Tuesday, November 25, 2014

November 25, 2014: So you are a manager. What do you manage?

When a person becomes an engineer, she knows what she is engineering.  She is an industrial engineer, a mechanical engineer, an electrical engineer, a chemical engineer.  Many (possibly most) managers do not have a degree in management.  So you're an architect who is a manager, or a graphic artist or teacher who is a manager.  What do you manage?  What does the word even mean?

To answer the question, we have to step back from the situation at hand and consider your workplace.  Look around you.  Is the computer on the desk yours?  Do the people on your team work for you?  Do their paychecks come from your bank account?  What, in your immediate work environment, belongs to you?  A quick inventory of mine shows a desk drawer full of fun size Snickers and some pictures of my family on the cubicle wall.  That's all.  And yet I'm a manager.

So who owns the things I'm managing?  My company does.  But can a company own itself?  No.  Every company is owned, in the end, by people.  These people are called shareholders if the company is public, owners or investors if it is private.  These people own the company, and by extension, "my" work computer, the employment of "my" team, "my" cubicle, "my" company car.

Now, what am I managing?  I am managing the resources of the company's owners.  My job, then, is to manage these resources (they could be paintbrushes or software experts or race cars or teddy bears) on behalf of the owners.  Why do they entrust me with their money and resources?  Because they believe I can provide a return on their investment because of my expertise.  That's my value-add.

Managers (every single one of us) are not managing teams or projects or anything else that we touch every day.  We are managing the company owners' resources.  It is our responsibility to do our best to return value to them - that is what they pay us for, after all.  A hedge fund manager is very close to this idea.  Is the manager of your local TGI Friday's aware of it?

It is important to note that company owners don't always know what they want.  Do they want to show growth quarter-over-quarter?  Year-over-year?  Are they in it for the long term?  The answers to these questions will come through the executive management team and trickle down. I worked at a wholly-owned US subsidiary of a Japanese company that was part of a huge conglomerate.  To trace ownership back to a person, I'd need to trace my management chain up 4 levels to the CEO, then to the board of directors of the Japanese company, then to the board of directors of the conglomerate, and then back to millions and millions of shareholders.

Somewhere along the line, the message came to the US subsidiary that we needed to make our revenue projections every fiscal half.  My team was an integral part of recognizing revenue for my company: we did the last $100K worth of work that allowed the company to recognize $20M in revenue.  So my job as a manager was to get my technical team the resources they needed to move their work forward so the company could recognize revenue on time and meet shareholder expectations.

This longer and wider view of the manager's role is vital to planning and successfully executing our jobs as managers.  Should I send my lead person out for training if the training may not pay off for a year?  Or should I manage for the short term, and keep him available for today's work?  Even if I have approval to hire another person for my team, is that in the best interests of the company's shareholders?  Or will it be a waste of their money?  I have found that keeping these questions in mind helps me to avoid making decisions that will cause pain later.  If I see a reduction in force coming, and someone transfers out of my team, I won't replace him even if I have authorization.  I'll inform my boss of what I am doing and why, and then when the RIF comes, I will need to make 1 less very hard decision.  In the mean time, I've saved the shareholders money.  If it looks like we're going to be engaged with a certain customer for a long time, I'll invest a year of being very tight with manpower so I can send them to training and reap the benefits of that training long term.

So take a few minutes to write down the goals your company's owners want you to achieve.  If you don't know, as your supervisor.  If she doesn't know, ask someone else.  Someone has to know, and the more people who do know, the better your company will operate.

Monday, November 24, 2014

November 24, 2014: Slow Week at the Office?

You have arrived at the office, the Monday of Thanksgiving week.  You have a lot to do, I know.  You always do.  But it seems like every stakeholder, every decision maker is gone this whole week, and normally smooth business processes, you know, will stall until next week.

So you have time at the half-empty office to fill.  What to fill it with?

First, you know that anything you do can't rely on anyone else to complete the task.  No approvals, no help with an IT system (although that department is most likely to have good coverage), nothing that will directly impact anyone outside your team.  What can you do that will positively impact your team, both up and down the management chain?  Here are some suggestions.

1) Build a tool to increase your knowledge and understanding of the business.  You get reports on your unit's performance through SAP or Crystal Reports or some other form of business intelligence.  But they don't tell you exactly what you want to know.  So build a tool that gets you the information you need.  I have seen managers build tools that model how busy each type of equipment is in a factory so they could forecast future periodic maintenance activity, or a financial tool that let him modify the number of people in his contract to maximize profitability without killing functionality, or a tool that tracks performance reviews for the team along with their raises to assess if he was really doing a good job at "paying for performance" like he was supposed to.  These are something you might show your boss at some point, but they key thing here is that they will help you to understand your operation better, and that will improve your performance.

2) Do some analysis to share with your team about their performance.  Perhaps you will do an COGS analysis and break it out by category, do a little drilling to see what potential savings are there.  You could share your analysis with your team to see what ideas they have about improving that metric.  Or perhaps your company is in a tough competitive market, and you can do some research on the competition.  Again, you can share this with your team at a later date and solicit their input on how they can impact your company's performance.

3) Learn something!  Always wanted to know how those Excel nerds write VBA?  You can, too!  It's not that hard, and Microsoft has free lessons online.  You local library or your college library almost certainly has access to business articles and research journals.  Do some reading on a topic that you are curious about.

4) Get ahead on an upcoming project.  Performance reviews due by the end of the year?  A budget due Dec 12?  Annual strategic plan due by Jan 15?  Get started now.  Even an outline is something.  If you take some solid first steps now and need to step away for a week, you will likely be surprised at how quickly it falls together when you come back to it.  The subconscious will work on this kind of stuff in the background; the results can be amazing.

5) Spend 1:1 time with the members of your team that are available this week.  They are probably having a slow week as well.  Do some coaching, get to know them better, see how you can help them and then follow up.

You already have a list 100 miles long of things that need to be done yesterday.  We all do.  A week like this one can let you get a little bit ahead.  Don't miss the opportunity.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

November 21, 2014: It's Time to Make a Decision

This is part 7 of a 7-part series on the hiring process.

Who screens the resumes?  Who sets up the conference room?  Who calls the candidates to arrange for interview times?  How long is the interview?  What questions will each person ask?  Will there be a skills test?  Who is in the conference room?  Is everyone in the room a decision-maker, or does 1 person get to make the call?  If it's a cross-departmental team, can a person not in the relevant department have a real impact on the decision?

A million questions, each with its own answer.  Many companies assign HR to be directly in the selection process, either as recruiters looking for candidates, or screening candidates.  HR may make or find a vendor to provide a recruiting training.  Most companies will have a single person screen candidates.  The final interview will most likely be a panel interview.

The best panel interviews have the following qualities:
1) All of the interviewers want to be there
2) All of the interviewers either have a lot of experience interviewing together or they have discussed roles and expectations before the interview starts
3) The decision-makers know in advance who they are
4) ANY decision-maker can veto a candidate for any legal reason
5) The panel has agreed on a set of questions to ask
6) The panel has a high degree of trust in each other

When a candidate leaves the room, the hiring manager (who may be the direct supervisor of the candidate or the supervisors boss) owns the conversation.  She will first do a quick survey.  Usually the panel will know just by body language about an obvious dud.  For the candidates that bear consideration, the hiring manager first has to assess the team's opinion on this central question: can the candidate do the job?

If the answer is yes, then the only question left is, "Is this the person we want to do this job?"  #4 above is the key to making this a useful discussion.  As we discussed in the first post in this series, the decision to hire someone is a momentous decision for a company.  Even if you do it 10 times a year, each one has large fiscal and performance impacts on your organization.

That you have a panel is the most important thing.  The second most important thing is #4 above: the veto power.  Maybe that one person picked up on something that no one else did.  Maybe that one person is wrong.  But what if he's right?

In a panel interview several years ago, we interviewed someone we had known for years.  We knew for a fact he could do the job.  At a previous company, he had reported to a member of the interview panel.  He presented himself well in the interview.  He was obviously capable.  There were questions about his personal behavior and interpersonal relations that stemmed from a few of our previous experiences with the individual at his previous company.  But if we had not known him from then, he would have been a solid candidate.

I was not in favor and said so.  Another manager said the same thing.  But we both also said to the other individual in the room, "If you want him anyway, go ahead."  We hired the guy.  In 6 months, we had fired the guy.  All of our predictions about how it would roll out came true.  In other cases, we have had a single individual veto a candidate.  The person just said, "I didn't like how he said..." and that was it.  We moved on to the next candidate.

Is this fair to the candidates?  Maybe not.  But that's not the hiring manager's responsibility.  The hiring manager is responsible to get the best person for the company, period.  The company provides parameters, the manager finds the best person she can to fit those parameters.  Once someone is trusted enough to be on an interview panel, she is trusted enough to wield a veto.

The best panels are also decisive. If the screening process is done well, there will be 5 or so final candidates to interview.  In the best situations, the panel will tell the hiring manager, "We like these 2-3 candidates.  Your choice for which one you pick."  The panel is then done, the hiring moves forward.

During the process, a good manager will take notes.  Why did I choose this person to interview and not this one?  Why did I choose to hire this person and not this one?  What did I notice during this interview?  Once you hire someone, watch her performance.  Should the interview have given you clues?  When you make a bad hiring decision, and we all do, good notes from the hiring process will help you to not repeat the same mistake.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

November 20, 2014: Weighing Other Factors

This is part 6 of a 7-part series on the hiring process.

So far, we have discussed education, experience, attitude, and fit as they relate to the hiring process.  These are all essential aspects of any hiring decision.  There are some other aspects that are not relevant in every decision.  This post is by no means exhaustive, it only seeks to bring up some things that may be relevant so that when you are faced with a hiring decision you can ask yourself the right questions.

Reasonable accommodation.  The law requires that employers make reasonable accommodations for employees that meet certain criteria.  If the job you have is a desk job and the applicant is in a wheelchair, it is easy to make a few changes in the cubicle furniture to make that work.  If the employee is a Muslim, it is usually easy to provide an opportunity for the employee to pray at certain times during the day.  If the employee is a Christian whose religious beliefs preclude working on Sundays and you run a 24 x 7 operation and the opening you have requires work on Sundays, you are in a gray area.  You may have a bona fide occupational qualification (BFOQ in court rulings) the means you don't have to make that accommodation.

It is important, then, to discuss work schedule and work environment and ask the candidate if she is willing and able to do the job as described.

Pay.  No employee wants to take a pay cut.  And those who are savvy at all know that there is wiggle room in your initial offer.  Get a sense of where the employee was at his last position, and what he's expecting you to offer.  If the 2 sides simply can't meet, don't waste your time.  If he's asking for $45/hr and your approved pay range tops out at $30/hr, put the number on the table before he leaves.  Don't waste your time negotiating if the 2 sides won't be able to agree.  Generally, the company will have a fixed COGS for all employees' labor of a certain grade or a certain employment type.  In budgetary terms, it does not matter to the company if you're paying someone $31/hr or $33/hr as long as those pay levels are both in the approved pay grade.  When a candidate comes back and wants a higher pay rate, it's usually a small amount ($1-$2/hr), and the company doesn't really care.  Your decision is that if you pay someone a certain amount, it is likely that someone experienced on your team is making less.  Word will get out, and certain members of the team will feel slighted.  That's why the decision is important - it comes back to fit, essentially.

Ability to work OT.  Almost every candidate will tell you she will work whatever hours are required to get the job done.  A very good candidate will tell you that she has to leave on time to pick her children up from day care but can come back after she gets them home to her husband.  Some people are really attached only to work.  There really isn't a good or bad answer to this question, unless you know that you'll require a lot of OT or the schedule doesn't have a lot of flex in it.

Long-term career plans.  A common question is, "Where do you want to be in 5 years?"  You can assess a candidate's career path by his actions to date and his trajectory at the moment.  If you are hiring for a technical writer who wants to be in management, but the individual hasn't done any management training, it tells you something about the candidate.  Each person's story is unique, and it's worth a couple minutes in an interview to get a sense of where the candidate would like to end up.

Personal appearance.  Jewelry choice, clothing choice and condition, hair style, fingernail length, etc: these each tell a story.  While going Sherlock Holmes on a candidate is living on the edge, you can tell a person's eye for detail by how they look.  You can get a subtle sense of if the person is there to work or is there to be noticed by how he looks as well.  Is the candidate comfortable in the interview clothing?  If not, maybe this is a one-time act.  I don't read too much into this as an interviewer, but when I interview for a new position, I always dress carefully.  The shirt should be dry-cleaned so it's pressed nicely.  Pants have creases, belt matches the shoes, shoes are shined, etc.

First impressions are hard to overcome.  If you are not a tattoo-oriented person (I am not inked, and don't understand the attraction), be aware that competence can be hidden.  Recognize your first impression for what it is, and except for the obvious and objective things it tells you ("this person has ear gauges" is objective) do your best to understand the person beneath the first impression.  It is true that taller people make more money and are more likely to be promoted.  Attractive people (women and men) are also more likely to get paid more.  Don't be the manager that hires someone because he is attractive.  Be the manager that finds competence and desire inside the person across the table from you.

And there are a million more things you can watch for and ask about.  Be holistic in your approach.  As you gain experience with hiring, you will notice which decisions were good ones, and which were bad.  If you are careful, you'll learn from your hiring mistakes and not repeat them.

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

November 18, 2014: The Slippery Slope of Fit

This is part 5 of a 7-part series on the hiring process.

Your candidate has met your qualifications, has the experience you want, and shows the right attitude.  Actually, 3 of the 10 people you interviewed meet these criteria.  What would differentiate between them?

The concept of fit is poorly defined and often discussed.  It is essentially the answer to this question: When the individual joins the team, will his ability to interact with the team hinder or help the team?  There are 2 main schools of thought on fit.  One is that all team members should be alike to reduce friction.  The other is that each team needs to have certain capabilities, and adding a new team member should add another capability or enhance a capability that already exists.  Like a pair of jeans is not all denim, you need people who are the stitching, the buttons, the zipper, the rivets, to make a complete team.

There are managers who prefer to have their teams not question them.  To them, a team player is a person who does what he is told, period.  These managers usually prefer homogeneous teams.  There is a value and stability to it.  In some cases, where the objective is to maintain the status quo, this is perfectly appropriate.  It is dangerous, of course, because things do change, and if your people can't talk to you about it, you'll be managing into a vacuum.  Most businesses that are successful in the long term can not manage to the status quo.  Thus, most teams who attempt to do so will find they are not successful in the long run.

Other managers prefer a little bit of rivalry, a little bit of diversity in the team.  It provides a livelier team dynamic, and it's easier to manage a team with a little diversity because everyone gets a good feel for where he fits.

Other managers prefer a lot of diversity, the more the better.  It is an open secret that many many more engineers are male than female.  Or that fashion designers tend to be women or gay men.  Or that trades such as carpentry and plumbing are dominated by men.  My teams have been engineering teams, and I would usually receive 1 resume out of 60 or so that were from a female candidate.

I am obviously of the type that prefers a wide diversity in the workplace.  If a female candidate meets my qualification minimum, I'll interview her.  One team I managed ranged in age from early 60s to early 20s in age, very diverse in ethnic background, and we even had a little gender diversity.  That team gelled more and got along better than any homogeneous team I have ever seen.  There are all sorts of reasons why, a good topic for another time.

Now, back to our question of fit.  What kind of team do you need?  Will your team be tasked with doing the exact same thing day after day?  Is there a personality profile that all very successful employees have who do that job?  Does your team have set of tasks they must be able to complete, but not know from day to day what they will find?  What personality types might do best in that circumstance?  Or is your team completely self-directed, creating something out of nothing, and must improvise as a matter of course?

The more your team has to improvise, the more diversity you need in your team to be successful.  It's not optional.  If you hire people with all the same skill sets (in this finite world we live in, nobody can do everything) and they have to improvise, you will miss the creativity and leaps forward that you get with a diverse workforce.

There are many aspects of fit that used to be common 40 years ago but are no longer legal.  You can not make a hiring decision based on a person's race, gender, age (if over 40), national origin, etc.  You probably know the list already.  It is easy and dangerous to start speaking in code about these things where "energy" = youth, and "good speaker" = talks like a white person.  Do not get sucked into that trap.  There lies danger both of the legal and functional kind.  So, once you put all of these illegal and immoral things off the table, what are you left with to determine fit?

You have energy.  I once hired a white-haired man with 35 years of work experience who was switching careers.  He had more enthusiasm for the job that most of the people we interviewed.  He was qualified, energetic, and understood that he would be starting on the bottom.

You have attitude.  The person who sells himself as being dependable (but it sounds like he's plodding along) vs the person who sells himself as being a problem-solver where nothing is ever good enough.  You may need some plodders, some people who lack ambition or ability beyond the role you are currently hiring for.  You may need to bring some people into the team who have ambition or are potential leadership candidates later.

You have speaking choices.  Is the candidate happy?  Does she make a joke or two during the interview?  Is the person going to have fun bantering with the team?  Is the person, conversely, going to waste a large portion of the day bantering with the team?  Does the candidate answer questions coherently?  Does she use profanity?  Is that a plus or a minus for your work environment?

The question of fit is a tricky one.  You first have to know what kind of team you are building.  Once you have a vision of that, then hire the person for the team you want, not the team you have.  As people roll in and out of your team, you will eventually end up with people you chose.  So choose your new people to make your team into the juggernaut it can be, with an appropriately diverse set of skills and abilities.

Monday, November 17, 2014

November 17, 2014: Attitude

This is part 4 of a 7-part series on the hiring process.

By the time a candidate walks through your door for an interview, she has passed at least 2 tests already: qualification and experience.  There may be others - a skills test for a administrative assistance, data entry operator, electronics theory.  The list of possibilities is endless, but every candidate will have passed those two tests.

Every interviewer has her own list of things she wants to find in an interview.  Some interviewers want to see how the candidate deals with pressure.  Some want to test the candidate to see if her skills are what her resume claims they are.  Some want to simply fit the job requirements to a candidate's skills and move on.

Of all the things that may become apparent in an interview, attitude is the single most important thing.  As long as the candidate passes the initial screens for qualifications and experience, attitude almost always determines the rest.  If a candidate is simply unable to communicate well, or is slovenly, or in some other way shows that he has unable to function to the position's social requirements, he will fail.  But those kinds of failures are infrequent.  Attitude drives the decision in most cases.

You've heard the adage "Attitude determines altitude"?  Yes, it's cliche.  And it is also true to a certain extent.

Attitude is key because attitude determines potential.  In a previous post I wrote about how I would much rather have someone with a longer learning curve and higher potential than a short learning curve and lower potential.  How does attitude determine potential?  What qualities does an attitude of success have?

1) Willingness to take risks.  Educated, reasonable risks.  If a person does not take risks, he will never achieve greatness in anything.
2) Drive to succeed.  In your business, "success" can be anything.  Sales performance, quality artistic output, great industrial design, delivering all packages on time without damage.  Whatever it is, the individual has to be internally motivated to succeed.
3) Engagement.  The candidate must be interested and engaged in your endeavor, whatever it happens to be.  Candidates should always have some questions for you.  The best employee ever to be on my team was extraordinarily engaged.  If there was something he didn't understand, he'd ask until he did understand.  When I gave him an assignment, he'd bring me a proposal of hoe he would accomplish it and ask for my input.  I'd give him suggestions, we'd go back and forth, and then he'd go away and finish it.  And then he'd ask for something else to do.
4) Team-centered thought process.  There are many very smart people in the world.  Not all of them are willing to do what must be done to accomplish the job.  I knew a manager once who was working on a large project.  It became clear that the project was under-resourced.  No additional resources were available for this highly specific task.  So he put on his boots and got to work, turning wrenches and wrapping parts, doing what he could to help.

I place very little value on a "good soldier" attitude.  Employees who are very obedient are also unwilling to take a risk.  Risk is required to grow, and companies that don't grow, die.  An obedient employee is unlikely to tell me when I'm wrong.

These attitudinal traits are all leadership traits.  When you filter for these traits in particular, you run the risk of having 8 people on a team who all want to be a team lead.  Some will relish the competition and being surrounded by competence.  Some will realize that their chances for a leadership role may take a while to develop, and they will leave.  Hiring this kind of person may increase your attrition rate.  It will also deepen your potential leadership pool, drive your team to a completely different level of performance, and allow you to achieve far more than the bare minimum a less-motivated team will achieve.

Attitude determines potential in one simple mechanism: a positive, results-driven attitude leads the individual to learn and grow.  Anyone lacking a positive results-driven attitude will only ever be able to what he is trained to do, as opposed to what he is capable of doing.  And wouldn't you rather have someone who is achieving everything she is capable of instead of only what you have told her to do?


Friday, November 14, 2014

November 14, 2014: The Value of Experience

This is part 3 of  a 7-part series on the hiring process.

Let's take a moment to think about John.  John barely finished college, but he got a good degree when he did so.  He got his start in an entry-level position, and was trouble from the moment he walked in the door.  He complained a lot, did not follow through on his commitments, and he seemed to have started looking for a new place of employment the moment he walked in the door.  His performance when he was being productive was great; it was the intangibles that he lacked.  In about a year, it was clear to him that his supervisor was not enamored of him any more, and he made good on his threat to find another job.

The next place John landed found a similar situation.  John had a little experience, which was good, but his personal behavior was still less than optimal.  After 2 years, this position ended in the same way.

John goes looking for his 3rd position.  He meets all of your requirements: a degree in cupcake theory and evolution, 3 years of experience using that degree at competitor companies.  By the qualifications benchmark, he is an instant and perfect fit.  He interviews well: he is smart, charming, competent.

You have no idea about his poor work history, and no way of finding out.  How much value do you put on his work experience?

In many cases, a hiring manager will lean heavily on industry experience.  Most of my involvement in hiring has come in the way of hiring individual contributors.  After making dozens of hiring decisions and noting how they worked out, my experience tells me that work experience makes very little difference.  Here's why.

1) Just because another company made a decision to hire someone doesn't mean I should accept their decision.  They may have made a bad hiring decision.  Or the candidate could have been the prior manager's nephew.  The simple fact that someone was employed before is not in itself a qualification.
2) No matter how skilled the candidate, there will be a learning curve as she adjusts to a new company, new customers, and the new company's specific business processes.  This learning curve may be shortened by someone with relevant experience, but not eliminated.
3) For the right candidate, investing a year in training can pay off hugely.  Do I want an experienced person who has a 3-month learning curve but a 1-year career ceiling?  Or do I want someone fresh with a 1-year learning curve and a 10-year career ceiling?  For almost every hiring need I have seen, the individual with a 10-year career ceiling is the better bet.

Is experience important?  Sure.  Someone who has done a specific job for a long period of time is probably competent at that job.  Experience, however, is just a starting place.  The individual will come into your company with a set amount of it.  The individual has her entire career ahead of her, though.  Most of her experience will come as part of your company, and certainly her experience in your company is going to be more relevant and helpful than her experience somewhere else.

Evaluating experience, however, must come with an evaluation of the individual's future potential and contribution.  I will gladly hire someone with high potential and little experience over someone with high experience and little potential for growth.  I don't recommend this for every hiring situation that every manager will ever see.  It is important, however, that all hiring managers put proper value on potential vs experience.  Whatever you choose will have a lasting impact on your company.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

November 12, 2014: The Value of Education and Qualification

This is part 2 of a 7-part series on hiring.

A job posting will nearly always have a set of criteria a person needs to meet to be qualified for the job.  The implication is obvious: if a person does not meet all of the criteria, the person is not able to do the job.  In practice, however, qualifications also include some nice-to-haves as well.

Does a manager of engineers need to have an engineering degree?  Or does he need a management degree?  Don't say he needs both degrees, because there aren't nearly enough people with both degrees to fill all engineering management positions.  Many of those people, obviously, are doing a fine job without one or the other (or both) of these degrees.

The qualifications argument also has another implicit assumption: that the institution that provided the qualification did so in a way to ensure that the individual actually learned the concepts and can apply them.  How many high school graduates do you know who have trouble reading?  Or college graduates who can't write well?  It is safe to assume that there are marketing grads who can't market, design grads who can't design, and MBAs who can't work their way through a balance sheet.

So what, then, is the value of education and qualification to a potential hire?  Setting out a list of requirements or qualifications has the following benefits:
1) It narrows your candidate pool.  When the list of requirements is steep, you may get fewer applicants for your opening.  I know one tech company who lists "a bachelor's degree" as the only qualification for engineering or management positions.  This widens their candidate pool, which has certain benefits.
2) Long-standing requirements for a team of people will mean that, over time, the skills of each member of your team will compliment each other.
3) A set of qualifications gives the candidate a specific lexicon that may be important.  Does your candidate need to know about ROI and gross margin?  Or should she know about spherical aberration and astigmatism?  Or Lean 6 Sigma?  Or the interaction of covalent bonds in a protein?
4) It shows the candidate understands the value of learning and was able to stick it out.  To me, this is the key to education.  A person who has finished a degree shows that he understands the long game, is willing to invest in his own future, and carries through to the end.

Those are it - there are people without engineering degrees who can engineer, people lacking business degrees who can business, people with no formal education in teaching who can teach.  We all know people who display competence outside of their area of formal education.

When you are making your hiring decision (but hopefully before you even post the job), you need to decide which things are requirements (qualifications).  The bar for setting a requirement is high: if the person does not have the requirement, she is not able to do the job.

When you interview a candidate for a technical position, it is important to probe a bit.  Have someone in the room who is a subject matter expert on your requirements.  I once interviewed a potential engineer who claimed to speak Japanese.  Impressive for someone wanting to join a Japanese company.  So I started speaking Japanese to him.  He looked at me in shock (I don't look Japanese), and said (in English), "I only know a little."  He didn't make the cut.  His engineering skills were fine, but his honesty was questionable, a risk we did not need to take.

We have to rely on qualifications and education more as we consider candidates without much in the way of work history.  These become less relevant the further along the individual is in his career.  A person with a degree in marketing but a career in equipment maintenance might be a better fit for a maintenance position than a marketing position.

In summary, qualifications tell you something about a person; not nearly enough, certainly.  So give qualifications some serious weight and consideration, but don't let that be your deciding factor.




Monday, November 10, 2014

November 11, 2014: The Critical Decision to Offer Employment

This is part 1 of a 7-part series on the hiring process.

As a manager, there are few decisions that impact your team's performance more than who you choose to put on your team.  Ponder that for a moment: every single thing your team accomplishes is dependent on someone (you or another manager) deciding to offer employment to those team members.

The ramifications of the decision are enormous: remember that problem employee, who was just competent enough to not get fired?  Or the employee who did the work of 2 of her peers with better quality?  Or the employee that was late just often enough that you had to choose whether to follow policy or let it ride, and either way was painful?  Whether a good decision or a bad one, the decision to offer someone employment is nearly impossible to rescind until it's too late.

What are the bad consequences of a poor hiring decision?  Let's assume that you made a reasonable mistake, not a disastrous one.  You're more competent than to make a disastrous hiring decision, aren't you?  Of course you are.  Your new employee fits the job description - he is qualified for the job with requisite experience and education.  You find that he never hears something right the first time.  At first, you put it down to you and he adjusting your communication styles, and maybe they don't match.  Then you hear from a team member that she is having the same issue with him.  Okay, you think, he's not a good communicator.  Then he finishes his training process, and you task him with something solo.  Something simple and important, to build his confidence.  He messes it up, and someone else has to fix it after bringing you in to assist.

The employee is earnest and apologetic.   He wants to get better.  You can envision this scenario, no?  I have seen in personally.  I realized about 2 months after hiring an employee that I had made a mistake.  He did not have the seriousness about the work that he needed, and his actions, while not egregious, were not acceptable, either.  My company required documentation, a performance improvement plan, and a period of time for the employee to fix his poor work habits.  3 months later, we finished the process and terminated the employee.

In the mean time, my company had paid him nearly 6 months in pay for his training and early work effort.  My team had paid the opportunity cost of not being able to train someone competent (senior staff members were wasting their time training the new employee instead of training someone who would stay).  I assigned him to work short-term with a closely aligned team, and they were unable to trust him to complete tasks correctly, so it cost them time to fix his mistakes or to do the work of the extra guy on the team who wouldn't pull his own weight.  Cost to the company?  Close to $100,000 when you include travel costs, pay, benefits, and time that senior people spent to train him.

A good hiring decision, however, shows up very quickly.  Good new employees ask questions, provide innovative solutions to nagging problems, and look for ways to contribute.  They do consistent, good work.  They make everyone around them perform better as well.

Training on making hiring decisions is hard to come by.  Good training on the topic may not exist.  I have never seen any.  So how does a person learn how to make this critical decision well?  The hiring manager (or the new employee's immediate supervisor) has to consider 5 things:

    1. Qualifications/education
    2. Skills
    3. Experience
    4. Attitude
    5. Fit  

We'll discuss each of these in the next few posts.

Sunday, November 9, 2014

November 10, 2014: Looking for Lessons in All the Right Places

Imagine yourself as 13 year-old middle school student.  You were assigned to read To Kill a Mockingbird and write a short book report.  The report is due tomorrow, and you don't even know who Boo is.  You go to your mother in a panic.  "Mom, I have a report due tomorrow and I can't get it done!  I'm going to flunk!"  Your mother sees your panic and decides to relieve it.

"Don't worry about it, dear," she says.  "I'll write it for you."  You thank her and go to bed.  When you wake up, there is a nicely printed book report with your name on it.  You turn it in, and get a good grade.

What did you learn from the experience?  I asked this question to a group of teenagers recently.  "Nothing" was the first response.  I challenged that answer.  "Why do you say that?" I asked.

"Because you didn't read the book, so you didn't learn anything."

"You learned that you got a good grade," another one piped in.  A boy in the group raised his hand.

Ed is usually the quietest person in the room.  I turned to him.  "Yes, Ed?"

"You learned that if you don't do it, your mother will do it for you."

None of the answers were wrong.  They all made sense.  But the rightest answer was Ed's.  It was an unintended lesson on the part of the parent, who intended to impart that she loved her kid.  These unintended lessons are often the most important.

We give unintended lessons all the time.  If a peer refuses to compromise in a reasonable way, and we cave in to keep the peace, we have taught a lesson both to ourselves and the other party.  We have taught her that we don't believe in our position enough to fight for it.  If our supervisor demands we do it his way and no other way, despite the existence of a viable and obviously superior solution, our supervisor has taught us that he cares more about obedience than performance.  And we have learned that following is better than thinking.

These are all unintended lessons, and you may have noticed that they all share a similar trait: while the intended lessons are specific (the issue that we cave in on, the direction we got from our boss), the unintended lessons are global and affect the quality, quantity, and type of our work in a holistic way.

A few years ago I hit a thorny patch at work; I was stressed to paralysis and didn't know what to do.  I started to set aside time during my work week to reflect.  What things happened this week that I didn't like?  Why did they go that way?  What did I learn from the experience in a holistic way?  What did I teach someone else about me through the experience?  What do I need to do in the future to unteach an unintended lesson?  This practice helps me keep stock of where I am, uncovers the hidden stressors in the office, and helps me to plan for the future.

What unintended lessons are people in your life teaching you?  What are you teaching them?  If you ask and reflect carefully, patiently, and openly, you may be surprised at the answers you find.

Friday, November 7, 2014

November 7, 2014: Using Power vs Pressure in the Workplace

Today I was working with a concrete saw.  My brother's house is under renovation, and today I was helping by running the concrete saw across his 20' long patio.  We're going to remove it and add a french drain to keep the basement a little drier.  The saw was a nice one - a Hilte, gas-powered, outfitted by our local home improvement store with a brand-new diamond blade.  I had never cut concrete before.

As with any saw, the power supplied by the motor is not infinite.  It also cut more or less quickly depending on how quickly the blade was spinning.  When I pushed it along, the blade had to cut more material all at once, it slowed at first, and then stopped.  Then I had to back off and go for the same section again.  When I kept the blade spinning very quickly (lots of motor power) and applied little pressure, the saw went much more quickly.

The lesson can be illustrated in the following situation:

I have 3 people on my engineering team: A is very good with interpreting data but bad at putting all the screws in all the right places when he is working on equipment.  B is great with physical detail, but terrible with data analysis that is not visible on the machine in front of him.  C is mediocre at both.  I have a serious new problem with a piece of equipment and all 3 engineers are up to their elbows already with previously assigned tasks.  I know there's a problem because a graph tells me something is wrong.  I don't know what.

In this situation, it is obvious that A is the right person for the job.  But I'm in a hurry.  How do I increase the chances that the problem will be fixed in a timely manner?  I can apply pressure by standing over A and telling her over and over again how important the problem is.  Or I can apply power to A by asking what she needs from the rest of the team and giving it to her.  In most cases, I will get a better (=faster, more accurate) result by giving A the resources she needs.  Power.

With my saw, power showed up in increased blade spinning speed.  I had to let it rev to its maximum RPM, and then I could get the most out of it.  If I applied pressure, the blade slowed and stopped, and I accomplished nothing.

There are many ways of thinking about power and pressure in team environments.  Power can come in the form of budget approval for a consultant to provide training, or a project sponsor clearing a way to modify a business process to make something easier to do.  Pressure can come as peer pressure to do something a certain way, emphasizing a deadline, or micromanaging a situation or employee.

I am naturally a power manager, not a pressure manager.  Pressure is certainly needed at times (a timely and appropriate termination can improve a team's morale and up its internal motivation, for instance), but many managers overuse it.  Take a few moments to think about situations where you had to change the dynamic of how your team tackled a problem: did you apply pressure to the individuals responsible?   Did you apply power to them?  How did they respond?  Was it the response you wanted?

It's a fine line to walk, one out of many judgment calls that managers have to make daily.  Knowing which side you are on can help you to understand when it might be better to take a different tack and possibly get a different outcome.