As
a manager, have you ever had the experience of trying to ‘make’ an employee
change, forcing an outcome from an employee to improve their performance or
even worse; have you ever attempted to have them work differently by
encouraging them to alter their natural work style, values, behaviors, beliefs and personality so they would perform
better in their role, or for the betterment of the company?
As leaders of people, we
often have to deal with ourselves to overcome the syndrome of
“I can fix and change people". As a peak performer in recruitment, for years I found myself placing the best and hiring the rest. As a small business owner, I was hiring 'C' candidates, because they were more affordable and selling myself on the myth that they would be better if someone just helped them and then I expended enormous amounts of my personal effort trying to overcome their ineffectiveness. My shortsightedness had me saving money on the front end and spending 3 times the savings on the back end. Until I went through a basic training from Vistage (formerly known as TEC), I was not present to the profit erosion that these non strategic hiring practices were causing.
Once having my eyes opened, I embarked on a hiring process development journey. I was committed to fixing my problem and I took courses on organizational assessment, behavioral interviewing, top grading, organizational development, personal transformation and executive coaching. Over the course of a decade I invested $100,000 in mastering 'putting the right people on the bus'. After much resistance and many breakthroughs, I finally learned the lesson handed down to me from my first mentor. "People are whole and complete and have everything they need to be successful, as long as you put the right people in the right role." It is your job to Choose Wisely"
There have been many books, articles,
lectures and even case studies written on this subject. Companies like General Electric, PepsiCo, Spielberg Productions, DreamWorks, Google, Microsoft, The Limited and more have all publicly stated that a KEY factor to their enormous success was the people they chose to employ in key contributor, mission critical and leadership roles.
The new game in the business of Recruitment Process In-Sourcing
and Talent Management goes way beyond the norm thinking and acting of the past. Currently, everyone is buzzing
about the need to find ‘those’ mission critical key contributors, and next level leaders in an economic crunch yet talent-deprived
climate.
Certain companies foolishly believe that because it is a 'down economy' these excellent performers are walking the street, anxiously waiting to join their companies. The reality is regardless of what unemployment is, the real numbers about unemployment are not posted on CNN or Fox News. Unemployment for the highly skilled, white collar, college educated labor is no higher than 4% in many highly populated business sectors.
Companies who do not have a systematic hiring process for selecting A and high B players often hire mediocre candidates in this type of employment marketplace. They hire the low hanging fruit and then Managers and Leaders expend countless hours trying to fix dysfunctional behavior, mismatched values and non existent core competencies. What these same companies often experience is that the bottom 80% of the performers are taking up 80% of the managers time and effort.
Imagine if the right people where hired for the right roles. What would be the impact be on the bottom line? How about morale?
What would happen if the managers focus was on engaging, retaining and developing the top 20% of their workforce?
What would happen to productivity if the right people were taken to the next level?
How would your companies Recruitment Brand and Employee Value Proposition be effected if your leaders spent little to no "people" time trying to force change and the majority of their "people" time defining and executing a profit driven recruitment and retention strategy?
