photo by skipgo shannon
An amazing article in the Wall Street Journal (subscription req.) today profiled a Frenchman who’d managed to con his way into a tryout for an elite European ‘football’ club.
The brief summary is that he doctored his resume to show the he’d…”been climbing the ranks of European soccer, signing with a top-flight Paris club and training with a team in Argentina. He had an agent and a Web site that showed him scoring a goal for the English club Swindon Town. He’d even been chosen as an ambassador for Lance Armstrong’s charity.”
The problem was that none of it was true.
His reaction? “If I lied a little bit on my CV, I am sorry…I am just like 99% of my friends in France, who say on their résumé they can speak fluent English.”
It’s amazing that we’re surprised when this happens. We put a lot of stock into the resume and the supposed skills and accomplishments one brings.
The stats say that almost half the resumes floating around out there contain false information (actually 42.7% via ResumeDoctor, March 2006).
So why do we keep putting so much faith in resumes?
Because it’s easy.
Resumes are shortcuts to get us what we’re looking for. It’s safe to hire the person with fantastic accomplishments. It’s safe to find the person who talks a great game and has the self-proclaimed history to back it up. Pedigrees, experiences and stated feats are cues to us for an individual’s ability to perform in our work environments.
Granted, the resume is likely still the best thing we have going for us. But it’s outdated.
Like stocks, past performance is no indicator of future performance. Especially if that past performance is falsified.
The reason the past doesn’t work is because new variables are added to the mix. Your business is a new environment. There are new politics at play. The dynamics between teams is different. And the way things get done is vastly different.
So what to do?
Look for themes in the resume instead.
Does the individual create new products or modify existing ones? Are they focused on working with teams or working in a silo? Are the accomplishments they focus on team accomplishments or individual? Answers either way are fine, it’s all a matter of what your own culture is. What’s makes your successful people tick? What does the role require?
photo by sflovestory
We’ve written a lot about why we think chemistry matters. RoundPegg, after all, is all about finding people who will fit on your team without creating a cloud of chaos around them. The better people fit into the team, the more energy they can spend driving the team forward instead of playing politics.
Kevin Millar, former Boston Red Sox, was recently signed by the Chicago Cubs. While he plays a position at which the Cubs need a backup, the odds of him making the big league team are incredibly slim. He’s fourth on the depth chart where only two will play with the big club. Plus, he’s advancing in his career and hasn’t hit much in the past few years. He was signed strictly to set the team’s mood in the clubhouse over the six-week stretch of spring training.
Millar’s take: chemistry matters.
“People ask me all the time, ‘Is team chemistry overrated?’ Well, you tell me. You’re with 25 guys more than your family from basically end of February to October. That’s not overrated. You try to bring a team and a group together. When you get everyone pulling on the same rope, it’s exciting.”
Last year, the Cubbies signed notorious clubhouse cancer Milton Bradley and paid the price. He’s the epitome of how companies often hire. An ‘A’ player by all statistical measurements, but little mind was paid to whether he’d fit in with the rest of the guys in the clubhouse. While impossible to attribute Bradley’s antics to the Cubs 14-game decline from 2007 to 2008, it’s obvious the front office has gotten the message and is determined not to repeat that mistake. Clearly, they lay some of the blame on a chemistry experiment gone bad.
Baseball is a unique sport where every play is a series of one on one battles. Between the lines, I’d go so far to argue that chemistry matters less in baseball than in other sports. Or your company. But as Millar points out, you live with these guys. If you don’t like being around them it’s going to be harder to bring your best every day.
The Cubs are willing to spend potentially up to a million dollars to set the right mood in the clubhouse. Meanwhile, your company is probably more dependent upon teamwork than any baseball team. How much time, effort and money are spent aligning your culture, your team and getting the most out of your employees?
photo by annadriel
A recent Towers Perrin post reveals a conversation the author had with former NFL coach Tony Dungy. Football is known for its gruff, abrupt, in-your-face style of ‘leadership,’ but Tony Dungy was far from that. He succinctly states his philosophy to leading and getting the best from his players three points (from the post):
- His parents were both teachers and they believed that it was their responsibility to make every student an “A” student. But not every student learns the same way, so you have to tailor your style to each individual to bring out the best in them.
- You have to make each player on the team understand that the good of the team is greater than that of any individual, and that you can only be successful as a team.
- You have to earn your players’ trust — this is foundational to the first two. They have to trust that your coaching and advice is what is best for them and for the collective team.
I like this for several reasons:
First, if your leadership style is inflexible and you see people as cogs in the wheel then you dramatically limit the field of potential individuals who could excel in the job. Finding good people is hard, why should we further constrain ourselves?
Secondly, you are limited by the boundaries of your own imagination and thought process. If you only know one way to go about things then you won’t be open-minded to new, potentially better approaches.
Further, by acknowledging that people are unique you are connecting with them on a very personal level. In order to motivate you have to know them. That connection is usually a two-way street. By taking the time to understand someone you’re proving you care about them. Reciprocation is then difficult not to grant. You wind up getting a lot more effort in return.
Finally, you don’t want your people to compete with each other too much. That devolves into a race to the bottom. It is far easier to push another down than it is to lift oneself up. Putting the team first means that you won’t reward pushing others down in order to shine.
I had coffee with Dr. Skippy this morning which always gets me thinking. While talking about how our motivation plays into how we behave at work I got thinking about how bizarre our philosophy is when it comes to promoting people.
Basically, you do a great job as an individual contributor you are rewarded with more responsibility until ultimately you are overseeing a bunch of people.
From puppet to puppeteer. How can we possibly think that being a good puppet means that we’ll be a good puppet master?
Switching metaphors, I like looking at sports because things are relatively simple, transparent and the stakes are ‘enormous.’
Only eight of the thirty baseball teams have managers who were all-stars in their playing days. With the possible exception of Joe Torre, there isn’t much chance of any of those guys being mistaken for a Hall of Fame player.
The old axe in baseball is that good players don’t make good managers. The reason given is that the skills needed to succeed came naturally so explaining how you perform a task was difficult. While I think there is some truth to that the biggest reason is that one has nothing to do with the other. The skills to succeed in each are completely different.
Having the skills to perform on the field are different than knowing how all the pieces should be utilized. The most successful managers know how to motivate people. They are able to adapt their style to meet the person they are coaching.
Good managers care about people. That doesn’t mean they are softhearted it just means that they are aware of what is happening in the heads of their players.
In the working world, selflessness is often the flint that starts the fire.
If a manager who came up the ranks as an outstanding performer is motivated by receiving recognition via his own performance excellence he clearly won’t have the team’s best interests in mind.
If a manager has the people-centric traits and is intrinsically motivated by achieving performance excellence for the team you can bet that the team will have far more staying power, evolve to take advantage of everyone’s strengths and ultimately produce better results through the manager’s motivational skills.
I’m not naive enough to think we can change this any time soon, but we have to start evaluating managers on the softer skills. Gone should be the days where individual drive, excellence of thought or sterling silo’d performance get someone to the head of the line. Good performance should be rewarded and promoted, but it shouldn’t default to managing people.
Let’s get smarter about this and figure out how to separately assess and cultivate the people skills that will make for successful teams.
Until recently baseball front offices had been filled with crusty, grizzled ‘baseball’ guys. The Moneyball crowd of 30-something sabermetricians has changed that but, surprisingly, the old-schoolers recognized the importance of some of the softer skills and nailed the execution, which has only been expanded upon today.
And despite all the ‘advancements’ made in the white-collar workplace there is plenty that executives can learn from those old-time, stogie-chomping, pot-bellied baseball guys.
1. Focus on hiring and coaching. Big league teams are only as good as the people on the team and how well they work together. Massive amounts of dollars are spent on scouting new talent (not waiting for players to happen to send their resumes to them), operating farm clubs and paying their managers and coaches. According to MLB, clubs spend an average of 46% of their revenue on non-player expenditures. These do include expenses related to non-scouting, coaching and farm club related expenses, but those are comparatively small. Even taking the base case scenario as suggested (Oakland and Montreal’s spending levels) we’re looking at ~31% of total revenue being spent to acquire potential superstar employees and proactively work to improve upon their performance.
Does your company care that much?
Sure, it’d be cheaper to do away with the farm systems. It’d be easier to cut the coaching staff and assume people will improve on their own. But your team wouldn’t be competitive for very long.
(note: My digging didn’t uncover recent financial statements. MLB financial statements are kept close to the vest but they did release some carefully prepared statements at the turn of the century to help diffuse labor issues.)
2. Merit-based Promotions. My wife works in an industry where ‘paying your dues’ is required. Similarly, I’ve experienced situations where sychophantism was the road to success.
Can you imagine baseball doing that? You could hit .400 with 50 HRs and not get promoted because you hadn’t spent enough time at your appropriate minor league level or because you didn’t tell the manager he did a great job setting the lineup. It’s reckless for mid-level managers and executives not to promote their best talent (best being defined by results rather than time served or ‘likeability’).
More attention needs to be paid to how we evaluate talent and ensure that the right people are retained, motivated and rewarded.
3. Continual Feedback is Vital. Can you imagine the coaching staff or front office only sitting with a minor league player once the season is completed? And yet in every workplace I’ve been involved, not only has there not been continual feedback (though I’ve always made a point of doing so with my reports) but the formal annual performance review has been anything but formal, regular or valued.
4. Hire the Best and Don’t Get Stuck Pigeonholing Based on Past Performance. Like other sports, baseball teams draft for the best player available rather than what their team needs at the moment. Hire based on intelligence (be it emotional, technical, interpersonal etc.) rather than someone who has performed the specific tasks you need accomplished in the past. How many times do you hear outfielders or shortstops being converted to pitchers? Baseball doesn’t give a damn what you’ve done in the past. It cares about what an athlete is capable of doing in the future and where he can best help the organization. But, how often do we see HR people not look at resumes because someone doesn’t have the exact requisite past experience?
We have a long way to go and there is a lot of easy, low-hanging fruit to really improve our businesses should we choose to pay it the attention it deserves. Yes, things happen quickly inside the cubical mazes but we have to rethink our priorities and adjust accordingly.
How do we reprioritize the importance of employees?
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