Month: July 2019

A good interview is both an art and a skill.  Most hiring leaders never develop both. The awful truth is that 50% of new hires don’t work out.

Why new hires don’t work.  The number one reason, in my experience, is that they’re not a good “fit” for the culture. Now, when my clients label someone a bad fit, it always makes me nervous since that word can be used to limit the opportunities of employees who are different in some way: gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and so on. I’m talking, however, about something deeper than these superficial differences.

The real reason for hiring failures.  The biggest problem in recruiting and retaining the best is that the leaders in the organization itself don’t really understand their own culture and values and therefore, can’t select employees who might be a great match. Hiring the best requires identifying what success means in the organization, studying which employees create the most success, and then selecting new employees who match that criteria. Unfortunately, this isn’t a superficial and easy process.

What Should You Do?  

In the meantime, you need to fill vacancies. While you’re taking a deeper dive into what your culture is really about — what works and who succeeds — ask this question of potential hires:

What was your biggest accomplishment so far in your career?

Follow up with the details. Make sure that you dig down into the reasons they view that accomplishment as the best: why they liked the assignment, how they were managed, parts of the project that they liked or didn’t like, how they measured their own success on the project and so on. These details will contain a treasure trove of information about the potential hire, more than any other question you could ask.

Of course, follow all the other good hiring practices. You should, for example, ask all of your interviewees the same questions, following an interview script so that you don’t discriminate by asking some candidates inappropriate questions but not others.

For more information about good hiring and retention practices, read my articles on these important topics:

Do You Know What Hiring Technique Really Works? 
Attracting and Keeping the Best Employees: What Really Works
Do You Know the Four Most Important Words to Retain Your Best People?
How to Keep the Ones You Love: The Number One Retention
Measuring and Tracking: Recruiting and Retention Success

What Do You Think?

What are the best hiring questions you’ve discovered? Call or write us at: 303-216-1020 or Lynne@workplacesthatwork.com

A useful workplace term? The short answer, in the workplace, is no. Putting aside whether the word should be used as a part of the current political and media debate, my experience in the workplace is that flinging that word around doesn’t help anything.

Warring definitions. Everyone has their own definition of what the term racist means. Politicians this week fussed and fumed about how and when to use the word, as did various media outlets. Contributing editor Ben Zimmer summarized in The Atlantic on July 17, the long history of the dictionary definition of the term.

Even Merriam-Webster joined the fray, tweeting their definition of the word. As the debate intensified, the dictionary added a tweet (who knew dictionaries could tweet?) with the usage notes to the racism entry, which counsels that “when discussing concepts like racism…it is prudent to recognize that quoting from a dictionary is unlikely to either mollify or persuade the person with whom one is arguing.” My sentiments exactly.

People become positioned. At work, using this word simply sends the quarreling parties to their corners, from which they are unlikely to return. Once there, they remain and dig in. People rarely agree that they are racist. On the other side, the users of the word refuse to back down from suggesting that the offending party is indeed racist. No one agrees and nothing is resolved. The argument continues over what that word means and whether the behavior meets the term’s definition.

What Should You Do?  

As a leader, avoid being pulled into the debate. Instead of arguing about whether someone’s behavior is racist, focus instead on the whether the behavior is correct under the law, your policy and your organization’s values. It’s much harder to dismiss these standards.

Investigate what was actually said or done. Before issuing your own opinion, make sure that your lawyers or your HR leaders have done a fair and thorough investigation of the facts. Many conflicts arise without taking this step, leading to arguments with no agreement about what behavior the dispute is actually about.

Read more about how to conduct investigations correctly in the following Monday Memos:

Bryan Williams’ Investigation and How To Do Investigations Right

Important News About Confidentiality in Workplace Investigations

Focus on a specific behavior. No one can know what is in another person’s heart or mind. Labeling someone rarely leads to effective resolution or the desired change of behavior. After an investigation, we can determine what they have said or done. At that point, you can decide whether the behavior is acceptable under the law, your policy or your values.

Focus on education. Once you decide whether a violation has occurred and whether the offending party or parties will be terminated, you can educate your staff. Focus on future behavior if the party(s) will remain employed, instead of making them feel bad or wrong. Make sure that your education efforts support the whole team, even if not everyone participated in the behavior. Frequently, the only reason that behavior has continued is that the culture of a workplace turned a blind eye. Educate managers and co-workers to intervene.

For more articles on this topic, go to:

Is That a Racist Remark? What You Need to Know as a Leader 

Want to Stop Racism? Start With Yourself

What Do You Think?

How do you handle this issue? What has worked? Call or write us at: 303-216-1020 or Lynne@workplacesthatwork.com

LAUGHING RATS:  Okay, I know humans are not (usually) rats, but significant laboratory studies on rats suggest that laughter may be a key to reducing aggression. The old phrase that “laughter is the best medicine” could be useful in defusing conflict and preventing the rise to more aggressive conduct such as bullying, harassment or worse.

Rats, it turns out, laugh at such a high pitch that we can’t hear the sounds with human ears. They also tend to “laugh” with this sound when they want to be tickled, and the more often that baby rats were tickled, the more they will “ask” to be tickled as adults.

WHY WE LAUGH:  In the early 1990’s, neuroscientist Robert Provine and colleagues conducted a study to find out what sparked laughter in conversations. Some of the “hilarious” phrases that prompted laughter 80-90% of the time included:

“I’ll see you guys later.”

“It was nice meeting you, too.”

“I see your point.”

“Look, it’s Andre!”

It turns out, Provine posits, that laughter is more of a social construct than a clever turn of phrase. People respond to other people when they laugh, not necessarily the situation or context. We use laughter to communicate agreement or fondness, not necessarily the best joke or performance.

THE MEANING OF LAUGHTER:  Sophie Scott is a neuroscientist at University College London who studies how the brain processes laughter and she believes that we should take laughter seriously.

What Should You Do?  

What’s Your Moonshot? Here’s What Leaders Can Learn From Apollo 11

WHERE WERE YOU DURING THE LANDING?  If you were alive and over the age of 8, you probably remember where you were on July 20, 1969, when we held our collective breath, along with an estimated 650 million people worldwide, as our Apollo 11 crew approached the moon.

 THE FINAL 12 MINUTES:  While we have focused on Armstrong and Aldrin as heroes, an astounding 400,000 people backed them up as engineers, control commanders, Navy SEALS and on and on. I highly recommend that you revisit the final heart-stopping 12 minutes before the landing by listening to NPR’s replay of the recording between the crew and Mission Control back in Houston.

ERRORS AT THE END:  Here’s what I didn’t know or remember: the landing almost didn’t happen. There was a series of last-minute glitches, including a loss of radio contact, and a mysterious alarm from the on-board computer. The device startled the crew by flashing error codes that the team had never seen. There was also a question of whether they would run out of fuel. And, the Apollo 11 spacecraft was traveling too quickly and in danger of overshooting the planned landing site.

The mysterious computer code – 1202 – caused a scramble back in Houston as the Mission Control Center tried to determine what it meant. A young engineer finally offered that the same code had flashed during a dress rehearsal, leading him to abort the whole simulation – for which he was later reprimanded. The code simply meant that the computer was overloaded but not ready to fail, so they blasted on.

EVERYONE STAYED ON COURSE:  We all know how this story ends. Yet what impressed me was the steely calm of the crew and the Mission Control Center through all these final upsets. At least based on the recording, no one panicked, blamed or blubbered, they simply did their jobs and pushed on, accomplishing one of the greatest feats of human engineering and cooperation in history.

What can leaders learn from this mission?

What Should You Do?

Set concrete visions and missions. Kennedy didn’t hesitate to set an audacious goal of putting a man [sic] on the moon by the end of the decade, inspiring a focused and jet-fueled team that flew through their jobs. In contrast, I’m always concerned when leaders set abstract goals – “to be a world-class company”, fo r example – encouraging nothing but yawns and lackadaisical efforts from their crew.

Train for mishaps. Both the crew and Houston Mission Control had gamed out countless scenarios before the actual flight. When error codes started flashing, I’m sure that hearts started racing, but everyone knew what to do. Fumbles are foreseeable; it’s not just working to hang onto the ball that’s important, but learning to recover from the inevitable blunders.

Keep calm and carry on. These famous words attributed to Winston Churchill were actually from a World War II poster that was never issued during the War but which has now come to be indelibly associated with his spirit and leadership. The phrase offers a useful mantra. If you can keep breathing, and inspiring your team to do the same, the results will inevitably be more successful than endless upsets.

Learn cooperation and conflict management. If either the crew or the Mission Control Center staff wanted to fight and be right more than they wanted to accomplish the landing, no one would have ever walked on the moon.

For more tips about leading through storms, visit:

Communicating During a Disaster: Don’t Make These Mistakes  Want to Avoid Helicopter Crashes and Other Disasters? Be Confrontable! Leadership Lessons from the Volkswagen Debacle

What’s Real Leadership?

Decisions! Decisions! If you can stand to recall another election season, on November 7, 2000, chaos tumbled out of Florida voting booths and into communities across the country as a storm of controversy erupted over the Presidential election. Did George W. Bush or Al Gore win Florida’s electoral vote? Should a “dimpled” chad count? What about a “hanging” chad? And what in the world was a “pregnant” chad? On November 6, 2000, the decision process seemed clear: registered voters cast their ballots, they are counted, and the winner takes all Electoral College votes. After that election, we learned that it wasn’t nearly that simple. At the heart of the matter was the question: What exactly was the decision process?

Are your decision methods clear? My clients frequently seem to have internal combustion explosions within their organizations when decisions are made in the absence of an articulated decision process and a strategic communication plan. Does everyone know the decision-making process beforehand?

There are countless ways to reach a decision-circumstances call upon leaders to use a variety of strategies daily. You might take a poll about where to grab a bite of lunch with colleagues, seek consensus about hiring a new person to join your management team, and decide alone to approve overtime. Each decision-making model has a role, and a good leader is flexible, using an array of techniques as appropriate. Especially when it comes to decisions where the stakes are high, and many people have an investment in the result, leadership consists of building a consensus around difficult issues. To quote my colleague Professor Paul C. Nutt, “The idea of a charismatic leader, someone who gets his one idea realized by sheer force of his personality, is a myth!”

What Should You Do?

Communicate How the Decision Will Be Made: Your staff may mutiny (or at least grumble) if you decide something without their counsel if the result has an impact on their work and they assumed they would be allowed to weigh in. While they still may disagree with your determination, if they are forewarned about the process, they will gripe less.

Consider the Pros and Cons of Each Model: You could use unanimity, convincing argument, following a popular leader, implicit majority or voting, compromise, the intensity of preferences or meeting everyone’s needs (true consensus.) As I’ve written before in my book “The Power of a Good Fight”, each of these methods has pros and cons. The key is to pick the right method for the specific issue and then manage the expectations of your staff.

Beware Consensus: I’m all in favor of using consensus for the right issue but groups frequently fail to understand the pitfalls. Consensus building may eat up an enormous amount of time, and the larger the group, the more time you will need to allow.

Many leaders tell me they “manage by consensus”. Just their terminology always makes me question whether this is truly their approach. The consensus is not something that can be “managed.” When leaders say this, what they usually mean is that they already have in mind an approach but want to give their group the idea that they are interested in input. They will convene an open forum to go through the appearance of listening to other ideas. This approach can backfire since people may be enthusiastic the first time this occurs, but they will soon realize something else is going on.

What Consensus Requires: If you want to use consensus, each member of the group must go in with an open mind, take responsibility for speaking up to make sure the group hears their concerns, as well as truly listening to the issues of others. Consensus requires each member to give up their beloved positions and focus on underlying needs. Most groups need a fair amount of training, discussion, and practice to make this work successfully.

For more information on group decision making, consensus building, and conflict resolution visit our Monday Memo archives.