A great leader is someone who can reduce the fear in the workplace, and will allow someone to be wholly and completely who they are.
– Jen
The importance of hiring the right people can’t be emphasized enough. However, too many organizations out there, simply hire people to “fill the holes” without actually thinking through the problem that they are trying to solve. What capabilities are required for the organization to move forward in the right direction, as well as processes which require human input need to be determined. But most importantly, how will the person actually fit into the organization’s culture and dynamics.
Topics
During this interview Scott and I discuss the following topics:
- The current situation in the hiring domain
- How to keep the people who are already in the organization
- The best way to find and hire someone
- The components of an effective hiring strategy
- The importance of looking into failures during the interview process
- How to effectively onboard new employees
- How to deal with employees who are leaving the organization
0:00:01.6 S1: Today on episode 187 of the Peak Performance Leadership Podcast, we bring back guest Jen Thornton, she’s gonna teach you how to hire the right way so you don’t waste your time, effort and money. That’s right folks. It’s all about hiring folks today. Are you ready for this? Alright, let’s do it. Welcome one, welcome all to the Peak Performance Leadership Podcast, a weekly podcast series dedicated to helping you hit peak performance across the three domains of the leadership, those being leading yourself, leading your team, and leading your organization. This podcast helps my 20 years of military experiences as Senior Canadian Army Officer with world-class guests to bring you the most complete podcast of leadership growing and for more feel free to check out our website at moving forward leadership.com with that let’s get to the show. Yes, welcome. Thanks for tuning in. It is your Chief Leadership Officer Scott McCarthy. It is so great to have you here. And today we’re gonna be talking about hiring people, bringing new people into an organization, and we do that with Jen Thornton, and Jen is the quickest turnaround return guest we’ve ever had on the podcast, so if you wanna check out her first appearance Leading Real Change you can do so by going to episode 168 with Jen. Fantastic episode, so good that right after I finished recording with her, I told her I wanted her back, and we literally booked the second interview right then and there. So today, we’re going to be talking about hiring people, why? Because you gotta find the right people. How many times have you heard the expression? Good help is hard to find. Well, maybe just maybe, it’s not that the people are hard to find, maybe you’re not doing setting yourself up for success from the get-go, and that’s really where we go right away with this podcast interview today with Jen… If you don’t know Jen, she is a strategy and leadership professional development, she’s got over 20 years of experience in the field, and she’s led international teams across China, Mexico, UK, US, gone into new markets, etcetera, and now she runs her own consulting firm, 304 Coaching. And she deals with clients, much like yourself, small businesses, big businesses, including large international firms and so on. During this interview, we talked about the current situation regarding hiring, how to key people who are already in the organization, because you want to retain your people, the good ones, the best way to find someone to hire them, the components of effect of hiring strategy, the importance of looking into failures during the interview process, had effectively onboard new employees and so much more…
0:03:48.5 S1: Kids are right. We have so much fun on this podcast. You’re gonna absolutely love her because as far as I’m concerned, I could co-host the show with her ’cause that’s how great she is and how well we job together, so with that, I’m going to say, It’s time for me to be Limelight. So why don’t you sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Jen Thornton on how to hire the right way. American, welcome back to the show. So great to have you here.
0:04:35.0 S2: It is so good to be back. And like we were saying, we could talk forever and you just keep going. So.
0:04:42.2 S1: Congratulations. I like to throw awards out from time to time too, my guess, you’ve won the award of the quickest return guest, but after we hit stop on the last episode, which was only 19 episode front, You’re gonna be fresh in the listeners mind out there for sure.
0:05:06.4 S2: Good, well, I’m excited to be back and continue the conversation ’cause it was going so well last time, but… We couldn’t go on forever.
0:05:14.2 S1: No, we couldn’t. So last time we were talking about leading change, and for a listener out there, if you did not hear Jen the first time, you need to go back, you need to listen to Episode 168-168 and you can hit that by going to moving for leadership.com. 168 leaving, real change. But today we’re gonna be talking about hiring people and hiring the right people and making sure we’re set up for success because you were just talking about it before I hit record, I told you hit pause, so let’s say… Play on what you’re going to talk about before. So what’s going on right now in the whole hiring world, in a site that’s up.
0:05:50.4 S2: What’s interesting right now, and people were kind of starting to talk about it, maybe mid-2020, knowing when we were going back to a more traditional work schedule or a traditional office that there were going to be some changes, and the term that’s being kicked out there a lot is the great resignation, and so what we’re finding is that many people over the last year and a half have maybe decided, Hey, I wanna do something different with my life, I wanna have more time off, or I want to have a blended schedule or my job changed and it’s just not what I want anymore, or there’s a group of people who are working for leaders who were leading through crisis management, and I got stuck there and they’re just not being led in a way that feels good to them, and there is probably even 10 more things I could list, but what we’re finding right now is that people are resigning from their job at a rate they’ve never done before, and this creates an incredible opportunity for organizations to hire new talents, but also a great opportunity for them to kinda crack the code on how they keep the talent that they don’t want to lose.
0:07:06.2 S1: Oh, that’s two different… That’s two different ways to go right now, so let’s go with the latter. First, I talk about keeping people because that’s gotta be… To prefer what we call them the art course of action in option, we just kind of like to make it sound on altruistic and fancy and stuff, but it’s an option, right, so that’s gotta be a preferred one because it takes so much time, so much money, so much effort to go out and hire people. And reality is, you know, the person you have right now is the known entity, you don’t know, you’re gonna get a I after the end of the process. So what are some of the best ways for organizations out there today to not lose their people with all this going on, you… I want changes, I don’t wanna have to come into the office, I’m… A lot of it, more flexible. It works good a label, all these different things that the pandemic has really shaken up and really make people think about their lives in a more holistic way, there is… The good news is there’s a lot of options that a organization could take, and.
0:08:06.0 S2: I think the first thing you wanna think about is taking care of your leaders, because they’re taking care of your teams, and they’re taking care of your business, and they’re taking care of your reputation, and so start there, start at the top and really think about how are you leading your leaders, how do your leaders need to lead in the way in which your business is today, ’cause it doesn’t matter what business you are, you are different today than you were a year and a half, two years ago, pandemic or not, that’s life. Things change. So think about what you need from these people, think about the competencies, the skills, the way of work, what is important, and really think about making sure that you’re asking them to do work that’s purposeful and meaningful, and that you’re not asking them to do that fluff work that doesn’t really have a business impact. And so start there. What we’re finding here and at my agency is that people are investing in their leaders like they’ve never done before, and I think that’s fantastic, because that’s a first step in keeping them, is investing in them. Then pass that, really start to think about how can you be incredibly efficient and purposeful with across the teams, and so it really starts with organizational design and stopping and saying what jobs are important, how are we gonna do those jobs, and then ensure that you have the right, people in those jobs.
0:09:35.1 S2: Because we’re doing things different. A person who excelled in a job today may need to be in a different job ’cause they’ll excel even more, someone who maybe struggled in a job two years ago may actually be a fantastic fit for today, we don’t know, but really taking the time and not assuming that everyone’s in the right job, but finding a way to think about What do we need to do and how do we best match that, and it’s almost like kind of shake it up a little bit and get people matched really well, and I think those are some of the first steps that you can take to start to think about providing people with purpose and structure and a reason to come to work every day.
0:10:14.9 S1: I love the first part, taking care of the leaders within your organization because it’s basically a litmus test of an organization when you start seeing senior leaders, senior management, rats from a sinking ship, people start scratching head and like, Okay, what’s going on that… I don’t know here that I’m not privy to, why is all these senior leaders leaving? So if you take care of them, re-instills confidence in lower ranks or their subordinates, but at the same time, it instills the confidence in those leaders to be able to… Okay, read do their job or out and take care of their people to do those sales calls that do that marketing plan to go out and affect the change or get the revenues brought in. All those things that are needed to be done to help the organization run effectively. So that was a really interesting point when I wasn’t expecting to come up.
0:11:14.4 S2: I try to keep you… Surprised.
0:11:16.4 S1: You keep me on my toes. I definitely will give you that much, but second part is I like to you changing people up and shifting around and realizing that, Okay, someone Joe there who’s not necessarily a great worker in that job today due to either a change in the recurrence of that job may become a great worker, or if you shift them to another job, I may strike the area of genius, and that’s what I like to refer to this, are we employing our people in their areas of genius? Even myself personally, recently, I was not… I would just shift the jobs, and before that I was not in my area of genius in a show like I struggled personally with it did the best job of cold day and but it just was not the work that made me come alive and where I got 100% out of me. Now, where I’m at now is much more in that late, where I’m like, Okay, I’m into the zone of what I’m working on now, I’m in charge of a bigger team, etcetera, etcetera, and it’s like, Okay, this is more of my air of genius, and sometimes this all takes, that’s all it takes.
0:12:25.4 S1: And.
0:12:25.9 S2: You know, putting someone in their area of genius, obviously it’s fantastic for the organization, but it impacts that person at home, it impacts that person out in the community, it impacts our brain health, it impacts their physical health, their outlook on life, and so as leaders or course, we’re thinking about the business and making sure the right people and taking care of those things, but when you take care of those things really well, those people create about our communities and create better relationships around you, and so it’s this beautiful cycle of, I took care of them, they are better, therefore they show up better, so therefore I’m gonna take care of them even more, as you can create this cycle where people are growing in your organization from mental health, physical health or emotional health, just by putting them in a job in which they feel good at… And they feel like they can succeed, because when you feel like you can succeed, you can do anything, you feel like you can succeed everywhere, but when you’ve lost your confidence in a key area of your life, you lose confidence everywhere.
0:13:38.7 S1: 100%. We 100% agree with you. And I’ve seen it so many times with other people, and it’s so true, I just see, let’s see where else we can employ such and such a person advice, show them then the door… But now, let’s go back. So it’s a dovetail back… We talked about hiring people. Keeping people in an organization, I would… I guess in the final thing I would wrap this up with is for a lease, you just need to have a conversation with your people, what’s working for them, what’s not working for them, listen to them if they say, Hey, this is not my area of genius, the work that I’m doing right now, it’s not something that makes me come alive or you can get the most out of me, then it’s like, Oh well, what would be… How would you employ within the scope of our organization or team or whatever, you have these conversations all… We need a bit more flexibility, Okay, how can we help you make cheese so that one, we don’t lose you until you say a happy healthy employee. So let’s go back to… But let’s go back to the other side of the coin.
0:14:41.9 S1: I E… Any position. So you don’t let people leave, it happens… We have the empty position, we need to hire someone. Let’s go here, let’s go fast is find the first person we find and put them in the chair… Right, that’s the best way to do it, right. Fieldhouse.
0:14:58.0 S2: Just grab someone off the street. I’m sure we can teach them how to do it… Yeah, Elliot.
0:15:02.8 S1: She says.
0:15:03.6 S2: Yeah, yeah, don’t do that. That’s bad. Don’t do that. But the beginning of the work is very similar, and you have to first make sure you know what this job needs, not only understanding, I need to hire someone to be a marketing director, but how do you want them to do that job? You do a job description, it’s all those little fancy bullet points and you check that box, but what we don’t always stop and think about is, do we want someone that’s innovative, so we are we in a change cycle and we need innovation, or do we feel like we’re in a solid place and we need more traditional maintenance of this job, ’cause if you hire a super creative person who loves to shake things up, who loves innovation, but then you give them the playbook to run and they don’t get to deploy that innovation, then you’ve hired the right skill, you haven’t hired the right way of work, and the same is true for someone who enjoys pragmatic traditional work, and then you hire them to be your chief innovation officer and they’re like… But what do you mean? I’m gonna innovate and think of things I’ve never thought about, here’s what I’ve done, and it’s always worked, and there are a place for both of those people, but what work do you want them to do and how do you want them to do that work? And that’s the pieces that we have to start with when we think about hiring.
0:16:35.6 S1: Like, Oh, I really like that, what’s the vision of that position, really… What is it I also like to look at in terms of capabilities, what… Keep it build day we’re trying to develop here. Are we trying… It is kind of a long lane, you said it… We’re trying to develop some… I keep building, it’s really innovative, that’s gonna push the ball, push on, blow, etcetera, etcetera, or are we look for a capability that araceae gonna get us there day-in day to what type of capability do we need and often I like when we have any roles, I’m like, Okay, is the role even valid anymore…
0:17:15.0 S2: Yeah, that’s a great question, and that’s what you have to decide too. Often, the role isn’t always valid, and often times too, what happens is we look at a team and we’re like, they’re overwhelmed, they’re all working a ton and get everyone’s like, Oh my gosh, and we throw payroll at the problem, and instead of pausing and saying, Does this team need capability development. Do we need to re-work? The work is their partnerships that aren’t working, which is causing them to be backed up and overwhelmed, or do we just throw a parole problem and then we just keep hiring people and the situation doesn’t change, and that’s a piece that we need to pause and ask ourself about too, before we just jump the gun and hire someone…
0:17:57.6 S1: Yeah, yeah. ’cause Money fixes everything. Come on.
0:18:00.7 S2: No, many covers up a multitude of sins, owari saying from back in the day, have great numbers and everyone ignores the.
0:18:08.1 S1: Rest… Yeah, some companies have been fair to… Well, from that angina think, yeah.
0:18:14.2 S2: That’s probably a… Probably.
0:18:15.7 S1: A relation for another day of ethics. Absolutely, I like where we’re getting it, so we were talking about checking what type of first off check and see if it’s still valid, what come in the fact or you’re looking for… What is it that you’re looking for? You looking for an innovation, are you looking for a study what is the vision for the job, so… Okay, we’ve gone through this analysis like, Okay, yes, the role is still valid, we are looking for someone who’s innovative ’cause times are changing and we need to get… We’ve obviously fallen behind the 8 ball or behind the curve, and we need to get caught up, so we know we’re gonna go there. What’s next? Where do we go next?
0:18:55.3 S2: Yeah, so what’s next? So now it’s the… You put a posting up in, it’s crickets, right? That’s usually kind of what happened, and it’s important to really think about your hiring strategy, think where your client or your ideal candidate is living breathing, where are they at? And so, so many times people just throw everything on LinkedIn or everything on Indeed, that’s not always the best way to go to find someone really good at the job you need to hire. Think about where they are. So if you’re hiring that same Marketing Director as our example, we’ve been using this evening, where might they be… Go look for organizations that someone that’s really talented and marketing may be associated with, Go look for conferences and events, and look at who their speakers were, who their attendees were, like go out there and actively think about where your ideal client might be and find them, but just throwing up that same old posting and hoping you get a candidate, you go fish in every time, every once in a while, you’ll catch something, but if you get really strategic and think about where that person might me be and go find them, that’s where you find the real talent, because they may not be out looking at those postings, but they may definitely take a phone call from you, if you say, hey, I noticed you were attending in this marketing conference, we’re looking for a marketing director, I’d love to pick your mind about who you might know or maybe you might be interested once you hear about it, but do the work to find where that person might be.
0:20:34.5 S1: That’s a great… That’s a great tip for sure. You need to have some form of strategy, some kind of idea of how you’re gonna go about this process, hiring is a process, it’s a step A through stuff. There’s a process, but you can’t just take shots in the dark, throwing a line out in the water… Yeah, like you said, you might get the fish, you might get it, you might get the biggest fish in the pond, but you might also get this falls one too. You just don’t know what you’re going to get. So I really like your idea of going out there and being seen, and really, I would even suggest showcasing your business to even attract people to come in because that’s what you want, is people come in like, Hey, I know you got no post up in A… But, hey, here’s my resume. Yeah, right. Would that not be the end goal that you would want from this hiring strategy?
0:21:28.3 S2: Absolutely, and you want the best of the best. And if you think about going out and finding where that person may be active, chances are, they’re pretty good because they’re committed to their career, they’re out and associations or out in conferences, they are out there learning that industry from others and learning from others and developing themselves, and those are the people that you probably wanna hire.
0:21:56.2 S1: For sure. So going fishing where the fish are is one component of an effective hiring strategy, what are some other ones out there that you can help the leaders listening with?
0:22:08.2 S2: So I think that we interview people completely wrong, and we talk about behavior-based interview… Right, that’s what we’ve all been taught. Tell me about a time you managed a crisis, and so that’s how we’ve all been taught to hire, and years ago, I found… I came across a book, and it’s called Who, Who are you gonna hire who, by GH Smart and… Gosh, it’s been 15 years ago that I came across it. And what I learned from that was how to find patterns in interviews, because the patterns of behavior help you figure out this person is gonna be a fit, and so I completely changed the way I interviewed early in my HR career, I was a full-time recruiter and I changed it up completely, and when I help clients today make hiring decisions, it is the way we do it, and what you do is you start early in someone’s career, so the very first job you can find on their resume and you sometimes for a high-level executive, they say, even go back to high school and college. And you kind of ask the same questions, what were you hired to do, what did you do? Because those are sometimes two different things, what you…
0:23:25.6 S2: What are you proud of or what is your biggest accomplishment? What was your biggest failure? What did you learn from it? And then what took you to your next job, you run that same series of questions, and as they answer, you can dig in and dial into some details, but if you keep that format, what you will find as behaviors, you’ll find that every single job they’ve ever had they’ve been promoted at least once, so you’re like, hey, this person comes in, works hard, and they get promoted at the last four jobs they worked at, I need this person, or you might find someone who… Every time you say, Well, tell me what took you from that job to the next… Well, you know, my boss wasn’t teaching me anything and I just couldn’t learn anything more there, and that was the answer for the last four jobs, well, chances are, they’re not willing to learn or they don’t see value in other people. You start to see when I had a failure, how did I approach that failure and what did I learn from it, and did I take that knowledge to the next situation and was my failure bigger or different or…
0:24:30.8 S2: Could you tell how that was leveraged, and when you start to find those behaviors, that’s when you really start to recognize how is someone gonna show up and do the job that you’re asking them to do?
0:24:44.1 S1: I love it, I love it. Especially the failure part. I think that’s a question we shy away from too much, ’cause it’s like, Oh, I get vulnerable, I messed up, I screwed up. I don’t wanna talk about that. I’m supposed to be boasting myself, turn the interview… Look at me. Look how great I am. No, no, no, I screwed up here. Is that I screwed up? Alright, let me tell you, I, I hear a time where I messed up… Oh yeah, it’s a back, grab a coffee creamer.
0:25:08.5 S2: Who, this is gonna be really good.
0:25:12.5 S1: You might wanna take some notes ’cause you’re gonna have some fun, right, but what that does is one that shows the vulnerability of the candidate to me, but two, it’s like that fall on like, Okay, what did you learn? How did you learn from it? Right, because Congratulations, we’re all human. And the hematoma mistakes… And I tell my people all the time like, I don’t care, I don’t care if you make mistakes, what I care about it is one, not being blindsided by it, if I don’t need to be blind-sided by it, and two is, how do you mean… What are you gonna do differently so that this most likely won’t occur again, you can never say won’t occur again, but most likely will not occur again, right. Because we just don’t know the future, we don’t know what’s gonna happen, so that is where… To me is like, Okay, this is where you can tell the difference of someone’s character. Did they take ownership of it? Did they learn from it? Are they changing habits, behaviors, processes, their own little workings, whatever… Depending on what the mistake was. So I think that’s something we need to talk more about, not less about…
0:26:21.2 S2: The other thing that’s interesting about talking about failures, you’re absolutely right, we should talk about it for all those reasons, and when you talk about it with someone in an interview, the thing that I like to discover is if they struggle to think of a failure, you might think, Oh well, they’re so good, they never fell. Well, if you’re not failing, you haven’t stepped on something and gotten a little bit of trouble, you’re either focused so much on perfectionism that you can’t… You don’t allow yourself to mess up, you don’t allow about those things, which means you’re maybe not allowing yourself innovation, because if you’ve never felt you’ve never innovative or have been innovative. And they go hand-in hand. So if I talk to someone and they’re like, my biggest failure was, we looked at the information, we researched it and the marketing strategy we went with was X, what we didn’t know, 30 days later, there was going to be this change in social views, and we couldn’t have predicted that. And so the marketing landed flat, how we pivoted, how we change that was this and this, but what I learned was have a plan B or whatever, and so then you’re thinking, Okay, this person is okay with innovation because they’re okay with failure.
0:27:43.1 S1: You remind me of a part of our conversation from the last episode, I brought up Kodak and it came back up again. Yeah, ’cause I remember her listen to Jaffee and he was talking about how they were running an ad campaign for code and code, and they were doing it in the movie theater and they’re giving me discounts. And it was before the movie started and they said, Okay, text one, two, three, four, two, whatever number, and you’ll get your discount code and blah, blah, blah. And the failure was as well, what do you do when you go into a movie theater? You turn your phone off, turn your phone on the sample for whatever reason, the theater that they sample that were great, because I guess that there didn’t tell people turn their phones off, but when they launched it, it was a huge failure. Right. But you had to own it. And.
0:28:38.9 S2: What do you do differently? Yeah, and there had to be someone in that room that was like, Oh, I don’t know about that, and I… It’s speaking up in a workplace…
0:28:49.6 S1: That’s exactly what we were talking about last time. The need for having that psychological safety, environment of psychological safety where people can speak up and say, By the way… And this is a mistake. Yeah.
0:29:02.3 S2: Yeah, run, run. Don’t do that. Which.
0:29:05.3 S1: Is actually goes back to what we’re talking about today and hind-E right people. Because, you know, I personally have one of those stories that I even talk about now, where I try to put my hand up, I told Don’t put my hand up and… Yeah, we had the Kodak commercial moment in the movie theaters. But now I use that stories. I should have pushed harder, I should have said something. I should have put my hand up regardless and said what I need to say, ’cause we would have ever at that situation… And now I use that as a story. And when we do that, when people do that through the hiring process, now you can see, Okay, they don’t just dwell on their failures, but rather like, okay, they’re making the place a better place with that story.
0:29:51.2 S2: They are… And it reminds me of, I tell people all the time, I now get paid to do the things. I used to get in trouble for a work in a traditional corporate environment for years, and I have different views and they’re not traditional, and I got in trouble for him, but today as a consultant, people pay me to come in with my traditional unconditional views and bring in ideas that they hadn’t heard before and to be a little wacky and it would be a little out there, and I think if that had been embraced earlier in my career, who knows where I could have been, but I really just felt beat up for being different, and it took age and a little bit of confidence and a little bit of circumstance for me to go, you know what, let me just give me… Just give me a try and see what happens and… Yeah, and see, I get paid to do the things I used to get in trouble for.
0:30:44.6 S1: So we’re talking with the interview process, and I like that part, I wanna segue a little bit, but I wanna keep on this interview, what are your best advice for people on the… Not the V, But interviewer in looking at candidates and they’re like, Okay, this candidate nails everything, all the resumes, amazing, all of the checks in the box are great, you just… There’s something… There’s something… What is your best advice? ’cause we’ve heard all these war stories where someone shows up and they look amazing a paper, they nailed the interview, and they show up to get into into the organization, it’s a disaster. And someone who’s like, I had this feeling, what’s your best device for them out there?
0:31:33.6 S2: I think one of the things that if you have that feeling is to spend more time with that candidate, we were trying to make hiring decisions quickly, we definitely don’t wanna do Death by interview ’cause we can run off really good candidates if we have this insane process, but find a project that that person could do and then talk about it with them, because that starts to help you see how their brain would work with yours. And an example of that is one of my clients. We have a position that they hire for from time to dock time, and this person isn’t responsible for P and L, and they’re responsible for transportation organization, so we do the top great interview that we had talked about, and if we feel good about their backgrounds and we give them kind of a made up P and L and say, Tell us what you see, and then we give them a couple of scenarios and we ask them to write us back and tell us how they’d handle a couple of things, and what that gets us to is we get to start to think about how they think about the work, not just in theory, but in actuality.
0:32:44.8 S2: It allows us to see their writing skills or communication skills, but the most important part about it is when we stop and talk with it, so the person who would be managing that person talks to the candidate about what they see in the P and L, and so that candidate starts to say, Well, this doesn’t make sense to me. Tell me more about that. Or there’s two different ways I would go. How would you go… And again, it starts to build this conversation of how we might work together and is that a match? And I think that’s a great way to start to kind of deal with those little butterflies in your stomach, like this person too good to be true, give them a project and sit down and have a great conversation with them about it. As if you were working together and then see what comes out of that.
0:33:32.5 S1: That’s great advice for sure, especially if you’re in a technical realm where it’s very hands-on or the plan process, Ariane planning-oriented, stuff like that, right. ’cause that really can see… You can really see it comes up really quickly because if someone doesn’t really know what they’re doing, they’re going flustered, frustrated very quickly, and then they’re gonna be asking questions that you know they shouldn’t be…
0:33:56.6 S2: Yeah, and we’ve given the exact same project probably 10 people over the last year, and we have gotten every kind of imaginable answer back, and there was one candidate in particular that we were pretty high on and we thought This is the one… And through that process, we were like, No way, there’s no way this, this is not gonna work, he’s not gonna enjoy working for us, we’re not gonna… He’s on it, or it was just wasn’t a fit on either side, and it could have been a really costly mistake for the organization, but also a costly mistake on that candidate because it would have put a bump in their resume and that’s not fair to do to that candidate, either you have to protect your company, but you also have to protect the people and respect the people that you’re interviewing and not put them in a place of failure…
0:34:46.9 S1: That’s a great point. And if they’re saying Yes to you, that means they’re saying no to someone else, if you realize that it’s not a great fit, then you’re taking them away from another opportunity, and I think there’s a lot of potential for respect there, like, Hey, we think you’re a great person, we love you, we just don’t think you’re a great fit for this role, if another opportunity pops up, feel free to apply, and then if I was on them and like, you know what, I can respect that. Thanks for an upward me in a situation where I wouldn’t wanna be in in the first…
0:35:25.4 S2: Every time someone changes jobs, they change the course of their life and the life of their family, and so when we hire people, we have to be responsible to that because that person is taking a chance on our company with their livelihood. And I don’t think hiring managers pause and recognize what that power is.
0:35:50.7 S1: Mike drop moment in Jensen, the house, telling you… That’s so true. Alright, so let’s pass through, so we decide the position, we figured out the requirements, the capability we wanna develop there, the vision for it, we’ve gone through the interview, we found the butterfly person said Thanks, but no thanks. Maybe next time we found the right candidate, dropping letter of offer, we both sign it. Jobson, right? That’s it. Listowel.
0:36:22.4 S2: That be great if that was it, and you just pick them up and plug them into their position and they knew everything and it was all fine. It wouldn’t have been great. Fortunately, some people think that way. I wonder why it doesn’t work out. Yeah, so onboarding is obviously incredibly important, and I look at onboarding probably a little different too, and how I look at onboarding is really thinking about prioritizing the work you want this person to do, so if you’ve got 10 things for this person to do in their job, find the three most important things, not the easiest stuff to teach, the three most important things as a person is gonna be responsible for, teach them that first, let them get some wins, let them get some confidence, then you add on additional responsibilities and then additional… Until they can handle the full Job… The reason why you start with what’s most important is that tells them unconsciously, at the end of the day, this is the most important part of my job, it’s what I learned first, it’s where I had my early wins, it’s how I built my confidence, and it’s how I’m gonna show up every day, and I’m gonna be able to prioritize in a different way, and instead of you just saying, Here’s a buffet of 10 things, have at it.
0:37:35.4 S2: And when we start to build confidence in our employees early on, we open up their ability to use their frontal lobes and so they can learn faster, but unfortunately too often we just dump on people and we just hand him a bunch of stuff and then they struggle and they get in trouble and then they don’t have confidence, and then it starts to spiral from there, and not a good way… Not spiraling in a good way by any means, but you have to set people up or they immediately know their priorities and they immediately get some wins…
0:38:10.0 S1: I love that last bit, you really get some wins, put that… Come and get that confidence on her villa, you’re right. That was not where I was expecting to they go, but I love it in the same breath, because you build that personal… Because they show up, they get in the new job, they’re nervous a little bit, new people, new building maybe, maybe new login, who knows, and it just new work, new flow and all this stuff and new dynamics, alliss like getting into the groove and getting into the routine and get some wins under their belt and you’re on it, some pats on the back saying, Good job. Thanks for taking care of that for us. Alright, the next one up is such a such a file and just having at it… That’s great because it makes them feel valued and they’re part of the team already, they’re contributing and all these things, so… Yeah.
0:39:00.5 S2: And that process help them find their best partners, and so you’re in a new job oftentimes, you’re like, Whoa, I supposed to be working with, and where do they work? And what’s their extension? And who is that? And I don’t even know. And so part of the onboarding is teaching people who are your most important business partners, and so here’s the first three task I want you to learn, and here are the three people that you need to talk to and talk about your relationship with, how you work with them to get that task completed and encouraging your current employees to really take those new people under their wings, so that it becomes this culture of we succeed together, but part of the onboarding plan has to be, Here are the people you’ll work with, and here is your time to learn how to work with them.
0:39:49.6 S1: No, I love it, I absolutely love it. And especially that last part, here’s how to work with them. ’cause again, that’s something that… Right, we just don’t really know nor do we get taught it, nor do we talk about it that much, is that working with me is different than working with you and the thing, how I receive information and process information differently than how you do, and as a leader, as a boss, a supervisor… Not boss, supervisor. I find it important that when I show up, so for example, in my current role, I have four direct reports and the team of 24 people right now, and so my director, it’s like, Hey, this is how I like to receive my information or whatever. Here are things that I like to do, or this is how I like to operate. But at same token, I need to know how that works for you so that when information is going in your direction, I can make sure that you understand it, because I’m giving it to you and the way that you need to…
0:40:57.8 S2: Absolutely, and when you go back to thinking about how to give people early wins, knowing who to work with and how to work with them, that will get them early wins, ’cause how many people in their first couple of months set at a desk and think… I don’t know who to even call for help, and I’m just gonna do my best, and you have to remove that noise in someone’s head so that they can spend their energy, ’cause we only get so much energy every day, so it’s a currency. If they’re spending their currency, that energy on trying to figure out who to work with to solve the job they need to do, then they’re not getting it done and take away those obstacles, so all of their energy is spent actually getting the wins.
0:41:45.1 S1: Which I would even suggest would be a massive drain on a creative person or a person who’s put it in a creative role ’cause they need that energy, that currencies, you call it, for that actual type of work, because it takes a lot… As it is, it takes a lot of work, a lot of energy and time and brainer to be creative now, as it does for me, because I’m not necessarily as creative first and out there on.
0:42:13.1 S2: Anything about double work, you think about someone goes down a path and I think it’s the right path, but they didn’t know the right person to partner with, and now that person may be mad ’cause a new person didn’t include them in a conversation, and now the works wrong and now you’ve got noise again, right, you’ve got all his noise and that person feels like they fell and now they have a bad relationship with a business partner, and it could have been prevented and it’s actually not hard, it’s not hard at all, but it’s slowing down to do the right things for the right reasons, to create wins and success of people can build their confidence so that they can bring their best selves to the job and deliver what you expect them to deliver.
0:42:53.0 S1: Beautiful, so I’m gonna summits on pretty quick. Basically, when you get people in, obviously you teach them what they need to do, but I actually prioritize the only the top three tasks that you want to achieve, rays that to get those quick wins, but most importantly, to make sure they are linked with the key people out there that they need to interact with in order to get those quick wins in and make sure that we have an understanding of… Everyone has an understanding how to send and receive information so that as a communication… Nice and clear and open a Chrisman. Life goes good. That’s right. Alright, so there’s one thing I wanna hit before we end this show, Jen, and we’ve gone through the whole hiring process right from think about the position up to onboarding, and that is you end of the day. We all leave, so I’d love to get your thoughts and ideas on how do we take care of people who are leaving? No one walks in and spit the 14-day notice or whatever, their resignation and stuff, you don’t do like, What the hell? And to go back at them and get the hell out and pack up your things now, or do we sit here and cry and say, No, please don’t go…
0:44:04.4 S1: Do how do we take care of that situation?
0:44:08.6 S2: The first thing we have to do is stop and pause and find out why, and too often we take it so personal that we can hear the why, and that’s what we’ve got to know, we’ve got to know the why, because if it’s a why, you can control and you can course correct and it’s someone you need to keep… Maybe that’s an option, if there’s a why and you can’t say that person, but you discover something about your organization and you’re like, Oh… And where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And you stop and really get curious without ego, and that’s really hard, but we can do it, because if you remove your ego from it and you really listen to that person’s why you will have a more respect for them, more empathy for them, those people that we treat poorly on the way out, you don’t think they don’t know people, you don’t think someone’s gonna apply for a job that you really wanna hire, but went to college with that person that you were really horrible too, and they’re gonna call and be like, Hey, what was it like to work there. Should I apply? They’re gonna remember that last period, they’re not gonna remember all the years leading up to that, and so it’s a good strategy to treat people well, it’s the right thing to do, and it’s an incredibly important piece to maintaining your retention in the future by really finding out the why…
0:45:32.7 S2: And respecting that person’s why I will talk to people, they’re like, Yeah, they gave notice and they think that they can go off and do this and there’s no way they can do it. Well, you don’t know that. Applaud them for having the confidence to try something new here, well, you’re walking around the office talking bad about that person who left every single person, you said something’s gonna be like, Oh, they probably think that about me too, and again, you’re reducing that safety in the workplace, and it seems to be really careful about how you treat those people, but use it as a moment to get curious, find out the why, be respectful of the why, and if there’s anything in that way that you can change… Change it.
0:46:14.0 S1: Love it, I love that. You know, if there’s anything that you can control and change. Change it. I was actually having this exact conversation with a member of our Facebook or leadership goes from and to be leaders, not bosses, and if you’re not a member or a listener, they’re easy just got movingforwardleadership.com and join the over 3000, probably the 4000 by the time, this goes live. Members who are having conversations in their daily… And we’re having this conversation where a leader was having issues with 13, and I asked a handful of questions, and she mentioned that there were people who were leaving, I said, okay, so have you asked why that they’re leaving. So someone said they were going for more money, which is not uncommon, sometimes people more… Right, you can’t control that. Most people who… Not everyone listen to the podcast, has control over payroll, so if you don’t have control or payroll can control, but the other aspect was, so some people didn’t like who they’re working with and like bingo. That’s where you focus in on. Why is it they don’t like it now, are there some people in there that are causing issues for the new people who are showing up, they’re causing issues with the rest of the teammates, obviously, there’s something there to…
0:47:31.5 S1: As you said, there’s a little bit of smoke and whether smoke… There’s flames, right? So that’s where I suggest that this member to focus her attention on and go after, because if there’s one or two people who are causing issues for the other 20, you don’t want that, you need to get after that and find out what their issue is, why are they causing problems. Right, the.
0:47:57.0 S2: Sorry, people who left for more money might have only believing for more money because they didn’t like their boss, so they were looking for a job and guess what, someone offered him more money, but if they love that supervisor, they may not have been out there looking and probably wouldn’t have been offered more money, so chances are the more money was related to that too.
0:48:16.5 S1: A great point, great point. The other point I wanna make was, you talk about respecting people as to go out and stuff like this, you always want a friend in court, and like you said, people talk when they get outside of work, so I was like, Hey, hello, you don’t wanna go to work for McCarthy in. That guy is crazy. He treats you like garbage. You wanna go over to 304, ’cause Jen is phenomenal, right? But if my former employees working for you and then suddenly something pops up on our own, like we need to partner someone… We need to partner with someone to handle this, and we get an idea, is eyeing suggestions, and if I was support of respectful, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, more likely in my former employees, go check of McCarthy a great guy. You guys have similar lanes, etcetera, there are some overlaps and some non-overlaps and stuff, and I said You might complement each other very well. It’s like, can you set up mating? Sure, I said up eating, I still talk to them. Right. And boom, now business is booming and we’re helping each other…
0:49:30.6 S2: Yeah, it is interesting. People have to change jobs for so many reasons, and when you build that, when you’ve treated them well and they have to leave for whatever, and you stay in contact with them and you stay in communication with them… Who knows what will happen down the road. You make your business with them, they may come back, they may refer someone, you may refer someone to them, but those relationships when we kind of build… So all these time, maybe years, building relations with someone and an overnight you stomp it out for no reason, that’s just… People are gonna remember it. Awesome, I’m.
0:50:11.1 S1: Jen, I could talk to you for hours.
0:50:13.6 S2: No, we have so much fun together.
0:50:15.4 S1: We do, we have so much fun. But I friction down. However, we do got lots of great comments going on to social feeds with the live video, so for Lister, again, you’re not falling on social, you need to… Because this is actually being last three months before the podcast is even being released, so you get ahead, you get access to these great interviews ahead of time, such as the one with Jen today, but Jen, before I wrap up, we’re gonna end… I show it it last time, so we’re gonna review answers. First question, before we wrap up, what makes a great leader?
0:50:52.7 S2: A great leader is someone who can reduce the fear in the workplace, and will allow someone to be wholly and completely who they are.
0:51:04.4 S1: Amazing, absolutely amazing. I think very fitting for this day and age right now is absolutely all the change that’s going on in the social dynamics of the world right now, so… Fantastic. And the final question of the show, where can people find you? How can they follow you? Shameless plugs. Have at it. Yeah.
0:51:22.2 S2: So you can connect with me on LinkedIn at Jen Thornton ACC, you can also connect with us on our website at 304coaching.com, where we have a ton of resources that you can download and enjoy and find podcasts like this one.
0:51:37.9 S1: Amazing. And for listeners, always, it is easy for you, go to moving forward leadership dot com, 187, 187 links or shoots, Jen, thank you. I appreciate you, I appreciate the time. And this friendship that we had going on, it’s fantastic.
0:51:54.8 S2: Yes, I appreciate you, and I hope you and all our followers have a fantastic…
0:52:08.2 S1: And that’s a wrap for this episode, ladies, gentlemen, thank you for listening, thank you for supporting the peak performance leadership podcasts, but you know what you could do to true support the podcast and know that’s not leaving a rating and review. It’s simply helping a friend, and that is helping a friend by sharing this episode with them… Yeah, you think this would resonate with them and help them elevate their performance level, whether that’s within themselves, their teams or their organization, so do that… Help me, help a friend, win, win all around, and Hey, you look like a great friend at the same time, so just hit that little share button on your app, and then feel free to fire this episode to anyone that you feel would benefit from it. Finally, there’s always more, there’s always more lessons around being the highest performing leader that you can possibly be, whether that’s for yourself, your team, for you, animation. So why don’t you subscribe? Subscribe to the show of a moving forward leadership.com. Subscribe, ’til next time we do it boss. And thanks for coming, take care now.