics of a great doctor and a great football player are not the same. Solving the talent puzzle means looking for exactly the right ethos that’s vital for a particular job–rather than trying to match candidates to a along list of universal virtues that might or might not be especially relevant.”

Worth Reading

Long after he had email, my Dad would still clip relevant articles from the newspaper and mail them to me. I loved it. But I don’t get my news from a newspaper, so I’ve updated the process. I email my kids hyperlinks to relevant content instead. (I’m sure they would prefer that I text them, but tradition requires that your father be at least one generation behind on technology). 

So here are a few articles I would have clipped from the newspaper for you. (They were actually sourced from Twitter and elsewhere):

• Want the Best Leader? Don’t Trust Your Gut Instincts: ”We get really seduced by someone’s charm and intellect, and we think that means they’re going to be able to use good judgment and make effective decisions.”
• The HR Examiner three part series on employee privacy: From employee monitoring to common law privacy rights to social media–all lucidly written by@HeatherBussing
• Why You Need Both Men and Women on Your Leadership Team:  “Men and women behave differently. Men and women handle stress differently, process certain emotions differently, and remember details differently. And …they also approach risk differently.” By @ChrisFerdinandi
• 11 Things You Should Never Say When You Fire Someone: Very practical advice for how to approach one of the toughest conversations you have at work. By @JeffHaden_bnet
• Candor Versus Civility in the HR Examiner. “With few exceptions, great teams choose candor over civility…If your group can’t manage a little candor, you are choosing mediocrity. Time to start having real conversations.” By Dr. Todd Dewett