With all of the miserable outlooks dominating our media reports for the New Year, I feel compelled to raise a cheer to 2009 and remind business owners that this is the perfect time to begin anew! This is the perfect time to retool your organization to take advantage of the chaos in the marketplace. In any recessionary time, the cumbersome, goliath companies lose ground while those that are lean and focused, and able to make quick decisions can carve out strong, new positions.
When times are good, companies tend to pay less attention to the basics that truly are the competitive edge. I happen to believe that companies live and die by the people they hire . . . and keep. In good times, owners are more likely to avoid the tough emotional decisions of dealing with mediocre performance by just hiring additional people to get the job done, or worse, by delegating that important hiring process to someone else. This is especially true among many human resources professionals who view more people and more training as the solution to almost anything. They are also less willing to take the time to find the best people and will settle on the easiest, and sometimes "cheapest," hires. I am pretty confident that these decisions and perspectives are what leads to the "bad times" being really bad.
As in all things, when the pendulum swings and times get tough, many owners realize they do not have the luxury of such avoidance thinking. When survival is on the line, the tough decisions become the only decisions. They still have to be smart decisions. People are not interchangeable legos, and they truly come to us with different strengths and capabilities; also with differences in commitment and dedication. Smart owners know they have to make every hire, or retained employee, count.
After the Depression of the 1930's, employers were asked what was the most important factor in deciding whom to keep and whom to terminate to keep their businesses going. In a study of 4000 men who were laid off, the employers said the deciding factor was their behavioral traits; not their degrees, seniority, or experience but how they behaved and interacted with others. Behaviors such as initiative, cooperation, attitude, accountability meant more to survival than what we typically see as hiring considerations.
Observant leaders know these traits spell the difference between success and failure today. The good news is we have exceptional and accessible methods of identifying those essential traits today, and who has them, that the leaders of the Depression years did not have. (Profiling would have been exceptionally valuable if it had been applied as a prerequisite to government agency leaders, money managers, and congressional leaders who allowed our economy to falter. I promise you that profiling would have pointed out their failings and insufficiencies in advance of seeing them acted out to the detriment of our very foundations).
Profiling has come a long way since the 1930s; Actually it has come a long way since the 1990s. With appropriate profiling any leader can make selections and decisions with amazingly predictable outcomes and results.
Any company that has not seriously considered profiling essential success traits, and matching them to candidates and existing employees for best performance, is seriously missing powerful opportunities. Such matching results in significant and immediate improvement in leadership and management, production, quality, sales and morale. I would challenge anyone to identify any decision or process that delivers more improvement and delivers it more quickly.
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410
Date Published :
Jan 4 2009