Measuring stick - the twelve questions
- Base Camp - What do I get?
- Do I know what is expected of me?
- Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?
- Camp I - What do I give?
- Do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?
- In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work?
- Does my supervisor or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person?
- Is there someone at work who encourages my development?
- Camp II - Do I belong here?
- At work, do my opinions seem to count?
- Does the mission of my company make me feel my job is important?
- Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work?
- Do I have a best friend at work?
- Camp III - How can we all grow?
- In the last six months, has someone talked with me about my progress?
- This last year, have I had opportunities at work to learn and grow?
Wisdom of great managers
- People don't change that much. Don't waste time trying to put in what was left out. Try to draw out what was left in. That is hard enough.
- What great managers do? Be a catalyst! Fuse employee's talents with customer's needs to catalyze the process of reaching company goals.
- Select a person
- Set expectations
- Motivate the person
- Develop the person
- One-on-one manager-employee interaction is important. Don't centralize manager's responsibilities(e.g. selection, development) to other departments(e.g. human resources).
- There is a difference between manager and leader. Leader is not an advanced form of manager. Great manager need to look inwards. Great leaders look outwards.
- How great managers do what they do? Four keys -
- Select for talent, not just for experience, intelligence.
- When setting expectations, set right outcomes, not right steps.
- When motivating, focus on strengths, not weaknesses.
- When developing, find the right fit, not just next rung on the ladder.
First key - select for talent
- Talent - a recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behavior that can be applied productively.
- Talent, skills and knowledge are different from each other. Skills and knowledge can be taught, talents cannot.
- 3 types of talent - striving(how), thinking(why), relating(who).
- Decide which talents are required /best suited for the role you are trying to fill.
- Secret to selecting for talent lies in the art of interviewing.
Second key - define the right outcomes
- Four hierarchical levels of customer satisfaction
- Accuracy
- Availability
- Partnership
- Advice
Fourth key - find the right fit
- Graded levels of achievements for each role
- Broad-banding - broad bands of pay overlapping between adjacent roles
- Create heroes in every role
- Self-discovery is the driving, guiding force for healthy career
- Self-discovery - Not to indentify and then fix your non-talents, but to learn about yourself so that you can capitalize on who you are, what your talents are.
Art of interviewing for talent
- Talent interview should be stand-alone.
- Ask few open-ended questions and then try to keep quite. Let candidate do the talking.
- Believe what candidate says.
- Ask specific questions. Specific to the time, to the event etc. e.g. Tell me about the time when colleagues made fun of you and how did you deal with it? Tell me about the time when your supervisor criticized you, what was it about, how did you react and what action did you take?
- Look for specific and top-of-the-mind, quick response. Goal is to find recurring talent in the candidate. If the expected behavior is a recurring pattern, candidate should be able to come up with a specific example quickly. If he needs probing 2-3 times, probably the talent is not that recurring. Don't judge one the quality of the answer, how detail are the specifics of the example or whether you agree with what all candidate says. Judge by the quickness of the example.
Performance management
- Simple routine, Frequent interactions, Focused on future, Self-tracking.