As entrepreneurs, we usually believe we can handle an increase in sales volume. It’s what we seek. It’s the holy grail of growth, right? Unfortunately, unplanned rapid growth can send any business to an early grave. Often, only after unplanned rapid growth do we discover we didn’t have systems and people to meet our growing needs. Customers have little patience for trial and error. Waiting until necessity drives development of systems and people, we miss the opportunity to proactively increase capacity. Ultimately, we damage profitability, and our reputation. So, how do we dodge the bullet?

Hire the Right People. Hiring the best can be a slow process. We must answer three questions:

• Can they do the job? (capacity)
• How will they do the job? (behavior)
• Will they do the job? (occupational interest—is this what they want to do?)

All three questions must also be context-specific: Can they do this job here? If the questions are asked properly and answered clearly, the probability of hiring someone who fits the job increases. Research confirms that people who fit their jobs produce more, stay longer, and create happier, more profitable workplaces!

Clarify strengths and weaknesses. When your capacity doesn’t change, employees stagnate! Those who might have handled new challenges leave for new opportunities, usually with your competition. Current employees may have effectively departed while still on your payroll—a problem Harvard Business School calls presenteeism. A clear view of each of each employee’s true interests is critical. Remember, it’s an ongoing process. A wise entrepreneur once said, “When you think you have it all handled, you’ve set yourself up for failure.” Our working systems are often created by employees for their own convenience, not necessarily for your customers. Worse, we rarely know what our systems really are, and employees modify them continuously.

Customers have their own, private opinions about your business. Ask them questions, both directly and indirectly:

• What works for you, our customer?
• What do we do that does not work?

Allow them to clarify.

• What do they need from you?
• What else would they like from you?

Develop accountability and responsibility in your employees, managers and yourself. Simply having feedback is one thing, acting productively on it is another. Measure skills in your managers, and plan to improve them. Make sure everyone realizes it’s an ongoing process. “Perfection is a direction, not a place.” Handle problem employees now! If you have an employee unable to do the job, be fair and let them go. Hire slowly, fire quickly. One manager put it very well: “The most expensive employee time I have is the interval between when I realize they have to go, and when I actually make it happen.” An effective manager must concentrate on, and measure, results. Working hard is a valuable part of the systems producing your total results, but is rarely sufficient. Focus on these fundamentals of business and you will soon see new opportunities for growth in your business based on planned increases in your capacity!

Unfortunately, evidence is clear that most of those responsible for hiring have very little knowledge about the characteristics necessary for “fit” in the jobs they fill. Worse, on the rare occasions when a manager actually knows the dimensions critical for fit, the same manager is likely to have poor judgment about an applicant’s match on those factors.

Without valid, reliable tools for measuring critical job fit dimensions of a job, we are unlikely to recognize, or select for critical factors.

Without a valid, reliable tool for measuring the characteristics of our candidate, we’re likely to be wrong in our hiring decisions. If we do not know the relevant factors, and cannot judge the individual’s characteristics, we will make many costly mistakes.

The case study in the most recent edition of this newsletter provided a case in point. In the study, a differential analysis of the characteristics necessary for success in the sample company’s sales environment produced very clear identification of two absolutely critical (“killer”) characteristics and four other very important success characteristics.

I had the opportunity to present the results to a group of 25 executives of the company. The participants ranged from C-level executives through sales managers, and included the Director of HR and the entire sales training staff. Presumably, these individuals would know what was required to produce sales success—if anyone did!

We then asked the group to individually rate the top two factors, in order, in terms of prediction of success. We also asked the direction (high or low) producing the indication. Subsequently, they rated the next four factors contributing to prediction of success.

Of the 25 people present, only one identified the top success factor (energy) correctly. No one present correctly identified both of the top two. In the second part, identification of the next four important factors (in any order), only four people correctly identified one, and no one had more than one!

This company employs over 150 professional salespeople, and every one of their current employees was hired by some subset of the group involved in our training. The company has been successful over many years, with an enviable growth curve. Presumably, they do this better than most of their competition. Their top performers, on average, produce over two and a half times as much gross profit as those who just hold on to their jobs!

The point: Without a valid, reliable instrument to measure what’s important (in the job and in the candidate), our good intentions are lost in emotion, first impressions, gut feel, and other enemies of good selection.

Job fit is critical. Are you hiring for fit? If so, what are your tools? Do they meet standards: job-relatedness, validity, and reliability? Are they free of bias against protected classes of employees? If not, it’s time for an overhaul — and your Profiles representative will be glad to help!

Measure to manage!

The current study was a pilot effort with the goal to measure all of the supervisors at two of their plants to identify a pattern that could be used to select candidates for first-level leadership positions. This would be the first step in the process of building ladder of success patterns useful for mapping career paths for those most likely to succeed as managers at each level of promotion.

The 14 supervisors in the pilot study were rated by plant managers on a three-point scale, with one being Top Performers (TP), two being Average Performers (AP), and three for Below Average Performers (BP). All of the supervisors took the Profile XT™, and were compared for job match to the Top Performer pattern. When the data were sorted by performance ranking and averages were calculated for each group, the conclusions were clear. The percentage of match to the Top Performer pattern correlated strongly with the rating groups. The TP group averaged an 86 percent match to the pattern; the AP group averaged 75 percent match, and the BP group averaged 64 percent. A very uniform 11 percentage points separated each of the adjacent groups, and there was a striking 22 percent difference between the top and bottom group. Clearly, there was good reason to expect the pattern to be useful in predicting which future candidates were likely to succeed at the supervisor level, if selected for the leadership development program. The graph below was generated from the last three columns of the chart.

In looking further at the individual scoring, it became apparent that one individual in the TP group, was an “outlier”—his scores were substantially different than the scores of the remainder of his group. He was much higher than the average of the group on all of the Thinking Scales, much higher on Energy, Assertiveness, Independence, and Decisiveness. He was much lower than the rest of his TP group on Manageability, Accommodating, and Objective Judgment. In group discussions with his plant manager and the HR team, it became apparent that this individual was headed somewhere else — either rapidly up the ranks of management at the company, or out to the broader world. He was not perceived as likely to stay long in his current position as an entry-level supervisor. This discovery was considered valuable insight by the management group, and they eagerly anticipate the opportunity to compare this “outlier” to the patterns under development for higher levels of management. Perhaps they have discovered a future C-level candidate among the ranks of their entry-level supervisors!