WorkPuzzle

How Candidate Abuse Impacts Your Organization - Part 2

Last week, I shared an article written by Dr. John Sullivan regarding the consequences many organizations experience due to treating their candidates disrespectfully.  Of course, the reason this pattern continues is that the negative impact of this behavior is not felt directly.  The candidates leave the interviews and the hiring managers never hear from them again. 

But, that doesn't mean the impact doesn't exist.  Like a low-level infection or difficult-to-diagnose illness, it is the type of thing that saps a person's energy.  For organizations, it often results in missed opportunities.  Missed opportunities are doubly hard to swallow because they cause your competitors to grow while you stagnate.

This discussion prompted quite a bit of feedback from WorkPuzzle readers.  I received permission to share* one of these responses from a business owner who I respect a great deal.  I like his response because it demonstrates how treating candidates with respect and dignity (what we all should be doing) resulted in his company capturing additional opportunities.

"Ben, What a great article!  I have two stories that reinforce the positives of treating candidates right. Both involve [my previous company].  As I'm sure you know, in almost any consulting business, today's employees (or job candidates) are almost ALWAYS tomorrow's prospects and customers.
 
In the first case, we interviewed one particular candidate for a senior leadership position.  While the candidate was a great cultural fit, the tasks the job required didn't match his experience.  As much as everyone liked this guy, I couldn't extend an offer. 

Avoiding my natural inclination to call him up and give him the bad news over the phone, I invited him back to my office.  My message to him was simple- everyone strongly wanted him on the team, but the position wasn't a good match.  We all felt that we'd just be putting him in a no-win situation had we made him an offer.  He was disappointed, but he seemed to take it well. 

Two months later, I got a voice mail from him indicating he had changed positions and asked me to call him at his new employer.  I remember the details like it was yesterday...I called him back at 3:30 on a Thursday afternoon.  He explained that he had, just that previous Monday, started a new position with a large customer of ours.  Then he floored me:

'Look, here's why I'm calling.  I'd like you to assemble a team of eight consultants for a project.  If you can assemble that team and have the profiles of the team members to me by 8am Monday morning, the project is yours.'

I couldn't believe it.  We absolutely could assemble the right team, but I asked him why he was calling us and not his former employer (one of our competitors).  His answer:

'I was so impressed with the way you and your team handled my interview, that I said to myself that day...I hope I get a chance to hire them some day.'

We went on to win that project, which would eventually grow to produce $2.5 million in revenue over the following two years.
 
Here's the second story:  I got a call from one of our East Coast offices, asking me to interview a job candidate who was thinking of re-locating.  Before the firm spent the money to fly the candidate out, they wanted our office to interview the candidate.  Since the position was a senior-level position, we scheduled a full day of interviews. 

Over lunch, it became apparent to me that the candidate had the right background, however, he made many negative comments about former bosses.  I suspected he may have some attitude issues.  Regardless, he seemed like a nice enough guy and, again, it was very likely he could end up as a potential customer.  So, we completed the interview and committed to following-up with our sister office.  My feedback to them was, essentially, 'He seems to have the right skills, but there were some red flags.'

Our East Coast office eventually chose to fly him out for an in-person interview, but did not extend him an offer.  Three weeks later, one of our sales executives received a voice mail from this interviewee who ended up working for one of our company's key prospects (this was a company whom we'd been trying to meet with, but couldn't get past the various screens).  The voice mail stated:

'I know you've been trying to schedule a meeting with our company.  Would you please call my assistant and get on my calendar?  We have three projects we'd like you to start on immediately.' 

Unbelievable.  I personally went to the meeting and when I asked why we were being given the opportunity to do not one, but three projects, she said:

'A friend of mine just interviewed with you and he was so impressed with the people and the process, that I decided to give you a chance.'

Those three projects lead to a steady stream of work (totaling well over $1 million) over a five year period with one of the area's highest profile companies.  What we had failed to do in months of cold-calling, we were able to accomplish with one candidate interview- even though the candidate did not get the job. 
 
Both stories, I have told over and over both as encouragement and as a warning to those on my team - An encouragement about how we could impact our sales just by treating job candidates respectfully, and a warning since in both cases, had we handled things poorly, we would never have known why we were not given the opportunity to work on these very large and very high profile projects."

Think about it--$3.5 Million in revenue that would have likely gone to this company's competitors if his company had failed to impress their candidates.  Wow--who can afford not to apply this lesson!

*Note regarding providing feedback on WorkPuzzle discussions:   We don't receive a lot of open commentary regarding our blogs because many of your are (appropriately) concerned about posting public comments.  If you have feedback or want to make private comments, you're always welcome to email Dave Mashburn or me directly (workpuzzle_at_hiringcenter.net (replace the _at_ with a normal @)).  Your comments will be kept private unless you give us permission to autonomously share, as today's reader did.

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Ben Hess.  Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below. 

 

The Power Of Good Interviewing

Thanks to Ben for some exceptionally written material over the past two weeks around the topic of drive.  I hope you have all digested the information and found ways to apply it.  I can tell you that on this end of the relationship, we have.  We spend a great amount of time discussing and implementing many of the ideas we present to you in WorkPuzzle.

Sometimes we forget to write about what you probably need most... reminders of the fundamentals of managing a real estate office!  Yesterday, I spent a great deal of time on the phone with an executive of one of our biggest clients, and pondered once again the nuts and bolts of great interviewing.

So here are some thoughts (some repeat from earlier blogs) and insight from yours truly:

As you know, it's almost impossible to find any relevant or useful information specifically about interviewing for the recruitment of experienced real estate agents. And when you do find something, there might be some fairly good information about building a solid pipeline and following up regularly....the usual stuff.

But I have noticed that two vital components are typically lacking.  These vital components are what separates the great from the mediocre recruiting managers.

The best recruiting managers are those who exercise these two essential components so naturally, they probably don't even know that they do it.  On the other side of the fence...a manager who doesn't put into practice the two things I'm about to tell you, can have 100 agents in their pipeline and follow up regularly, but their recruiting efforts will always fall short.

Before I tell you what the mystery components are, ask yourself what you do personally.  My guess is that you try to sell.  No matter how many times you have heard that this doesn't work, it's hard to break the habit.  If you're accustomed to closing, that's what you'll do.

We've written about it before, but here's the key:  Ask and Listen!  These two factors are more important than anything else.  It might be easy to sign lower caliber agents to the sell method, but anyone of any substance wants to know that you understand their story and their needs.  They want to know that you are deeply interested in them as people first, and agents second.  They need to feel that you sincerely want the best for them, and if the best is working for your company, then you'll only be able to articulate that once you've exhausted all relevant questions pertaining to them.

As most of you know, I am a clinical psychologist and still operate a private practice, seeing clients two days weekly.  I am trained to listen to the stories people tell me.  I can't begin to help anyone until I understand their story and their greatest challenges.  It's only in the context of understanding the entire picture that anything I say about their course of therapy will have any relevance to them.
 
Recruiting is no different.  Do a lot of asking and listening, and I guarantee that you will be doing more for your candidates than the majority of managers and recruiters out there.  That is the central competitive advantage.

As I said, the best managers among you are already doing this...because they do it naturally.  The rest of us have to be trained to do it... and that's OK too. 

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn.  Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

 

How Candidate Abuse Impacts Your Organization

As you may know, our company has the opportunity to interface with the management teams of many different organizations across the country.  While this is a great privilege for us and we learn a great deal from these interactions, we also have the opportunity to identify patterns of behavior across these companies.  Some of those patterns are positive and some are negative.

  Today, I'd like to draw your attention to one of the negative patterns that exists in many businesses, and touches nearly every industry - It is the tendency that many companies have to treat candidates disrespectfully.

Dr. John Sullivan, a professor at San Francisco State University, recently wrote one of the best articles I've read on this topic.  The article is compelling because it correctly quantifies the financial impact a company experiences when it treats candidates poorly.  This article is quite long, but I believe you'll miss some of the impact if I attempt to summarize it.  So, I'll republish part of the article below and then I'll provide a link to the entire article for you to continue reading if this is a topic that interests you.

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"How Candidate Abuse Is Costing Your Firm Millions of Dollars in Revenue"     -Dr. John Sullivan

A reporter from the Wall Street Journal once asked me what I thought was the greatest secret in recruiting. Such a broad question would usually cause one to ponder, but my immediate response was that abusive hiring processes cost organizations millions of dollars by turning possible customers into lifelong "haters.”

For decades it has been accepted that god-awful treatment of candidates is normal, and that since it is widespread, it’s OK. How anyone in recruiting cannot connect that a poor candidate experience is similar to a poor customer experience and assume that there is a significant negative impact is disturbing. Anyone with a basic knowledge of customer relationship management knows that there is a well-documented correlation between customer satisfaction (with their treatment and the products purchased) and customer retention, i.e. their willingness to buy from the organization again.

Organizations like the Ritz-Carlton and Wal-Mart have elevated monitoring guest satisfaction to a science and know the exact dollar cost of obtaining a customer, upsetting a customer, and losing a lifelong customer. While such evaluation is common in sales and customer support functions, it is nearly unheard of in HR functions, which often interact with a significant volume of potential customers in any given year. The impact of a poor “candidate experience” is uncalculated, unreported, and not discussed, making it quite possibly one of the largest “hidden costs” facing modern organizations.

Given that median job tenure is approximately 3.9 years, it’s highly probable that the vast majority of you reading this article suffered through an interview process in recent years or have a close friend of family member that did. As professionals in recruiting, we know the process sucks; the volume of evidence indicating so is overwhelming.

Staffing.org has for many years reported that more than 70% of applicants find the process distasteful. In most organizations little or no thought has been given to how the candidate experiences the process. Instead, the design is solely based on administrative need. Many organizations treat candidates more like prisoners or detainees than customers.

Applicants voluntarily come to your company wanting to help. They spend dozens of unpaid hours preparing for your process. Many of them may in fact be paying customers. Unfortunately they are all too frequently met with web pages that offer up generic content and are black holes when it comes to advancing their objectives. If they advance, candidates will also likely undergo a painful drawn-out application process, intervi ews scheduled at the most inconvenient times, and ultimately be dropped from consideration with little or no honest feedback about why.

I estimate that the average professional candidate voluntarily spends more than $1,000 worth of their own time and money in preparing for and participating in an organization’s hiring process. Given that level of investment, they deserve to be treated like good customers.

Remember that being treated poorly during the hiring process which often ends up in being rejected will not result in a mild disappointment, but rather unhappiness bordering on anger. Individuals who once championed your organization will likely become activists against your organization for at least two years and maybe a lifetime.

....Read the remainder of Dr. Sullivan's article. 

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If you're in a business that interfaces directly with the public, then your candidates are your potential customers.  It is important that your hiring process is designed so that every candidate has a better opinion of your organization after they interact with those involved in recruiting.  Making sure you've got this right is time and money well spent.

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Ben Hess.  Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below. 

 

Drive: New Thoughts and Theories on Motivation

So, we’ve learned (1,2) that the “carrot and stick” motivation techniques often fall short at producing desired results.  Worse yet, deploying such techniques sometimes worsens the status quo to the point where offering no incentives at all produces a better end result.

Of course, this begs the question—if the “carrot and stick” does not work, what does?  Daniel Pink, best-selling author of Drive, spends the majority of his book answering this question.  As you might imagine, the answer is not very simple and concise, but I’ll try to summarize a few of the high points in the next couple of articles.

Motivation techniques take on new and vibrant life when you can get an individual to switch from being extrinsically motivated to being intrinsically motivated.  To address this desired migration, a few prominent researchers are starting to focus on “self-determination theory” (SDT) as the best vehicle to get us there.  Pink describes it this way:

“Many theories of behavior pivot around a particular human tendency:  We’re keen responders to positive and negative reinforcements, or zippy calculators of our self-interest, or lumpy duffel bags of psychological conflicts.  SDT, by contrast, begins with a notion of universal human needs.  It argues that we have three innate psychological needs—competence, autonomy, and relatedness.  When those needs are satisfied, we’re motivated, productive, and happy.  When those needs are thwarted, our motivation, productivity, and happiness plummet.”

This may sound overly simplified, but this motivation theory boils down to engaging what many people are now calling a third drive—the capacity each human has for interest (the first drive is biological--eating, sleeping, sex, etc.; the second drive is responding to rewards and punishments in one's environment).  

For many people, this third drive is suppressed—especially when it comes to work and vocation.  But for a small minority, this aspect of humanity emerges and blossoms on the job.  These are the people you would probably already recognize as intrinsically motivated, and it’s the characteristic we desire to develop in those who are missing it.

While the research on this topic is still somewhat limited, it is starting to gain momentum:

“Over the last thirty years…a network of several dozen SDT scholars has been conducting research in the United States, Canada, Israel, Singapore, and throughout Western Europe.  These scientists have explored self-determination and intrinsic motivation in laboratory experiments and field studies that encompass just about every realm—business, education, medicine, sports, exercise, personal productivity, environmentalism, relationships, and physical  and mental health.  They have produced hundreds of research papers, most of which point to the same conclusion.  Human beings have an innate inner drive to be autonomous, self-determined, and connected to each other.  And when that drive is liberated, people achieve more and live richer lives.”

Take a minute to inventory your work environment.  If you’re coaching and managing a team, do the individuals on your team have the opportunity to operate under these important principles?  If you’re trying to recruit the best talent, are you able to offer an environment where talented individuals will feel engaged and experience their own intrinsic motivation?

These are important questions to consider if you want to successfully compete in the future.  Next week, we’ll cover how to start to integrate these ideas into your team. 

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Ben Hess.  Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

What Is Talent?

One of the things that we often hear when talking to executive teams about recruiting is that they want to hire talented individuals.  Additionally, most of their frustration with the hiring process comes from interacting with candidates whom they perceive as low quality.
 
With this issue causing such angst in the hiring process, have you ever tried to come up with a clear-cut   
definition of “talent?”  Certainly, common factors such as level of education, work history, and personality are going to contribute to a person’s talent, but these characteristics don’t seem to capture the whole picture.  Is it possible that we have a tough time recognizing talent because we don’t know what we’re looking for?

Recruiting guru, Peter Weddle, seems to think so.  In a recent article, he points out that there are an unprecedented number of experienced, highly-educated individuals who have lost their jobs and are available in today’s labor pool:

"Ironically, even though millions of Americans are now in the job market looking for work, a large percentage of employers believe there is a shortage of individuals with talent.  While their email boxes and mailrooms are filled to overflowing with resumes, they see themselves as increasingly challenged to find, recruit and retain workers who have the critical skills and/or the commitment to superior performance necessary for organizational success in the global marketplace.”

Weddle goes on to offer a great definition of talent.  In practice, a person of talent is someone who has one or both of two attributes:

“They have a skill that is critical to organizational success and a track record which demonstrates their ability to use that skill effectively on-the-job."

and/or

"They perform at a superior level on-the-job which sets a standard that encourages their coworkers to upgrade the caliber of their work, as well.”

If you have the responsibility of recruiting for your organization, it is important to read both parts of this definition a couple of times to let the information sink into your brain.  Many hiring mistakes are made because hiring managers either don’t understand these principles, or they choose to abandon them in the midst of the hiring process.

Here’s how you can begin to apply these principles to your hiring process:

1. Identify the skills that are critical to your organization’s success. Take a quick mental inventory of those who perform at a high level. What skills do they all have in common? As much as possible, go down to the task level. Only at the task level can you make appropriate comparisons between those who are currently performing well in your organization, and candidates who desire a career change and think they'd like to work in your organization.
2. Don’t compromise on track record. If you’ve determined that one of the critical skills necessary to perform well in the role for which you’re hiring is making cold calls, then don’t hire someone who doesn’t have a track record of making cold calls. It’s that simple. It’s financially too risky to have blind faith that a new hire will pick up a critical skill necessary for a new position. It’s better to source more candidates and find someone who possesses the necessary skills.
3. Stop hiring below average people. I know that no one tries to make lousy hires, but we do talk ourselves into accepting candidates that should be screened out. Ask yourself honestly: Do I envision this candidate being in the top 25% of individuals who work in this position? If you can’t see this happening, then consider a different candidate. It is important that the “new blood” in and organization raise the quality of the group—not the other way around.

Once you have a clear picture of what talent is for your organization, you can more passionately pursue those candidates who will be able to successfully apply their talent in your organization.  

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Ben Hess.  Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

What Bill Walsh Can Teach You About Coaching And Recruiting - Part 4

We’ll finish up our discussion about Bill Walsh today.  If you’re just tuning in, you may want to read the previous discussions (1, 2, 3).

This weekend is the Super Bowl.  As you probably know, it will feature the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints.  What you may not know, is much about the coaches of these teams.

For both coaches, this is their first appearance in the Super Bowl.  So, I would imagine they are probably more than a little nervous.  When the Saints coach, Sean Payton, wanted to get the pre-game practice week off to a good start, what you do you think he did?  The San Jose Mercury News reported that he followed in Bill Walsh's footsteps:

“Sean Payton had taken a few pages from the playbook of the late coaching great Bill Walsh before.  Not quite like this, though.  Ever focused on the mood of his players, the Saints' head coach kicked off Super Bowl week by donning a bellhop uniform and helping with luggage when the team bus showed up at its downtown Miami hotel on Monday.

Drew Brees and the Saints' six other Pro Bowl players joined him, hoping to ease whatever tension accompanied the Saints on the first Super Bowl trip in the club's 43-year history.

'We're always wanting to steal a pretty good idea,' Payton said.  'I think Bill Walsh, a long time ago, had a pretty good idea, and we just kind of took it like one of his offensive plays and ran with it.'
 
When Walsh coached the 1981 49ers to the first of five Super Bowls for that franchise, he did essentially the same thing.  The Joe Montana-led Niners beat Cincinnati 26-21.”

Sean Payton was primarily trained by coaching legend, Bill Parcells, in the Dallas Cowboy franchise, but with this type of stunt, do you think he has spent some time studying Bill Walsh’s methodologies?  Probably a safe bet.

What about Jim Caldwell?  This is great story.  Caldwell spent the first part of his career as an assistant coach at seven different colleges in the midwest.  He was finally awarded the head coaching job at Wake Forest in 1993.  

His record at Wake Forest was dismal.  Over the next eight years, he lead the team to 26 wins and 63 losses (he was 12 - 52 inside the notably weak ACC conference).  I’m not sure if he got fired after the 2000 season, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.  In 2001, he took an assistant coaching job with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers under the supervision of their head coach, Tony Dungy.

In 2002, Caldwell followed Dungy to Indianapolis, where Dungy took the helm of the Colts.  Dungy lead the Colts on a remarkable run over the next seven years.  Dungy compiled a record of 85 wins and 27 losses, making the playoffs every year.  Additionally, the Colts won the Super Bowl in 2006.

In 2008, when Dungy announced his retirement, he named his successor as Jim Caldwell.  You wouldn’t think this would be a good choice based on his track record, but Dungy had spent the previous seven years teaching Caldwell his system and felt confident that he could carry on that system after his departure.

Dungy was right.  Caldwell compiled a 14 win – 2 loss record this year as a “rookie” coach.  This is the best start by a rookie head coach in NFL history.  It has been quite a remarkable turnaround from his performance at Wake Forest.  What changed?  I believe that he simply executed Tony Dungy’s system.

Any idea where Tony Dungy learned to coach?  You guessed it—from those heavily influenced by Bill Walsh.  In fact, many of today’s most successful NFL coaches trace their coaching philosophies back to Walsh:

So, we learned from our previous discussions that Walsh had “a magic wand” when if came to quarterbacks—anyone who played inside his system would perform remarkably better.  It now also appears that Bill Walsh may have had the same effect on coaches.  In the end, this speaks to the power and wisdom of the system that he conceived and perfected during his coaching career.

From a business perspective, every owner wants to build a business system that not only works (profitable) but can also be predictably duplicated (scalable).  Bill Walsh did just that in the very competitive arena of professional football…not by focusing his efforts on hiring better talent, but by building a better system to plug that talent into.  As described in Walsh's book, The Score Takes Care of Itself:

“Walsh was not presumptuous enough to write a book that would guarantee good leadership; rather, Walsh sought to help us understand the ways we can increase the probability of success: 'That’s what it all comes down to, namely, intelligently and relentlessly seeking solutions that will increase your chance of prevailing in a competitive environment.  When you do that, the score will take care of itself.' ”

Enjoy the Super Bowl this weekend, and see if you can detect some of Bill Walsh’s legacy unfold in the action on the field.

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Ben Hess.  Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

What Bill Walsh Can Teach You About Coaching And Recruiting - Part 3

How did you do on your assignment from last week?  I know, when it comes to reengineering your business, it is probably not something you can do over a weekend.  If you need to catch-up, take some time to read the last two (1 and 2) discussions.

Since it is Super Bowl week, I thought I would spend a little more time talking about a guy who knew quite a bit about winning Super Bowls—Bill Walsh.  We learned last week that Walsh decided to question (and later abandon) the status quo for NFL football teams.  He did this primarily out of necessity because he didn’t have the resources to play the game like everyone else.

Once he had some initial success with the Cincinnati Bengals, he went on to prove out his theories with three more teams over the next 15 years.  Here’s a quick summary:

Walsh left the Bengals in 1976 to become the offensive coordinator of the San Diego Chargers.  With the Chargers, Walsh inherited a struggling quarterback named Dan Fouts.  Inside of Walsh’s passing system, Fouts led the NFL in completion percentage the next year.  Fouts went on to become one of the best quarterbacks in NFL history.

In 1977, Walsh became the Head Football Coach at Stanford University.  He only coached Stanford for two years, but experienced quick success, especially at the quarterback position.  In 1977, Stanford quarterback, Guy Benjamin, led the nation in passing and won the Sammy Baugh Award given to the nation’s best passer.  One might think that was just good luck (i.e. Walsh showed up at the right time), until you notice that in 1978 Benjamin’s replacement, Steve Dils, repeated his accomplishments!

In 1979, Walsh was finally awarded an NFL Head Coaching job—his ultimate goal.  However, the team he inherited, the San Francisco 49ers, had the League’s worst record and the League’s lowest payroll.  He also had, by most statistical measures, the NFL’s worst quarterback—Steve Deberg.  In the previous year, Deberg had a 45.2 pass completion percentage and 22 interceptions.

As usual, quarterbacks seemed to blossom in Walsh’s offensive system--Deberg’s transformation was particularly remarkable.  The next year, Deberg completed more passes than anyone in NFL history.  His interception percentage dropped by 50% and his completion percentage rose to 60%.

As if almost to prove his point, Walsh fired Deberg the next year and brought in a new college recruit to run the 49er offense.  His choice was a third round draft pick from Notre Dame that most people said was too small and had too weak of an arm to play in the NFL.  His name was Joe Montana.

As many of you know, Joe Montana went on to become one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history.  He was the starting quarterback in four Super Bowls in the 1980s, and his team won all four.  At this point, you have to start wondering—was he really that good, or did he just play inside a system that allowed him to experience remarkable success?

Michael Lewis, in his book The Blind Side, answers this question:

“How good was [Montana] really?  That’s hard to know, because his coach held a magic wand, and every quarterback over whose head that wand passed instantly looked better than he’d ever been.  When Joe Montana’s play became sloppy in the 1987 season, Walsh replaced him, temporarily, with Steve Young—whose sensational performance caused a lot of 49ers to wonder, and to feel guilt for wondering, if maybe Steve Young was even better than Joe Montana.”

Of course, Steve Young went on to become a Hall of Fame quarterback himself, but there is even more evidence that Walsh was probably the ultimate star.  In 1986, when Joe Montana was injured, Jeff Kemp stepped in as his backup for ten games.  In Walsh’s system, Kemp completed nearly 60% of his passes and averaged 7.77 yards per attempt, posting one of the highest passer ratings in the NFL.  The same year, Kemp was eventually injured also.  He was replaced by a quarterback named Mike Moroski who had only been with the team two weeks before he found himself in a starting role.  Even Moroski completed 57.5% of his passes!

There are some who believe that Walsh changed the entire way that football was played professionally.  In the late ‘70s, NFL teams passed the ball 42% of the time and ran the ball 58% of the time.  By 1995, one year after Walsh retired from coaching; NFL teams passed 59% of the time and ran the ball 41% of the time. 

What’s the lesson here?  Not many of us are going to be as brilliant and as successful as Bill Walsh, but we can learn from his example.  Walsh created a football system that many people (who happen to be quarterbacks) could be successful under.  He gave up on trying to “find the best talent” and instead built the best system.

I talk to many business owners and first level managers who mistakenly believe that recruiting a large number of people will solve their problems.  In the real estate industry particularly, this is the status quo.  It takes a great deal of effort, expense, and focus to execute a high-volume recruiting effort.  And yet, these efforts only produce a success percentage of about 15%.

What if some of this effort was redirected toward creating a sales system where 50% or more of the people who operate inside of it are successful?  You’ll know you’ve developed such a system when, like Walsh, you can plug almost anyone into the position (who has a baseline set of capacities and competencies) and  he/she is successful.  This would be a major paradigm switch for the real estate industry.  While you wouldn’t make it into the football Hall of Fame for developing such a system, you could change an industry and be remembered as a great innovator in your own right.

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Ben Hess.  Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

 

The Blind Side: What Bill Walsh Can Teach You About Coaching and Recruiting

Last Thanksgiving, The Blind Side was released in theaters.  While the movie received lukewarm reviews from many critics, the public seemed to fall in love with it.  By New Year’s Day, the movie had gross sales of over $200M...and it only took $29M to make.  When a low-budget film produces this type of return, it demonstrates the compelling nature of the story that the movie told.

The movie is based on a book (by the same name) written by Michael Lewis.  He is the same author that wrote Moneyball—a book that we wrote about last year in WorkPuzzle.  While the book and the movie both do a great job of chronicling the life of Michael Oher, the book goes into much greater depth about the topic of professional football.  Michael Lewis has a gift for boiling down the complexities of a sport into simple observations and statistics that open your eyes to the realities of why some teams win and others lose.

One of Lewis’ observations involves the impact that coaching legend Bill Walsh had on professional football.  As an offensive coordinator for the Cincinnati Bengals in the early ‘70s, Walsh started to figure out how to build an offensive “system” around players who had average skills (as compared to other NFL players).  Because “superstars” were not something that Walsh had at his disposal, the system itself had to compensate for his team’s lack of talent if he hoped to win.

And win he did.  After leaving the Bengals and coaching Stanford to two winning seasons, Walsh took the position of head coach for the poorly performing (2 Wins / 14 losses ) San Francisco 49ers in 1979.  By 1981, Walsh lead the 49ers to the first of three Super Bowl championships during his ten year tenure with the 49ers.

The “system” that Walsh built is now called the “West Coast Offense,” and it was so superior that it was eventually copied by every team in the NFL and landed Bill Walsh in the Football Hall of Fame.  The system changed the nature of how football was played professionally by transforming how a team could gain an advantage by passing the football.  I won’t go into all the details here (it took Lewis a whole chapter to chronicle the events and explain all the particulars), but there are some important business lessons we can learn from Walsh’s accomplishments.

In general, Walsh’s system was designed to take advantage of the possibility of near perfect execution.  If a quarterback and a receiver were able to accomplish fairly simple tasks with near perfect timing, short pass plays were almost impossible to disrupt or curtail.  This style of play did have one major weakness however—if the quarterback did not have enough time to perform his tasks (due to defenders harassing him during the pass rush), the plays would breakdown.  The most effective way to rush the quarterback was from behind his field of vision so he couldn’t see the defender coming.  This is called the quarterback’s “blind side.”  Reliability protecting the blind side has translated into big business—it’s something a team will now pay millions of dollars to have reliably performed.

In my next article, I’ll outline some of the recruiting and coaching lessons that can be taken from Bill Walsh’s successes.  I think you’ll find there are some important similarities to what you’re trying to achieve.  

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Ben Hess.  Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

The Checklist Manifesto - A Surgeon’s Attempt to Keep You Alive as a Recruiter

Did you know that over 80,000 people die each year in hospitals due to infections?  Depending on how you define an accident, as many as 225,000 people die each year “accidently” in the United States while being treated by a physician.  (The Journal Of The American Medical Association)  

Compare these numbers to other forms of death, and it becomes apparent that one of the most dangerous things a person can do in the United States is step into a hospital!  However, one of the safest things a person can do is take a trip on a commercial airplane.  On average, only 200 people die each year while undergoing air transport.

A few years ago, an inquisitive surgeon named Atul Gawande noticed this differential and wondered if there was something a surgeon could learn from the airline industry to help save lives.  His discovery was so simple that it almost seems ridiculous:  a checklist saves lives no matter what industry you use it in.

A recent article in the Seattle Times tells the story:

“Commercial pilots have been using checklists for decades.  Gawande traces this back to a fly-off at Wright Field, Ohio, in 1935, when the Army Air Force was choosing its new bomber.  Boeing's entry, the B-17, would later be built by the thousands, but on that first flight it took off, stalled, crashed and burned.  The new airplane was complicated, and the pilot, who was highly experienced, had forgotten a routine step.

For pilots, checklists are part of the culture.  For surgical teams they have not been.  That began to change when a colleague of Gawande's tried using a checklist to reduce infections when using a central venous catheter, a tube to deliver drugs to the bloodstream.

The original checklist:  wash hands; clean patient's skin with antiseptic; use sterile drapes; wear sterile mask, hat, gown and gloves; use a sterile dressing after inserting the line.  These are all things every surgical team knows.  After putting them in a checklist, the number of central-line infections in that hospital fell dramatically.

Then came the big study, the use of a surgical checklist in eight hospitals around the world.  One was in rural Tanzania, in Africa.  One was in the Kingdom of Jordan.  One was the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle.  They were hugely different hospitals with much different rates of infection.  Use of the checklist lowered infection rates significantly in all of them.”

This is a very counter-intuitive finding.  You’d think that with all the training, equipment, procedures, and smart people involved in the process of conducting a surgery, the simple things would be covered.  But, the opposite is true.  It seems that failures in the mundane arenas of life have a way of derailing some of the most important things we try to accomplish.  Something as simple as a checklist can have a profound effect on the end result.

If you think about it, this finding can be directly applied to recruiting.  Many of us have been working in and around the recruiting process for many years.  While that experience is valuable and necessary to perform at a high level, it can also be the very thing that trips us up.  When we start to see circumstances that repeat themselves, it is human nature to get bored and start to skip steps.  Before long results start to diminish and the cause is not obvious.  We tend to want to concentrate on what we perceive to be the most significant issues (the condition of the market, the quality of the candidates, our company’s offerings compared to competitors, etc.) and assume we have the basics down.  Dr. Gawande would say that's a mistake.

Have you ever considered building a checklist for your recruiting process?  The new year is a great time to take inventory of the processes you’re using to accomplish the most important functions in your business.  At first, this will feel ridiculous, but as with surgery or commercial air transport, it can have a profound impact on your end result.

Take the time to build a list of 12 to 15 steps that you know work (i.e. best practices) in your recruiting process.  Arrange them in a checklist format and follow the checklist for each candidate.  Then, measure results on a month-by-month basis.  If your results improve, then I guess it's not just those airline "dummies" who need a checklist to be successful.

One of the questions Dr. Gawande often gets regarding his research is:  If providing a checklist can improve results and (in his profession) save lives, then why has this not been done in the past, and why do surgeons still resist the concept?  The answer is almost as simple as the concept of using a checklist--surgeons don't want to use checklists because they are arrogant.  Hopefully, this issue will not be the thing that trips you up...
  

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Ben Hess.  Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.

Job Satisfaction: Up in the Air

Last week (1,2), I presented data which sadly reveals job satisfaction among Americans to be at an all time low, with a steady downward trend over the past 20 years.

I theorized that much of that decline isn’t so much a result of fewer interesting jobs, as it is the result of higher levels of emphasis upon individualism, and an increased focus on self-gratification...rather than on earning respect through contributions to something greater than oneself.

If you recall, I proposed two possible answers to the above problems:  (1) Building a culture of standards, and (2) Having recruiters and managers of character. 

Most recently, I focused on the importance of building a culture of standards and expectations, which will in turn attract the brightest and best candidates.  Today, I'll tackle the importance of having recruiters and managers of strong character.

I came across an insightful article by Peter Weddle that describes the vital importance of strong character, specifically with regard to recruiters.  Weddle describes having seen the latest George Clooney movie that he feels serves as...

"an appropriate metaphor for post-bubble America... Called Up in the Air, it tells the story of a human resource professional who works for what might best be described as a LOO-a Lay Off Outsourcing firm. Clooney travels 10 million miles by plane doing the dirty work of firing employees companies no longer want or can afford." (Weddle)

Without giving too much a way (I've seen it too), I can tell you that the storyline is subtly wrapped around the importance of character.
 
By the end of the movie, Clooney has succeeded in teaching a tech-savvy young go-getter "a thing or two about the human side of their work.  More importantly, he personifies a value we often overlook in our efforts to improve performance:  character matters most.  Especially in recruiting." (Weddle)

Do you recall the definition of culture I described in the last blog... "a specific set of beliefs and behaviors built on those beliefs?"  This is very similar to Weddle's discussion of the definition of character:

"The dictionary defines character as 'The combination of qualities or features that distinguishes one person, group, or thing from another.'  While that may be accurate, I think it's much too neutral.  To me, character has a decidedly positive overtone.  It is the combination of qualities or features that represent the best of a person or group.

The irony, of course, is that we spend countless hours attending recruitment conferences and training programs that teach us the best practices in our field, and that effort leaves us little or no time to focus on character.  Yet, character is the secret sauce of best practices.  The best practices work best in the hands of recruiters who are at their best as people.  Implement the best practices with a recruiter whose character is deficient, and they may fill their reqs, but they will never recruit the best talent."

Why?  Because character operates like a magnet.  It attracts those who have it and repels those who don't.  And the best talent are almost always people of character.  They not only perform at their peak, they help others do so, as well.  Or to put it another way, they focus on both doing things right and doing the right things.

The best talent have their pick of employers, and not surprisingly, they want to work with the best of their peers.  While they may know a colleague or two in any given organization, they will often judge the character of its overall workforce by the character of its recruiters.  A recruiter without character, therefore, can be an expert in social networking; they can make Twitter sing, they can write job postings even the most passive job seekers will read, but they cannot recruit top talent.  Their nature actually pushes them away.

Happily, the converse is also true.  Recruiters of character have a powerful advantage in the War for the Best Talent.  They bring in top performers because they are top performers themselves, and because they have personal attributes that resonate with those individuals.  They transform the recruiting experience from a transaction between strangers to an interaction between those who share a commitment to being their best."

I couldn't agree more.  Combining managers of character with companies of standards will help you greatly improve the level of job satisfaction on your team. 

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Editor's Note:  This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn.  Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle.  Comments or questions are welcome.  If you're an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email.  If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the "comments" link below.