OPUSBOB: How do you like your candidates, with or without lead?
March 2, 2010 – 5:14 pm
So here’s today’s question. Would you rather have an individual that you are adding to your team that is not very assertive and you know that you are going to need to work with this person to make them more assertive in order to be effective on the job or to have somebody that you are adding to your team that you know is extremely assertive and you know that you’re going to need to tone them down. I had both of those incidents happen one right after the other just recently.
In the first case, I had a client that was trying to hire a sales person for their operation in Brazil and the manager knew that he wanted a very strong, very direct, independent assertive person for the job and low and behold, he found a candidate that really fit the bill. This person had dominance as their highest trait and everything about them in the conversation, in their resume and their results showed that they are a very strong, very assertive person. And with that we know there is good and there is bad that can come along because the nature of that person although they can be very strong, can also be a bit challenging to work with on the inside. They perceive other people that don’t see things their way as potentially being incompetent and they have a really difficult time dealing with anything that they see as interference or micromanagement. So, we know that going in and so the manager and I had a very good conversation about the nature of this person and the manager said to me, “You know what Bob, I’d rather worry about taking a little bit of lead out of the person’s pencil than trying to put the lead in” and I said, “You know, I understand right where you’re coming from.”
Well right after that phone call, I had another conversation with the manager that was trying to hire somebody to work for them to run a program running alliances in Europe and this person was going to need to work with country managers all over Europe working with different partners and different areas of their business and in conversation with this manager, the manager said to me, “I am looking for somebody that’s very collaborative. I need somebody who is a consensus oriented person who knows how to get things done while not making waves” and low and behold, he found himself a great candidate for that role. This person’s dominance was by far their lowest trait and their patience was their highest trait, but when you take low dominance matched up with high patience, you definitely have a consensus oriented collaborative oriented person.
So we had a conversation and said all of that is great, but some times the person who may need to know how to break a little glass and you’re going to need to coach them on that and the manager said, “No problem, I am great at breaking glass. I don’t have any problem in working with somebody that I am going to need to coach them to be more assertive than is their natural style.” So it was a great lesson. In both cases, mangers would go in to get what they think they were looking for, but they knew going in what the nature of their candidate was and they knew exactly what they were going to need to do to make this person more effective. And isn’t that what leadership is about? Understanding the strengths of the people that we have on our team, knowing how to position them to take advantage of what they do well, but also knowing where they may have difficulties and being able to anticipate that and coach them on that, so they can work through those areas that are not as natural for them.
Thanks for your time.
Tags: assertive, behavioral traits, dominance, leadership, patience, Performance
OPUSBOB: Personality and Performance
January 23, 2010 – 12:03 pm
The purpose of this video broadcast is to talk about how personality impacts performance and the topic came up in a conversation that two of the hiring managers from one of my clients were having. Where one of the managers said you know I think personality is overrated. You can have all different types of personalities that can be successful and the other manager said you are really looking at this in a way that can get in your way because it is not a matter of being able to say personality A is good or personality B is bad. It is not a matter of lining up a personality and predicting their performance. It is how the personality will predict their behavior. It is not how they are going to do. It is how they are going to attempt to do it. So here is some of the related factors when you look at.
Whether or not personality is important. You have to determine whether these factors are relevant to the success of your people within your organization. Does it matter whether people have good people skills. Whether they get along well with other people or whether they really want to be able to go playing their own corner by themselves. Doesn’t matter whether they are patient people or whether they are always in a hurry. Doesn’t matter whether they have good attention to detail or if they are big picture oriented people. It is not a matter that one trait is necessarily good or bad as a human being but certain traits will make a difference in how a person approaches a problem or how they approach a task. For instance if you know that one of your people are very hard and critical on other people that don’t get their job done right, internally you may need to coach that person a bit if they don’t want to turn off the resources that they are really going to need to have in hand. If you know in advance that this is a challenge then you can coach in advance.
The personality doesn’t necessarily determine whether they get the job done but it does determine how they are going to approach it and as a result of that it has a direct impact on your ability to be a proactive leader. For after all what is leadership as it relates to people if it is not being able to provide people with the coaching of the guidance that they need so they can be successful and to be able to recognize what people naturally do well and the areas that they may naturally have more difficulties in and position people appropriately. Jim Collins had it right. We first need to figure out who we want to have on our bus and then we next need to figure out what seat of the bus they need to be sitting in. That is our job and so much of that has to do with understanding the personality nature of the people that we have on our team or the candidates that we are assessing, thanks for your time.
A Holiday Gift from OPUSBOB: Interviewing Skills
December 18, 2009 – 1:08 pmFor the holidays OPUSBOB gives the gift of understanding candidates and the interviewing process.
The topic of this video blog is Interviewing Skills and specifically what I want to talk to you about today is how to look for evidence of behavior in the interview process. The areas that I am focusing on have to do with important skill sets that an individual needs to have in order to be successful in a job that you are hiring them for and when we think about the sales position, certain areas which really standout that you can’t look for evidence of behavior or listening skills, writing skills, presentation skills and closing skills and the reason I say that we can look for evidence of behavior is because these are all areas that you really don’t need to question your candidate about almost any good sales candidate, I have to say they are a good sales person but a good sales candidate if asked the question are you a good closer, we will say yes I am an excellent closer but in fact the interview process and the hiring process is very much like a sales process and so instead of asking the question are you a good closer, you can look to see how the person closes you and here is where it really gets interesting.
There are very different closing styles and a closing style has more to do with the behavioral style then it does whether one is right or wrong. For instance people that are very assertive and people that are impatient may go to close early and often. People that are more patient, people that are more consensus-oriented may allow the process to go on a bit longer and in a sense allow you to extend the offer to them versus them closing you.
Now is one style better or worse well that really depends but what traditionally happens is if one style is the way that the manager is and that persons closing skills measured up and narrowed the manager style, they will be more comfortable with that and the manager, if the manager is a high dominance, low patience person themselves we said well I love the way that person really came after me. But if the manager is more laid back then that high dominance, low patience person may have been a huge turnoff for them so our ability to read good or bad, right or wrong is really more tied into how we match up with our candidate and as a result of that we have a tendency to hire people that are more like us and sometimes we end up passing on the candidates that although their style is different from us, it can actually be more effective. The more you know about your own personality style and the more you know about your candidate style, the more effective you can be because it’s not really whether the style is right, it’s whether they are able to use that style to their benefit. Thanks for your time.
OPUSBOB: Would You Hire a Known Conniver?
November 6, 2009 – 3:51 pmBob Kreisberg asks your opinion. Would you hire a known conniver?
I want to talk to you today about an interesting conversation that I had with a candidate who is applying for a position with one of my clients. I had a chance to review her personality profile with her and she liked the results very much and she was very animated, so she went on to tell me that she has always been a top sales person, everything that she has every done is life, she has always been the best. In fact Bob, she said to me that I was the very top girls scout cookie sales person, when I was at girls camp. And I said, oh! That’s great. She says, yeah, let me tell you how I did it. On the days that the girls scout cookies were delivered to our house, I faked being sick that day, so I could go home from school early and get a head start on all of the other girls that were in my troop and as a result of that I got out to all the houses first and I got all my cookies sold. And she was obviously very proud of this otherwise she wouldn’t have brought it up.
Now, when I had an opportunity to talk with my client to review the personality profile, and the conversation that I had with the candidate, my client was a bit perplexed about a person who would readily admit to being devious in selling girls scout cookies. And they said to me, we’re a very high integrity organization and if this person who readily admit to being devious about selling cookies, I don’t know that I can trust her when selling my software. I said, well, I understand where you stand. So later that day I had another conversation with another hiring manager and talked about the conversation regarding the girls scout cookies. That manager’s reaction was completely different. That manager said, that’s exactly what we need. I need people that think outside the box and you know what if they are a little devious I think that’s okay. So interesting conversation, curious to know what you think, do you think you’d be interested in going after the person who figured out a way to sell more girls scout cookies by faking being sick or would you see that as a behavioral trait that you would want to avoid in a person? Thanks for your time.
OPUSBOB: Employee Morale
October 30, 2009 – 1:23 pmBob Kreisberg talks about how certain methods of sales training can be destructive to employee morale.
I want to talk to you today about how companies could inadvertently destroy the morale of their employees although they are well intentioned in their efforts. I want to talk to you about a sales woman by the name of Miller. She went to a sales training class where she was learning about complex sales and this is the type of a training class that many companies have and one of the exercises that they did at the beginning of the class was a very simple personality assessment kind of a tool, not something that we offered in this particular class but the kind of work that we actually do. Well, after the sales people went through the exercise, they were broken up into the different behavioral styles that showed up in the group. There were people that were high in dominance and there were people that were high in extraversion, people high in patience and people high in conformity. My friend, Miller, happens to be in the high conformity group. Well, the sales trainer who perhaps was a high dominance person himself started to talk to the class about all of the positive things about being a high dominance sales person. The competitive nature, the desire to win to do what ever needs to be done at all costs and then proceeded to pretty much slam the other three behavioral styles that the high extraverts talk too much and the high patience people don’t know how to create conflict and the high conformity people get all wrapped up in minutiae. And my friend Miller didn’t come out of this feeling very good about herself.
Well here is the amazing fact, the week before on the last day of the quarter, my friend Miller closed a $5.3 million deal in software licenses for her company and all of those high dominance people that were fist pumping and chest bumping themselves about the great personality styles… They didn’t close anything. And if you really look at what the skill set is for handling a complex sale that involved a year’s worth of discussions and demonstrations at the technology level, at the application level, meeting after meeting after meeting at all different levels of the organization. You can understand that Miller’s high conformity trades really served her very, very well because after all was said and done the buyer bought from her because they genuinely believed in her competence and her ability to have her company deliver what needed to be delivered. Now that’s not to say that high conformity people are the only strong behavioral profile for sales but we get so wrapped up and thinking that what we need is the aggressive no hold bars type of a behavioral style that we forget that the complex sales cycle requires many different talents. No one brings all of them to the table and as a manager’s job it is your responsibility to understand what your people naturally do best and help them focus on adapting their style to meet the other requirements and providing them with the resources that they need, so they can be successful.
By the way, this was a new name, new logo account and they beat out their number one competitor who was the incumbent who by the time the deal got done was prepared to provide the license software to the client for free. So think about that and think about what the behavioral style must have been of the sales person who had just taken over this account for the competitor. So don’t be so quick to put down the other sales people on your team that may not bring that very aggressive “A” type personality to the table. They may be just what you need, in fact my friend Miller told me that the other sales person who was the high conformity sales person in the group is about to get a $10 million deal this quarter. Why? For basically the same reasons. Thanks for your time.
OPUSBOB on the Obama Education Speech as it relates to Business Leadership
October 22, 2009 – 3:57 pmOPUSBOB on the Obama Education Speech as it relates to Business Leadership
So what I want to talk to you about today is to relate President Obama’s speech that he gave last week to the school kids about what is important to them and the thing that stood out in my mind is when Obama talked about how students need to try to learn different subject matters because that gives them an opportunity to find out what their strengths are. If they work hard in a biology class they may find out that they are really good at doing science like things. If they work hard in an English class they might find out that they are really good writers. It is the strength based approach. And think about it from a work standpoint. Think about how important it is that the people that we have working for us are doing things they are naturally good at. That they are working in areas that play to their strengths and different people have different strengths that may be in the same job.
So you as a manager need to understand what you need to be able to do to help the people that you have on your team utilize their own strengths. For instance some sales people have as a natural strength very strong problem solving skills. So if you have good strong problem solving skills the best bet for that person is to take advantage of that and show their buyer how they can help him solve their problems. It is a very different approach and for instance a sales person that has relationship building skills nothing wrong with being a good relationship builder but it is different than being a problem solver. If you can help your sales people that have relationship building skills focused on their strengths and problem solvers focused on their strengths then you are really making a difference as a leader within your organization, thanks for your time.
Tags: Business Leadership, Education, Obama, Opus Productivity, Opusbob