A truly
great team requires obsessively great hiring, a trusting, transparent Leader
who strives to be a servant Leader, shared goals and values (best if developed
by the team), a culture of ownership and responsibility, and a need for
constant improvement.
I have been
writing about hiring and training the best hourly team members, as well as how
to change the team culture to enable the development of a truly great team on
my blog for some time now. It's been
almost 100 posts in the making, and I imagine it can be daunting jumping into
what is essentially a book on hiring and team development.
So... I
thought we might shorten all of those posts into a much shorter series on hiring
the best hourly team members; how and why to hire for Leadership qualities;
honesty, trust and transparency as they relate to Leadership (servant
Leadership in particular); developing team goals and values;
developing/changing our team culture; and developing enough trust and ownership
in that culture that will not only allow for constant improvement, but will
demand it.
I've been
hiring hourly team members, from entry level/no experience people to department
Leaders and Store Team Leaders for 30 years now, and that is what I'm writing
about. When hiring executives, or other
jobs where specific job skills, talents, and/or a specific educational
background is needed, weed out the applicants without these mandatory requirements,
and then follow the steps I outline below.
If you disagree, I'm sure you'll let me know
Hiring is
arguably the most important thing we do.
You cannot have a great team without hiring great people. If you don't have the team you want, the
first thing you need to look at is your hiring.
In fact, if you don't have the team you want, and you have been doing
the hiring, I'd suggest that you need to get someone who has a track record of
hiring great people either take over your hiring, or retrain you on how to
hire. Yes it's hard to own up to that,
and admit that we aren't good at hiring.
And... without great hiring we will never have that great team.
Too many of
us have some notion that we cannot admit we are not that good at hiring… for
some reason admitting that is a huge blow to our egos. We are all very good at one or two things, OK
at most things, and not so good at other things. Build and play to your strengths, and find
people who are very good at the jobs you are not so good at. You can read my whole series about how to hire
hourly team members for Leadership qualities starting here from earlier in this blog. It will take some humility to fully accept
that we need to unlearn our old ways of hiring in order to learn to hire for
qualities. And the payoff is simply
amazing!
You will be
hiring for attitude/qualities first, and any needed skills second (again, I'm
talking about hiring hourly team members).
In fact, you should be hiring for every position based on Leadership
qualities first, skills second. If you
are serious about developing a great team, you will need the best Leaders. How many places have you worked where great
Leaders are being developed? Any? So... you will have to grow your own, and
hiring for Leadership qualities is the best way to start. The hourly team members you are hiring today
will be your Leadership team in the near future.
Your should
read my post about Hiringfor what can't be trained, and in a nutshell... Think about the people
who you would love to clone... they are probably really good at the skills of
their job, and is that what makes them clone worthy? Probably not... They are most likely clone
worthy because of the qualities they possess... because of their attitude
towards their work... that's what makes them great! I can take the next person you see and train
them how to do every task needed to run a grocery store (you can probably train
the skills needed for your workplace), however I cannot train qualities. We cannot train anyone to be self aware, to
show self responsibility, to have courage, to extend trust, or to be honest...
those cannot be trained, so we must hire for them, and I dare to say, at least
for hourly team members, almost only for them!
The best way
I have found to determine which people have the qualities we are looking for is
through a long and friendly conversation, with some specific questions used to
draw out our own make or break qualities.
For
instance, if your new hires will be dealing with your customers, it is
imperative that their default level of customer service is at least as high as
your expected level of service. I have
found it next to impossible to get people to consistently provide a higher
level of customer service than they believe is the correct level, without
constant supervision, and no one has the time for that. So... we must hire people who already believe
that our expected levels of service are the correct and only reasonable level
of service. Then, and only then, can we
count on them to consistently deliver that level of service without any supervision. I wrote a post specifically about hiring for
customer service here.
Well, we
knew this would be a series… next time
we’ll start to talk about just how we discover whether or not our applicant has
been developing the qualities we’re looking for.
No comments:
Post a Comment