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Questions to ask when Assessing your Company Culture

The Austin Technology Council held a CEO Roundtable on May 18th about “How Healthy is your Organization’s Culture”? The featured speaker was Dr. Carol Kallendorf, the Founding Partner of The Delta Associates. I made a commitment to Tweet more often and so I maintained a Twitter Stream throughout the whole event. If you’re not following me on Twitter, why not?

The event wasn’t an exceptional one as the featured guest has been in business of telling companies what they do wrong for over 27 years. Further, no matter how pointedly people asked her questions she had a political answer that wasn’t based on experience and instead, sounded like rhetoric. At the end of the event we all got handed a piece of paper (how very Baby Boomer) of the 10 questions you can ask to assess your organizational culture. While the document wouldn’t surprise you even if you were from Mars and didn’t even know what culture was, there were a couple on there that at least bore repeating:

What are the issues that tend to align your Executive Team? What about fractionalize it?
To what extent do the people in your organization have shared goals, vision or fate?
Could your employees explain to their family members what it is that they do within the company that contribute to its success?
Do people at all levels in your organization know what business you are in, how you make money and who your customers are?
What’s your culture for handling mistakes and failure? What would your employees say is the culture for handling failure or mistakes?
Do people like to come to work?
How big a priority is culture?

Again, nothing earth shaking or really insightful but they ARE thought provoking. Can you make any changes today inside of your company that could represent a baby step in the right direction?

Tags: alisha ring, amwf, Austin, austin technology council, brian wong, carol kallendorf, change management, culture, delta associates, drive culture, Fame, Family, Fortune, Fun, hire better, talent acquisition, tweets, Twitter

02 Jun 09 | Retention, Topgrading, Twitter | Read on | Comments (0)

Build It Right – Right from the Start

Hanging out with Early Stage Entrepreneurs is about my favorite thing in the world to do. For the past 18 months I’ve been actively involved in EO’s Accelerator Program which is dedicated to helping companies between $250k-$1mm grow faster and more efficiently through peer to peer learning, introductions to advisors and facilitated learning opportunities.

This morning I got the chance to share some of our best practices with the Portfolio Companies of Austin’s newest Incubator: Capital Factory. (If you’re interested, you can follow them on Twitter: @capitalfactory). I find it exhilarating to spend time with new companies and brilliant minds and I’m proud to have American Workforce be a supporter of this organization. This morning we focused on how each and every one of their companies has a chance to do things right – right from the start. None of them have started to hire employees yet but each of them has the plan to in the very near future. We talked about a number of strategies and the ways that they can make their companies attractive to top talent without having to spend a lot of money. But what I really challenged each of them to do was to analyze their Virtual Bench, build a repeatable screening process that gets to the point of what they need to find out about someone before hiring them, and thinking about the candidates’ perspectives when they are considering joining these new companies.

There were FOUR main questions that I asked them to really think about as we were wrapping up. If you’re a Business Owner, aspiring Entrepreneur or Manager, you should be thinking about these questions too:

What is the first impression we provide to prospective A-Players when they come on-site to meet us?
If we’re interviewing an A-Player and everyone knows it, are we willing to make our decision on the spot? If not, what else needed to happen during screening to make us comfortable and confident?
Have we acknowledged the spouse or significant other and included them during the recruiting process? How could we?
Are we ready to have new A-Players on our team? Can our management style challenge them so that they’ll stay and thrive in our company?

And the BONUS Question: Are we comfortable hiring people that have the potential to take our position?

Sure, Topgrading is tough to implement. But in the 2 years that I’ve been involved with it, I’ve found that it’s the questions above that impair companies and limit the effectiveness of the process more than conducting 4 hour interviews or executing on TORC. What are you doing in your company to Hire Better?

Tags: @capitalfactory, @joshuabaer, A-Player, A-Players, american workforce, amwf, aspiring entrepreneur, Austin, capital factory, chris mursau, emerging entrepreneur, EO, EO Accelerator, Fame, Family, Fortune, Fun, hire better, hiring, Interview, job description, josh baer, recruit don't absorb, Recruiting, Scorecard, talent acquisition, Topgrading, topgrading methodology, TORC, Twitter, virtual bench, who the book

28 May 09 | Employment, Interviewing, Recruiting, Retention, Topgrading | Read on | Comments (0)

Establishing Accountability on a Volunteer or Non-Profit Board: Topgrading can help

For the past 2 years I’ve been fortunate to be involved with something called the Accelerator Program. Established by the Entrepreneurs Organization, the Accelerator Program was built around educational content focused on four key issues faced by first-stage entrepreneurs: strategic planning, sales & marketing, people and finance. Unlike Business Schools or Government Programs, the Accelerator Participants learn from actual Entrepreneurs who are running their organizations day to day and have businesses that are over $1mm in Revenue (less than 4% of companies in the US ever attain this level).

In July, my role as the CHAMPION for Central Texas (essential the Chairman of the Program here in Austin) expires. My Champion-Elect, Jeffrey Stukuls, will take over. I’ve been working hard on a transition plan and wanted to be sure that I had:

Chosen the right person for the position
Assessed them on the skill sets and competencies needed to be successful
Clearly set expectations so that they knew both (a) what success meant and (b) what was expected of them

As I was going through all of this I had one of those light bulb moments of clarity. I thought, “Why not create a Top Accountabilities document like we do for our clients here at Hire Better?” In case your not familiar, the Top Accountabilities idea was established by Dr. Brad Smart in his book Topgrading.

It’s funny that this kind of idea never struck me as being a solution before but when you really think about it, when have you ever gotten something as simple as a Job Description for a Volunteer role that you had?

Because this blog post wouldn’t have that much meaning unless I showed it to you, I asked Jeffrey if he would mind if I published the document. Hope you enjoy it! Click HERE and it will open in a new window.

Tags: A-Player, A-Players, Accelerator Program, american workforce, amwf, Austin, Board, Brad Smart, business school, central texas, Champion, Champion-Elect, chris mursau, competency, competency library, comptencies, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurs Organization, EO, first-stage entrepreneurs, Interview, Jeffrey Stukuls, job description, non-profit, revenue, Scorecard, Top Accountabilities, top accountabilities document, Topgrading, topgrading methodology, volunteer, what success means, YEO

20 Apr 09 | Interviewing, Topgrading | Read on | Comments (0)

Recruiting vs Absorbing: Know the Difference?

I continue to hear from Recruiters, Journalists and even Business owners that now is a great time to pick up talent because of how high the unemployment rate is. I’ve written in the past about how I think that now is a great time to be RECRUITING as well but not because of the growing number of the unemployed. I’m not going to re-hash that here. Instead, this post is going to focus on what Jack Daly considers the difference between Recruiting and Absorbing.

I’d like to start by sharing that I live in Austin, TX (yes, it is as cool as you’ve heard). In this town we’re proud of live music, barbeque and, probably above all, Longhorn Football. Mack Brown is the Head Coach (aka the CEO) of the team.

Right now, spring practices are done and the coaching team is spending all of their time figuring out (1) what’s our depth chart for the fall (2) who are the top High School Sophomores at each position in Texas and the US and (3) how are we going to convince young men from around the country to pay us $300+ to come to our camp so that they can be seen by our coaches when every other school in the country wants them to do the same?

The reason I brought up point #3 is because it’s not unlike the current marketplace for Businesses looking to land top talent. How? Hundreds of young men will descend upon Austin in the coming weeks and happily throw down their $300 camp fee. While the coaching staff has a responsibility to treat every camper fairly by providing them with a safe place to stay, healthy food and some nominal feedback about how to improve, it’s the 8-10 players that they personally invited in for the camp that they are focusing their attention on. Every once in a while a young man who shows up and was unheralded impresses the coaches and gets a shot scholarship but it’s rare.

I hope you’re seeing the direct parallel between the people who are applying for jobs at your company as opposed to the people who you have to fight to get.

With that in mind, let’s go back to Mack Brown’s role in this recruiting process. Because he has the advantage of knowing who the top 10 Prep Quarterbacks or Linebackers are by subscribing to the industry publications that track this data, he can carefully place phone calls to these young men to get them excited about the program.

Focus because here’s the crux of the blog post: After Mack Brown gets off the phone with a young man who he’d like to see as his starting quarterback in 2011, do you think he sends that 16 year old a copy of a job description for what a Quarterback does?

Let’s bring it all back to your business: here are the 5 questions you have to ask YOURSELF when recruiting and then share with your “top recruits”:

1. Why come to work here?
2. What are we (as a company) doing to ensure that our team is successful?
3. How can you (our prized recruit) be sure that the reputation of our company is exceptional?
4. Where is our greatest opportunity for growth in the marketplace?
5. What are the most compelling reasons to join the team here?

If you’ve read the book Who you would know that these are also part of the 5 F’s (Fame, Family, Fortune, Fun and Fit). By asking yourself these questions as the CEO or Hiring Manager you’re attempting to proactively answer a lot of these concerns that a recruit would have.

If you’d like to pick up a great book for the weekend and learn how college football is answering each of these questions, check out Meat Market: Inside the smash mouth world of College Football Recruiting by Bruce Feldman.

Bonus food for thought: if Mack Brown needed a starting quarterback in 2011 and he didn’t start thinking about it until 2 weeks before the season started, would he start placing ads on CraigsList with the hopes someone would apply that he could hire?

Tags: 5 F's, A-Player, A-Players, Austin, bruce feldman, Fame, Family, Fit, Fortune, Fun, geoff smart, hiring manager, jack daly, longhorn football, mack brown, proactive recruiting, recruit don't absorb, recruiting versus absorbing, talent acquisition, unemployment, unemployment rate, who the book

10 Apr 09 | Networking, Recruiting | Read on | Comments (0)

Defining a Rock Star

The first few times it happened I considered it coincidence. Since then it’s become an epidemic. It would seem that there’s one guy in Austin who everyone wants to model their VP of Marketing after. If you’re not from Austin there’s still probably a decent chance you’ve heard of him as he’s recognized as having quite the ability to get people to pay attention to what he’s saying – whether it’s on his own behalf or to the benefit of someone else.

Sam Decker recently took a stab at something that’s in our backyard and now I’m thinking that maybe we should be modeling any searches where we’re looking for a VP of Talent Acquisition on his resume as well because he’s done a good job of identifying the 5 key aspects of a ROCK STAR .

To summarize:
1. Initiative
2. Integrity
3. Execution
4. Strategic Agility
5. Communication

He offers intuitive reasons for each of these skill sets and justifies the importance of each in greater detail in his blog (see link above).

If we could teach this guy to write a scorecard he might be dangerous! But who knows, it’s Sam Decker and if he’s even 1/10 as good at Recruiting and Talent Assessment as people suggest he is at Marketing he probably knows how to do that too.

Tags: 5 key aspects of a rock star, 5 stars, Austin, bazaarvoice, rock star, sam decker, Scorecard, talent acquisition, vp of marketing, vp of talent acquisition, word of mouth marketing

22 Sep 08 | Employment, Interviewing, Recruiting, Retention | Read on | Comments (0)

The Power of First Impressions

I may be a little bit behind the times but apparently this commercial aired this past February during the Super Bowl. It’s a gentlemen trying to interview but he has a coffee stain on his shirt that keeps mumbling very loudly - so loudly that the man interviewing him can’t hear a thing he’s saying: click here.

While the commercial is funny and points out the value of the Tide stick, it’s remarkably appropriate for what is happening in today’s job market. As unemployment rises and jobs get harder to obtain, the importance of your first impression gets even greater. It’s amazing how often we hear about candidates showing up at our clients’ offices unprepared: no extra copies of their resumes, arriving late, wearing wrinkled clothes. In Austin (where American Workforce is based), many people tend to dress rather casual; flip-flops in business meetings aren’t uncommon. Just because the manager who is conducting the interview is wearing khaki’s and a Hawaiian shirt doesn’t mean you have permission to show up in the same attire. When in doubt, wear a business suit. You can always take off your tie or jacket and laugh about it later but don’t ever be ashamed of being the best dressed candidate being considered for the job.

Tags: Austin, Flip-Flops, Interview

14 Apr 08 | Employment | Read on | Comments (0)

HIRE BETTER™

Delivering the Systems and Expertise You Need to Make Great Hiring Decisions

Questions to ask when Assessing your Company Culture

Build It Right – Right from the Start

Establishing Accountability on a Volunteer or Non-Profit Board: Topgrading can help

Recruiting vs Absorbing: Know the Difference?

Defining a Rock Star

The Power of First Impressions

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