Management Psychology: How to for Hiring, Managing, Motivating, Cloning, Mentoring

This section of our website includes a variety of articles and resources for helping managers be more effective in hiring, managing and motivating employees. Additional information is also available on mentoring, transferring knowledge and cloning your best people.

How to Clone Your Best People

Moderately successful business owners and managers know who their top performers are. Highly successful owners and managers have learned how to clone those top performers. Which one are you?

Whether it’s sales people, office staff, or service technicians, did you ever say, “If only I had more people like Bob, the entire department would operate in the black.” And, chances are that’s correct. The question is, exactly how can you clone your best people? How can you add more black ink to your bottom line by hiring better?

You have two basic choices: 1) high-tech and expensive, or 2) low-tech and affordable. Which one do you like better? Just a wild guess, but let’s say you want low-tech and affordable. This means you’ll take more of a hands-on approach.

First, identify your top performers (in a specific job). Let’s take sales as an example.

Second, recognize how your top sales performers do what they do. In particular, you look for the common qualities and competencies among your star salespeople.

Third, build a profile of those qualities and competencies. You can use a few conversational questions to get key information from top performers. Let’s say you discover that your top sales people possess five common qualities and competencies:

Proactive – tends toward direct action rather than thinking about things
Persuasive – good at building rapport, leading, influencing
Competitive – invigorated by competition, likes to win
Positive – always on the lookout for the positive in any situation
Social – invigorated by social interaction

Now that you have this information, you have a head-start on what to look for when you begin to interview new sales people. You simply look for people with those specific qualities.

The Tricky Part

How do you identify the common traits? That’s the tricky part, and it requires a tool. Again, the choice is yours. You can spend literally millions and get a highly effective, high-tech tool. Or, you can spend mere thousands and get a highly effective, low-tech tool. What makes this so tricky is that there are lots of choices. You probably already know about the many variations of personality tests and behavioral assessments. Chances are, you’ve also discovered lots of variation in the quality and validity of those personality tools.

To make matters worse, most assessment processes tend to employ tunnel-vision - they focus on assessing the applicant within a vacuum. They don’t take time to understand the job and the success criteria. It seems like common sense, doesn’t it – to know what you’re looking for BEFORE you start looking! Unless your tool can help you address the job and success within your culture, you could easily end up with an excellent performer who hates showing up for work.

In addition, if you’re not careful, you could easily end up assessing all the wrong things, and not even know it. You could chew up a lot of time and expense and get very little return on your investment. All this is to say, be cautious when selecting the tool. Unless you employ 30,000 people, keep it simple and low-tech.

A perfectly logical solution

During ten years of research, we’ve discovered only one tool that contains everything you probably want: low-tech, affordable, highly effective and used by some very high-profile corporations, such as Southwest Airlines and IBM. Its called the Language and Behavior (LAB) Profile.

LAB Profiling is based on the scientifically valid concept that people’s language gives you a direct link to their behavior. In other words, if you listen carefully to the words someone uses, you can understand how his or her mind works. Here’s how it would work for you. If you teach your sales people to follow a specific sales process, you absolutely need to hire people who naturally and automatically embrace procedures. You need to hire people who will not vary from that procedure. What are the chances of finding those people in a random sample? About 1 in 2. But, if you know what to listen for, you’ll recognize it in the language when your applicant talks.

Here’s how we use the LAB profile to create a profile. We interview the top performers in a specific job, asking 8 – 10 conversational questions that enable us to determine their values and how their minds work. What we actually identify is called a “mental filter configuration.” That configuration becomes a template or map to identify your next superstars. We, then, simply use those same 8 – 10 questions to interview job candidates. The result is, we can immediately see how closely a candidate’s mental filter configuration matches those of your top performers. The closer they are to the template, the better they will perform. The farther they are from the template, the more money they will cost you.

It’s a low-tech, practical, and amazingly effective approach. The important thing is not so much what tool you use, just that you look at the characteristics of star performers and use those as your guide for hiring.

An added bonus - Use the Right Language to Attract Exactly the People You Want

Once you identify the specific characteristics you’re looking for in a candidate, you can then use the appropriate language in your recruiting ads to attract more of the people who fit the profile. For example, if we know that your best sales people are competitive, we might include language like “Do you want to be the top salesperson in your region?” or “Are you driven to win?” Similarly, if you want to attract a person who is proactive, you would use proactive language, in other words, short, active sentences. For example: “Want to take control?” “Want to get the job done?” “Like to Win?”

A New Look at Job Descriptions

The ancient artifacts we call job descriptions haven't changed much over the last half century. But the world of work has. Rather than having a single job, most of us perform a variety of roles and activities. What we do changes frequently, and typically bears little resemblance to formal job descriptions.

Isn't it time for a new approach to defining work? One that's more in tune with the times and focused on effectiveness rather than efficiency? One that actually provides real guidance and enables "right person right job." Isn't it time we put job descriptions to work? We should start this process by revisiting what we want job descriptions to do. For example, job descriptions should:

Provide guidance to people as to what to do and how to do it.
Provide information that could be used in staffing the job -- not only
technical skill requirements, but also information about the "nature"
of the person best suited for the work.
Provide a basis for "Who's Who" and Expertise directories that
enable people in the organization to know who does what and who
knows what.

What do we need to change in order to accomplish these objectives?
I suggest three things:

First, expand job descriptions to include multiple roles and areas of
expertise.

Second - identify underlying attributes of the work that can be used to better match people to activities. For example, is most of the work hands-on, "in the trenches" or is it more conceptual, planning, and analyzing? Does the work deal mostly with people, data, or things? What's the level of responsibility, in other words, what are the repercussions of mistake making?

We must stop looking at jobs and people as two separate entities and focus instead on the relationship between the two. We also need to develop a common language for describing work and people, a language that goes beyond technical skills, degrees, and years of

Finally, job descriptions should be written by or with the person in the job. I mean, if you look at the benefits of good job descriptions, a common theme emerges. Who is in the best position to supply job information?

Who knows better what the job is actually all about and what kinds of skills and competencies are most important? The incumbent! I'm an advocate for enabling employees to complete their own work profiles and job descriptions. Some people may need help articulating details about their job, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be the primary supplier of information. Consider using an interview process for gathering key information.

I'm also in favor of "self-assigned" job titles. Encourage employees to choose their own job title, one that actually means something to them, one that motivates them and makes them feel good about what they do. Chief Visionary. Client Caregiver, Director of Talent.

Job descriptions and job titles provide identity and purpose. Perhaps by redefining work, we can help make employees feel better about who they are and what they do.

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