A: As a manager, one of the things you might want to look for in a subordinate is the ability to self-direct. And why not? Having a team of self-starters makes your job as a manager nice and easy, right?

Actually, not so fast. Before we dive into the tactics of what to look for when hiring for the “self-starter” competency, consider first how having an intrinsically motivated individual on your team will impact things:

1. This person will act on limited information, seeking forgiveness, not permission.
2. This person will expose others on the team who do not work as hard.
3. This person will build relationships with your peers and possibly even your superiors.
4. This person may make you work harder just to keep up with your subordinate.
5. This person may take an informal leadership role on your team.
6. This person may not need you as much as you will need this person.

In short, this person may make you feel threatened in your current job, as s/he causes previous practices to be called into question while building powerful relationships around you and demonstrating superior results.

Generally, I find that most people think they want self-starters because they have this image for themselves of sitting back and relaxing while their team of self-starters do all the work… then, during the interview, when looking at a self-starter, many of them begin to realize, intuitively, what’s in store; it takes a courageous manager with ambitions of his or her own (or a strong teaching orientation) to tolerate strength below in the hierarchy. Managers who are not so secure in their own roles, when faced with the self-directed candidate in person, may start to find behaviors that sounded good in theory to look “annoying,” “pushy,” and “arrogant.”

But now, I’m an optimist; in my world, managers are fearless, and they truly want the best and brightest for their teams, even at the expense of their own security. So, ye manager, if you are going to assume the risks that come with building the absolute best team possible, you’re going to want the following information:

When looking at a job candidate and considering whether the person is a self-starter, watch for the following:

1. How does the person respond to you in the interview itself? Does the candidate repeatedly wait to be asked a question before offering information? Do they repeatedly ask for clarity about their answers? Do they constrain their answers to the bare minimum? Do they avoid small talk, relationship-building, and other non-Q&A interactions? Or, do they take the interview and run with it, leaving you with the slight feeling that if you don’t jump in, they may take the process slightly off-course from where you want it to go? Do they offer well constructed, thorough answers that have “hooks”—points of interest that provide easy segues to follow up questions? Do they gently challenge you? Do they show as much energy at the end of the interview as at the beginning?
2. How does the person behave outside the interview? We don’t care so much how the person describes himself or herself, because we don’t know how self-aware the person is and therefore can’t trust their interpretations of their own behaviors, but we do care about how they say they will act. For instance, how will they decide on which job offer to take? Who else will be part of their decision process; are those people counselors who will aid them or authorities who will give them implicit permission? How did they make decisions in the past—can you find a theme that this person consistently had decisions “vetted” by authority figures before making them? I know parents are becoming a more integral part of the hiring process, and one of the questions that raises for me is, does this candidate know how to make a decision alone? The involvement of parents clouds the issue, making it more difficult to know if the candidate is truly self-directed… or is having his or her strings pulled by mom and dad.

One other thing you can do is narrow down what you mean by self-starter. There are a number of competencies you could look for that cluster around that same concept, such as decisiveness, comfort with ambiguity, ambition, forward-looking, action oriented, results oriented… sometimes, being able to tease these competencies apart can make it easier to understand what exactly you are looking for, and can help you distinguish between two candidates who both seem to have the quality you are looking for, but who express it differently.

Posted under Q&A, Coaching & Consulting, Job Interviews, Gen X & Gen Y

A: The answer to this question is not what you think. I know, I know… there are only about four gazillion books out there on delegating. Throw in all the stuff written about productivity, management, and accountability, and the number zooms up to about nine gazillion. Or 10, I lost count.

And if any of it worked, the world would be filled with master delegators from top to bottom.

[Cue moment of daydreamy bliss.]

Fact is, humans are, in a word, human. So before we can address the tactics of the issue, we need to look at how the human condition may impact our ability to execute it. And when it comes to delegation, the answer is both obvious and tough to swallow.

Here’s a 2 question quiz that I often use, though not in so many words, when coaching:

1. Describe your relationship with your subordinates.
2. Describe your relationship with your boss(es).

Often, I’ll get an answer to the first that paints the subordinates as hungry, probably capable, but deficient in some meaningful way. (Compare to your own answer.) As for bosses, I often hear that bosses are good people, but maybe too political. And maybe not aware enough of subordinates’ work effort, time commitments, capabilities, etc., to do the job effectively. My corollary to these questions is:

“Ignoring power, pay, benefits, etc., and just considering the work they do, whose job would you rather have: your subordinate’s, your own, or your boss’?”

Here’s the kicker: answers to the first two questions are irrelevant. Those Qs exist only to set up the third, which is the money question.

Did you answer it? Yes? How? Because the answer to the question, “How do I delegate better” is hidden in your answer:

I PREFER MY SUBORDINATE’S JOB—You’re attached to the “doing” part of the work and haven’t fully accepted your management responsibilities. Not that you’d ever admit so in public… and not that you’d even let yourself knowingly admit as much to yourself… but there it is. You’re not delegating because you don’t yet fully embrace delegating as part of your job. You’re still a worker at heart. Until you do so, attempts to delegate won’t stick.

I PREFER MY OWN JOB—You won’t delegate because doing so will create competition for your current job, and you like your current job too much to want to give it up. Look at it this way: no one below you gets promoted until you’re ready to move up yourself (in theory; ignore lateral moves for a moment). So if you’re not ready to move up… in other words, if your boss’ job is unappealing, then a part of you is going to resist developing your subordinates. Like Shakespeare, you’ll likely give your troupe only those parts of the play they need to have, and you’ll orchestrate the integration of the whole. You’ll have good reason to do so, but at the end of the day, that reason is really just a rationalization for your desire to stay in place. Attempts to improve your ability to delegate will probably fall short… in your eyes, your team will never quite be up to the challenge as much as you will be.

I PREFER MY BOSS’ JOB—Delegation books are for you. You are mentally and emotionally ready to learn the skills. If you’re not a good delegator, it is because you lack the skill; learning the tactics of delegation will likely help you.

Surprised? Most of us are usually a bit surprised to learn (remember?) how the human condition is affecting us. We tend to lose sight of its impact on our own behavior… as clearly as we might see it at work with others. Like I said before: obvious, and tough to swallow.

Posted under Q&A, Coaching & Consulting, Self-Development, Leadership, How to Self-Destruct

A: I don’t care how many people you have on your IM account; true friends are hard to find and the most precious thing in all the world when you do find them. Friends–real friends–stand by you even when they’re not with you. They think about you (bonus if they call and let you know that) and root for your success. When they see you doing something wrong, they find a way to get the message through to you. They understand the boundaries of the relationship and take risks that balance their desire to protect the relationship against what they feel you really need in that moment.

False friends come in a lot of flavors. Common ones we all know to watch for are the User, the Brown Noser, and the Drama Maker. Here are six other, more subtle forms of false friends that we don’t usually think about, but who are equally as troublesome:

1. Competitor—He supports you only as long as you don’t achieve quite as much as he has. Get close to surpassing him and his support evaporates. An undercurrent of jealousy keeps this friendship in check.
2. Patronizer—Sees you like a kid brother and leaves you feeling like you have something to prove. Over time, his limiting compliments—around which he does not provide a path to let you overcome—stunt your growth.
3. Bonzai—The ability to lay things on the table takes courage and is a great skill to have, but the friend who calls people out on every issue inhibits relationships from maturing as surely as aggressive over-pruning keeps plants from ever reaching their full potential.
4. Laissez Bon Temp Roullez—“Let the good times roll!” Fun to be around, but as fulfilling as a bag of gumdrops. There is a time and a place to cut loose. There is also a time and place to focus.
5. Detached—She keeps you at a distance. Conversations never quite feel… right. To this friend, you may as well be a character on a TV sitcom. You’ll spin your cycles seeking an emotional response that never quite comes.
6. Collector—Cares about the network, not the people in it. If you ever need something from this person, be prepared to trade your name to get it. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself SOL.

We all have false friends to some degree… and we all ARE false friends at times. These are not meant to be absolutes… they are guidelines. The best way to use these guidelines? Use them to change your own behavior and become a better friend yourself.

Posted under Q&A, Self-Development, Communications

A: Whoa! Stop! You’re not really saying that your people are good “because they’ve been trained,” are you?

Because unless you train wives in Stepford, or inject trainees with some virus that rewrites their DNA, or do some voodoo magic during your sessions, no one can MAKE someone good through training!

Of course, you know this. I know you know this because I’ve seen you remind trainers and consultants of this fact whenever one shared his or her success statistics with you. OK, so in your quest to master your domain, you conveniently forget that training doth not a paragon make, and you’re now realizing that you’ve over-invested in training. C’est la vie, we all get a little blinded by the beauty of our own plans now and then.

So what now? Here are the steps to laying out a truly effective development program:

1. Stop by finance and say hi. Stop by the executive suite and say hi. Visit a few operators; say hi. Get to know as many people in as many departments as possible. Do this way more than you think you “should.”
2. Take stock of your talent. Not your processes; your talent. There are a lot of moving parts to development, including training, coaching, mentoring, lateral job rotations, special projects, high-potential programs, promotions… and these are just the organic elements that do not account for the impact of strategic changes such as mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPOs, corporate restructuring, new product lines or new lines of business, new plants and other significant cap ex, all of which can have a big impact on development efforts and should be accounted for when putting together an integrated talent solution. To know if you’re rolling out the right pieces in the right order, you’ve got to assess your talent. I mean your actual people. How well rounded are your executives? What role do people on your management teams play? What are the true capabilities of your younger workers? (I.e., who are the strategic thinkers? Who keeps things moving forward? Etc.)
3. Assess your culture. I’ve seen plenty of organizations where people say all the right things (“We want to be a learning organization!”) without having the foggiest idea what it takes to get there, let alone what impact that will have on how business is run. While doing the talent audit, take time to also get a handle on what your organization is capable of as an organization, and how development efforts will need to get rolled out to ensure their adoption.
4. Share the results with top decision makers, and let them know what you are doing with the information. Tell them when you anticipate being done with step #6, and what preliminary budget you are thinking about for step #4.
5. Set a budget for development. You’re going to want it all, we all know that, but resources are limited. The talent audit (aka, organizational talent assessment, environmental scan) you did in step #1 is only as good as what you do with it, and without some kind of budget, you won’t get very far!
6. Brainstorm plan options. Armed with the talent audit and budget, you should be able to determine the best use of your funds across all the various development options. Also, you should be able to spot some low-cost options that will help you extend your resources. A good plan creates “pull through” interest that builds on itself.
7. Pick one or two alternative courses of action, and build cases for them. Do the research needed to ensure that you are on the right track. Study the risks of your chosen approach(es), and build a picture of what success looks like. If you’re in a large organization, get together with someone who knows what the letters NPV stand for (hint: they’re in finance) and build a business case for training. Get help answering the question: “How will we measure success?“ This help should come in the form of outside experts and future program participants. (Hint: “I enjoyed this session” is not a good survey question.)
8. Present to the decision makers and operators. If they push back, don’t fight. Listen. No one likes to be bullied, and people will often reject good ideas out of spite if they feel those ideas are being crammed down their throats. You did make friends with these people in Step #1, right?
9. Confirm the decision to move forward.
10. Stop thinking, start doing.
11. Measure your impact. Assume nothing; call participants 1, 3, and 6 months after their involvement and ask what, if anything, has stuck. If you use a survey in this step, augment it with personal calls–you need to hear from people first hand!

Like a great amplifier, the list of things to do to ensure a great development program goes to eleven. But unlike Nigel Tufnel, something tells me that you’ll know how to use all the numbers. Good luck!

Posted under Q&A, Coaching & Consulting, Lists

A: Let me help you: as special, perfect, and good-looking as you are, you still comprise only about 1/6 billionth of humanity. That’s right, you make up .00000000167th of the human experience. That’s nine decimal places just to get back up to one, Sport.

Nine.

Are we over ourselves yet?

Don’t worry, it took me some time to even recognize that I had this problem, let alone do something about it. Anyone who knew me in college can attest to the fact that I spent a good chunk of time being full of myself. If I didn’t like my clean up assignment in the house, I skipped it; that kind of thing. What a joy I must’ve been to be around.

I think BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, et. al. would do humanity a huge favor if, after making people tap the warning screen on their GPS systems, a voice would come on and simply say, “Nice car. Whoop-dee-doo. Get over yourself.”

Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening anytime soon. Still, you should do it. Get over yourself, that is.

Why? Look at it this way: if you’re ego is that precious, imagine what you’ll get for it if you trade it in. I’m not sure what’s going to get you over you, but I can tell you what gets me over me… what helps propel me past the major hurdle that is my ego. An incomplete, still-growing list:

1. My wife telling me that I held a lot of grudges. Realizing that I was carrying so many torches forced me to confront the probability that I was the one causing the problems. The alternative was that I had somehow, cosmically, attracted over half a dozen people into my existence who were congenitally incapable of having normal relationships… a theory blown out of the water by the fact that they had lots of normal relationships, just not with me. (What about me? Yes, I had friends. I wasn’t an a-hole to everybody. Sheesh.)
2. Learning to sell something. My goodness, if you’ve never rolled up your sleeves and tried your hand at sales, I suggest you do so at your earliest possible opportunity. Suddenly, my academic pedigree meant nothing. It didn’t matter how smart I was, how funny I was, how good looking I was, or how good my stories were. All that mattered was whether or not I could solve someone else’s problem. Someone else… can you imagine?! And this wasn’t like a charity where I could fool myself into thinking that I was helping the less fortunate; if I didn’t sell, then I was the less fortunate one!
3. Learning to read people. When I started doing assessments, the first exercise I did was to fill up legal sheet-length columns on various individuals’ positive and negative attributes. This forced me to see others in a balanced light… which had the interesting effect of causing me to see me in a balanced light. (Suddenly, they weren’t so simple anymore. And I wasn’t so good looking anymore!)
4. Having kids. The best demotion I’ve ever taken.
5. Coming to understand what I’m truly good at. There are a few things that I do that make me an excellent management consultant. Once I realized this, I no longer needed to go out and try to one-up others at every turn. I could let them be great at their thing, and they’d let me be great at mine.
6. 6.Wanting to be done with a high school mentality. Drama, while exciting on some level, is also exhausting. I think I just got bored with it. This required me to not care about a lot of things.
7. 7.Skiing. No matter how great a skier I were to become, I’d never be greater than the mountain. Not even close. I’ve gotten some great perspective from my time on the mountain.
8. 8.Living. I own my own business, and I’ve had a lot of very good luck getting it to where it is today. But I haven’t been perfect, and not every day, week, or even month has been a cakewalk. It doesn’t more that a sleepless night or two, wondering which is going to hit first, the check I deposited or the check I wrote, to realize how fragile success can be.
9. 9.Writing. It’s hard to write about the need to take 100% personal responsibility for your own success and not have a little bit of the concept sink in… and in my case, what sank in was, “If I’m having a problem with someone, it’s on me to get us out of it. Regardless of who started it, I am responsible for ending it.” You can’t end an argument with a holier-than-thou, back-handed compliment. You end it only by helping everyone save face.

Am I perfectly modest? Please. I’m not perfectly anything. When I achieve perfection in anything, they’ll stick me up on a mountain top to dispense answers to weary wisdom-seekers. But, I am trying to make the most of the .00000000167th slice of humanity I represent. And I am finding the efforts surprisingly rewarding.

Posted under Q&A, Self-Development, Personal, Gen X & Gen Y, Lists