in this issue
	Leadership Corner: Talent – How to Choose the Best Candidate for Your Executive Team Coaching Corner: Coaching Q&A Organizational Corner: Building Teams to Build the Company

Leadership Corner: Talent – How to Choose the Best Candidate for Your Executive Team

Unemployment is hovering over six percent. Only three years ago it was a third of that. Approximately 30 percent will be hired within four months. With all the talent that is in the market, will you find the right one for your position? The comment we most often hear from CEOs is the regret of hiring someone in haste only to regret it at leisure. The opportunity we miss in the interview process to assess this candidate from all perspectives becomes a threat down the road. As in any initiative, planning is half the challenge while implementation is the other. There are five steps to successful assessment that will help you fill the gaps of uncertainty in the process of finding key talent. Ask yourself some key questions that must be answered by the interviewee and create a process that chooses the top candidate. Include many ways of finding the answers to those questions, including scored individual interviews, team interviews, social interviews, DISC assessments, and presentation interviews; in all cases create questions that get at the traits and skills, both hard and soft, that will make this a successful fit. By the time you see the candidate, your HR department will present people who meet your basic requirements for the job. The real challenge is creating a process that culls the extraordinary from the ordinary and finds someone who will excel in your corporate culture with your unique executive team. Individual Interviews and Rating Process. Here are some questions to ask: Who is the ideal candidate? What kinds of results in his/her last job do I look for that may prove useful in this company? What is their value proposition? What are the greatest challenges of this position, and what type of personality traits; habits; communication style will help mitigate the challenge? What are the key functions of this job beyond the job description? Do they have to motivate staff; drive results; collaborate with other departments? What are their strategies to do that? How have they demonstrated that in other positions? What kinds of personality traits and communication style would help or hinder that process? How will this person fit into the team? Are they a motivator, analyzer, challenger, producer, supporter? Given the key functions and key traits or habits that would drive success, create a weighted scale for each function from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest.) Construct a question or scenario that illustrates that function and rate their responses as you interview. Since we only remember 20 percent of what we hear—memory is a faulty function for assessing winners—write down your impressions as you go. For example, if one of their key functions as VP of Sales and Marketing is to be able to work closely with R&D to give a forecast on future needs, how does this person communicate across silos? What question would answer that? How have you gathered the information you need to make accurate forecasts in the past? Rate their response from 1 to 5. Follow up with a question about what would be their strategy here. Again rate from 1 to 5. Everyone who interviews the candidate should have the same standards and process so that when you sit down together you can look at different parts of the elephant. Team Interviews Team interviews with some or part of the team can reveal a whole other side of the candidate that can be camouflaged in individual interviews. How would this person complement, adapt, or challenge this team? Create questions that get at some of your company's culture. If you are team-based, for example, ask a question about their most frustrating experience on a team and how they handled it. If your culture is a pressure cooker, ask about the one time they didn't deal well with stress. If your culture values diversity, ask a question about a different situation that involved diversity or culture merger issues that they didn't handle well. You want to note where they place blame; what lessons they learned, how they are better equipped now to handle the situation. Red flags would be no experience to report or blaming others without any sign of culpability. Social Interviews Take time to know them socially. Have lunch or dinner and see how they function in unstructured interview time. Presentation Assessments Have them make a formal Power Point presentation to you and your team on some key trends or information relevant to their position. Notice their style and standard for presentation. Is it consistent with your culture and standard? DISC Assessments DISC personality, values, or team assessments can give you important data that can then be translated into questions or scenarios that will help you avoid the "hire in haste, repent in leisure syndrome." Conclusion Assessing candidates is a testing process. It should not be a crystal ball process. You want to use as many assessment tools as you can to find out when they leave the cap off the toothpaste. Individual interviews with a standardized and customized screening process and scoring among interviewers Team interviews by the potential team they will join Social interviews to get to know how they are outside the structure of the office Samples of presentations they have made at executive meetings—power points without confidential information—to see their presentation standards and style DISC or similar testing on personality , communication style, team style, values Scenario questions that get at the "what ifs" of work Questions that get out how they have managed change, failure, teams in the past When you think about the last person you let go from the executive team, it was most likely not for their lack of relevant experience. More likely it was for their personality, style, communication style, diminished drive to produce results, and ways they managed themselves, others, and change that made you wonder, "Why didn't I catch that in the interview process?" By taking control of the process and using a five-step approach, you can spare yourself that question in the future. Executive hiring is essential in the growth of your company. It deserves the extra time and variety of methods to choose the best fit for you, your team, and your company's culture and future success. by Bonni Carson DiMatteo, CMC ©2003

Coaching Corner: Coaching Q&A

Q: We have someone in our department who is an excellent producer, but manages to alienate her reports or peers on an almost daily basis. Should we let her go or try to get her to change? A: It sounds like you feel mixed. If only she understood the value and the liability of her style. On one hand she can get results; on the other hand, she might mitigate her results by alienating people who could help her shine instead of lime lighting her limitation. Often people aren't aware, don't know, or don't understand when and how they alienate people. The only place to start is to address the issue and begin with some assessments—360 and/or DISC. The feedback of these is critical so that the suggestions can be framed positively with an action plan. Identify a coach or mentor that can help her spot the pitfalls before they become freefalls. Often the behavior that alienates others comes from a source of vulnerability that creates a defense. When they can identify the triggers and cascade of actions that follow, they can take steps to prevent it. If she is a valuable employee, give her six months to change the identified behavior with some training and coaching to support success. by Bonni Carson DiMatteo ©2003

Organizational Corner: Building Teams to Build the Company

How are your teams working? Have you found that there is often a gap in communication, a sense of purpose and urgency, a process to leverage the efforts? No matter what assessment of teams you use, there are usually four or five roles that emerge: the motivator, producer, analyzer, manager, strategist, and harmonizer. What makes teams effective is the depth of the communication and commitment, the standards of performance, creativity, collaboration, and the focused drive toward a specific end. In one company where there was significant change, communication was a challenge. We created a change management team A.S.S.I.S.T. (Allied Staff to Solve the Impact of Systems in Transitions). The function of the team was to address the concerns raised by the employee satisfaction survey to consider the options and decide on the actions. This was a cross-functional team from 12 different corners of the company and several different layers from executive to hourly worker. It had a life span of 18 months and in that time was able to make decisions on key issues in the company, including: creating processes and standards for internal flow of information; rewards and motivation; training; and running effective meetings. In order to make these decisions, the team was trained in team dynamics, communication, decision making; roles; group process, and how to run effective meetings. They learned how to respect each other's role and style regardless of position in the organization or perspective. They had a clear vision, mission, and values that drove their decisions, and they had standards that kept the power or distractibility in check. They were clearly greater than the sum of their parts. Throughout the rest of the company were small cross-functional resource teams. These were also trained in communication, roles, mission, and decision making. They checked the pulse of the company on these issues; discussed suggestions for change, and then fed those suggestions to the A.S.S.I.S.T. team who made the final decisions. Throughout the company there were positive changes in communication, respect, processes and systems, contribution, morale, productivity pride, and employee retention and satisfaction. Teams develop their own style, identity, passion, and purpose. The most effective ones have these hallmarks: Commitment: What is our purpose, mission? Communication: How do we communicate effectively? Constructive Criticism: How do we give feedback that can be heard? Competition: How can we beat the extensible competition and challenge ourselves competitively? Creativity: How do we innovate and tolerate risks and failures Consensus: How do we decide—what drives or delays decisions? Consistency: How do we set standards of performance and behavior, and keep ourselves accountable? Cooperation: How do we break down silos and create a unified fortress Concentration: How do we keep focused? Avoid distractions? Execute and implement? Connection: How do we acknowledge that the sum is greater than the parts? Celebration: How do we celebrate success, performance, team effort? Jon Katzenback reminds us in The Wisdom of Teams how powerful they can be in creating a high performance organization. The need for purpose, urgency, and processes to give the team meaning and focus is critical in the success of teams. And yet the very issues that stall team performance are the 12 C's above. If you find that your team is stalled the best place to begin is with the end in mind. What is the mission of this team? What do we want to achieve? Are we committed to the goal and to each other? Do we have the processes and the communication to stay focused and indeed become greater than the sum of the parts? When teams work they can move mountains and when they are stuck they can be like mountains to move. The first place to begin when stuck is to work on the communication and the mission. From there all things are possible. by Bonni Carson DiMatteo ©2003