Hiring For Engagement
In the last post I stated a case for engaging employees. In a nutshell, competitive advantages for knowledge businesses come from ingenuity which can only be fostered when an employee is engaged.
The first step is making sure we get the right people on the bus. My starting point is to focus on fit. Engagement comes from a number of sources, but how well someone fits into our company is step one and within our control. If you aren’t in an environment that can leverage your strengths you’re going to be wasting your energy conforming instead of innovating.
Our current thinking is that we need to find the best and the brightest. Exclusively hiring ‘A’ players makes sense, right? We should all be so judicious. Why then do we keep getting it so wrong?
Working in Silos. Photo by Rachel R.
Let’s change how we identify ‘A’ players.
Unless everyone works in a silo, stop looking for the smartest, most accomplished applicants for a position. Seriously. It’s killing your business.
A simple, illustrative example:
Allen Iverson cements his ‘A’ player status based on his 10 all-star appearances. Looking at his accomplishments (i.e. stat line. A resume for you and me.) it’s a no-brainer. But he hates practice, takes too many shots and looks to get his before involving his teammates. Not surprisingly, his teams have never won a championship. Not many coaches and ‘teams’ are set up for one man circuses that only come to town on gameday.
Would working with that type of co-worker bring out your best?
How we accomplish something in the workplace is as important as what we accomplish. Your actions define you and influence others. If we merely tolerate each other, what are the odds we can create excellent work that drives our businesses forward?
Being a selfish star or a lone-wolf genius may work for the short-term, but it’s not sustainable. By virtue of how we’ve created our current work systems we win and lose as teams. Most of us are symbiotically dependent upon others in order to do our job well.
Some suggestions on how we change our identification of ‘A’ players:
- Recognize that you’ve developed a unique company culture, processes and ways of interacting whether you’ve consciously thought about it or not. Be honest with yourself about what that is. Highlight both the positive and the negative. Then start looking for the smartest applicants who best fit your entire ecosystem: company culture, the hiring ‘manager,’ and the team.
- Describe the traits needed for a job rather than the tasks that will be performed. Hire those before hiring for experience.
- Don’t mistake delivery for substance in the interview. We’ve trained the shit out of people for how to answer our ‘trap’ questions in an interview. You need to know what they really believe and how they really act rather than whether they can remember the best answers.
- Look beyond the resume. Dig deeper than ‘A’ accomplishments for ‘A’ methodology.
The two best ways to do this would be to 1) put applicants through a day of situational collaboration with their would-be team in lieu of the series of interviews and 2) shameless self-promotion alert – wait for RoundPegg’s solution to come on-line in the next month or so.
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