Buried Treasure

                           

Who Knows What’s Hidden Right Under Your Nose?

In the 1970s, the Dallas Cowboys football team adopted the philosophy of drafting the best athletes they could find, some of whom did not have any college football experience. In the process, they found genuine talent that everyone else in the National Football League had overlooked. However, in the long run, the Cowboys decided it was more productive to focus on drafting football players who had already proven themselves on the football field.

We see that many businesses have designed their selection process in a similar manner: they almost always hire good people, but they make the mistake of placing some of these people in positions for which they are ill suited. Perhaps you’ve heard someone say, “He looked good in uniform, but he couldn’t play.” That’s a way of saying that an employee appeared to have all the attributes for success in a particular job, but didn’t perform up to expectations. Everyone has hired and promoted people who turned out to be disappointments. The number of times we have heard about top salespeople who became lousy sales managers is painful. That mistake occurs because neither the company nor the employee has a clear understanding of what it takes to become an outstanding sales manager. Oh, for sure, the company has a job description in a file somewhere that the sales manager could dust off and read if he or she wanted to, but traditional job descriptions are inadequate today.

A complete job description goes beyond listing the duties that go with a job title. A complete job description has to describe the attributes of the person who will perform the job in an extraordinary manner because he or she has the right brain power, the right behavioral traits, and the right occupational interests for the job.

A Personal Story from Bud Haney

We all subscribe to the idea that our people are among our greatest assets, recognizing that those organizations that stand head and shoulders above our peers and competitors in business tend to have superior people policies and, on the face of it, superior people. Accordingly, many of us spend a huge amount of time chasing the rainbow, at the end of which we know we’ll find a pot full of those perfect people that our industry leaders seem to have, instead of focusing upon identifying the best in those who already make up our teams. And therein lies the secret of those organizations with people-based competitive advantage – it’s not just that they identify and recruit great people (and, of course, that does help), but that they work with those people that they have to make them great, to find just what attributes they uniquely possess that can be developed and employed effectively within the organization, to build the sort of serious competitive advantage that only good people can confer.

So what? Well, the simple point is that sometimes looking at the familiar in an entirely different way can produce results that we scarcely expect. Your people are like that – you assume that because you’ve worked with them for a while, you know what they are, and what they’re capable of. That’s truly only up to a point. To uncover genuine hidden potential requires a shift in the way you evaluate your people.

Take the following actions to get started.

• Uncover Your Team’s Career Goals, Aspirations, Likes/Dislikes and Strengths/Weaknesses 

You can’t begin this process without knowing a lot about each and every member of your team. Start by talking with them regularly. Find out what they like to do. Research published in a 1999 Harvard Business Review demonstrated that people excel at jobs that interest them deeply more than at jobs that their education, skills or experience might suggest fit them perfectly. Find out what your people enjoy doing, what career plans each has, and where they aspire to go in your business or in life in general. Don’t confine yourself to informal chats. Use more formal means like the Profiles Checkpoint 360°™ and psychometric assessments like the ProfileXT™ to determine the particular strengths of your key assets. The authors of the HBR research cited above put it perfectly: “…the best way to keep your stars is to know them better than they know themselves – and then use that information to customize the career of their dreams.”

• Make Better Use of Strengths 

When you have a good appreciation of the particular strengths of each member of your team, start to look for new ways in which to apply them. Brainstorm on how you can apply these strengths in new or imaginative ways to enhance the roles of each of your people and to address problems that you haven’t previously been able to address. In one successful example we observed recently in the IT industry, a talented project manager was put into the role of sales manager – not because she knew an awful lot about sales or had a gleaming sales record – quite the contrary – but because she was particularly good at organizing campaigns, marshalling resources, motivating her team to action, and seeing initiatives through to the end. Take off the blinders when it comes to applying strengths in new ways.

• Turn Weaknesses into Strengths 

In the movie Enemy of the State, Gene Hackman tells Will Smith, “…in guerrilla warfare you gotta turn your strengths into weaknesses…if they’re big and you’re small, then you’re fast and they’re slow…you’ve got to work with what you’ve got.” You’ve got to do the same with your people. Look at what you currently perceive as shortcomings, and then look at situations where those attributes could be positive. After all, most weaknesses are just overused strengths.

For example, a customer service representative who’s just too assertive to “put up and shut up” with angry customers may actually make a very successful salesperson, capable of overcoming objections not easily overcome by others. Consider the marketing executive who comes up with killer campaigns but just can’t seem to follow them through to the end. Focus that person solely on developing the creative campaigns, and assign project management and completion to someone better suited. Look at every shortcoming you currently perceive in your team members, determine where a weakness might become a strength, and figure out how you can capitalize upon it. You’ll be amazed at the results.

• Feedback, Feedback, Feedback 

In a recent study, 25 percent of employees said lack of feedback from management about their performance was one of the main reasons for changing jobs. Make it a formal objective to provide positive feedback on a job well done to every one of your people at least weekly. This requires you and your management team to actively seek opportunities to provide feedback. Not only does this increase the interest level in the job being done (we all like to be recognized), but it helps to reinforce positive behavior and performance at the expense of more negative alternatives. Also, experience shows that when you provide feedback to the team, they’ll provide feedback to you.

If you’ve been searching for a competitive advantage, then the answer may be just under your nose. Before you start exploring more exotic sources, look at the people who are driving your company right now. You’ll find untold treasure buried behind those familiar faces you see every day.

*From the book 40 STRATEGIES FOR WINNING IN BUSINESS by Bud Haney and Jim Sirbasku. © S&H Publishing Co., 5205 Lake Shore Drive, Waco, Texas 76710-1732. All rights reserved. Contact S&H Publishing Co., (254) 751-1644, for reprint permission.

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Taken from the January Edition of Top Talent Trends Newsletter.  To receive our monthly newsletter with helpful info on improving your people's performance, click here!