Awhile ago, we talked about Marcus Buckingham, a senior researcher at the Gallup Organization, and discussed his findings in his excellent book, “Now Discover Your Strengths.” He has more to offer us. Buckingham says a workforce can be divided into three categories: people who are loyal and productive, or “engaged,” those who are just
Best Hiring Practices 101d
This is the final installment of a series on Best Hiring Practices. The series is not intended to be all-inclusive, but rather an examination of the most impactful things you can do to improve your hiring process. In the previous postings, we’ve talked about the need to hire well . . . and the high
Best Hiring Practices 101c
In our last posting on “Best Hiring Practices,” we talked about the need to write a comprehensive job description detailing not only the skills an applicant must have, but also the behaviors. Now the next step is to prepare written interview questions. Why written? For that answer, and for a lot more on preparing for
Best Hiring Practices 101b
This is the first installment of a series on “best hiring practices,” and as such, it probably makes sense to start at the beginning. The real beginning is making the decision that you need to hire someone, but for this purpose, we’ll assume you’ve already done that and that you now need to take the
Best Hiring Practices 101a
Although unemployment is still high and small business owners are reluctant to undo some of the painful staffing cuts they’ve had to make, some owners are creeping back into the job market to fill some needed vacancies. So it seems an appropriate time to talk about a hiring “process.” While there’s no hiring process that
“Permitting colleagues to participate in decision-making is not so much a favor to the participants as it is to the executive.”
The days of the boss hurling down lightning bolts while his employees scurry to do his bidding are long gone. Employees today are better educated, better trained, and have access to more information than ever before. They have insights as to what’s working well and what’s not. In short, they are smart people who expect
“Goals produce results, not activities.”
Our last posting talked about consistency. We talked about identifying “critical success factors” . . . operating principles that, when applied consistently, are at the core of a company’s success. But operating principles are only half the equation. They are the front end, the input side of things. They are the consistent activities that produce
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”
In his outstanding book, Great by Choice, Jim Collins relates the story of Howard Putnam, a former CEO of Southwest Airlines. Putnam institutionalized the Southwest Airlines’ “recipe” for success. His “recipe” was not a strategic plan or a vision or a mission statement, but a carefully thought-out list of operating principles. That list included: Utilize
“Give up trying to grow the bottom line. Grow your people and your people will grow the bottom line.”
I was in a conversation recently with a guy who works for a technology company, and during the course of the conversation, the subject of “training” came up. He said that his company has a training budget for their technicians, but not for their managers. He said he knows this because he wanted to attend
Now, Discover Your Strengths
In his excellent book, “Now Discover Your Strengths,” author Marcus Buckingham and co-author Donald Clifton discuss the work they did for The Gallup Organization to find out what makes successful people successful. What do those successful people have in common that makes them high achievers? So they sifted through over two million interviews that Gallup
