Do you read the afterword of any book? I’m usually done when I finish the last chapter but this time I read on.
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen in print as strong a statement as Stephen Covey’s regarding the importance of proactive recruiting. Covey was asked – “ If you had it to do over again, what is the one thing you would do differently as a businessperson?” His response – “I would do more strategic, proactive recruiting and selecting. When you are buried by the urgent it is so easy to put people that appear to have solutions into key positions. The tendency is to not look deeply into their backgrounds and patterns, to do the due diligence, nor is it to carefully develop the criteria that needs to be met in the particular roles or assignments. I am convinced that although training and development is important, recruiting and selection are much more important.”
Easy to say, hard to do! Absolutely, most organizations, unless they are growing consistently, fill positions when they are open – planned or unplanned. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t look to be proactive when we can predict the need to add to staff.
I hope your business and personal year is continuing to go well and your New Year’s Resolutions (remember mine was to read more) are still intact!

How did your team perform against their goals in the all-important first quarter?  Sales, production quality, cost efficiency, it really doesn’t matter: “you basically get what you reward!”

I’m rereading Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, some books really are timeless as it was published in 1989 and as of Sunday April 20, 2014 it remains in the Top 25 on the New York Times Bestseller list.  In his discussion of Habit #4, “Think Win/Win” he writes “Win/Win can only survive in an organization when systems support it. If you want to achieve the goals and reflect the values in your mission statement, then you need to align the reward system with these goals and values.”

So if your team fell short of their goals in the first quarter, and April isn’t turning it around, it isn’t necessarily time to send your accounting and finance team on a “reforecast assignment.” However, it may well be time to involve your entire management team in rethinking how you are incentivizing and rewarding the behaviors which will lead to achieving those goals.

I will have more from Covey in the next installment. I hope your business and personal year is continuing to go well and your New Year’s Resolutions are still intact!

I don’t know about you but I’m in the habit of not only making New Year’s Resolutions, but writing them down.  One of my dual purpose business and professional resolutions for 2013 was – “Be On Time” and seeing it regularly on page one of my 2013 journal helped me improve my punctuality throughout the year.  For 2014 my dual purpose resolution is “Read More”, meaning more books, so I thought sharing excerpts from current and previous reads would be helpful in keeping my resolution and giving you some thought provoking ideas during 2014.

I read this book twice during 2013 because I liked it so much – how could you not be intrigued by a book titled The No Asshole Rule.  The author, Robert I. Sutton, PhD, a Stanford University professor begins by stating we may call these people by other more polite names but “asshole best captures the fear and loathing I have for these nasty people.”  I didn’t agree with all of his “Ten Steps for Enforcing the No Asshole Rule” but here are two that hit home with me when it comes to hiring and managing professionals:

Step 2)  Assholes will hire other assholes.  Keep your resident jerks out of the hiring process, or if you can’t, involve as many “civilized” people in interviews and decisions to offset the predilection of people to hire “jerks like me.” 

Step 3) Organizations usually wait too long to get rid of certified and incorrigible assholes and once they do the reaction is usually, “Why did we wait so long to do that?”

I hope your year is off to an excellent start and your New Year’s Resolutions are still intact!