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“Hire the best, fire the rest” (Part 2)

In our previous post, “Hire the best, fire the rest,” we talked about the “topgrading” concepts espoused by management psychologist Dr. Brad Smart. In his book, “Topgrading: How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching, and Keeping the Best People.” He forwards the idea that, any employee the company hires or promotes, from the executive suite to the factory floor to the loading dock, should be an A-Player (people who are in the top 10 percent of the talent available for that position) or people who have the potential to become A-Players.  Over time, says Dr. Smart, people who are not A-Players or who lack the potential to become A-Players, must be replaced.  Sounds like a tall order, and it is.

If you’re interested in becoming a “topgrading” company and would like some thoughts on where to start, please continue reading below.

“Hire the best, fire the rest” (Part 2)

First, let’s be clear. Topgrading is probably not for everyone.  It’s a very rigorous system for hiring and promoting people, and it’s not for the faint of heart.  It’s not the kind of thing that you say “Let’s give it a try.”  No, you either go at it full throttle, or you don’t go at it at all.

If you are interested in becoming a topgrading company and want a detailed manual on how to do it, you need to read Dr. Smart’s book, but there are three major areas that you’ll need to think about.

Commitment. Becoming a topgrading company is a major strategic objective that will require the horsepower that only the CEO can deliver. You won’t be able to hand this off to an HR person or to someone else on your leadership team. So if you’re not prepared to lead the charge on this, you should not attempt it. You will also need to get a commitment from all hiring managers that, no matter how desperate they are to fill a key spot, they absolutely will only fill it with someone they believe to be an A-Player. That means they will need to have contingency plans for key openings to help them “get by” until the right person can be found. And if they’re smart, they will begin seeking out and keeping a list of people with the “right stuff” to be A-Players in your organization so that when they do have an opening, they already have a short list of people who can fill it.

Detailed job descriptions with key success factors.  “cultural fit.” Too often we focus on the skills we need and overlook a candidate’s values and interpersonal skills. We need to recognize that if a candidate has great work skills, but is a poor fit for our culture, he or she may be an A-Player at another company, but not at ours.

  • 3)  The topgrading interview.

 

  • Earlier in this post, we said that topgrading is a tall order and that it’s not for the faint of heart. It will be a jolt to your culture . . . perhaps a welcome jolt, but a jolt nonetheless.  You will be saying to your organization, “We only have room here for people who are top performers or are on their way to becoming top performers.”  When your lesser performers realize that you’re serious about this, some will self-select out and leave the company in search of less demanding pastures.  There will great pressure on you and your hiring managers to be faithful gatekeepers and not to allow any B- or C-Players in . . . your culture will feel violated if you do.  But if you can deal with all of that and successfully navigate the rigors of the topgrading approach, the payoffs can be enormous.

 

NOTE: If you missed Part 1 of this post or if you would like to review it, here is a link to it.

https://rocksolidbizdevelopment.com/ourblog/hire-best-fire-rest/

 
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“Hire the best, fire the rest”

Brad Smart isn’t a household name . . . at least, not in my household. But he holds a PhD in management psychology and is the author of “Topgrading: How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching, and Keeping the Best People.” In that book, Dr. Smart advocates a system whereby a company identifies its “A-Players” (top performers) as well as those who have the potential to become A-Players.  B- and C-Players who do not show the potential to become A-Players are either re-assigned to roles where they could become A-Players, or they are asked to leave the company.  Legendary CEOs  Jack Welch (General Electric) and Larry Bossidy (Honeywell) were early adopters of Dr. Smart’s “Topgrading” concepts.  What did such titans of American business see in these concepts?  For the answer, please continue reading below.

“Hire the best, fire the rest”

I couldn’t find whoever coined that phrase, but it does capture the essence of Dr. Smart’s concepts for hiring and promoting people.

The thing most people don’t understand about “Topgrading” is that it applies equally to everyone in the organization, not just to the key management spots. That is, you not only want A-Players in the executive suite, you also want them on the loading dock.  Easier said than done, right?  Especially when you consider that an “A-Player” is generally defined as someone who is in the top 10 percent of the talent available for that position.  That means they’re hard to find, and because they’re in demand,  they will expect to be paid at, or even above, the top of the pay scale for their position.  But if, compared to B- and C- Players, they work more efficiently and effectively, show more initiative and resourcefulness, innovate more, and display better leadership qualities, they’re worth what you pay for them.

 

Among the companies he studied. Dr. Smart found that only one-fourth of people hired or promoted turned out to be A-Players. Or, to put it another way, they had to go through three mis-hires before they got a good one.  And as we know, a staffing mistake can be very costly.  Just how costly is open to debate because data on this is sketchy at best.  At a minimum, the company is out-of-pocket whatever the mis-hire was paid in salary and benefits, plus recruiting costs for the mis-hire as well as recruiting costs for the mis-hire’s replacement.  Now, if  Dr. Smart’s 1 in 4 is to be believed, multiply this bundle of costs times three.  But beyond that, the costs of staffing mistakes can get spectacular.  Consider, for instance, the cost of  “ lost opportunity.”  Or worse, ask any manufacturer the cost of a product recall.  So while hiring A-Players may be difficult and expensive, mis-hires can cause situations that are orders of magnitude more difficult and more expensive.

Consider one other thing. A-Players don’t like to play with B- and C-Players.  They want to play with other A-Players.  Genuine A-Players are always trying to improve their game.  B- and C-Players can’t help them do that.  A-Players can.  So if you have A-Players on your team, they may be at risk of leaving if they find themselves surrounded by Bs and Cs.

OK, so if there are strong arguments, financial and otherwise, to becoming a topgrading company, how exactly do we do that? Where do we start?  For the answers to those, and other compelling questions, please read our next post, “Hire the best, fire the rest”, (Part 2) on June 15.

 
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A good customer/supplier relationship is essentially a partnership

Life is all about relationships, not the least of which are business relationships. We must build relationships with business peers and advisors, with employees, with our vendors and suppliers, and of course, with our customers. But what sort of relationship do we enjoy with our customers? While many like to think they’ve forged a “partnership” with their customers, few truly have. What they really have is a simple transactional relationship the nature of which is, “You give me this much money, and I’ll send you this much of my stuff.” Period, end of story and end of the relationship until the next time your customer needs more of your stuff. So do you really “partner” with your customers, or do you simply engage in a series of transactions with them? For more on this, please continue reading below.

A good customer/supplier relationship is essentially a partnership

If you have a strong, well-crafted culture that is driven by a clear vision and compelling values (as we hope you do), then you are probably careful in your hiring practices to screen out people who are not a good fit for that culture. Likewise, in your sales and marketing efforts, you should be screening out prospective customers whose business practices are not a good fit with yours.  This can be very tough to do when you have sales people who are under pressure and incented to achieve ever-increasing sales goals.  Yet, just as an ill-fitting employee can wreak havoc on your organization, so can an ill-fitting customer.

In your customer relationships, if you want to know if you’re a genuine partner or just an order-taker, consider the following:

  • Have you developed strong personal relationships with your customers? As billionaire entrepreneur Wayne Huizenga has said, “I don’t want to be just a voice on the phone. I have to get to know these guys face-to-face and develop a sincere relationship. That way, if we run into problems in a deal, it doesn’t get adversarial. We trust each other and have the confidence we can work things out.”
  • You almost certainly honor your commitments to your customers (if you don’t, you won’t be in business for long), but do they reciprocate by honoring their commitments to you? Or do they figure honoring commitments is a one-way street?
  • Do your customers understand and appreciate the value you bring to them, or do they focus solely on price?
  • From time-to-time, your customers may ask for your help in solving a problem. I’m sure, if you have the ability to help, you do. The fact that when they have a special problem, they turn to you for help is a testament to the confidence they have in you. But is the reverse true? If your customers had the ability to help solve a problem for you, would they? If they would, that speaks volumes about the relationship.
  • Do you regularly confer with your customers to determine how their needs are evolving? Or are your conversations limited to how big their next order is going to be?

This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of all the things that can validate the strength of a customer relationship, but it’s a good start. And by the way, let’s not lose sight of the fact that you’re not only a supplier, you’re somebody’s customer as well. You should be trying to build the same sort of partnerships with your vendors as you are with your customers.

The point is, if your customers see their relationship with you as purely transactional . . . if they see you as only a peddler, someone who is just trying to sell them as much of his stuff as he can . . . they’ve already got one foot out the door. There are plenty of other peddlers out there, so as soon as there’s the slightest bump in the road or as soon as one of those other peddlers offers to save them a few pennies, they’ll be gone. Clearly, that’s not what you want. You want to build a relationship with your customers based upon mutual caring, trust, and respect. You want them to see you as a valued resource, a part of their team, who can help them build their business. In short, you want them to see you as a genuine partner who is committed to their success.

 
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“You can manage things, but people need to be led.”

John Maxwell, who has written many books on leadership and who teaches courses in it, talks about “The Five Levels of Leadership.” (NOTE: If you want to watch Maxwell’s entire 27-minute presentation, you can view it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPwXeg8ThWI ).    In it, he describes the “Five Levels” as a pyramid whereby all of us start at the bottom and work our way up, level by level, until we (at least some of us) reach the pinnacle.  He calls Level One, the “Position Level” because the person who holds a leadership position at this level holds it only because the org chart says so.  At this level, people will do what they’re told to do because they must . . . if they want to keep their jobs and collect a paycheck.  But the authority figure in this environment will get the minimum effort from his or her people.  They will do what they have to do in order to protect their jobs and collect a paycheck, but no more.

If you suspect that you, or some of your managers, are stuck in Position Level leadership and would like to change, please continue reading below.

“You can manage things, but people need to be led.”   – Peter Drucker

Pretty smart guy that Peter Drucker. He understood what many people do not . . . that leading and managing are two totally different activities.  A great manager is not necessarily a great leader, nor is a great leader necessarily a great manager.  Good managers are organized, task-oriented, able to juggle a lot of details, and are driven by schedules and deadlines.   As Drucker teaches, managing is about things.  Buildings and equipment can be managed.  Inventory can be managed.  Cash can be managed.  But people?  Not so much.  Good leaders are visionary, big picture people who are capable of inspiring and challenging the people around them, and painting a picture of exciting possibilities ahead.  It’s not that people can’t lead and manage, but it’s a rare person who can be great at both.  So are you leading your people, or are you trying to manage them?

In its current issue, Time magazine profiles “The 100 Most Influential People in the World.” Sadly, I’m not one of them.  Neither are you.  But one who did make the list is Christine Lagarde.  She has led the International Monetary Fund since 2011 and also serves as Finance Minister in her native France.  As the first woman in both roles, she has shown extraordinary leadership at a time when the world was still recovering from recession and the European Union was trying to hold itself together.  Time quotes her as saying, “Leadership is about encouraging people.  It’s about stimulating them.  It’s about enabling them to achieve what they can achieve  . . . and to do that with purpose.”  While that may not be a precise definition of leadership, it’s a great definition of what leaders do.

There is an inflection point for all would-be leaders. They can stay at the John Maxwell’s Position Level, leaders in name only because the org chart says so, or they can begin working on their leadership skills, developing their own leadership style, and move beyond Level One toward the sort of  leadership envisioned by Christine Lagarde.  The objective, according to Richard Teerlink, former CEO of Harley-Davidson, “is a group of people working toward a common goal because they want to, not because they have to.”

Think of your own leadership style as well as the leadership styles of other authority figures within your organization. Are any of you practicing Position Level leadership and getting less-than-optimal performance?  Or have you moved up a few levels to a point that people are performing at “want to” levels rather than “have to” levels?

If you need help elevating the level of leadership within your organization, call me. I’ll be happy to talk to you about it.

 
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Solve Problems with Ignorance, Not Experience

“When you’re a little bit dumb and naïve, things get done that no one believed could be done.” We don’t know who said that, but it’s true. Consider the new, fresh-faced young salesman who marches into an account we wrote off long ago as a waste of time. We all laugh at his innocence and inexperience, and wait for him to get thrown out on his ear. But he doesn’t get thrown out. He walks out . . . and with an order in hand, no less. Unbelievable! Apparently, nobody told him that account would never buy from us, so in his ignorance, he just went ahead and made the sale. So maybe, sometimes, a little ignorance can be a good thing. For more on the power of ignorance, please continue reading below.

Solve Problems with Ignorance, Not Experience

Huh? Sounds nuts, doesn’t it? But what it’s really saying is, if you depend on your past experience to solve every new problem, you will keep coming up with the same answers. On the other hand, if you approach each new problem with fresh eyes and an open mind, you may come up with a great solution that your experience alone would not have. Henry Ford understood this when he said, “None of our men are ‘experts.’ We have most unfortunately found it necessary to get rid of a man as soon as he thinks himself an expert because no one ever considers himself expert if he really knows his job. A man who knows a job sees so much more to be done than he has done, that he is always pressing forward and never gives up an instant of thought to how good and how efficient he is. Thinking always ahead, thinking always of trying to do more, brings a state of mind in which nothing is impossible. The moment one gets into the ‘expert’ state of mind, a great number of things become impossible.”

Prior to the U.S. entering World War II, German submarines were sinking the cargo ships that supplied England much faster than the English could build new ones. The British asked us for help. While we had no real experience in building merchant cargo ships, the British were desperate and had nowhere else to turn. Industrialist Henry Kaiser, who at the time was involved in large public works projects like building roads, bridges, and dams, accepted the challenge. He didn’t have the know-how, experience, or heavy equipment typically used in shipbuilding, but he forged ahead figuring it out as he went. In his ignorance, he did a lot of things not typically done in shipbuilding at that time. He used oxyacetylene torches to cut steel instead of industrial cutting machines and used welding instead of rivets. He used prefabricated parts and introduced American assembly line techniques. As a result, he was able to build ships much faster (and cheaper) than the British shipyards were able to do. While the British shipyards would take eight months to build a cargo ship, Kaiser started cranking them out in thirty days. Then he improved his time to two weeks. Finally, as a publicity stunt, he produced a ship, start to finish, in four and a half days. Not bad for a guy who had never built a ship before. But of course, in his ignorance, he didn’t know that you couldn’t build ships that way.

We’re not saying experience doesn’t have value. Of course it does. Great value. But it can sometimes blind us to new ways of thinking and new ways of doing things.

Try this. Next time you give an assignment to one of your people, tell him what needs to get done, but don’t tell him how to do it. Tell her what, not how. Let her figure it out on her own. Unfettered by preconceptions or prior experience, you may be surprised at the innovative ways he finds to complete the assignment.

 
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“Outstanding performance is inconsistent with fear of failure.”

In today’s business environment, change is inevitable. It’s all around us . . . new government regulations are thrust upon us, new competitors enter our market as old competitors leave, and new technologies make current technologies obsolete. Yet our instincts are to resist change.  After all, we perform well doing things the way we do them now.  We’re efficient and we’re successful using our current methods.  If we change, our instincts tell us, we’ll have to go through a learning curve which will hurt our efficiency for awhile, and who knows?  Maybe we won’t be as successful as we were before we enacted these changes.  So do we resist the forces of change as long as we can, hoping to eke out every last benefit we can from our current way of doing business?  Or do we see the changes coming at us as opportunities and embrace them, enacting them as fast as we can?  For some perspective on this dilemma, please continue reading below.

 

“I do not believe you can do today’s job with yesterday’s methods and be in business tomorrow.”     – Nelson Jackson

First, let’s be clear. When a significant change impacts your market, you can adapt to the change or you can go out of business.  If you decide to continue along your merry way, ignore the change and hope it will go away, you will have selected the “going out of business” option.  In certain situations, you may want to delay adapting your business to the new market dynamics, but don’t delude yourself into thinking, “This will all blow over and we can get back to business as usual.”  Think of the Luddites who thought they could stop the Industrial Revolution.  Think of IBM who brushed aside the PC as a toy that would never have any commercial value.  Ignoring significant change didn’t work out too well for them, and it won’t for you either. Think of the Nelson Jackson quote above.

“Outstanding performance is inconsistent with fear of failure.” – Peter Drucker

Then let’s consider the above quote from management guru Peter Drucker. If we except that change is inevitable and that successfully adapting to that change is essential to the long-term health of our business, then we must also except that if our culture encourages fear of failure, our organization might be slow to respond to important changes.

Change does involve risk. It doesn’t matter if the change is thrust upon us or if we enter it voluntarily, it still involves risk.  So if you want “outstanding performance” from your people as you try to manage change, they need to be confident of your support and focused on positive outcomes.  If they are afraid of failure, they may be overly cautious and instead of playing to win, they may play not to lose which will allow a nimble, aggressive competitor an opening to win the game.

Change is inevitable, and the pace of change will continue to accelerate. But the good news is, change usually does provide opportunity to those who can spot it early, and to those teams who are confident in their abilities and who can fearlessly reach out and grab it.

 
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Everyone is accountable

Accountability.  Everybody talks about it, but few really practice it.  In its purest form, accountability is a contract to carry out a specific responsibility, and if the responsibility is time-sensitive, to carry it out within a specific time frame.  The problem is, for many people,  accountability isn’t viewed as a contract, but more of a guideline . . . a casual sort of thing.  When someone is asked to take on a responsibility, their mindset may be, “I acknowledge what you want and when you want it, but I’ve got a lot of other stuff to do, so no promises. OK?”  In other words, in some organizations, holding someone accountable may mean getting their good intentions, not necessarily their full commitment.  It’s a cultural thing.  If it’s true that “your culture is defined by what you tolerate,” then what sort of accountability do you tolerate?  Real commitments or just good intentions?  For more on this, please continue reading below.

Everyone is accountable.

In the U.S. Navy, ship captains understand accountability very well because for them, being accountable is absolute.  A ship’s captain is fully responsible and accountable for everything that happens on (or to) his ship 24/7.  Whether the captain is on the ship or ashore, awake or asleep, or the victim of an Act of God, it doesn’t matter.  He is responsible for the well-being and the performance of his ship and crew regardless of the circumstances.

We don’t often find civilian organizations that hold accountability to that high a standard, but maybe they should.  What would it feel like, for instance, to ask someone on your team to complete a certain task by a certain time and date, and be absolutely 100% confident that it would be done correctly and on time?  What if everyone on your team held themselves to that level of accountability?  What if everyone in your entire organization practiced that level of accountability, not just between superiors and subordinates, but to one another, to customers, and to suppliers as well   What if it were a cultural norm at your place that when any one of us accepts responsibility for doing something, it’s as good as done.  You can take it to the bank.

So how do you infuse that level of accountability into an organization?

  1. Good communication is a key.  People need to understand what being accountable truly means, why it’s important to the organization, and most importantly, what it looks like when it’s being practiced appropriately.
  2. Consistency is crucial.  We can’t hold people accountable one day and give them a pass the following day.  And we have to hold people accountable for things big and small . . . not only to bring a big project in on time and on budget, but also to be prepared and on time to the weekly staff meeting.
  3. Get agreement up front.  When you’re asking someone to do something, make sure they agree that they can do what’s being asked.  If they don’t, you may have to do a little negotiating  . . . either reducing the scope of the project, or allowing more time for its completion.
  4. Make it clear to the person receiving an assignment that you want to operate by the Doctrine of No Surprises.  Acknowledge that unforeseen situations can arise that might prevent a task from being completed as planned, and that’s OK as long as the bad news is communicated in a timely manner.  What’s not OK is to wait until the project is already late before saying anything about it.  If you’re not comfortable with that level of oversight, you can ask for regular progress reports to make sure projects are on track.

We’re all human, so from time-to-time, we may fail in some of our commitments.  We’re not suggesting a public flogging every time someone slips up, but nor can we just ignore such lapses.  So simply acknowledge the slip up, re-commit to the principles of accountability, and move on.

This may seem like a big undertaking, and it is . . . in the beginning, at least.  But in the end, a willingness to hold yourself and others accountable becomes a habit and an intrinsic part of your culture.  At that point, it builds tremendous trust throughout the organization and beyond . . . trust that our word is our bond, that we keep our promises, and that we honor our commitments.

 
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“What Everybody Knows Is Frequently Wrong.”

In his book, “A Class With Drucker” William Cohen talks about the “lost lessons” he learned from renowned management guru, Peter Drucker, as a first-year graduate student in Drucker’s classroom.  One of those lessons was to disregard so-called “conventional wisdom,” avoid being a crowd follower, and draw your own conclusions about a situation based on your own analysis of the facts.  For example, when Swedish track star Gunder Haegg set a world record for running a mile in 4 minutes, 1.4 seconds, it was common knowledge that running a mile in under four minutes was impossible.  Expert after expert testified that running a mile in under four minutes was an impossibility.  It simply could not be done.  The human body was just not designed to be able to run that fast.  Yet on May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister, who apparently didn’t get the memo on the impossibility of it, broke the 4-minute mile.  Today, some high school runners are able to break four minutes, and the current world record is 3:43.13.  For more on Drucker’s admonition against following the crowd and why it’s important to your business, please continue reading below.

“What Everybody Knows Is Frequently Wrong.”            – Peter Drucker

Or as Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

We’ve been making false assumptions since we thought the earth was flat.  And those false assumptions have been wreaking havoc with our decision-making processes.  It stands to reason, doesn’t it?  If you base a decision on a false assumption, that decision is unlikely to be one of your best.

Author Cohen talks about the Tylenol scare in 1982 when tragically, several people died from Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide.  Prior to this unfortunate episode, Tylenol was the most popular brand in its category, controlling 35% of a $2 billion market. Afterwards, “everybody” knew the product was dead.  It would never recover.  According to popular sentiment at the time, the maker of Tylenol, Johnson & Johnson, should retire the brand, formulate a new product with a new name, and start over.  But Johnson & Johnson didn’t buy into the universal assumption that the brand was dead.  The company had a marketing and public relations plan that they thought would save Tylenol.  And it did.  The product slowly but surely regained its previous market position, and preserved the hundreds of millions of sales dollars that would otherwise have gone down the drain.

Still, Drucker says that everybody is frequently wrong, not always wrong.  Therefore, sometimes what “everybody knows” to be true, actually is true.  The problem, then, is to figure out how to analyze assumptions upon which you’re basing an important decision in a way that you can separate the false assumptions from the true ones..  To do that, we basically have to trace the assumptions back in time to their origins.  Let’s say, for example, we’re considering a change to our long-standing marketing approach.  We would want to look at the assumptions underlying our current approach.  Were those assumptions formulated in-house or by an outside consultant?  When were those assumptions formulated?  At that time, were market conditions about the same as now?  If not, are those assumptions still valid?  So we keep drilling down on the history of an assumption looking for its origin and trying to determine if the conditions that spawned this particular assumption still hold water.

Sometimes we learn that assumptions are buried so deep in a company’s culture that nobody really knows how or why they got there.  In other cases, we may learn that an assumption found its origin when it rolled off an influential tongue that nobody wanted to challenge.  Or, as in the example above, we may find that an assumption was born under conditions that no longer exist.  The point is, when making critical decisions, don’t let “What everybody knows” go unchallenged.  When your mother says she loves you, check it out.

 
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Using DISC for fun and profit . . . and did I mention it’s FREE?!

Would you be interested in a behavioral assessment tool that can help you:

  • Strengthen your communication skills?
  • Build your leadership abilities as well as your coaching and mentoring skills?
  • Reduce personal and organizational conflict, stress, and turnover?
  • Make better hiring decisions?
  • Learn to appreciate behavioral strengths, challenges and differences in yourself and in others?
  • Increase your sales skill by understanding how clients or customers make buying decisions?
  • Improve customer relationships and satisfaction?

Some of you may already be familiar with it.  It’s the DISC behavioral assessment.  While it’s been around and widely used for many years, there are still lots of people who have never been exposed to it.  If you know and understand DISC and have used it before, you can probably stop reading now because it’s unlikely I will be telling you anything about DISC you don’t already know.  But if you’re one of those people who has never been exposed to DISC, if you are intrigued by the benefits listed above, and if you’d like to find out how to get a DISC assessment for yourself FREE . . . that’s right, I can get one for you FREE . . . please continue reading below.

Using DISC for fun and profit . . . and did I mention it’s FREE?!

First, DISC is not an IQ test.  The results of the assessment say nothing about how smart you are.  Nor does the assessment say anything about your values, morals, or personal ethics.  It doesn’t try to measure skills or knowledge.

DISC is a behavioral assessment tool based on the theories of psychologist William Moulton Marston (who, under the pen name of Charles Moulton, created the Wonder Woman character for DC Comics).  He conceived his behavioral theories in the 1920s which were later used by industrial psychologist Walter Vernon Clarke to develop the DISC behavioral assessment tool.  This tool attempts to divide people into four distinct behavioral traits: Dominant, Influencing, Steady, and Compliant (collectively referred to as Ds, Is, Ss, or Cs).

We’ll look at each of these in a bit more detail.

Dominant.  If you’re a D, you’re impatient and may have a short attention span.  You’re a big picture, action-oriented person.  You don’t want to get bogged down in a lot of details and you don’t want to talk something to death, you just want to get on with it.  Your focus is always on results.  Your communication style is minimalist.  Your spoken and written communications are clipped, sometimes cryptic, often blunt.  People may interpret your communication style as impersonal at best, or even rude.

Influencing.  In many ways, if you’re an I, you’re the polar opposite of a D.  You’re gregarious, talkative.  You’re a relationship-builder.  You may tend to take action or make decisions emotionally, not rationally.  You have a high need for social recognition and approval.  Your communication style is warm and engaging. If you’re going to err, you’re going to err on the side of saying too much rather than too little.

Steady.  An S is patient, loyal to a fault, but becomes insecure in the face of change . . . particularly rapid change.  They can tend to be “lurkers” who lay back in the weeds and watch what’s going on very closely, but may not be active participants in what’s going on until they feel it’s safe.  Their behavior is a reflection of how secure or insecure they feel.  They don’t like a lot of attention and will resist putting themselves “out front” whenever possible.  In a meeting, they may tend to keep their thoughts, opinions, and ideas to themselves unless the leader works to draw them into the conversation.

Compliant.  Cs are information junkies.  Before they will make a decision or commit to anything, they want as much information in as much detail as possible.  They operate best in an unambiguous environment surrounded by well-defined rules and procedures.  They react badly to criticism of their work.  Their communication style is to ask questions, endlessly, in an effort to get as much data as possible about the subject at hand.

None of these four traits are good or bad, no single one of them is more desirable than the others.  And all of us possess at least a little bit of all four traits.  Some of us will have one trait that completely overshadows the other three, while other people may have several traits that are more or less equal.  Either way, understanding why we behave the way we do and why others behave the way they do is a key insight that can help improve communications, build leadership abilities, and do all the other things mentioned at the top of this letter.

If you haven’t ever had a DISC assessment done on yourself but would like one, call me at (847) 665-9134 or email me at ARock46@aol.com.  I will be happy to put you in touch with a friend and colleague who will give you a FREE trial DISC assessment, and afterward, if you like, I will be happy to help you interpret your results.

I hope to hear from you.

 
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“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.”

Fast Company magazine recently hosted the “Fast Company Innovation Festival” and invited fifty executives, not only from large well-known companies like GE and Nike, but also from relatively obscure companies like Grey North America and Birchbox, to attend.  The only common denominator shared by the participants was they all came from companies known for being innovative.  In the current issue of Fast Company, the magazine publishes what some of these innovators said about innovation and its place in today’s business environment.  To read a little about what they had to say, please continue below.

“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.”   – William Pollard

When we think of innovation, we immediately think of the newest smart phone or the coolest new app or some other clever gadget.  We think of technology companies like Apple, Google, or Microsoft, don’t we?  But what about the rest of us?  Don’t we have to be innovative too?  As a matter of fact, we do.  Whether your company is a startup or old and established, whether it’s high tech or low tech, whether it’s a service business or a manufacturing business, you must be innovative or you won’t be in business for very long.  While some innovation is aimed at totally new and unique products or services, the great bulk of innovation is aimed at simply improving existing products or services, or figuring out how to deliver them more efficiently.

Here’s what some of the Fast Company Innovation Festival participants had to say about innovation and creativity:

“It’s all about choosing your [creative] partners wisely – choosing partners who are additive.”                – Darren Star, producer

“Surround yourself with good people who like things you don’t like.”                     – Garance Dore, fashion blogger

“If you want innovation, you want diversity.  We often hire people like us, and the actual answer is to hire the person who is least like me – who is going to complement me.  There’s a real art to that.”         – Beth Comstock, GE

“When I hear people say, ‘Well, that’s just not the way we do things,’ my hair stands up.  You have to be careful not to let success breed a one-dimensional way of thinking.      – Mark Parker, Nike

“In the work environment, innovation comes from great trust, from people having a voice.  Fear inhibits innovation.”    – Susan Reilly Salgado, Union Square Hospitality

So in the minds of these Festival participants, the key to innovation is to create an environment where diversity of thought is not just tolerated, but encouraged.  As General George Patton once said, “If everyone is thinking alike, someone’s not thinking.”

And one more.

“Starting with the premise that [customers] are smart and their needs will continue to change is the only way that we will not become a victim of our own success.”                                              – Katia Beauchamp, Birchbox

So like the William Pollard quote above, Beauchamp tells us to beware of entrenched success.  A defensive, don’t-rock-the-boat mentality can creep in that will kill innovation.

Some innovative companies put a fancier handle on innovation and call it Continuous Process Improvement (CPI), but it’s all the same stuff.  It’s the idea that we have to constantly look for creative ways to do what we do better/faster/cheaper or to change what we do to satisfy changing and evolving customer needs.

After all, that’s what our competitors are doing.

 
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