WorkPuzzle

Agent Retention: Someone's About to Pull the Plug on Your Bathtub - Part 2

A couple of weeks ago, we highlighted an article written by Dr. John Sullivan regarding how turnover will increase once the economy starts to recover.  If your company is going to retain good agents (and employees), more emphasis must be put on retention metrics and strategies.  In the previous WorkPuzzle article, I covered retention metrics.  Today we’ll discuss Dr. Sullivan’s retention strategies.

Retention strategies can be broken down into three categories: 

1.  Laissez-faire Approaches:  This is the most common approach and involves everything from doing nothing (i.e. turnover is normal and unavoidable) to relying solely on effective recruiting.  If your company is going to be successful with this approach alone, you must develop excellent recruiting and talent pool processes that provide talent on demand.

2.  Company-wide Approaches:  People generally seek out employment to provide income and security to their families and to find personal engagement.  Most company-wide approaches involve making compensation opportunities better (addressing income), making benefits better (addressing security), and increasing the workforce’s engagement in their work.

If your company is known for not being competitive with other companies with regard to compensation and benefits, you’ll likely have a retention problem.  However, the research suggests that incrementally increasing compensation and benefits with the hope of increasing retention will most likely cost more than it produces in retained revenue.

A better return can be achieved by attempting to increase the workforce’s engagement in their work.  Doing this on a company-wide basis is a challenge.  Companies have attempted many things with varying levels of success.  Here is a short list of ideas that Dr. Sullivan presents:

• Employment Branding Strategy: Build the brand of the company up in the mind of the agents. Agents will want to stay with a firm that they perceive as the best place to work.
• Blocking Strategy: Erect barriers that keep external recruiters from contacting your company’s agents and employees.
• Casino Strategy: Make the physical work environment so attractive that the environment by itself becomes a retention tool. Casinos use the physical environment to keep their customers from thinking about the outside world. Google pioneered this in the employment world by providing free food, a gym, on-site events, etc.
• Improve Training, Learning and Development: This is the most popular among real estate companies and probably the most effective. High-performers tend to have a keen interest in continuous learning and will stick with a company where that need is being met. Coupled with increased opportunities to use new skills and techniques, well-trained agents can quickly contribute to revenues.
• Remove Ineffective Managers: The number one reason an agent or employee leaves a company is a poor relationship with their first level manager. Replacing individuals who are a poor fit for the management role is the best long-term strategy for reducing turnover.

3.  Personalized Approaches:  With people, one-size rarely fits all the individuals involved. Targeting retention strategies to the individual needs of an agent takes much more time and effort, but it also produces the greatest results.  This is where good metrics and open lines of communication will allow meaningful and productive dialog to take place.  Sometimes it’s difficult for agents to quantify what they want.  Concrete data regarding performance metrics, opportunities, and a competitor’s performance can keep the conversations from focusing too much on emotion or personal opinion.  Dr. Sullivan suggests a personalized plan should address issues such as:

• Flexibility: Think of things that can be done to reduce an agent's stress and the incremental costs of doing business inside the framework of your company. Focus on issues that would strengthen the individual’s family and personal relationships.
• Special Perks and Opportunities: Special perks have been used for many years by companies to incentivize performance. Why? They work! Rotate the perks around — People get bored with the same old thing. Also, try to customize the perks to the agent’s interests. It is tough for a competitor to duplicate thoughtfulness. In addition to perks, consider making special business/revenue generating opportunities available to those agents whom you want to retain. This can be tricky because it can discourage others on your team, but a good manager can find the right tension between these competing priorities.
• Challenge/Exposure Strategy: This approach increases the opportunities for targeted agents or employees to be challenged with exciting stretch projects and rotations. In addition, agents interested in increasing their exposure to upper management executives are provided with an exposure plan to increase their visibility.
• Demonstrating Impact: This education strategy focuses on improving retention rates of key agents and employees who may be unaware of the significant impact of their work. It proactively “walks them downstream” in order to see the impact of their work by meeting and interacting with not only customers, but also others in the company and your organization at large.

There are many more issues and ideas that could be addressed regarding this topic.  Hopefully, this article will serve to ignite your creativity regarding how you can retain the agents and employees on your team.  Don't underestimate the disparagement that many people feel toward their employers due to the difficult economic circumstances.  If you do, you'll have to suffer through the potential loss of those agents and employees...a loss that may have been prevented...

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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.

Three Mistakes Effective Hiring Managers Do Not Make

Some of the best lessons for recruiting and hiring come from realities that are experienced in other parts of a business.  Principles that are discovered through the application of buying, selling, customer service, and other business functions often give us important insight into our talent management efforts.

Michael Mauboussin wrote an article in Harvard Business Review this month that demonstrates such an application.  The article is called When Individuals Don’t Matter, and the topic is understanding the behaviors of a complex system.  More specifically, it addresses the hard-to-predict behaviors that emerge from the interaction of individuals in a business system.

I know, this article sounds like something you’d want to pick up when you’re having a hard time sleeping, but stick with me—I think you’ll see how this can make you a more effective hiring manager.

Mauboussin lays the groundwork by describing the nature of a complex system:

“ 'If you watch an ant try to accomplish something, you’ll be impressed by how inept it is,’ said Stanford biologist Deborah Gordon in a National Geographic article about swarm theory.  ‘Ants aren’t smart…ant colonies are.’  If you’re familiar with the ideas behind the wisdom of crowds and swarm intelligence, you’re probably nodding knowingly.  Under the right conditions, groups—whether ant colonies, markets, or corporations—can be smarter than any of their members.”

Effective hiring managers understand that their organizations are made up of individuals, but only gain their true synergy as a team.  When bringing new members onto the team, they spend time considering how a person will fit with the culture and what contribution the person will offer to make the team better.

This is not easy to do.  When there are deadlines and performance pressures with regard to the hiring process, hiring mangers often focus on what’s right in front of them.  The chances of making a hiring mistake increase under these conditions.

Mauboussin goes on to lay out three mistakes that executives make when dealing with complex systems.  A pertinent application can be made to an organization’s hiring process.

Mistake #1:   Managers extrapolate individual behavior to explain collective behavior.

If your team is performing well, there is a tendency to attribute that success to the most visible members on the team.  In turn, we want to hire more individuals who are like the prominent high-performing employees.  This is not a bad strategy, but it can’t be successfully implemented without considering what resources the new high potential employees could disproportionately consume.  For example, if support resources are reduced or diluted in the support of the new employee, could the performance of the existing high performing employees be diminished due to lack of support?  The collective may end up performing worse as you add high performers. 

Mistake #2:   Managers fail to recognize that changes in one component of a complex system have unintended consequences on the whole.

Let’s imagine that you manage a real estate office in a prominent suburb of a large metropolitan area.  While your office is successful, you also have two competitors who regularly attain sales volume equal to your organization.  Recruiting high-performing agents from your competitors is a quick way to gain market share and increase your revenues, right?  It may not be that simple.

One of our clients told us about a prominent real estate agent in his community who was very effective at marketing his services.  He drew a huge amount of attention and new clients as a result of his efforts.  However, due to his ego and abrasive personality, a percentage of his prospects would look for alternatives after initially interacting with the “celebrity agent.”  Several of the agents in our client’s office would scoop up these disgruntled prospects and receive the direct benefit (and low cost) of the competitor’s marketing efforts.

What if you were able to hire the “celebrity agent?”  On one hand, it would be a significant win for your marketing prominence in the community and your short-term market share and revenues would almost certainly increase.  But, hiring this person could disrupt the complex system of how the real estate companies interact with each other and the customers in your community.  You may end up with less business in the long-run because the system compensated in a way that worked to your disadvantage. 

Mistake #3:  Managers tend to prize standout individuals while ignoring how much they draw on their surrounding systems for support.

When you recruit a high performer (especially if it is someone you lure away from a competitor), you naturally have high expectations.  You hope that the new employee’s high performance can be duplicated in your organization.  The reality is…it rarely happens.

One Harvard Business School study tracked more than 1000 high-performing equity analysts over a decade and monitored how their performance changed when they switched firms.  The disappointing conclusion of the research was that only 20% of the analysts could duplicate their high performance once hired into a new company.  Why?  Because the support structures that helped make the person successful in the first company were not made available in the new company.

Conclusion:  All three mistakes have the same root:  Wrong assumptions about the relevance of an individual to the behavior of a complex adaptive system.  While change is necessary, still going to happen, and not something you should fear, effective managers navigate change with the needs and dynamics of the overall team in mind.  In the end, the performance of the organization is going to trump the potential of any particular individual—no matter how high-performing the person may be.

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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.

Agent Retention: Someone's About to Pull the Plug on your Bathtub

I've read numerous articles in the last month regarding a coming wave of turnover that is predicted to hit companies if an economic recovery starts to materialize.  The line of reasoning is that if employees have been treated poorly (from their personal perspective) during the economic downturn, they will be looking to make a move upon the long-awaited recovery.  The premise is that they’ve only remained with their present employer because there were no other options.  When new opportunities begin to emerge during a recovery, many will express their dissatisfaction by heading for the door. 

Dr. John Sullivan, a professor at San Francisco State University, wrote a recent article that summarizes the problem in this way:

“Study after study has confirmed the notion that many employees would have left their employers months/years ago had the option to do so been viable.  The economic downturn, combined with the mortgage crisis, has forced many frustrated, disappointed, and unmotivated employees to stay put.  The trend is not a new one and is consistent with past downturns.

While turnover rates are at an all-time low, they most certainly cannot be taken as an indication of a firm’s status as a desirable place to work.

Just as in years past, when job opportunities become more prevalent, employees will exercise their right to demonstrate just how much they appreciated the treatment they received throughout reductions in force, furloughs, clumsy mergers, travel freezes, and budget cuts.  The level of animosity among many will render most traditional retention approaches ineffective.

Some studies indicate that as many as two-thirds of employees are ready to go.  Unfortunately, few corporations are preparing today to handle the dramatic increase in voluntary terminations that will come tomorrow.”

Of course, Dr. Sullivan is looking at this issue from a workforce-at-large perspective.  However, many of the same principles apply to real estate businesses.  There is a lot of dissatisfaction among real estate agents.  In their minds, they’ve been forced to make a great number of sacrifices over the last several years, and numerous agents believe their company and their manager were at least partially to blame.  If a person has this mindset, it doesn’t take much to convince them that the grass is greener in a new organization.

Dr. Sullivan goes on to suggest that the first step to solving or lessening the impact of a problem is being able to measure factors that lead up to it becoming a reality:

“Retention metrics in most organizations begin and end with overall turnover by period.  Absent are metrics that measure the business impact of turnover and specific goals to mitigate predicted impact.  If your retention function doesn’t measure and report these five key metrics, chances are your efforts are under-managed:

•The cost of turnover.  Reporting a percentage turnover rate seldom excites executives, but converting that turnover rate to a dollar impact on business performance can establish the visibility on talent issues needed to transform a good recruiting function into a great one.

•Top performer/key employee turnover.  Often called regrettable turnover, this measure prioritizes the jobs and individuals based on the degree to which their leaving hurts the firm.

•Competitor win/loss ratio. This metric is simply the ratio of the number of top performers you have successfully recruited away from a competitor compared to the number of top performers who voluntarily terminated to join a competitor.  If a top performer quitting goes directly to a competing firm (vs. retiring), it raises the costs because it hurts the firm while aiding a competitor.

•Preventable turnover.  If turnover is occurring for silly or preventable reasons, the percentage of cases where that is true needs to be reported and fixed.

•Percentage of 'at risk' employees.  The best firms proactively identify high-priority individuals who present a high risk of leaving during the next one or two years.  Reporting the percentage of target individuals at risk alerts managers, helping them put into place proactive programs attacking retention issues before they get out of hand."

As we’ve discussed in the past, you can’t improve what you can’t measure.  If you start by measuring the impact turnover has on your organization, the strategies to minimize that impact will start to become evident.  
 
The good news in all this is that many of your competitors may not see this coming.  When your competitor’s agents start to gain some confidence in the economic recovery, make sure that you are well positioned to receive them with open arms…

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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 100 Best Business Books of All Time: How Many of These Books Have You Read?

Are you looking for a good book to read this weekend?  Pick up a copy of The 100 Best Business Books of All Time and it may lead to a whole bunch of good reading! 

Here is the list of business books that made the list, published by Jack Covert and Todd Sattersten (these guys are executives from a company called 800-CEO-READ) earlier this year:

You: Improving your life, your person and your strengths.

• Flow by Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi
• Getting Things Done by David Allen
• The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
• How to Be a Star at Work by Robert E. Kelley
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Swim with the Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive by Harvey B. Mackay
• The Power of Intuition by Gary Klein
• What Should I Do with My Life? by Po Bronson
• Oh, the Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss/Theodore Geisel
• Chasing Daylight by Eugene O'Kelly

Leadership: Inspiration. Challenge. Courage. Change.

• On Becoming a Leader by Warren Bennis
• The Leadership Moment by Michael Useem
• The Leadership Challenge by James M. Kouzes and Barry Z. Posner
• Leadership Is an Art by Max De Pree
• The Radical Leap by Steve Farber
• Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will by Tichy and Sherman
• Leading Change by John P. Kotter
• Questions of Character by Joseph L. Badaracco, Jr.
• The Story Factor by Annette Simmons
• Never Give In! Speeches by Winston Churchill

Strategy: Eight organizational blueprints from which to draft your own.

• In Search of Excellence by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
• Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew S. Grove
• Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? by Louis V. Gerstner, Jr.
• Discovering the Soul of Service by Leonard Berry
• Execution by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan
• Competing for the Future by Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad

Sales and Marketing: Approaches and pitfalls in the ongoing process of creating customers.

• Influence by Robert B. Cialdini, PhD
• Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout
• A New Brand World by Scott Bedbury with Stephen Fenichell
• Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith
• Zag by Marty Neumeier
• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
• Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar
• How to Become a Rainmaker by Jeffrey J. Fox
• Why We Buy by Paco Underhill
• The Experience Economy by B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore
• Purple Cow by Seth Godin
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Rules and Scorekeeping: The all-important numbers behind the game.

• Naked Economics by Charles Wheelan
• Financial Intelligence by Karen Berman and Joe Knight
• The Balanced Scorecard by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton

Management: Guiding and directing the people around you.

• The Essential Drucker by Peter Drucker
• Out of the Crisis by W. Edwards Deming
• Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno
• Reengineering the Corporation by Michael Hammer and James Champy
• The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox
• The Great Game of Business by Jack Stack with Bo Burlingham
• First, Break all the Rules by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman
• Now, Discover Your Strengths by Buckingham and Clifton
• The Knowing-Doing Gap by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
• Six Thinking Hats by Edward De Bono

Biographies: Seven lives. Unlimited lessons.

• Titan by Ron Chernow
• My Years with General Motors by Alfred P. Sloan, Jr.
• The HP Way by David Packard
• Personal History by Katharine Graham
• Moments of Truth by Jan Carlzon
• Sam Walton: Made in America by Sam Walton with John Huey
• Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson

Entrepreneurship: Seven guides to the passion and practicality necessary for any new venture.

• The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
• The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber
• The Republic of Tea by Mel Ziegler, Patricia Ziegler, and Bill Rosenzweig
• The Partnership Charter by David Gage
• Growing a Business by Paul Hawken
• Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson
• The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar with Kent Lineback

Narratives: Six industry tales of both fortune and failure.

• McDonald’s: Behind the Arches by John F. Love
• American Steel by Richard Preston
• The Force by David Dorsey
• The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind
• When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
• Moneyball by Michael Lewis

Innovation & Creativity: Insight into the process of developing new ideas.

• Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie
• The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley with Jonathan Littman
• Jump Start Your Business Brain by Doug Hall
• A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger Von Oech
• The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
• The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander

Big Ideas: The future of business books lies here.

• The Age of Unreason by Charles Handy
• Out of Control by Kevin Kelly
• The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida
• Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
• Driven by Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria
• To Engineer is Human by Henry Petroski
• The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki
• Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

Takeaways: What everyone is looking for.

• The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins
• Up the Organization by Robert Townsend
• Beyond the Core by Chris Zook
• Little Red Book of Selling by Jeffrey Gitomer
• What the CEO Wants You to Know by Ram Charan
• The Team Handbook by Peter Scholtes, Brian Joiner, and Barbara Streibel
• A Business and Its Belief by Thomas J. Watson, Jr.
• Lucky or Smart? by Bo Peabody
• The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas L. Friedman
• Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko
• More Than You Know by Michael J. Mauboussin

While I've read a lot of these books, I was surprised how many I've not read.  There is so much left to learn!

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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.

Your Personal Employment Brand

Last week, I read an article written by Dan and Chip Heath in Fast Company that highlights the importance of emotion in marketing.  The Heath brothers are the bestselling authors of "Made to Stick."

These guys noticed that there is often a disconnect between the emotion that a company tries to relate in a marketing campaign, and the reality that truly exists. 

“Marketers caught on early that emotion sells product.  'Would your husband marry you again?' screams a Palmolive ad from 1921.  (Not unless you scrub with Palmolive soap, honey.)  Today, Heineken has promised warmer international relations via handoffs of Premium Light from mountain men to Indians to ballerinas.  And, of course, Axe has sold young men on the fantasy of hooking up with deodorant-loving nymphomaniacs. 

Emotional appeals are ubiquitous.  They're also interchangeable.  It would be just as easy to pitch Heineken as an aphrodisiac and Axe as a global harmonizer ('Peace starts in the pits').  And that's the problem:  It's all stick-on emotion.  Sometimes that works brilliantly (see: Corona).  Other times, it's as weird and clumsy as an adhesive mustache -- remember Carl's Jr. and Paris Hilton's sexed-up hamburger ad? Fortunately, there's a better and more sustainable way to create emotion:  Mean it.”

The article goes on to demonstrate how the impact of a marketing emotion can be greatly increased if there are concrete realities supporting that emotion, proving that it is a genuine representation of reality.  Emotion combined with integrity REALLY sells!

If you’re a hiring manager, this is a principle you cannot afford to miss.  People are drawn to you as a leader because of their perception of who you are.  You may have a prominent company brand, many desirable externals (ex. office location, physical appearance of the office, advanced business tools, etc.), and you may even present yourself in a way that people are naturally drawn to you.  That’s all emotion. 

But, if the reality of who you are matches what you project, the fireworks start to fly.  People want to work on teams with these types of leaders.  Your “personal employment brand” has the ability to attract (or repel) people with a significant amount of force.

Ask yourself this question:  What do people in your professional network really think of you? 

Then ask yourself:  Is this perception based on surface emotion and externals, or on the reality of what those in your professional community have experienced firsthand or have actually seen you do?

If you do not have a strong and believable personal brand, it is very difficult to be a successful hiring manager.  But, how do you repair (or build for the first time) your personal brand?  The quickest and most believable way, is through doing good deeds that support your emotional appeal.  The Heath brothers put it this way:

“Why not simply replace the fake emotion with a real one?  What if Downy started doing things to help struggling mothers -- and then used their ads to talk about the work?  What if Bounce retaliated by throwing its weight behind job seekers looking to bounce back from a layoff? What if all this good work raised the competitive hackles of the not-to-be-underestimated Snuggle Bear?  Perhaps it could sponsor a winter-coat drive.

What we're proposing here is an arms race of goodness -- a generation of companies that compete on real emotion rather than stick-on sentiments.  Maybe that sounds Pollyanna-ish.  If so, let us introduce you to some companies succeeding by meaning it.

Toms Shoes has a simple business model:  Buy a pair of shoes, and it'll send a second pair to a child who needs it.  This year, it'll send about 300,000 pairs of shoes to the developing world. And because it's the company's genuine passion to do so, Toms can take advantage of the word of mouth built into its product and spend dramatically less on marketing than other shoe companies.  When you mean it, convincing customers doesn't take as much shouting.”

Start working on your personal employment brand and you may find that recruiting is not so difficult.

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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 Best Place To Launch a Career: Can You Compete?

Each year, Business Week conducts a survey of companies and new college graduates to assemble a rank list of the best places for new graduates to begin their careers.  This year’s research involved data from more than 60,000 recent college graduates and more than 60 of the nation’s top universities.

There was some shocking information revealed by the research this year.  For example, of 2009 graduates, only one in five people who applied for a job succeeded in landing one.  And those who were lucky enough to land a job are not getting paid much—it is very difficult to get an entry-level job out of college above $50K in today’s market.  Many jobs on the list begin at $35K or below.

Some industries were hit particularly hard with regard to entry-level hiring:

Hospitality:    -76.3%
Technology:   -55.4%
Transportation:  -41.6%
Investment Banking:  -39.3%
Telecommunications:  -30.8%

These percentages were derived by comparing hiring levels in the first half of 2008 versus the first half of 2009.  The negative values indicate the percentage of decline with regard to hiring in the respective industries.

Does this all add up to doom and gloom for you?  Not necessarily.  If you’re a real estate company (or any small business), that is able to offer a bright young person an opportunity to get ahead, you have a window of opportunity to acquire some very talented, young workers.

In today’s environment, you no longer have to compete with high salaries, signing bonuses, and company-provided meals. Instead, many new workers are realizing that it will take hard work and sacrifice to get ahead.  (As a side note.. Interestingly, Google—famous for providing their employees free meals—did not make the Business Week top 50 this year.) 

One person highlighted in the Business Week feature, an Operations Manager for Nestle, revealed that:

“...he wakes up at 3am to get to work an hour before his 5:15am shift—and often stays late.  He’s a good example of what it takes for young people unaccustomed to drudgery to get ahead these days:  hard work, long hours, and a willingness to make sacrifices.”

With the changes happening in the talent marketplace, here’s an important question to ask yourself:  Is it possible for you to begin competing for the attention of these young, talented employees?

Of course, the traditional wisdom is that a real estate agent needs to be a little older to match the demographics of their buyers and sellers.  While there is some truth in this statement, consider the fact that investment banks, insurance companies, and financial services firms consistently hire college grads, and with great success.  Is there some way you could make this work as well? 

These companies have learned how to grow talent by engaging people at a young age and allowing them to gain experience and build skills on the job.  There are some companies who are already taking advantage of this opportunity.  For example, of the top 50 companies on the Business Week list, the one that has grown college level hiring the most in the last year (up 75% from the previous year) is New York Life.  Their hiring model is not much different than that of real estate, and their compensation scales are among the lowest in the industry.  How are they successful?  Part of the answer is that they are smart enough to put themselves in the right place at the right time!

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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.

WorkPuzzle Update: Improved Focus and New Publishing Schedule

Since December of last year, Dr. Dave Mashburn and I have been writing in WorkPuzzle with the intended purpose of sharing how a basic understanding of the psychology of the human mind can help in numerous ways to make individuals and organizations operate more effectively.  We’ve learned a lot in this process, and we hope you have too.  We're thankful for all the thoughtful feedback you've provided along the way.

At this point, we’ve established a base of more than 100 articles.  These articles are available in the WorkPuzzle archives and are searchable online.  Most of these articles have been written to cover the general and basic principles of psychology, business, recruiting, and other workplace issues.  Many of these principles are timeless, so hopefully you’ll find it useful to refer back to some of these articles as you have need for insight.

As we move into the fall season, we’ve decided to take a slightly different posture with WorkPuzzle.  As you may know from our past references, the majority of our company’s clients are in the real estate industry.  In order to better address the needs of these clients, we’ve decided to focus WorkPuzzle efforts on the issues that concern these companies.  More specifically, we’ll be focusing our discussions on issues that real estate owners and strategically-minded real estate managers face in the day-to-day execution of their jobs.

For those of you who are more “general purpose readers” of WorkPuzzle, many of the principles that we’ll discuss in upcoming articles can still be applied to other industries and work scenarios.  Our intention is not to leave you behind.  There will still be much written that can be applied to your unique circumstances if you're outside the real estate industry--it will just require a bit more creativity to apply.  As we grow in the future, we may also begin to address other specific industries in blogs parallel to WorkPuzzle.  We’ll keep you posted on what develops in these other areas...

Finally, WorkPuzzle has been published daily during the work week for the past nine months.  We have very strong and vibrant readership early in the week, but by Thursday and Friday our readership wanes.  We’ve hypothesized that perhaps people are more willing to assimilate new and creative information earlier in the week.  Or, maybe by the end of the week, you’re just tired of hearing from us!

In response to this trend, we’re going to start publishing WorkPuzzle twice per week, on Mondays and Wednesdays.  If you’re an email subscriber, you’ll receive your copy of WorkPuzzle on Tuesdays and Thursdays (email subscribers are delayed a day).  This change in publishing schedule will begin this week. 

As always, we appreciate your comments and feedback concerning WorkPuzzle.  It is our privilege to serve our readers, and we look forward to exploring new topics and applications in the months ahead.

Sham WOW! Overselling an Employment Opportunity - Part 2

Last week, one of our clients sent me some solicitation information his company had received from an employment assessment company.  The information was a sample report that candidates receive from the assessment vendor upon applying to a given company.

The report is intended to give the candidate some feedback concerning their personality, and some insight regarding their potential for success at the said company.  The report is well done from a graphical perspective.  The assessment results are presented in a box on the upper right hand side in each of four pages, thus the candidate can easily access the information.
 
The problem is that the assessment results boxes are surrounded by a series of testimonials from existing employees.  Most of the testimonial boxes contain pictures of attractive women, and the general theme of each testimonial is that the person found fulfillment in life by working for this company.

I think testimonials are helpful, and one or two might complement this report nicely.  But, this report contains seven testimonials in just four pages!  The testimonials take up as much space on each page as the assessment results, and surround the box that contains the information the candidate is trying to read.

It’s like we’re back at the fair and the “gadget sales guy” is desperately trying to get my attention for a few minutes to make a sale.  The neon lights are flashing as the candidate approaches this employment opportunity.  Naturally, defenses rise under such circumstances, and people become protective.  What is effective in separating a person from the $10 that is in their wallet at the state fair, typically has the opposite effect in an employment dialog.

I know the majority of you are probably not involved in candidate advertising and marketing, but many of you are involved in various other aspects of the hiring process, including prospecting for candidates and conducting interviews.  The same principles apply to these pieces of the hiring process.

Overselling your company and your team will have a very negative effect on your recruiting results.  While most of us can look at an advertisement and tell if something looks gimmicky, it is difficult for many people to realize how their conversations may contain many of the same traits.

Here are some quick questions that you can ask yourself:

1. What percentage of your conversations involve you talking versus the candidate talking?

2. What percentage of your conversation is spent talking about the candidate’s existing organization (or past experiences) versus your organization?

3. What percentage of your conversation do you spend talking about the challenges on your team?  Do you ever talk about how a candidate’s contribution could enhance your team?

I'm sure you can figure out the correct answers to these questions by reflecting back on past interviews, but can you determine if you're doing these things during a live conversation?  The first step is to make an effort to become more aware of what you're saying during a recruiting conversation, and then make adjustments if you find you are overselling.  To follow up, you may want to invite a trusted friend or collegue to attend one of your interviews and then provide you some honest feedback on this topic.  

Believe me, if your recruiting conversations sound like they belong in the gadget barn, better to find out so that you can make some changes.  First impressions can become last impressions if you don't "fix" your approach.

More About Grit: Predicting and Coaching for Success

In past articles, we’ve highlighted the works of both Dr. Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania; and Dr. Carol Dweck, a psychologist from Stanford University.  These women are two of the most influencial leaders on the topic of grit.  Both professionals have a passion for researching what, in fact, we should be measuring with regard to propensity for success.

Johan Lehrer puts it this way in his recent article in the Boston Globe:

“One of the main obstacles for scientists trying to document the influence of personality traits on achievement was that the standard definition of traits - attributes such as conscientiousness and extroversion - was rather vague.

Duckworth began wondering if more narrowly defined traits might prove to be more predictive.  She began by focusing on aspects of conscientiousness that have to do with ‘long-term stamina,’ such as maintaining a consistent set of interests, and downplayed aspects of the trait related to short-term self-control, such as staying on a diet.  In other words, a gritty person might occasionally eat too much chocolate cake, but they won’t change careers every year.  ‘Grit is very much about the big picture,’ Duckworth says.  ‘It’s about picking a specific goal off in the distant future and not swerving from it.’"

In essence, Duckworth is suggesting that, rather than IQ level, what we should be measuring is a person’s ability to narrow and maintain focus on a particular goal.  Research confirms that this is a better predictor of a person’s potential than their intelligence and well-rounded background. 

If you’re a hiring manager, think about how you interview candidates...  Would this be a trait that you could measure during an interview by changing the types of questions you ask?  If so, you’d probably be more successful at predicting your prospective employee's potential in your organization.

If you’re in a coaching role, you can also take advantage of the research in this area:

“While Duckworth and others are quick to point out that there is no secret recipe for increasing grit - 'We’ve only started to study this, so it’s too soon to begin planning interventions,' she cautions - there’s a growing consensus on what successful interventions might look like.

One of the most important elements is teaching kids that talent takes time to develop, and requires continuous effort.  Dweck refers to this as a 'growth mindset.'  She compares this view with the 'fixed mindset,' the belief that achievement results from abilities we are born with.  'A child with the fixed mindset is much more likely to give up when they encounter a challenging obstacle, like algebra, since they assume that they’re just not up to the task,' says Dweck.

Interestingly, it also appears that praising children for their intelligence can make them less likely to persist in the face of challenges, a crucial element of grit.  For much of the last decade, Dweck and her colleagues have tracked hundreds of fifth-graders in 12 different New York City schools.  The children were randomly assigned to two groups, both of which took an age-appropriate version of the IQ test.  After taking the test, one group was praised for their intelligence - 'You must be smart at this,' the researcher said - while the other group was praised for their effort and told they 'must have worked really hard.'

Dweck then gave the same fifth-graders another test.  This test was designed to be extremely difficult - it was an intelligence test for eighth-graders - but Dweck wanted to see how they would respond to the challenge.  The students who were initially praised for their effort worked hard at figuring out the puzzles.  Kids praised for their smarts, on the other hand, quickly became discouraged.

The final round of intelligence tests was the same difficulty level as the initial test.  The students who had been praised for their effort raised their score, on average, by 30 percent.  This result was even more impressive when compared to the students who had been praised for their intelligence:  their scores on the final test dropped by nearly 20 percent.  A big part of success, Dweck says, stems from our beliefs about what leads to success."

Could this change your perspective on how you coach those on your team?  It is so natural to praise those we coach for their natural abilities.  While this feels natural and right, the research shows it is counterproductive.

It may be better to just let the natural talents speak for themselves, and seek to praise someone for living out their values and displaying positive virtues.  Grit is one of these virtues, but there may be more.  It will be interesting to see what the research unveils in the future...

More on Grit: The Problem with Measuring Intelligence

Have you ever wondered why intelligence and academic achievement are so revered in our society?  My oldest son is 16 years old and entering his junior year in high school.  He is becoming increasingly aware that college is just around the corner, and is doing his best to prepare himself for it.  We’ve noticed that the college admissions process is mainly about grades and SAT scores, and little about his ability to work hard and follow-through on accomplishing his goals.

Interestingly, research shows that setting a specific, long-term goal, and doing whatever it takes until that goal has been reached ("grit"),will be more predictive of his success than his grades or academic achievement.  Most of us assume this must be a brand new revelation, but look what Jonah Lehrer points out in his recent article in the Boston Globe:

"In 1869, Francis Galton published 'Hereditary Genius,' his landmark investigation into the factors underlying achievement.  Galton’s method was straightforward:  he gathered as much information as possible on dozens of men with 'very high reputations,' including poets, politicians, and scientists.  That’s when Galton noticed something rather surprising:  success wasn’t simply a matter of intelligence or talent.  Instead, Galton concluded that eminent achievement was only possible when ‘ability combined with zeal and the capacity for hard labour.’

Lewis Terman, the inventor of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, came to a similar conclusion.  He spent decades following a large sample of 'gifted' students, searching for evidence that his measurement of intelligence was linked to real world success.  While the most accomplished men did have slightly higher scores, Terman also found that other traits, such as 'perseverance,' were much more pertinent.

Terman concluded that one of the most fundamental tasks of modern psychology was to figure out why intelligence is not a more important part of achievement:  'Why this is so, and what circumstances affect the fruition of human talent, are questions of such transcendent importance that they should be investigated by every method that promises the slightest reduction of our present ignorance.'

Unfortunately, in the decades following Terman’s declaration, little progress was made on the subject.  Because intelligence was so easy to measure - the IQ test could be given to schoolchildren, and often took less than an hour - it continued to dominate research on individual achievement.

The end result, says James J. Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, is that 'there was a generation of social scientists who focused almost exclusively on trying to raise IQ and academic test scores.  The assumption was that intelligence is what mattered and what could be measured, and so everything else, all these non-cognitive traits like grit and self-control, shouldn’t be bothered with.' "

I find all of this a bit humorous.  It seems that much of our systems of higher learning are based on the premise that intelligence and academic achievement predict a person’s propensity for success.  But, ironically, they don’t really predict success very well at all...they’re just easy to measure.  Yikes!  This makes me even more concerned about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on my kids' educations!

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss the transition that is evolving regarding the traits that are believed to actually precede success.  A group of very insightful researchers are performing the hard work of measuring and tracking what truly leads down the path to success...