HireBetter Blog

Case Study: Living Direct Finds a Leader

April 26th, 2012 | by | case studies, employee relations, hirebetter, human resources, interviewing, management, topgrading

Apr
26

Client: Living Direct

Role: VP of eCommerce and Marketing

Location: Austin, Texas

 

 

 

Sometimes a client approaches HireBetter with a pretty good idea of what they think they need in a new hire and they’re right.  Other times, we get a chance to shine when we help a client realize that a truly great hire can mean so much more for a company than they originally thought.  When Rick Lundbom came to HireBetter, he thought that he just wanted someone to manage his eCommerce and Marketing division.  Little did he know that we would deliver his right hand man who would quickly propel his business to new heights!

 

Intake:

Rick initially was really set on hiring a serious, but simple marketing person.  He wanted someone who had a very strong grasp of traditional e-commerce marketing principals AND was comfortable with big web data.  Furthermore, he wanted someone who was competitive and would thrive while working with his very young team (in his mid-30s, Lundbom is the resident “old guy” in the office).

He had a very specific model of an ideal candidate (even one “perfect” candidate in town who he said we would not be able to get) and a few specific types of candidates that he wanted to target.  He asked us to recruit those candidates first, but still use our expertise to find the right person for the role, whoever that was.

After we did a full intake evaluation, however, we realized that what the client really needed was a leader, someone with the leadership acumen AND technical skills to mentor and inspire his very young team.

 

Strategy and process:

As the client requested, we were sure to recruit the specific candidates that he wanted.  So we did.  And after we finished recruiting, we had three very strong candidates who met Rick’s criteria lined up and wanting the job:

 

  • A candidate with both Internet and retailing experience?  Got it.
  • One with e-commerce experience at a top 200 e-tailer?  Done.
  • Someone like his ideal local guy?  We actually got the “perfect” one who he thought would be unattainable.

 

…But we also found someone better.  From the first time we met him, we had a feeling that Dave was the guy.  Dave didn’t really fit the mold of what Rick said he wanted; he started off in tech and had only later gained an affinity for marketing.  We convinced the client to at least give him a call, and though he remained interested in his other candidates, we could tell that he knew that we might be onto something.

Then came the Topgrading® interview…

After putting the candidates through the VERY thorough Topgrading® interview process, it became abundantly clear who was the right one for the job.  After four hours with Dave, Rick was totally sold.  Though he didn’t look like the candidate the Rick initially had in mind, he knew that Dave was an A-player.

 

Results:

He was right.  Not only has Dave been able to lead the eCommerce and Marketing division at Living Direct, he has become Rick’s right hand man.  “He’s earned my trust,” Rick said.  And more than that, his presence has allowed him to work on growing the company.

“We are up 30% year over year and Dave is a big part of that…but he’s also freed up my time to work ON my business instead of IN my business.”

Dave has been fitting in very well at Living Direct, and even allowed Lundbom to get some much needed R&R: “I was able to take a two-week vacation for the first time in a LONG time.”

There’s nothing better for us than to see our clients so surprised when they see how much great talent can help their business.  Rick Lundbom came to us looking for a simple marketing guru.  What he got was a leader for his company, trust in his new partner, and the time to live his life again.  We’re glad to have gotten to help.

 

Want to see how HireBetter can go above and beyond for you and your company?  Take a look at how we’ve helped other clients, and then drop us a line.  We’d love to show you how HireBetter can help take your talent to new heights.

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What is Topgrading®?

March 5th, 2012 | by | hirebetter, hiring, human resources, interviewing, topgrading

Mar
05

In our previous post, we talked about behavioral interviewing and how it is a superior way to predict how your job candidates will actually perform inside of your company than traditional interviewing.  This week, we’re going to introduce you to a specific type of interviewing that we use here at HireBetter: Topgrading®.

Topgrading® basics 

Topgrading® was created by Brad Smart back in the 1970s while he was working on his Ph.D. studies.  He decided that many companies’ inability to consistently hire top performers was unacceptable, so he began to develop what would become the Topgrading® methodology.

Topgrading® is a method for hiring and promoting top performers.  It is an objective, thorough, and tested way to determine which candidates are most likely to become A Players.  At the center of the methodology is the Topgrading® interview.

 

A Topgrading® interview

A Topgrading® interview will probably look different from most other interviews you’ve seen before.  It is intense.  Very intense.  Lasting four hours and relying only on facts about your interviewee’s past behaviors, this interview cuts through to the core of your candidate.  Candidates can’t really prepare for a Topgrading® interview, because it is specifically designed to strip them down and make it impossible for them to fabricate a false image of themselves.  It helps you collect facts and use those to make your decision.

These interviews are Comprehensive, In-depth, and Structured.  By following this structure closely, we objectively create a picture of each candidate’s personality, motivations, and probability of success.

 

Why we Topgrade

HireBetter uses Topgrading® because it works.  Its history of success goes back decades.   While working with Jack Welch at GE, Brad Smart helped them hire and promote employees who ended up being high performers ninety percent of the time!  We have been using Topgrading® with our clients for years, and we can deliver this same kind of success to your company.  Contact HireBetter to learn more.

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Behavioral Interviewing vs. Traditional Interviewing

February 13th, 2012 | by | hirebetter, hiring, interviewing, talent, topgrading

Feb
13

When you interview job candidates, how often do you trust them to truly tell you about themselves?  Do you really expect them to tell you their actual strengths and weaknesses, or do you often foresee a canned, well-rehearsed speech?  (“My greatest weakness is that I work too hard?”)

Behavioral interviews make it much harder for candidates to put their spin on their responses because they employ a totally different mindset from traditional interviews.  Behavioral interview questions demand facts rather than opinions.  And this allows you, as the hirer, to make your own opinions of your candidate’s work, which is where the power should be.

Traditional interviews are easy to distort

A traditional interview might involve a query such as: “How do you deal with conflicts in the workplace?”  It’s designed to answer a very reasonable concern that any interviewer might have, but that question doesn’t solicit as valuable of a response as a behavioral one because it relies on an implied hypothetical situation.

The interviewee has the opportunity to answer a question like that from the perspective of their ideal self.  They can (without lying) say how they think that they would handle such a situation in the future.  Or they might respond with how they generally think they’ve dealt with such a situation in the past.  But the very fact that they’re sitting in a job interview will prime them for giving an answer that is based on what they think they are capable of, rather than what experience has shown to be true.

 

Behavioral interviews let you be the judge

Think about the response that you would get from that candidate if you asked the same basic question in a different way.  If you said, “Give an example of a time in the past that you had a conflict with a coworker.  What, specifically, did you do to settle the conflict, and what was the result?”  Won’t this give you an entirely different answer from the one we mentioned before?

Your interviewee is forced to deal in reality from the get-go.  By making your questions fact-based, you now have to opportunity to learn about a real person, not a hypothetical one.  What they actually do in a given situation is far more valuable to learn in an interview than what they think they can or should do.

 

“Who are you?” vs. “Who do you think you can be?”

Behavioral interviewing gives you, the employer, a chance to paint a picture of your candidate, and then you get to make your own assessment of how attractive they are.  It’s your job to determine what their strengths and weaknesses are, based on what their past experiences tell you.

At HireBetter, we rely on behavioral interviews because our experience has shown us that they provide a superior snapshot of a candidate.  In our post next week, we’ll explain the specific behavioral interviewing methodology that we use: Topgrading®.

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An Open Letter to The Staffing Advisor

February 19th, 2009 | by | interviewing, recruiting, topgrading

Feb
19

I’ve watched a dialogue occur over the last couple of weeks between Brad Smart, the Author of Topgrading, and Bob Corlett who owns a recruiting firm in Washington DC and refers to himself as The Staffing Advisor for his Blog.

I’m genuinely concerned that by responding to the initial post of Mr. Corlett’s called, “What Exactly is a Top Performer?” Dr. Smart provided some credibility to what was written and provided an opportunity for this blog post to get some notoriety that it didn’t deserve. After reading Mr. Corlett’s rebuttal I simply can’t stay quiet.

Disclaimer: Topgrading is not a novel. Topgrading is not an easy read. Topgrading is not a page-turner. Honestly, Topgrading is about as dry as a piece of burnt toast without butter. With that being said, it’s still one of the best business books ever written.

Before I begin, I’m going to take a small tangent. The book Freakonomics sold more than 3 million copies when it was released 4 years ago. Buried within those pages was a chapter about the imperfection of the commission model for Realtors. It closely assessed the value of a Realtor’s contribution to the home selling process and found, in short, “the commission you pay your Realtor is in essence a big fat tip”.

I’ll complete my thoughts on why I’ve included this random snippet from Steven Levitt in my conclusion but I wanted to make sure I got that in on the front end to get you thinking.

On to the Open Letter…

I’d like to point out that I’m going to be jumping back and forth between both of Mr. Corlett’s posts on Topgrading (the second being his rebuttal) and his website. I’ll lead in with a direct quote as a precursor to that section to make it easy to follow.

Part 1

“I freely admit that I gave up and only made it halfway through [Topgrading] (worst beach read ever).”

“I found nothing that would help my clients make better hires, short of implementing a massive, formal, top heavy initiative to learn how to conduct a Topgrading interview. And that is simply not practical when you are hiring only one or two of each kind of person.”

I’ve grouped these quotes together to try to point out a very significant element of my counter to Mr. Corlett. If you’re [Bob Corlett] positioning yourself as an expert in the world of “Results Based Hiring” and you’re choosing to bash your “competition” in a very public forum, might it make sense to actually read the entire book before making blanket judgments and heavy-handed criticisms of a process and methodology that is proven to be wildly successful when implemented properly? You’ve lambasted every CEO who shares with you that they want to hire A-Players through Topgrading after admitting that you personally have an inability to finish the foremost book on the topic. Is this at all indicative of how you screen candidates whom you are considering presenting to your clients – that is, seeing a resume that is more than a page long, making a judgment after reading their address and then choosing to wholeheartedly endorse or count an applicant out?

Here’s the thing: if you can’t find a single item in this book to help your clients make better hires I truly doubt that you even read half of it. My guess is, you got to page 63, read the section about Search Firms and Brad’s suggestions on due diligence, and stopped.

Here are some examples of things that we have implemented and have helped our clients implement as well that we learned from inside the pages of Topgrading:

1. Take the time to build Scorecards. When we know what we’re looking for and then we can show the new hire what we screened them on and what we expect of them, the likelihood of their success (in our experience) improves exponentially. Interestingly enough, Mr. Corlett, you even mention this exact idea later in your blog when you said, “Here is a strategy that will dramatically improve both your results and the quality of your life: set performance goals [and] manage your people against the results.”* My guess is that you weren’t able to get far enough into the book to read that part.

  1. TORC (threat of reference checks). We always check references but not the ones that our candidates are interested in giving us. We require and only talk to previous managers and we don’t let candidates advance in the process until that is finished. Geoff Smart, Brad’s son, suggests that about 25% of the information you learn about a candidate is obtained during reference checks. I think he’s right on.

3. Create a Virtual Bench. Jack Daly, an esteemed Public Speaker and former CEO is famous for saying, “It’s called RECRUITING, not ABSORBING”. We’ve got a list of people that we’re always recruiting and talking to in the event we need to hire them due to growth or turnover at HireBetter. Our clients do too!

Part 2

“In a job description you need to nail down exactly what you are looking for.”

“There is no universal set of attributes. It depends on the job.” “Most companies need a diverse mix of skills and work styles, but all with a common shared set of values.”

“Small organizations need to think hard, move fast, and make the best decisions possible with imperfect information.”

Really, I love Jack Daly. I bring him up again because I got to hear him recently and so much of it rang true. One of his favorite stories is about VISION and PLANNING. The story goes something like this:

Jack walked out of his house the other day and saw his neighbor filling his car with luggage. He was really cramming it in; filled up the trunk and then the back seat too.

Jack called out to him, “Hey, where you headed?”

“East!” his neighbor replied.

“How long you think it’s going to take you?” Jack countered.

“Quite a while, not sure really.” his neighbor shouted back.

“How much money you gonna need to get there?”

“Beats me, just hope I don’t run out!” said the neighbor.

I shared this story because I think that the next-door neighbor is a lot more like most small businesses than you could possibly imagine. Simply asking a hiring manager to write a job description when they have no experience doing it and hoping that they can “nail down exactly what they are looking for” is a lot tougher than it appears on the surface. Believing that your clients need to think hard and move fast while making decisions based on imperfect information as it relates to their hiring decisions is very, very dangerous. Not only does it adversely affect your ability to screen for the right kinds of people, it leaves your clients open to hiring based on “gut feel” and emotion instead of reality and strategy.

No, Topgrading is NOT easy. Neither is being an A-Player.

Part 3

“We’ll continue…developing faster, less expensive, less cumbersome ways to help our clients consistently hire people who will drive business results”.

There was a time when we thought about touting our speed to hire or cost per hire at HireBetter. Before we learned about Topgrading we were proud of our speed. Today, the focus isn’t on speed or cost at all. Rather, we focus on helping organizations change their methodology and expectations around hiring. We know that Topgrading has been effective when (1) our clients can hire the first or second person they interview – no matter what the role because the hiring managers know what they are looking for and (2) the employees perform as expected.

When Business Owners or Hiring Managers share with me that Topgrading is or was too hard it is almost always indicative of them being ill-prepared by not knowing what they actually want to hire or too reactionary in their hiring process (e.g. only thinking about new hires when someone leaves). As previously mentioned, these companies are simply absorbing new people, not recruiting them.

Part 4

“As someone who runs a search firm, I am also cognizant of the candidate perspective, which is generally not favorable toward Topgrading.”

Dave Kurlan, Founder and CEO of the Objective Management Group, has come up with the five major challenges that salespeople face and must overcome before they can be successful in sales.

The most significant of these challenges is something that he calls a “Need for Approval”. He describes it as, “Salespeople who have a high need for approval will avoid saying or doing the things which, in their mind, would change how the prospect feels about them. This includes asking tough questions, legitimate confrontation and the potential inability to handle rejection.”

At American Workforce we’ve actually had to screen out the Need for Approval from the people on our team who conduct interviews. Why? Our interviewers need to be able to interview with the clear understanding that it’s not their responsibility to make the candidates like them. Candidates don’t hire us – companies do. If the candidates can’t handle a company doing its due diligence and lose their temper or get easily frustrated, what does that say about how they will react under pressure in front of a client six months from now as an employee? Conducting Topgrading interviews takes focus and guts. Focus to stick with the plan and the guts to be able to ask the tough questions and not back off when someone gives a weak answer to a question because they either have something to hide or they’re too lazy to go into greater detail.

Conclusion

As promised, I want to finish my thought on why I included a whole paragraph about the commission structure of Realtors in the beginning of this Letter. When he really dug into it, Levitt found that Realtors aren’t really acting in the best interest of their clients. You can pretty easily figure out why when you consider the following:

-When they are selling a house their only incentive is speed, not getting the best price. They’re going to receive 3% of the sale price. To encourage a homeowner to reduce the cost of their home from $200,000 to $180,000 results in a net loss of only $600 to the realtor but they pick up a check for $5,400. The homeowner loses 10% of their value. If they [the Realtor] turn down a lowball offer and really stand up for the seller of the house, they risk not getting paid at all.

-When they are helping to buy a house, every dollar that they negotiate in savings for a buyer results in them making LESS money.

Here’s why I think this is so applicable to why nearly every recruiting company in America is denunciatory of Topgrading:

-If a company is paying a recruiter a percentage of the first year’s salary (akin to a Realtor receiving a percentage of the sale price), the ONLY incentive that recruiter has is to get someone hired quickly so they can avoid expending more than the minimum amount of effort. They are NOT incentivized to:

- ask tough questions

- conduct reference checks with past managers

- point out red flags on a resume or a career history form

-If a company is paying a recruiter to help negotiate compensation with a prospective candidate, every dollar they help the company save is costing them part of their commission.

Your recruiters should be partners with your company. Because they are truly incentivized against doing so, why should we expect any traditional recruiting firm, and especially ones like Staffing Advisors, to ever embrace the tenets of Topgrading?

Finally, Topgrading isn’t the ONLY way of recruiting and it can’t be implemented as an initiative from HR.  It must be adopted wholeheartedly and with the full endorsement of every Executive inside a company.  When this happens and it is implemented properly and executed on with precision, its results are staggering – no matter the size of the company.

*Geoff Smart & Randy Street released a little more user-friendly book entitled WHO in 2008. The quick and dirty version of their scorecard framework can be found on page 44.

 

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Corporate Culture: What’s Yours?

January 30th, 2009 | by | retention, topgrading

Jan
30

Just about every company that I’ve ever come across has questions about Corporate Culture.  Many aren’t sure how to create one (which is a culture of its own).  Some feel really great about their culture.  Others feel the need to radically change it.

Corporate Culture can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people.  It’s sort of like asking someone to describe what a beautiful person looks like.  We also live in a society where some things are valued over others.  Examples include Google which has the famous policy of encouraging everyone in their company to work on being innovative one day a week and Bazaarvoice  that just received an award for the oddest category I’ve ever seen: the company that most the most unemployed Executives want to go to work at.  Some companies have invested so much in culture that they even put it on their site’s main page (again, Bazaarvoice as an example).

A lack of culture (or a really lousy one) seems to be so prevalent in so many companies that when a new start-up is able to really create a great work environment they can get serious mileage out of it.   A prime example of this is Josh Baer‘s newest company: OtherInbox.  In an effort to foster an environment of independence and collaboration along with innovation, his company’s website, office and marketing strategies are all aimed at ensuring that prospective employees know that they’ll be valued and given the chance to be part of something great.  For an example of what I mean, check out the Jobs page.

It goes without saying, corporate culture is easier to create from scratch than to change mid-stream and it also takes a lot of effort and time.  I heard Russ Reeder, the CEO of Austin-based LibreDigital suggest the other day, “Building our corporate culture is a journey, not a destination.”  I couldn’t agree more.

With the amount of business guides and books in the world today, it’s no wonder so many companies struggle to find themselves conflicted.  The difference between reading a business book then thinking about how it would look inside your company and then implementing it are two entirely different things.  We see this all of the time with companies who are contemplating either Rockefeller Habits or Topgrading.  If a company has been in existence and has an established way of doing things, trying to bring these or any other kind of system or methodology can be downright intimidating – especially if it does not have the fullest support from the Executive Team.  In my experience, the companies that have started something and then stopped are much worse off than companies who didn’t try to drive culture at all!

Marty Park, a business coach and amateur blogger from Calgary, AB had this exercise for determining what your existing company culture on his blog.  I enjoyed it and hope you might too:

 

1. Take a piece of paper and write down the first 10 words that come to mind to describe your business and its people. Is it positive, negative? Fun? Performance based?

2. Being as honest as you can, review your list. Are any of your choice words describing how you wish it was or how it really is?

3. Now get 5 other people to do the same exercise anonymously. When you compare the lists of each person, the words that come up repeatedly are the ones that really define your current culture.

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Best Week Ever: The Power of Process

January 23rd, 2009 | by | interviewing, recruiting, topgrading

Jan
23

It’s rare that I find myself writing directly about Hire Better and our team but tonight I can’t help but share what I consider the best week in the history of our company. About 18 months ago we embarked on a path to embrace the principles of Topgrading and become recognized as a company that was not only expert at delivering on its (Topgrading’s) promises, we also wanted to continue to innovate and make it faster and easier to implement for small and middle market companies.

The week of January 19, 2009 I’m excited to say: Mission Accomplished.

We have one fear when working with our clients: if we don’t understand a role and have a complete picture of who will be the very best fit and perform at the level of an A-Player, the Hiring Manager that we work with will probably become apathetic really fast. We knew that apathy towards the recruiting process was already present when we launched American Workforce back in 2004. When apathy sets in, the entire process becomes arduous and it can have a significant (and negative) impact on a company’s ability to hire top talent.

That’s why this week was so amazing.

This week we had a significant impact on the futures of a number of client companies very different industries (Insurance, Media, Technology). But it gets even better. Today we found out that 4 people, each of whom were the FIRST and likely the ONLY interviews that our clients had to conduct, were extended offers of employment. Even more amazing, none of these roles were below the level of Director.

Four for Four. In one week.

Obviously Topgrading plays a big part in being able to truly identify A-Players but our Team at American Workforce has embraced the true need to really understand the needs of our Clients, the Top Accountabilities in each role and the softer side of each client company’s culture. One of our clients even made the statement, “Yeah, the methodology is really great but wow, your team and their processes are incredible!”.

Next week I’ll get back to commenting on industry trends and news but, just for tonight, we can celebrate the efforts of this team of about 20 people who work at Hire Better. I’m proud of each and every one of them.

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5 Things You Can Do To Improve Hiring (Part 2)

November 21st, 2008 | by | interviewing, recruiting, topgrading

Nov
21

Earlier this week I wrote a blog post that started a list of the Top 5 Things You Can Do To Improve Hiring. I am trying to offer simple but high-impact exercises that companies and Hiring Managers can engage in to improve their hiring predictability.

#1 was “Work Backwards to Create a Job Description”. Start from the 1 year review instead of trying to create a Job Description from Scratch.

#2 was “Write a Scorecard”. By knowing what the 5-7 things are that you’re looking for you’ll be less likely to hire someone because you really like their personality.

Here are the other three things that you can do today, without much effort, to have a significant impact on your hiring predictability.

3. Implement a screening process that allows you to rapidly “screen to exclusion”. A Topgrading interview is 4 hours long. Not many people can actually conduct more than 2 or 3 of those without getting burned out. To quickly screen your large candidate pool, try implementing 2 or 3 quick steps before conducting any “real” interviews. Remember through the process that you’re trying to find reasons to take people out of contention, not include them. Some examples:

a. Rapid Resume Review: have they had more than 3 jobs in the last 8 years? Have they changed industries more than once? Have they taken a demotion for no obvious reason?

b. 10 Minute Phone Screen: ask two or three quick questions and score the answers.

i. This role requires that you have experience establishing metrics around profitability of our various retail products. Are you qualified to handle this?

ii. Would you please share with me a specific example of how you’ve done this in the past?

iii. And what did you learn through doing this?

If they really impress you with their answers to these three questions you’ll gain the clarity of knowing that they’re worth spending more time learning about the rest of their background and how they might fit into your organization.

4. Ensure that your job postings are in places where people can find them. Significantly increasing the volume of candidates who apply for your role can make a huge impact on your ability to hire effectively. When you post, ensure that the website is tied in with some of the more popular job posting aggregators like Indeed.com or SimplyHired.com. Try to also find niche websites where the traffic will be much lower but the quality of the eyeballs is higher. Make an effort to seek out local associations or user groups (example: Java User Groups or JUGS exist in every major metro area).

5. Interview for behaviors instead of relying on a resume. Even if you’ve only created a rough scorecard and you’re trying some of these tactics for the first time, interviewing for specific behaviors will yield significantly better results than simply going from role to role on a resume and letting a prospective employee tell you about just the things they want to bring up. Ask why they were hired in a role? Were they successful? Why or Why Not? What specifically were they engaged in that would make them uniquely qualified for your position? Beware the applicants who have never made mistakes (or won’t admit them).

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5 Things You Can Do To Improve Hiring (Part 1)

November 18th, 2008 | by | interviewing, recruiting, topgrading

Nov
18

Dr. Brad Smart, in his book Topgrading, gives a scary statistic that should make any Manager or Executive cringe:

“[Only] 25% of people hired and promoted by most companies turn out to be high performers.”

An even more alarming statistic: Topgrading has only sold about 150,000 copies. Why isn’t it the most popular business book ever written?

The most common answer we hear: implementing all of the Topgrading principles isn’t easy. With that in mind, here are 5 simple things, many of which are based on Topgrading and Good to Great, that you can implement in your business today to have a direct and positive impact on your hiring track record.

1. Work Backwards to Create a Job Description. Most people start with the Job Description when they start to think about hiring a new employee. The next time you need to hire someone, start at the end: be honest with yourself about what your year-end review would look like with this new team member. Quantify as much as you can. By understanding what could be accomplished by an A-Player in the first year, the creation of a job description is a lot easier. An added bonus, because you know where the person needs to be at the end of 1 year, your 30, 60 and 90 day reviews just got a lot easier.

2. Write a Scorecard. What are the top 5-7 things that you need from this new hire? Could you handle hiring someone who has only 4 of the 7 skill sets? What if they have 6 of the skills but not the most important? Scorecards give you a strong focus and allow you to rank and quantify the people you’ve interviewed objectively and unemotionally.

I’ll cover #’s 3, 4 and 5 later this week.

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Thoughts on Ponds & Right-Sizing

November 7th, 2008 | by | retention, topgrading

Nov
07

I had the opportunity to sit next to one of my favorite people today on a flight from Houston to Chicago. Ben Richter, the Founder and CEO of Bradford Airport Logistics , and I spent a lot of time talking about bodies of water and specifically: Ponds. Odd you might think, but really applicable to what’s happening around so many companies in America right now. Here’s his thought: there are three types of ponds:

-Vibrant & Fresh
-Static
-Septic

When companies are growing and expanding, their ponds are vibrant and fresh. New people are joining the team. New customers are coming online. The team is dynamic and performing together. Wins are celebrated and profit seems easy to come by.

When economic recessions hit, many companies shift to a static mode, and rightfully so. There are serious dangers in doing this, however. People who don’t carry their weight don’t have the “deodorant” of winning to mask their lack of results. Static Ponds, where no new opinions or experiences are being interjected have a tendency to both disincentivize teams and create tension. It also, when not monitored closely, can become a source of corporate welfare for people who shouldn’t have been in the company in the first place but who know are just hiding and trying to garner as little attention as possible.

This kind of environment usually leads to the third kind of pond: a Septic one. Attitudes are miserable. People walk around the office waiting for pink slips to be handed out. Not only are there no new ideas being injected into the company but the under-performers are dragging everyone down. Fingers get pointed. Blame gets laid on others. It just plain stinks.

Obviously there are lots of ways to identify when a pond is turning from Vibrant to Static and in a future post I’ll devote significant time to explaining how processes likeTopgrading can work really well when applied to an existing organization.

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Topgrading Vs. The E-Myth

September 16th, 2008 | by | recruiting, retention, topgrading

Sep
16

I got forwarded a tremendous Whitepaper that was written by Doug Wick, a Certified Gazelles International Coach . This short document outlines, for the first time that I’ve seen, the differences in opinion between (a) hiring great people or (b) putting in place great systems. If you’ve read this blog with any consistency you’ll know that we’re huge fans ofTopgrading at American Workforce so I was a little skeptical when I first saw the title.

Here’s the initial “teaser” for the article:


Successful business models must operate successfully with low-skill employees. Replicable models use systems that do not require high-skill specialists. If your franchise model requires a highly skilled and motivated clone of you, its potential success is structurally limited from the start. How many you have you met?

Systems-dependent models, unlike personality- or expert-dependent models, produce consistent results when replicated. Such systems allow ordinary people to produce reliable, predictable, yet extraordinary results. The Gazelles Inc, in their seminar Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, test Michael Gerber’s fundamental idea with a concept called Topgrading. What is Topgrading? It is a view that holds that high-skill-based models can be more profitable and still be duplicated consistently.

I’ve found myself sitting and reading this Whitepaper numerous times already since yesterday and I think that virtually every one of his arguments is well stated and thought provoking. Check it out, it’s worth a glance.

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