When it comes to selecting and assessing CEOs, other C-suite level executives or board members, the most important criteria for boards to consider are competencies, commitment and character. This article focuses on the most difficult of these criteria to assess – leadership character – and suggests the eleven key dimensions of character that directors should consider in their governance roles.
Corporate directors look – or should look – for three things in the C-suite level executives they hire, assess and occasionally have to fire: competencies, commitment and character (see Figure 1).
Competencies, commitment and character Competencies matter. They define what a person is capable of doing; in our assessments of leaders we look for intellect as well as organizational, business, people and strategic competencies. Commitment is critical. It reflects the extent to which individuals aspire to the hard work of leadership, how engaged they are in the role, and how prepared they are to make the sacrifices necessary to succeed. But above all, character counts. It determines how leaders perceive and analyze the contexts in which they operate. Character determines how they use the competencies they have. It shapes the decisions they make, and how these decisions are implemented and evaluated.
While specific competencies may differ with the role, we believe that these same criteria should also be considered in director recruitment, selection, evaluation and turnover.
Focus on character
Our research has focused on leadership character because it’s the least understood of these three criteria and the most difficult to talk about. Character is foundational for effective decision-making. It influences what information executives seek out and consider, how they interpret it, how they report the information, how they implement board directives, and many other facets of governance.
Within a board, directors require open, robust, and critical but respectful discussions with other directors who have integrity, as well as a willingness to collaborate and the courage to dissent. They must also take the long view while focusing on the shorter-range results, and exercise excellent judgment. All of these behaviors hinge on character.
Our research team at Ivey was made very conscious of the role of character in business leadership and governance when we conducted exploratory and qualitative research on the causes of the 2008 financial meltdown and the subsequent recession.[1] In focus groups and conference-based discussions, where we met with over 300 business leaders on three continents, participants identified character weaknesses or defects as being at the epicenter of the build-up in financial-system leverage over the preceding decade, and the ensuing meltdown. Additionally, the participants identified leadership character strengths as key factors that distinguished the companies that survived or even prospered during the meltdown from those that failed or were badly damaged.
Participants in this research project identified issues with character in both leadership and governance. Among them were:
Overconfidence bordering on arrogance that led to reckless or excessive risk-taking behaviors
Lack of transparency and in some cases lack of integrity
Sheer inattention to critical issues
Lack of accountability for the huge risks associated with astronomical individual rewards
Intemperate and injudicious decision-making
A lack of respect for individuals that actually got in the way of effective team functioning
Hyper-competitiveness among leaders of major financial institutions
Irresponsibility toward shareholders and the societies within which these organizations operated.
These character elements and many others were identified as root or contributory causes of the excessive buildup of leverage in financial markets and the subsequent meltdown.
But the comments from the business leaders in our research also raise important questions about leadership character. Among them:
What is character? It’s a term that we use quite often: “He’s a bad character”; “A person of good character”; “A character reference.” But what do we really mean by leadership “character”?
Why is it so difficult to talk about someone’s character? Why do we find it difficult to assess someone’s character with the same degree of comfort we seem to have in assessing their competencies and commitment?
Can character be learned, developed, shaped and molded, or is it something that must be present from birth – or at least from childhood or adolescence? Can it change? What, if anything, can leaders do to help develop good character among their followers and a culture of good character in their organizations?
Leadership character dimensions
We define character as an amalgam of traits, values and virtues. Traits, such as open-mindedness or extroversion, may be either inherited or acquired; they predispose people to behave in certain ways, if not overridden by other forces such as values, or situational variables such as organizational culture and rewards. Values, such as loyalty and honesty, are deep-seated beliefs that people hold about what is morally right or wrong or, alternatively, what makes the most sense to do, or not do, in running a business. Virtues, such as courage or accountability, refer to patterns of situationally appropriate behaviors that are generally considered to be emblematic of “good” leaders.[2]
In Figure 2, we posit character as consisting of 11 dimensions: integrity, humility, courage, humanity, drive, accountability, temperance, justice, collaboration, transcendence and judgment. If we were to take just one of these dimensions – accountability, for example – we could say that it is defined by traits such as self-confidence and internal locus of control, values such as a deeply-held belief that good leaders should take ownership for their actions, and the near-universal view that good leaders readily hold themselves accountable for results. Each of these 11 dimensions has a similar underlying structure of traits-values-virtues, and each could be extensively deconstructed and discussed in greater depth.
The following set of dimensions, together with an illustrative set of elements that describe each dimension, is unique in that it attempts to integrate age-old concepts from philosophy with more contemporary thinking from the fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, evolutionary biology, management and leadership. The wording of these dimensions is heavily influenced by the language used by the executive- and board-level participants in our “Leadership on Trial” research, subsequent qualitative and quantitative work with leaders, managers and students to ensure that we had identified relevant dimensions, as well as endless debate within our own research group.[3] This analysis differs from many other discussions of character in that it extends the definition of character to embrace other aspects of personality traits, values and virtues, rather than focusing exclusively or primarily on its moral dimensions.
Talking about character
In our original “Leadership On Trial” research, participants had little difficulty talking about the role that character appears to have played leading up to the financial crisis. Yet those we have interviewed over the years almost always wondered why such issues were seldom addressed prior to the crisis. They noted the absence of ongoing meaningful discussions about character in their own organizations, even in critical issues such as talent recruitment, selection, development and retention and succession management.
We think there are several reasons for this inconsistency:
Decades of time and many millions of dollars have been spent by private- and public-sector organizations developing ways of measuring competencies. No such effort has been placed on character. However, we are confident that this is changing. Whether it does or not is largely in the hands of the governance community itself, and we sense that it is ready for the challenge.
Competencies are manifested in behaviors and we can actually measure them, however imperfectly. Character, on the other hand, addresses a capability in individuals that may not yet have been tested and the evidence for which is frequently vague. Here again, work is underway to develop better assessments and measures. Our discussions with members of the global governance community suggest that directors would welcome this development.
Character is a loaded word. We tend to avoid talking about character in the workplace because it seems such a subjective construct. It does not have to be so – especially if we are able to describe the good and bad behaviors associated with these character dimensions in the appropriate business contexts. This is the focus of our ongoing research.
Too often, discussions of character have required people to buy into some particular school of philosophical, ethical, psychological or managerial thought. We have tried to minimize this problem through balance, transparency, careful wording, and clear definitions.
To date, the language of character has been complicated and inaccessible to those unversed in philosophy, ethics, and advanced psychological terminology. It is often viewed as a “soft” and certainly a non-quantifiable construct in a world that looks for hard data. However, we don’t think that it has to be this way. We believe some adept translation of arcane terminology into contemporary managerial language, which we have tried to do in our framework, is a starting point to making the discussion of character easier and ultimately more valuable.
Where character comes from
Some elements of character, especially basic personality traits, are inherited, while others are acquired through early childhood development, education, experiences in both work-related and socially-related organizational settings, as well as later-in-life experiences that mold character. People cite such life-changing experiences as being hired and fired; working with “good” or “bad” bosses; marriage and divorce; success and failure; illness and recovery. These crucible events only contribute to character formation if individuals have the degree of humility and self-awareness that allows and motivates them to seize the opportunity for self-improvement. Other “character-forming” experiences include working in different international, industry or corporate cultures, as well as having great critics and mentors who are prepared to have the tough discussions that also shape character development.
Assessing character strengths
Character is revealed by how people behave in situations. For example, we don’t know whether individuals have courage until they’ve faced a major challenge or danger and done the right thing. Similarly, we don’t know if they have humility unless they’ve experienced failure, acknowledged it and learned from it. Whether or not they have integrity can only be assessed by how they have responded to situations that tested that integrity under pressure.
While it is standard for directors to establish selection criteria for competencies, we believe it’s rare for them to discuss the character dimensions they expect in qualified candidates. Nor is it common to address character dimensions when reviewing executive performance or doing peer reviews of other directors. Most of us lack the vocabulary to have these discussions behind closed doors, let alone in face-to-face discussions.
Regrettably, systematic and thorough character assessment is seldom done well, often relying on an “absence of negatives” rather than focusing on positive character dimensions. A full character assessment requires a deep and wide-ranging examination of a person’s life and work history over an extensive period of time, through the investigating of the highs and lows of a business cycle, and the asking of very specific, pointed and often intrusive questions in both the interviewing and reference-checking processes. We all know how difficult this is to do – especially when the candidate has achieved positions of leadership prominence, possesses a sterling reputation, and may even be a personal friend. It’s even harder when the candidates clearly possess the competencies that you urgently need, or have a track record of success.
We look to character to attempt to predict how someone will behave in future circumstances. It is much better to ask well-constructed, probing questions about how candidates have behaved in similar situations in the past, or how they believe they would behave in specific situations in the future, than to settle for impressions formed from loosely-structured interviews, or basing hiring decisions on individuals’ reputations. This focus on behavioral interviewing is not a new idea, but emphasizing character assessment underscores its value and importance.
Building character
There are several ways that directors can influence character development in the organizations they govern. They can talk about these dimensions, especially in their formal processes of CEO appraisal and succession management. They can press management to develop formal leadership profiles that address competencies, character and commitment. They can also introduce character-focused discussion into their own board assessments. Since CEOs are almost always board members, such discussions should start to rub off on their own internal talent reviews.
Boards are in a pivotal position to alter the way businesses are run. If boards put character on the corporate agenda, organizations will have to respond. Boards can begin the process by ensuring that the senior leaders of the organization are selected, evaluated and promoted based on character as well as commitment and competencies.
We are encouraged by the number of business leaders who feel that they themselves must surmount these obstacles to talking about character, and who believe that boards should focus more on it – just as we are sometimes discouraged by stories of character-related scandals, from bribery and corruption to money laundering and near-insane risk-taking in capital markets, that are emerging on a regular basis. We are conscious that we must guard against the cynical assumption that there is, somehow, a natural cycle of wrongdoing (recognition, learning, improvement and relapse) as we go through business cycles and forget the last crisis and why it happened.
There is a lot we don’t know about the role that character plays in governance and effective leadership in organizations. We would like to get a better sense of how boards actually address character-related issues. We also need to improve how we assess character dimensions and measure them more accurately. The holy grail of this line of leadership research is an empirical assessment of whether or not the character of an organization’s leadership is significant in determining its success or failure; there is much work to be done before we can pronounce on that. We are committed to engaging members of the global governance community in this future research.
We recognize that we must be careful and responsible in asking busy directors and executives to master new language and new methods of assessment. But we believe it will pay off in better leadership. In short, while competencies matter, while commitment is critical, character really counts; it must be embraced as a major concern by boards and the governance community.
This is a shortend version of an article originally published by Ivey Business Journal, Issue: May / June 2013
Author(s): Jeffrey Gandz, Mary Crossan, Gerard Seijts, Mark Reno, Mary Crossan, Gerard Seijts, Mark Reno
At the intersection between a leader’s personality and decision making, there is a pressure point where personality style will be the ultimate influence on business judgment.
“Leaders with higher learning orientation are more likely to embrace ambiguity, complexity and paradigm shifts and to positively engage in both the practical and intellectual challenges.”
Business Judgment: Who You Are Affects What You Decide
Personality is a vital factor in leadership success. The intersection of a leader’s personality and performance is most consequential when the leader needs to perform under pressure within the pervasive VUCA business context. Most leaders are required to navigate the complexity of unfamiliar situations with fluid, unpredictable outcomes. Too often, though, highly experienced leaders fail due to their dysfunctional personality tendencies.
We studied whether particular personality styles were more related to the decision-making skills that underlie business judgment than others. We were particularly interested in the strong relationships between the business decision-making leadership competencies (i.e., business savvy, entrepreneurship, establishing strategic direction, and operational decision making) and certain personality styles, specifically ambition and learning orientation, as well as any strong negative relationships with argumentative, avoidant, and risk aversion.
Evidence
Notable personality-judgment links are shown in the “Personality Factors” graphic. Ambition measures the degree to which a person is socially self-confident, resilient, competitive, motivated to lead, and energetic. To be effective when making business decisions, leaders need high energy, a positive and aspirational mind-set, and a preparedness to subordinate other life options to pursue goals. Ambition is difficult to develop and should not be underestimated in considering leadership potential or selecting leaders.
The strong positive relationship between learning orientation and business decision competencies reinforces the importance of learning capacity and versatility for being successful as a leader in a VUCA world. Leaders with higher learning orientation are more likely to embrace ambiguity, complexity, and paradigm shifts and to positively engage in both practical and intellectual challenges.
Leaders scoring high in argumentative, avoidant, and risk aversion performed poorly in the business decision leadership skills. Under pressure, leaders with these dysfunctional tendencies can disproportionality fear failure, become insecure, and become myopically focused. Further, their interrogative styles of questioning can cripple trust-building outcomes.
Leaders who do not learn to manage these tendencies can develop highly short-term, conservative decision styles that lead to distorted perceptions of higher risk. This disconnects them from anticipating opportunities and inspiring people toward a better future.
Action
Clearly discuss the tangible impact of personality patterns on key aspects of business judgment. For example, if your business has an urgent need to identify cost controls or to find innovative ways to generate sales, consider the impact of a leader with an unmanaged risk aversion tendency, and how the person’s overly constrained consideration of options could lead to actions that would be too conservative and slow to realize results. Or, consider a leader with an argumentative tendency whose interrogative approach tends to dominate discussions and prevent others’ good ideas from surfacing—this would become a serious barrier to generating effective solutions.
Heighten self-awareness and sustain improvement in managing personality implications on business judgment by creating an open environment and ensuring that leaders have feedback skills. A leadership team that has an understanding of each other’s tendencies and the skills and receptivity to provide feedback will be more successful avoiding situations that trigger these potentially destructive behaviors and their associated business execution problems.
Ensure that leaders have a 100-day action plan that identifies their personality tendencies linked to business judgment and specifies the actions needed to manage these behaviors. This plan should be reinforced by processes such as time frames, required support (e.g., coaches), and measures to indicate improvement. Implement stronger governance and accountability processes to manage the heightened risk that, in stressful environments, allows individual personality tendencies to get in the way of execution.
After spending nearly a decade helping Fortune 500 companies with organization development,
Matt Hoffman decided he’d rather work on a smaller scale where he could have an even bigger impact. He’s since helped numerous startups and small businesses to scale their teams, and today supports the growth of venture capital firms in his role as partner and head of talent at M13.
Over the years, he’s observed that most barriers to success are not caused by a company’s actions, but by its inaction in the areas that matter most — like failing to build a healthy culture in the early stages.
“I think the biggest thing is the things that they don’t do,” Matt says.
Matt realized the importance of addressing these gaps early when he was working with his very first startup team at a software company called Return Path. Luckily, the company’s leaders were willing to look ahead rather than thinking short-term, because in many cases, these missed opportunities don’t become apparent until years later.
“I wasn’t just solving immediate problems,” Matt explains. “It was more saying how can we get better regardless of whether things are working fine. And they were working fine.”
As we all know, it’s often harder to fix something that’s broken than it is to do it right from the very beginning. To learn more about the things many companies wish they’d known when hiring their first 100 employees, I caught up with Matt for an episode of my 21st Century HR podcast series. Here are some of the key steps he says companies often neglect to take until it’s too late.
1. Not developing a people strategy early enough
One of the most fundamental mistakes growing companies make when it comes to their people strategy is not really having one at all.
“Many early companies don’t think thoughtfully or as thoughtfully as I would argue they should around people strategy,” Matt says. “Because it just seems like something you can figure out, and there are more pressing things, and we’ll get around to hiring a head of talent when we’re 75 or 100 people.”
By viewing their people strategy as something that can be pushed off their plate for now, companies ultimately makes their own lives harder. By the time they get round to it, they often find that bad practices have become ingrained, and gaps that could have easily been plugged in the early days are now much harder to fix. And for every day these issues go unaddressed, the company may not be working as well as it should.
This doesn’t mean that Matt thinks you should rush to hire a highly experienced head of talent as one of your first handful of employees. But he does believe companies need to start thinking about their people strategy much earlier in their lifespan — like outlining what kind of people they want to hire and why, how this will help the business meet its goals, and what types of behavior won’t be tolerated. After all, most companies are aware they need a fleshed out go-to-market strategy to secure future success, so why don’t they have the same mindset about who they hire and what those people will need to succeed?
“It doesn’t necessarily seem intuitive yet that you would want to have that on the people side,” Matt says, “which is strange to me.”
The longer you neglect your people strategy, the more bad practices will become systemic within your organization. And the more you grow, the more those practices will hold you back, so it pays to sit down with your stakeholders and start talking about what your people will need to succeed — even if you and your stakeholders are the only people at that point.
“Almost any decision can be undone, right?” Matt says. “But the question is, what is the cost of undoing it versus the cost of doing it right in the first place?”
2. Not being thoughtful about culture from the very beginning
Similarly, Matt argues that many growing companies are not nearly mindful and intentional enough about culture from the beginning. For some, it doesn’t even cross their minds — but it should.
“Once you get beyond… your first non-founding employee,” Matt says, “you’re starting to create a culture whether you want to or not. So you may as well start thinking about it.”
By neglecting to ask themselves big, introspective questions like who they want to be, what they believe in, and what their guiding principles and core values are, companies let their culture just kind of follow its own path. And all too often, they later struggle to course-correct when they realize it’s heading in entirely the wrong direction.
“[Ask yourself] what are the types of behaviors we want to encourage?” Matt says. “What are the behaviors we want to discourage? What values do we care about? Those things are just as important in the early stage as the more tactical strategy around go-to-market product — in some ways more, because companies pivot all the time in terms of product and go-to-market. But the foundation that you lay in your earliest stage around culture is really, really hard to undo if it’s bad, and that stuff will make you go slower.”
While your founder might have a very strong vision, this alone is not strong enough to create a scalable culture. If you’re leaving employees to interpret and act upon that vision without clear guidance, 20 or 30 people in, it may be utterly unrecognizable.
“By definition, every time you hire another person, the founder’s influence gets diminished,” Matt says. “How do you make sure that you’re hiring people that are going to be consistent with the founder’s vision, and add to it, and create better scalability rather than worse? Those are things we [need to be] thinking about.”
3. Not focusing on team performance over individual contributions
Another blindspot that Matt sees among many growing companies is in recognizing the importance of team performance. Too many organizations, he says, are obsessed with hiring “A-players” and ranking individual performance — but this doesn’t make sense in terms of how they operate.
“Unless you’re in one of these rare organizations where everyone is just completely siloed in a box,” Matt says, “you shouldn’t be interested in how they do individually. You should be focused on how do they perform as a team, because that’s the vast majority of the time that they’re going to be spending.”
This doesn’t mean that some people aren’t more skilled at what they do than others. But context matters — and by putting people on teams where their strengths are complemented, you can make everyone more effective.
“If you’re doing a really good job of recruiting,” Matt says, “and you’ve created a compelling employee experience… most people should be high performers. So figuring out gradations between all or most strong performers is not as useful as figuring out, to my mind, what are the conditions in which we can set them up for success, and how do teams work really well together.”
While he was working with Return Path, Matt and his team examined the traits that high-performing teams shared. Their findings were consistent with other research in this area — namely, that these teams focus on trust, collaboration, cohesion, a shared commitment, and alignment around accountability. So rather than fixating on how to improve individual employees, Matt recommends that all companies focus on trying to create optimum working conditions for their teams, like encouraging employees to give regular, candid feedback to one another.
It’s also important to recognize that team dynamics will shift as your company grows. Every employee you hire should play an intrinsic role in their team’s success — but the type of person that is able to do that won’t always remain the same.
“I think that is actually the number one role of a chief people officer or chief HR officer,” Matt says. “To help organizations really understand that and not just hire ‘A’ talent, but hire the right talent for the right roles — and recognize when organizations change and how that shifts.”
Build a strong framework early or be prepared to make repairs further down the line
Your earliest hires can fundamentally shape your company’s future. And it pays to recognize that as soon as possible.
“It makes a difference when you see the companies that are really thoughtful, how much better they’re able to perform,” Matt says. “Having that framework for how we think about people and how we think about culture and how you think about talent is time well spent by an early stage team.”
For Matt, that’s what 21st Century HR is all about: building strong foundations instead of racing to put up walls.
“Rather than focus on personnel and processes,” he says, “it’s focused on building the culture around creating healthy foundations where you can trust employees, scale, get manager and leadership behaviors that drive that in the future — and then find ways to unleash people’s potential.”
First published at LinkedIn Talent Blog 2020 by Lars Schmidt
Amazon now employs more than 750,000 people around the world. In 2019, the e-commerce giant hired nearly 100,000 workers in the third quarter alone.
But only 25 years ago, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was looking to make his very first hire for the company that was then being called Cadabra. He was looking for software developers, fluent in C, C++, and Unix, to help build the systems that would be the backbone of his fledgeling company.
On August 22, 1994, Bezos published this job post on Usenet, an early online bulletin board and discussion network:
The job post has a confident, almost swaggering brevity. No words are wasted — Bezos cuts right to the chase: He is looking for people who will “help pioneer commerce on the Internet.” But it’s the second sentence that is most telling: “You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible.”
The sentence — impatient, cocky, almost scornful — demands that developers show up convinced of their own superiority.
Clearly, Amazon’s stunning transformation of the world of retail suggests Bezos both knew what he was doing and found the extraordinary talent he was seeking 25 years ago.
It’s worth taking a few minutes to look at what makes this early job posting work:
1. Less is more — shorter job posts elicit more applications
It pays to get to the point. On average, candidates will spend 14 seconds deciding whether or not to apply, and shorter posts (300 words or fewer) get 8.4% more applicants than an average post.
GeekWire gave the primal Amazon posting to the team at Textio for an analysis. Textio, an augmented writing platform that evaluates writing for gender bias and other shortcomings, found the post to be “too short” and rated it a 19 out of 100.
But the post actually manages to say a lot in a short space. Admirably, it doesn’t cloud its message with a list of nice-to-have qualifications. It is clear about needing someone who writes code quickly and confidently and communicates clearly.
2. Focus on the things that matter most — comp, qualifications, job details
And, in his own terse way, Bezos touches on all three.
Comp? “Your compensation,” the post says, “will include meaningful equity ownership.” Can you say bazillionaire?
Qualifications? “You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems” and “have a BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science or the equivalent.”
Job details? Successful candidates will “help pioneer commerce on the Internet.” If he’d had more details, he wouldn’t have been hiring pioneers. Bezos was also leery of people finding out exactly what he was up to, something he felt would lessen his competitive advantage in getting to e-commerce early.
3. Publish your job post on Mondays, when application rates are the highest
LinkedIn data found that viewing and application rates are highest on Mondays and slowly decline as the week passes by. Bezos did not have access to that statistical insight when he posted for developers — LinkedIn wouldn’t be founded until Amazon was nearly a decade old.
Final thoughts: No matter how prescient the founder’s vision is, talent is always key to making it a reality
Amazon began as an online bookseller, but Jeff Bezos’s vision was always to be “The Everything Store,” as author Brad Stone calls his 2013 book that examines the evolution of the company. Bezos’s relentless (he also considered calling Amazon “Relentless.com”) pursuit of that dream is the foundation for the company’s implausible and runaway success.
But the vision only started to become a reality when the Amazon founder began to hire the people who executed it. Talent is critical to any organization’s success, so you want to make sure that your job postings reflect who you are and what you’re hoping to do — whether you’re hiring one person or one hundred thousand.
First published at LinkedIn Talent Blog 2020 by Bruce Anderson
Recruiters have a front-row seat to the ever-changing mix of skills most prized by the business world. Understanding what those skills are early on can give you a leg up on the competition. And while the soft skills valued by companies tend to change gradually, the most sought-after hard skills evolve lickety-split, pushed largely by the relentless transformation of modern technology.
Last year, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and analytical reasoning led LinkedIn’s global list of the most in-demand hard skills. They’re all on the list again this year, but a skill we weren’t even looking at a year ago — blockchain — tops the list of most in-demand hard skills for 2020.
And whether you’re looking to hire someone with blockchain chops or expertise in, say, video production (No. 10 on the list), you’ll be making sure your candidates have a desirable mix of soft skills as well. Our list of the most in-demand soft skills is headed by creativity, just as it was in 2018 and 2019. But slipping in at No. 5 is a newcomer, emotional intelligence, a skill important in just about every role.
What are hard and soft skills? Hard skills concern an employee’s ability to do a specific task, and soft skills are more about the way they do them — how they adapt, collaborate, solve problems, and make decisions.
Hard skills include specialized knowledge and technical abilities, such as software development, tax accounting, or patent law expertise. They’re often easier to define and measure than soft skills.
Soft skills are more about behavior and thinking, personal traits and cognitive skills. They’re typically more difficult to measure, but they can also help a person thrive in a variety of roles and industries.
Here are the TOP 5:
Creativity
Persuasion
Collaboration
Adaptability
Emotional Intelligence
In looking for soft skills, companies are focusing on candidates with emotional intelligence
While hard skills are usually very specific to a person’s role in their company, the top soft skills — creativity, persuasion, collaboration, adaptability, emotional intelligence — are needed to be successful in nearly any role.
New to the list this year, emotional intelligence has different meanings to different people. But Daniel Goleman, author of the 1995 best-seller Emotional Intelligence, has pointed to a mix of self-awareness, self-regulation, social skill, empathy, and motivation. Others cite the ability to recognize emotions, your own and those of others, and to use emotional information as fuel for productive thinking and behavior.
You can screen applicants for EQ by asking references targeted questions, such as how did the candidate handle a previous mistake or what motivates them; giving candidates personality assessments; or bringing them on for short-term projects. Managers can also build emotional intelligence on their current teams by, say, modeling appropriate behavior, making feedback regular and fact-based, and providing assertiveness training.
Emotional intelligence, of course, is not just important in the people you’re recruiting. It’s critical in your role as a recruiter. Everyone has some level of EQ, but there are some practices you can adopt to sharpen yours. They range from embracing criticism as a learning opportunity to exploring the “why” in every situation.
With your emotional intelligence honed, you’ll be ready to find and attract candidates with exactly the skills your organization needs most, whether they’re completely old school like sales and business analysis or something as new age as blockchain and cloud computing.
First published at LinkedIn TalentBlog 2020 by Bruce Anderson
Take a moment to consider the following: If your company hires 100 people in the next 12 months, that’s an annual increase in compensation costs of at least $10 million if you factor in average total compensation of $100,000 per person. Clearly, the total cost of hiring dwarfs the cost per hire, and no matter how you cut it, that’s a lot of money. Unfortunately, much of this spend will be wasted by hiring the wrong people.
here are 10 tips to help you avoid those $100,000 hiring mistakes:
1. Don’t judge a book by its cover or a wine by its label. A good rule of thumb is to wait 30 minutes before making any yes/no hiring decisions, as you’ll minimize the impact of first impression bias. (Here are some ideas on how to wait the 30 minutes and for eliminating bias of any type.)
2. Ensure recruiters and hiring managers have clarified expectations before the hire. It’s impossible to assess someone properly for ability, fit, and motivation without having a complete grasp of the actual work the person will be doing. Worse still, recruiters who can’t describe the actual work to top tier candidates when they ask “Tell me about the job?” won’t be able to convince them to become serious candidates.
3. Don’t screen on compensation and skills too soon. The strongest candidates are willing to negotiate the compensation if the job represents a true upward career move. Recruiters often short-circuit the chance to hire these people by only checking boxes for skills and forcing candidates to agree to a compensation range before they know anything about the job.
4. Conduct exploratory phone screens. You’ll save time, increase assessment accuracy, and close more deals within your budget by only inviting semi-finalists for onsite interviews. A structured phone screen can ensure the people you invite onsite are not only top performers, but also the kind of candidates who would see the open role as the best career move among competing alternatives.
5. Don’t use generic competencies and behavioral interviewing without context.Asking for examples of competencies and behaviors without describing how they will actually be used on the job is a mistake. It’s like assuming people will always go the extra mile just because they’ve done it a few times. Doing it all of the time in different situations is what matters.
6. Don’t ignore the fit factors. Even the most able candidates will underperform if their working style clashes with the hiring manager, if they don’t fit with the team and company culture, and if they’re not intrinsically motivated to do the actual work required with the resources provided. The Hiring Formula for Success describes how to relate ability with these fit factors to accurately predict on-the-job performance.
7. Assess strangers using the same process used to assess acquaintances. People known to the hiring manager or who come highly recommended via referral are assessed on their past performance and future potential. I find that this hiring approach is very accurate in predicting subsequent performance. On the other hand, those who apply without a reference or their foot in the door are evaluated on their years of experience, depth of skills, and how well they interview. This much-too-common approach is not nearly as accurate. Here’s how strangers can be assessed like acquaintances.
9. Don’t use a surplus of talent strategy when a surplus of talent doesn’t exist. Weeding out the weak using advanced technology and state-of-the-art artificial intelligence will backfire if the best people aren’t applying or get weeded out for reasons that don’t predict performance. Instead, go with an “attract the best” high touch talent strategy that offers career growth over some ill-defined lateral transfer.
10. Hire for Year One, not Day One. Avoid falling into the trap of hiring to fill a job quickly. A “Win-Win” hiring process requires the hiring manager and the new hire to both agree it was the right decision one year after the position was filled.
I’m not sure if hiring managers should be allowed to hire people on their own if they don’t have a proven track record of doing it. I’m also not sure if B-level managers are able to hire A-level talent. What I am sure of, though, is that these 10 ideas are effective for any hiring manager who wants to hire the very best — and avoid making any future $100,000 mistakes.
First published at LinkedIn Talent Blog 2019 by Lou Adler
Peter Sursi is an experienced Senior Executive in HR/Talent Acquisition, focussed on growing and shaping the future of the FBI.
To help recruiters reach their diversity targets, FBI recruitment team of Peter Sursi focused on improving old and ineffective processes.
“All our processes had not changed in a million years,” Peter says. “Again, the more we went and looked at them, the more problems we found.”
One major problem area was a standardized test that was creating an adverse impact among some underrepresented candidate pools. Over the course of two years, Peter’s team developed an entirely new test, interviewing 2,000 agents, and performing a thorough analysis to tailor the test more closely to the job requirements.
After passing the standardized test, candidates undergo an interview and writing exam. But the interview questions hadn’t been updated in 10 years — and the exam hadn’t changed in 20. So Peter’s team replaced both, then put all interviewers through mandatory interview and unconscious bias training.
These changes were helpful, but there was still a problem: many candidates weren’t even making it that far. After speaking to IT, Peter’s team discovered that 40,000 candidates who had begun filling out the special agent application form had never completed it.
The team reached out to these candidates to gain a better understanding of the issue. The answers were clear: the application process was too long and demanded too much information all at once. And since Peter already knew this was causing women and people of color to drop out of the process at higher rates, something had to change — and fast.
“We stripped the application down to the studs,” Peter says. “We said, ‘What is the absolute minimum information we need to gather to get you to phase one?’”
By simplifying the initial application process, Peter’s team discovered that candidates were not only more likely to complete the application but were more emotionally invested in the job. Passing the first test on the path to becoming an FBI special agent made them feel good, so when they were asked to submit more information later, they were more incentivized to see it through.
Excerpt from:
How the FBI Overhauled Its Hiring Process to Improve Diversity and Create a Better Candidate Experience, by Samantha McLaren, posted on LikedIn Talent Management Blog, 2019
This is a tactic every company can use to avoid missing out on great talent who might otherwise drop out. Get candidates in the door first by focusing only on essential requirements, then focus on the nice-to-haves along the way.
USA Swimming’s long-time high-performance consultant Russell Mark has his fingerprints on many of those 123 medals. Russell studies video and data then makes suggestions to swimmers and coaches to help them achieve faster times. In fact, The Washington Post recently called Russell the team’s “secret weapon.”
So, during the recent USA Swimming National Championships at Stanford University, LinkedIn invited Russell to speak to our Global Talent Organization about what it takes to coax ever-better performances from the best swimmers in the world. We were excited to hear what he could teach us about creating high-performing teams and about giving people insights that allow them to become more effective and productive. Here are a few things we learned:
1. Breakthroughs come from understanding convention and having the courage — and support — to challenge it
An easy trap for top-performing teams to fall into is letting success get in the way of innovation. This is what Russell confronted when he joined USA Swimming in 2002 as a 22-year-old with a freshly minted degree in aerospace engineering and a background as a competitive collegiate swimmer. He had a sense that things could be done better but he also faced decades of institutionalized — and largely unquestioned — beliefs about swim technique.
“I had to understand where the conventional thinking came from,” he says, “which was the science and information available at the time, reinforced by very respected people in the sport. And I had to adopt the mind-set of proactively going out and looking for ways it could be done differently and better, and studying why and how that worked, to get to new thinking with some facts and evidence behind it.”
So, data and a growing comfort interpreting it became Russell’s friends. Seventeen years later and more established in his field, Russell tries to make sure that he doesn’t become calcified in his thinking. For example, in breaking down the races of high school backstroke phenom Regan Smith, Russell noted that her starts were shockingly average. In the first 15 meters, she was falling behind. Starting in February, the team gave Regan focused work on her start. She trimmed four-tenths of a second off her time in the first 15 meters — and set world records in both the 100- and 200-meter backstroke at the World Championships in July.
Like world-class swimmers, successful large-scale businesses often have a hard time embracing innovation (even when they’re the source of it). Kodak, for example, invented the digital camera but didn’t change its focus and eventually had to file for bankruptcy. Innovation is hard, but you don’t want to lose sight of the big picture. Turning to data rather than relying on hunches or habit can help you stay ahead of the pack.
2. Culture is the foundation of both team and individual success
Russell attributes much of USA Swimming’s success to a strong team culture. What many do not appreciate is the diversity of the team, from athletes in their teens (freestyler Katie Ledecky, who has five Olympic golds, was 15 when she first swam at the Olympics) to veterans in their 30s and sometimes 40s (freestyle sprinter Dara Torres was 41 when she earned three silvers at the 2008 Olympics).
“To enable our athletes to perform,” Russell says, “we need to have a great team environment — a place where everybody from all around the country and all different backgrounds and ages feels comfortable.” Creating this atmosphere can include everything from joint training sessions to making viral lip dub videos. “People point to how much fun we’re having,” Russell says, “despite how serious the moment is. And I think that is a huge part of our success.”
3. Mentality and adaptability distinguish great from good
The physical abilities of Olympic athletes are incredible, but Russell says they are not what distinguish the highest-performing athletes. Instead, he points to their drive to be the best, their willingness to consistently put in the necessary work, and their openness to feedback and change.
“Our lead athletes,” Russell says, “have this uncanny ability to make a change in a swimming motion right away — they actively seek the opportunity to make adjustments that make them better. They don’t need me to be on top of them and remind them.”
For example, while reviewing video after the 2015 swim season, Russell noted that freestyler Simone Manuel didn’t seem as mechanically efficient when she breathed to the right. At the 2015 World Championships, Simone had finished sixth in the 100-meter freestyle with a time of 53.93. During that race, she took 22 breaths — 19 to the right and three to the left. Simone and her coach, Greg Meehan, took Russell’s suggestion to heart and worked on her taking more breaths from the left side. At the 2016 Olympics, Simone won a gold medal in the 100 free with a time of 52.70, becoming the first African American woman to medal in swimming at the Olympics. She took 21 breaths — one to the right and 20 to the left.
This willingness to embrace continuous learning and improvement, to persevere through pain and fatigue, to serve as your own toughest taskmaster is, in a word, grit. And when you recruit for grit, whether you’re looking for swimmers or financial analysts or pastry chefs, you find people who will thrive no matter what their obstacles.
4. Preparation requires continually planning around talent, years ahead of the next big push
Strategic workforce planning is all the rage in the corporate world, given the technological, social, and economic shocks that contemporary businesses face. Due to competition and the long-term nature of developing athletes, USA Swimming actually started thinking about the team for next summer’s 2020 Tokyo Games in 2014 — before the last Olympics in Rio had even taken place. “We know that some of our best athletes at any point in time are going to retire by the time the next Olympics roll around,” Russell says. “And we have to figure out how we’re going to fill that gap.”
After the 2016 Olympics, Russell crunched the numbers and found that over the previous four Olympiads, only four U.S. swimmers had medaled in butterfly events compared with, say, 13 in the backstroke. And two mainstays of the stroke — Phelps and Dana Vollmer — were not likely to be around for the 2020 Olympics. So, with Russell’s numbers in front of them, USA Swimming launched the Butterfly Revolution, using social media, swim clinics, webinars, and other tools to boost interest in the stroke among swimmers across the United States. In 2017, just two U.S. swimmers medaled in the butterfly at either the worlds or world juniors; this year, the U.S. collected eight medals at those two meets.
Your company may not be facing a shortage of butterfliers but it may already be considering what pending retirements, business growth, and new technologies all mean for the makeup of your workforce in five to 10 years. If you don’t have the UX designers, cryptocurrency experts, or drone pilots you will need, you need to start developing a plan to make sure they’re in place when you do need them.
5. Everyone needs a break sometimes
The Olympics are an all-consuming passion for those who strive to get there. The leadership at USA Swimming acknowledges this, and Russell cites purposeful efforts to mitigate the inevitable “post-Olympic blues.”
“All of our Olympians go through that,” he says. “They’re real. You plan your entire life to achieve a goal as an athlete. Similarly, I have my entire professional life pointing toward this one moment. And then it passes. It’s our job as coaches and as a team to help athletes see past the Olympics.”
Companies, too, need to monitor and control for burnout, particularly among their top performers. One way to do that is to incorporate sabbaticals into your benefits portfolio. A growing number of highly regarded companies have adopted sabbaticals — an extended break, separate from paid vacation, awarded to employees who hit tenure milestones — as a way for employees to decompress and re-energize. Interestingly, this already happens occasionally in the world of Olympic swimming.
Michael Phelps, the most accomplished swimmer in history, “retired” after the 2012 Olympics. Phelps stayed away from competition for nearly two years and then returned to the pool. Two years later, he added five golds and a silver at the 2016 Summer Games. U.S. breaststroker Breeja Larson took a six-month break from swimming after the 2018 nationals to focus on her job . . . as an IT recruiter. She returned to the pool and won the 2019 nationals in the 100 breast.
Personally, Russell doesn’t know what he’ll do after the 2020 Games, but he knows it will be something to do with his away-from-the-pool passions of hiking and climbing. For the next year, he and the rest of USA Swimming are focused on bringing home Olympic medals from Tokyo — and having fun along the way.
First published at LinkedIn Talent Management Blog, 2019 by Chris Louie
I found the following story that speaks volumes why traditional reference checks simply don’t work.
Not long ago, I received a call from a furniture-store owner who was checking the references of one of my former employees. He introduced himself, and got right to the point: “I’m calling for a reference for …” He named a former saleswoman.
I immediately said, “She’s very nice!” Which she is. He went on to explain that he was excited to hire her because of all of her contacts. I didn’t say a word. He thanked me and we finished the call. He never asked if she really had contacts. He never asked how her sales compared to those of our other salespeople. He never asked why she left. He never asked if I would consider rehiring her.
It was all self-affirmation. He was happy, and so was I. I really didn’t want to answer any of the questions he didn’t ask me. When I’m hiring, I always check references and I always try to ask those questions. Usually, I get either insightful answers or insightful silence. But at least he made the call.
I remember another reference call. This caller asked if my former employee was difficult to work with. Which she was. No one liked working with her. I started to squirm. I really didn’t want to give her a bad reference, but I also didn’t want to lie. “Who isn’t difficult to work with!” I said with a laugh. He laughed, too. And then he hired her. Again, at least he made the call. And at least he made it himself.
Another time, the call came from one of those professional reference-checking services. The caller named a former employee and then went through a laundry list of questions with the attention and interest of a census taker. Clearly, the person’s objective was to get off the phone as fast as possible, and so was mine. Did the service give me any motivation to offer helpful answers? Why would I say anything negative — and risk being sued?
But the really amazing thing is that most companies don’t even bother to call. Over the past 30 years, I have had hundreds of employees and most of them have moved on, for one reason or another. Do you know how many reference calls I have gotten? I’m guessing about 10. I can’t remember 10, but I assume it was more than the three or four I do remember.
<blog originally posted BY JAY GOLTZ JANUARY 10, 2012 at The Times Magazine>
We use cookies on our website to give you the most relevant experience by remembering your preferences and repeat visits. By clicking “Accept”, you consent to the use of ALL the cookies.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
