Job Descriptions No Longer Describe Jobs

The most accurate part of many job descriptions is “other duties as assigned.”  The rest of it is just a dull list of responsibilities and qualifications lacking all context.  I read them all the time and can rarely understand what the job is really all about.

Any perceived relevance of the job description rarely survives contact with actual work – they are outdated the moment they are written. Rarely do they define the work to be accomplished, and they almost never define the goals to be achieved.  They are, quite simply, a relic of the industrial age.  In the Brand for Talent blog, Libby Sartain asks what’s next if the job description is no longer relevant?  She says:

“The changes of the past decade point to a different environment in which business must search for people. Instead of measuring talent needs by the number of jobs, the forward-thinking business thinks in terms of work—the incremental activities that it must successfully complete for the business to meet its obligations. The measurement of effort as work instead of jobs enables business to focus on output rather than on the input of people in specific roles.”

Hmmmm, measuring the outputs (results), instead of the inputs (activity) – that sounds like a Results-Only-Work Environment (ROWE) to me.  Are we finally moving from industrial age, activity-based time and motion studies and into the future of work –  managing for results?  I sure hope so.

We take this results-based approach in our consulting work with small to midsize enterprises.  At the start of each search engagement we ask the hiring manager what success looks like a year from today.  What will need to be accomplished in the next 12 months for the new hire to be considered a success?  What talents and abilities must someone have to drive those results?  What values fit well within the company culture?   We write it all up in a document we call a Hiring Blueprint.  But really, we could call it a “Results Description” – it’s what a job description could be (if it actually wanted to be relevant).  So how do we know our documents are actually relevant?  Because people refer to them frequently in performance management conversations.

In fact, one of the great joys in our consulting work is following up on the placements we’ve made.  During the first year, we check in with the hiring manager about every 3 months, asking not just ”How is Frank working out?” but ”What have you achieved together?”   We call and ask the candidate not just “How do you like the job?” but ”How does the job differ from your expectations going in to it?”   We judge our own performance by the accuracy of the performance expectations we set and the corresponding results that were achieved. 

Yes, we have an enviable track record of success on our placements, but this is not a “set it and forget it” approach – Results Descriptions change year to year.   Jobs change, unforeseen challenges emerge.  Growing businesses outgrow people, technology and market forces change the nature of the work, and eventually people outgrow jobs.  Work is not static, and job descriptions should not be static either.

If you agree with the following statements, it’s no wonder that very few firms hire effectively:

• The typical job description is useless in defining performance expectations.
• The typical resume is useless in predicting the job performance of the candidate.  

If the Job Description is no longer viable, let’s at least consider replacing it with the Results Description.  As to the resume, I have no idea what to replace it with… 

 (By the way, if you want to see a sample of our Results Descriptions, just take a look at our current searches).

Culture Matters

One of my most popular recent blog posts was about the importance of cultural fit in hiring.   And while it takes great effort to build a company culture, once built, it has a momentum of its own.  Culture is what keeps organizations moving even when managers are temporarily distracted doing other things.  Culture is like an immune system, it repels the foreign antibodies.  People who do not fit in are repelled – like a hairball from a cat.  Customers and business opportunities that do not fit are repelled, employee behavior that does not fit is repelled.

But what does it take to build and sustain a culture, and who has done a good job of it?  My colleague Doug Davidoff pointed out some outstanding work NetFlix has done in his recent post “Why Culture Matters.”  Here’s what Doug said:

“Netlfix is a darling.  Their customers love them – and so does Wall Street.  In the last five years the stock has more than doubled, while the S&P 500 has gone nowhere.  But let’s face it – Netflix should not have succeeded – Blockbuster should have.  Blockbuster had every advantage – they had the relationships, the cash and the marketing budget.  However, while Netflix has doubled, Blockbuster stock is worth less than 1/10th of what it was worth just 5 years ago.”

What did Netflix do?  You’ll be amazed.   Someone really gave their culture some serious thought.  There are no easy platitudes here, no easy 3 step magical fixes.  Just some seriously hard thought about who they want to be.   Read all about it here.

Success or Survival?

This guest post is by Vistage Chair Ed Robinson, President of Capacity Building Solutions, who has been a great coach to many of my clients and a terrific source of leadership wisdom to me.  He shared a series of observations with me, so look for future posts!

Every leader I know wants to be successful.  In fact, they can usually articulate the specifics and generalities of what this means pretty easily.  However, the majority of these same people spend most of their time simply “surviving”. Why is this?  If it’s not a question of awareness, what is getting in our way?  The answer is simple; our actions don’t match our thoughts or ideas.

Knowing what to do is much different than doing it!  This is not just limited to business, but our personal lives as well.  Take some time, sit down alone or with your team, and ask the following three questions: 1) In our business (or life), what is the difference between success and survival? 2) Which answers best describe the current situation? And, 3) how can we change our current thinking/behavior to be more successful?  Then segment these answers into both short and long-term action items; prioritizing those activities that you have the greatest ability to change.

It sounds too simple, but believe me it works.  We often are so caught up in the day to day, that we lose sight of what we were trying to achieve in the first place.  Over time, our actions begin to match this mindset resulting in dissatisfaction with the status quo.  Unsurprisingly, we end up with exactly what we are working towards.  Unprofitable companies make bad bottom-line decisions. Businesses that are stalled in their growth agenda no longer make good growth decisions/investments.  Leaders frustrated with the accountability of their employees often create cultures that limit accountability, etc.

In most developed nations, especially America, success is mostly a conscious choice, as is survival.  Don’t ever lose sight of this fact.  Of course, this doesn’t mean everyone’s journey is equally hard or easy – external forces do intervene.  However, if you’re unhappy with your current results, then take a step back and reflect on your actions/decisions over the past year. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll quickly identify how your business and/or you got off track and begin fixing the problem.  It’s not rocket science, but rather a case of simple logic.

The Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE)

I’m enthralled with ROWE –  the Results Only Work Environment.   The concept of ROWE is that as a manager, you focus only on results, and not managing activity, or worse – the appearance of activity.   Best Buy has adopted this approach to work, and preliminary results are intriguing.   As Ashley Acker puts it, time does not equal productivity:

“Arriving at the workplace at 2:00 p.m. is not considered coming in late.  Leaving the workplace at 2:00 p.m. is not considered leaving early.”

As an employee, this sounds great right?  Yet, not all employee feedback is positive.  As a manager, of course, it can appear to be a free-for-all, but the same complaints are leveled against telework.  So what are the other problems with ROWE?  Matt Cholerton observes, the concerns are mainly because HR practices cannot support it in most companies:

“ROWE doesn’t quite work, and we don’t have confidence it can work for us, because we aren’t doing HR and business well enough. Some low-hanging-fruit examples are that we don’t have good job descriptions, we don’t always understand what outcome we want, we don’t measure/or know how to measure success, there are no consequences (or follow up), and we don’t communicate.”

Frankly, I’m surprised that more companies have not moved to improve their performance management systems already.   (See my earlier post “HR, Don’t Let the Crisis Go to Waste“).  ROWE requires many of the same underpinnings as a decent performance management, telework, or offsite disaster planning policy.   Yet, I find that most firms still lack the ability to really manage performance well in their current 9-5 face-to-face, in-the-office setting.

Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter suggests that the simple act of working from home one day a week would make a profound difference for the environment, for work / life balance, for morale, and for productivity. 

“During this time of economic crisis and reinvention of global capitalism, one of the things crying out for reinvention is the rigid workplace of the last century. It is amazing in the digital age that most work is still associated with industrial age work rhythms and the symbolic chains that tie workers, knowledge and otherwise, to fixed locations. Flexible workplaces with flexible hours and days are long in coming.”

Amen to that.

Why Your New Hires Just Aren’t That Into You Anymore

Sometimes you can do everything right in your hiring, and the person just does not work out after a few months.  Hiring is hard enough, but starting all over is really frustrating.  So why are mis-hires so common? 

Well, one answer lies not in our hiring, but rather in how we manage those precious new employees.  Research shows that employee morale, or enthusiasm declines precipitously after just five or six months.  The culprit?  Poor management practices.  And those management mistakes pile up right from day one.   

• David Lee, speaking at the ERE conference, says that if your new hires experience any of these emotions when they join your company, you have trouble: Confused, frustrated, overwhelmed, bored, annoyed, anxious, insecure, disappointed, regretful. 
• Instead these emotions are the ones your onboarding and orientation programs should inspire:  Welcome, comfortable, secure, valued, important, proud, excited, confident.

Uh oh.  Few small and midsize employers are very good at onboarding and orientation.  Very few managers offer a real orientation or a performance and training “ramp-up” plan.  Even fewer assign a seasoned mentor, most just expect people to “jump in” and then blame them when they fail. 

What a colossal waste of resources.

In “The Enthusiastic Employee” David Sirota reviews specific management practices that offer the greatest performance impact.  Although I rarely encounter someone who has read it, I still rank it right up there with “First Break All the Rules” as a way to understand human motivation and the major reasons people stay with or leave an organization.  The book is thoroughly researched - based on surveys with two and a half million employees.   It is not trendy, but rather chock full of timeless but perhaps unconventional wisdom.  Consider this grabber:

“…the often-asked question, “How do you motivate employees?” is foolish.  Most people enter a new organization and job with enthusiasm, eager to work, to contribute, to feel proud of their work and their organizations.  Perversely, many managers then appear to do their best to demotivate employees!”

Management practices that destroy enthusiasm are insufficient training, poor equipment, bureaucracy, indecisiveness, the status structure, and conflict within the organization.  As David Sirota puts it, “People don’t come to work to fight.”

The authors posit a ”Three Factor Theory of Human Motivation in the Workplace.”    Here they are:

1. Equity:  to be treated fairly in relation to the basic conditions of employment.  These include a safe, respectful working environment, management that can be trusted, reasonable job security, and satisfactory compensation and benefits dispensed without favoritism.
2. Achievement:  To take pride in one’s accomplishments by doing things that matter and doing them well; to receive recognition for one’s accomplishments; to take pride in the organization’s accomplishments. 
3. Camaraderie: To have warm, interesting, and cooperative relations with others in the workplace.  The authors note that “We often neglect the extent to which an organization functions not only as a business entity, but also as a community that satisfies the social and emotional needs of its members.”

So how are you doing welcoming the new members of your community, showing them respect, making them feel valued, and helping them get some early successes under their belts?

Why Innovation Matters

Do more with less – recessionary words to live by.  Of course, that’s nothing new for small and midsize organizations.  When times are good, costs tend to creep up a bit, in lean times you cut back a bit.   So what is the smart money doing right now?  The really smart organizations are cutting costs through innovation, and not simply cutting costs.  And while those phrases may sound similar, they are the difference between lightning and lightning bug. 

I work with a lot of entrepreneurs, so you might notice that I reference innovation frequently in my posts.  So what are some innovative ways to cut costs?   For one, I’m seeing a renewed interest in outsourced services as companies work to turn fixed costs into variable costs.   Where it once made sense to hire an IT manager to support your growing staff, it might make more sense now to outsource IT support to an external vendor.  Where you once might hire an HR Manager, today you consider outsourcing HR instead.  Companies everywhere are reexamining old assumptions, revisiting old ways of doing things – open to new ideas.  They are innovating.

Business to Business (B2B) purchasers “want it fast, right, cheap and easy” (which is on the path toward the mantra of our age – “perfect, free and now”).  Innovation expert Stephen Shapiro calls this the Innovation Bell Curve.  Value Brands with good quality are displacing mid-market brands. 

In recessions, lower cost competitors often earn greater profits.  Wal-mart grows, but luxury brands are hurting – even discounter Target is taking a hit as consumers pull back on unnecessary spending.    McDonalds is doing just fine as people trade down from more expensive restaurants.  Wal-mart and McDonalds are not slashing costs and staff to survive, they are already designed to make a profit at a lower price point.

To speak from my own experience, Staffing Advisors is an innovative low cost alternative to traditional search firms – the Southwest Airlines of Staffing – we are built to make a profit at about a third the cost of a traditional search firm.  Consequently we are very busy right now, as busy as we were last year.   Similar to Southwest, our competitive advantage is “fast, right, cheap and easy.”   Even in a downturn there is still an enormous need for third party recruiters  – staffing is a multibillion dollar industry.

By innovating – literally inventing a new way to deliver search services – we have been able to keep costs low, serving clients who want an alternative to using a full-fee agency (and today that’s almost everyone) but more importantly, we are also able to serve companies who would never consider using a full-fee search firm – a massive and untapped market for search services.    In fact, more than half of our clients have never used a full-fee search firm, even in good times.

Our more expensive competitors  – because they did not innovate  - cannot compete in our markets and cannot cut their prices to our levels and still survive – their process is simply not designed to work that way.  

So yeah, innovation matters.  As Steve Shapiro says:  

“Exercise grows muscle while burning fat.  Innovation is exercise for business.  It helps grow the organization while also enabling cost efficiencies.”

So tell me, what are you doing in your job and in your organization to innovate your way out of this recession?

Moving HR From Tactical to Strategic

You can tell who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.   CEOs who have chosen to make their HR department purely tactical are swimming naked and getting crushed right now – they have only blunt instruments at their disposal – hiring freeze, pay freeze, layoff.  (Freezing is not a smart way to survive a threat).    A purely tactical HR department does a competent and efficient job with compliance and legal issues, they serve employees and companies with increasingly efficient HR services…and by and large, are uninvolved with major business decisions. 

 John Sullivan ranted that he “can’t think of another time where human resources as a profession appeared to be floundering to the point where it’s embarrassing itself.”  Where was the workforce plan?   He sagely makes the point that business is cyclical, why not plan for that?  But when I think of the small and midsize employer market, I have a hard time placing the blame squarely on HR.   There is also a lack of vision on the part of the CEO.

CEOs who have demanded (and invested in)  strategic HR support are getting far better results.  They get worthy advice on major decisions.  They can use a scalpel to cut low impact items and wisely reallocate scarce resources to the things that matter – the things that have leverage – gaining a multiplier effect.  They avoid the idiocy of across the board freezes and instead focus on smart ACTIONS that drive business results.  They are avoiding  the predictable problems that come from guiding people through change, so productivity soars, and results come faster. 

For a brilliant distinction between tactical vs strategic HR, read John Sumser’s post today “Five Things HR Can Do.”  It’s brief, practical, clear and concrete.   I won’t summarize or explain it, you deserve to read the original.  (If you are an HR pro, please follow his instructions, he’s exactly right).

There has been quite a dustup over the latest round of HR bashing  – “Why the CFO Can’t Trust HR“   - this is counterproductive.   It’s not about who is competent and who is not, or who should trust whom.  It’s this:   

If you run an organization, and you must make a hard decision that involves people, do you have a strategic advisor for that?  If you don’t, you are a fool.  Go get one.

In the small and midsize employer market, I think many CEOs simply don’t realize that a significant part of their problems are really HR problems and a competent HR strategist could help them every bit as much as a competent CFO can help.

R U Digital or Do you Live in the “Real World?”

I’ve heard that it only takes about 40% of your productive capacity to keep the boss off your back.  So, if you are an employer and you want the REST of your employees’  productivity, you have to be more inspiring…like a Yahoo Community. 

A couple days ago, I mentioned an HBR article that discussed the need for management theory to evolve.   HBR threw down the gauntlet and made a good argument for why our concept of management needs to change, but they stopped short of suggesting exactly what to do.

Yesterday, Kris Dunn moved the ball forward a bit with a great post about “Why Your Company Needs to Think Like a Yahoo Community.”   Kris suggests that we employers use less command and control management and instead think more like an online community.  (Those communities get really smart people to engage and work for FREE after all).  Kris advocates a more modern approach to management, a “secret sauce” of “part praise, part visible scorecard, and part future career promise” for people who make a difference.  It’s a good start, a place to look for inspiration…and sadly, wholly divorced from the reality of many HR professionals and executives.  A recent study by the Human Capital Institute found that “hardly any” HR professionals (2%) have a deep understanding of how social networks, you know, actually work.

What fascinates me is the wide gulf between the social media adopters and the people who are still living in “the real world.”  Many “real world” people think Twitter is a waste of time, and perhaps it is.  But like it or not, social media will have an increasingly powerful impact on how work gets done.  Although some managers believe social interaction at work is a time waster, some studies show that social people are actually MORE productive.  In fairness, the study looked at people with both digital networks and face-to-face networks (and face-to-face networkers were more productive than digital, but BOTH outperformed the anti-social hermits).

As someone who built a pretty decent network of old-school, face-to-face connections (formerly called a rolodex) I really marvel at how many digerati are not well regarded in the “real world” and how many dinosaur “real world” people are (virtually) ignored by the digital folk.   Hmmm, it sounds like that (r)evolution in management theory might take a while.

Why Won’t Your People Step Up?

With increasing regularity, CEOs ask me the question “Why won’t my people step up to the plate?”  In troubled times, many executives feel suddenly alone and disappointed by the lackluster response of their key subordinates.  

So why is it that so many companies are filled with anxious people who are hesitant to take initiative or trust their own judgment? 

A provocative article in the February 2009 Harvard Business Review argues that the problem might not just be about your people.  Maybe your management strategies have not evolved to keep pace with the rapid pace of change and the increasing volatility in the world around us.  Frankly, I think HBR got it exactly right in this article.

Why do so many work environments stifle creativity, emphasizing continuity and past experience over change and new ways of thinking?  Why do many work environments lead to group-think and so few work environments encourage information sharing, risk taking and challenging of the status quo?   

Every day I see the powerful impact of culture and work environment on your ability to attract, retain and inspire your most talented employees.  As W. Edwards Deming observed “A bad system will beat a good person every time.”

 ”Modern” management theory was primarily developed by people born about the time of the Civil War ( Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford come to mind)  These management strategies were designed to get maximum productivity from semiskilled labor.   The focus was on control, efficiency and scale, and they worked well for an industrial economy.  But these command and control systems are wholly unsuited for the kind of work that is probably occurring in your office today. 

Your management structure, how you organize people and work, how you allocate resources, how you share information, how you give power to a limited group of people on the org chart - all those things you “grew up with” and learned from your previous managers –  may be precisely what is making your employees give up, shut down and wait for direction from above.  As enlightened as you think you are, your current management practices (and the people it attracted) may be threatening your ability to adapt to the turbulence in the market today. 

Today’s challenges are how to build a resilient organization that can adapt to dramatic changes, and how to inspire initiative, imagination and passion in workers.  The newer models of management will be unfamiliar, uncomfortable and might make you feel “out of control” so YOU must evolve in order to thrive.

So what are you doing to give power to your natural leaders – the people who mobilize others without formal authority?  How do you reduce fear and de-emphasize compliance -  encouraging people to voice their dissenting opinions?  How do you ensure that power and resources flow to the most competent people and don’t just become the domain of a box on the org chart?  How can you rely less on top-down supervision and give front line employees more ability to serve customers? 

Obviously there are no easy answers, but HBR argues it’s time to move past Management 1.0 into the next era of management.  I wholeheartedly agree.  

See these related posts for additional perspective:

 How to Hire People who Thrive in Turbulence

How to “Trade-in” Poor Performers for Top Performers

How Companies Turn Crisis into Opportunity

Recessions Spur Innovation

Adversity often brings out the best in people.  Our current recession holds the potential for sparking both innovation and collective action for social change.  Many people do not realize that the Great Depression sparked enormous management innovation (see  ”Recession: The Mother of Invention?”). 

Many successful organizations started during an economic slump. Why?   Market upheavals provide rich opportunities for innovation.   Wary buyers begin looking for more cost-effective ways to meet their needs so new business models gain traction in the market.  (For that very reason, I’ve argued that search firms must innovate their way out of this recession).

Some people say a lack of venture capital money is really not a constraint to innovation.  Tim O’Reilly in an article in Forbes, sees it this way “many of the great waves of creative destruction . . . didn’t even start with the profit motive.  Rather they started with interesting problems and people who wanted to solve them . . . because exploring new ideas was fun.”   He suggests that venture capital follows innovation, not the other way around.  “The people inventing the future are doing so just because it’s fun.”

In this economy, fear of change might be the biggest danger facing your business.  So, here’s the question: are you innovating?   Are your employees showing resilience and really swinging for the fences, or just playing it safe?

What Exactly is a Top Performer?

I cringe every time a hiring executive tells me they use Topgrading.  My reaction is visceral when people mention “Hiring A Players.”  (So naturally I cheered when Harvard Business Review published the far more sensible “Let’s Hear it for B Players.”)

I acknowledge that Brad Smart is a very credentialed guy and he has built quite a dynasty on the Topgrading concept -  I just never see it applied intelligently in small and midsize enterprises.   Never.  (Remember,  I work hard to avoid using absolutes in sentences, so I must be adamant about this).   

OK, so I also freely admit that I gave up and only made it halfway through the book (worst beach read ever).  I just find Topgrading too rigid and impractical.  And no way will most managers first learn the interview techniques and then spend 3 hours in a CIDS interrogation, I mean interview. . . no, I mean interrogation.

What I object to most about Top Grading is the vague definition of an “A Player” -  “the top 10% of available talent for the compensation level” -  like anyone could possibly determine who exactly qualifies.  But this is what really irks me; even if you did figure it out, it would NOT help you hire correctly.

One thing I know for certain:  top performance in one environment does not necessarily predict top performance in another.  Simply hiring Olympic athletes or poaching your competitor’s top person guarantees you nothing.  Nothing.

So rather than filling your company with mythical “A Players”  here is strategy that will dramatically improve both your results and the quality of your life: 

The Misplaced Loyalty of the CEO

There is a consistent theme emerging from my conversations with CEO’s lately.  Loyalty.  While many people enjoy bashing Fortune 500 CEO’s for showing no loyalty to employees – and for dumbsizing, the bigger issue for smaller organizations is too much loyalty.   I see too much loyalty to long-time employees who are not performing, and too little loyalty to everyone else who is.   Truth be told, I’m not really a fan of Jack Welch, but he did have an interesting column about misplaced loyalty in BusinessWeek.

Most business leaders really struggle with their loyalty to long-time employees who are no longer effective, and while I think loyalty in general is both admirable and good business . . . blind loyalty is not.  It is dangerous.   The context matters. 

Sometimes the person’s performance just waned over time – they “got comfortable”,  sometimes the person was simply over-promoted (Think: Peter Principle), sometimes the person took on a job that appeared similar but required different skills (Think: salesman promoted to sales manager), perhaps the most common is when a growing company simply “outgrew” one of the original employees.  

Increasingly in this recession, the problem person was a good steward of a function during normal times, but simply cannot adapt to the chaos of the current environment.   They resist change, ignore market signals and get in the way of new initiatives – doing what is comfortable and familiar, instead of what is right.

My conversations with CEO’s generally go something like this:

Search Firms Must Innovate, But Will They?

This is my third recession in the staffing business, and this one is different.  The search business has arrived at what Andy Grove would call a  ”strategic inflection point” – where the fundamentals of its’ business are about to change.   Costs simply must come down, way down.  I saw alot of search firm repositioning in the last recession – mostly tinkering with their pricing models, but not fundamentally changing  who they hire and how they deliver services. 

The largest search firms got crushed in the last recession – some laying off 40% of their staff.  Of course they got into trouble because they gorged on the dot com bubble.  But they learned their lesson, right?  Wrong.   Good times returned and then they used the same inefficient business model to gorge on the financial services bubble and surprise!  now they are now laying off again.  Note to my investment advisor:  The next time any major national search firm earns a third of their revenue from any business sector…that’s the very definition of a bubble – a whole business sector not paying enough attention to costs.

Now the blogosphere is lit up with comments about “disruptive innovation” in the recruiting world.  Most of the comments are about technology and social media, but the same market forces apply to search firms.  One of the most thoughtful is David Manaster’s ERE post – (R)evolution.  In another must-read article, John Sumser bluntly counsels that HR “should be hammering its vendors for cost reductions.  Get the same for less money.”  John refers to a brilliant article in The Economist about the flip-side of Moore’s Law:

“Suddenly there is more interest in products that…provide a particular level of performance at an ever-lower price.”

Here is the problem. 

How Can you Tell Who is Right for the Job?

If you care at all about hiring, education or even football, don’t miss Malcolm Gladwell’s riveting article in The New Yorker.  “Most Likely to Succeed – How do we hire when we can’t tell who is right for the job?”  

Seriously.   The article is long, but worth every word.   Here are a few key points:  The students of a good teacher will, on average, learn a year and a half’s worth of material, while the students of a bad teacher will learn just half a year’s material.   That’s a difference of a year’s worth of material in a single year.  Since a good teacher costs about the same as a bad one, one of the biggest improvements school systems could make would be to hire great teachers to replace poor teachers - except for one detail –  it’s devilishly hard to determine who would make a great teacher in advance. 

In predicting teacher performance, none of the “resume” credentials seems to matter, not teaching certification, not a master’s degree, not even test scores.   Great teachers exhibit qualities like “with-it-ness” (translation: “eyes in the back of your head) and “regard for student perspective” and giving direct individualized feedback to students. 

Good luck finding ”with-it-ness” in a job description, or a resume, or even in an interview sequence.  Hmmm, why oh why do I think this conundrum does not just apply to teachers?

Hiring for Performance

To hire the right people for the right job, first envision yourself in their performance review after a year on the job. How will you be evaluating them? What information will they have access to, to monitor their own performance? Top performers want to win, and they want to know how they will be evaluated. When you can share that level of information in the interview, you will always hire more effectively.

Are you surrounded by people who are hungry to win?