When I started writing our blog a couple of years ago I had a few ideas about blogging in general and how I wanted our blog to be viewed.

I had read enough about blogging to understand that it is all about promoting our company’s brand, building a following of interested, like minded individuals who could appreciate and would comment on our postings, and would be the focal point of all our social media content.

I also wanted our blog to be more about quality than quantity. I felt that it wasn’t a matter of frequency but the content that was important. My goal was to blog at least once a week about recruiting, talent acquisition, hiring and retention and everything in between, including Bob Dylan and Arthur Guinness.

Over the Thanksgiving Holiday weekend, I took some time to reconsider a few things about our business. What is the best use of my time, where could we best leverage our company’s knowledge, experience and passion about finding the best talent for our clients, and was there anything relevant about our industry that needed to be said. The question that I had to then ask myself was, could I admit that I had a problem? Blogging had become an addiction and before I could decide whether I needed the help of other bloggers and join BA (Bloggers Anonymous) I would gather the inner strength that I knew that I had and just go cold Turkey.

So, this is my last blog for now. I need to get back to the business of actually applying all of those great ideas that I blogged about and begin looking at our industry with a new blog free perspective, a new pair of blogless eyes.

I hope to be back in the blogosphere after the New Year. After all once a blogger, always a blogger and you can’t stay away too long from that rarefied air.

Blog On!  

“Your strategy should be reviewed and updated on a quarterly basis.  Of course, that assumes you went through a disciplined thought process and have a real strategy to start with!”  – Stephen Lynch, COO, Results.com

Does your company have a strategy? Do you know if the clients that you work with have a strategy for their business? If your company does not, then you may want to take Stephen Lynch’s advice and go “through a disciplined thought process and develop a real strategy” before you continue reading the rest of this blog.

As to whether your clients have a business strategy, I doubt that any of us in the talent acquisition and recruiting business could answer that. We may assume that most do have a strategy, since we only prospect for clients who have a need for our services, have the dollars to spend for our services, and have a demonstrated track record of success. Surely that would indicate that they have a strategy for their business. Maybe, but how good it is, is another issue.

In a recent blog post on Results.com, Stephen Lynch presented a 10 point pressure test for a company’s business strategy devised by McKinsey – who maintain that most companies can barely pass more than 3 of these tests. Hopefully your company and your client companies can score better?

Here is the test:

1. Will your strategy beat the market?
Perform a thorough industry analysis (at least once per year) to get a clear picture of how the competitive forces in your industry are likely to play out. To beat industry average growth rates you will need a meaningful point of difference that can’t be easily copied or nullified.  Mindlessly copying your competitor’s innovations is not a strategy – it is a recipe for mediocrity. Do you really have a winning strategy?

2. Do you have a sustainable competitive advantage?
How will you make money in the future?  Do you have a unique strategic position – a concept that you “own” in the minds of your target customers?  Do you have special capabilities that can’t be easily copied?  Remember that nothing lasts forever.

3. Are you focused on the bulls-eye?
Push for the narrowest possible segmentation of your target market. Clearly defining and understanding your ideal target market customer is one of the most powerful things a company can do to improve its strategy.

4. Does your strategy put you ahead of trends?
Many strategies place too much weight on current trends. But as Peter Drucker said, it is not the trends, but “the changes in the trends” that leaders must keep on top of. These changes creep up so slowly that most companies fail to respond until it is too late to mount an effective response to take advantage of it.  They delay taking action; held back by cost concerns, an unwillingness to cannibalize a legacy business, or an attachment to yesterday’s formula for success.
Always look to the edges. How are your early adopter customers acting?  What are the small, innovative new entrants doing?  What innovations could change the entire industry?

5. Does your data give you privileged insights?
It is easy to be overwhelmed with data – the key is to make sense of it all and obtain actionable insights.  Don’t rely on the same data your competitors use.  Do you really understand your customers? Companies who go out of their way to experience the world from their customer’s perspective will develop better strategies.

6. Does your strategy embrace uncertainty?
Prioritize all your current threats (things that could derail your strategy) as part of your SWOT analysis, and consider what action you would take if these worst case scenarios came to fruition.  Could you handle it?  Do you have a plan B ready to roll out?

7. Does your strategy require commitment and tradeoffs?
Hedging your bets is not a strategy.  A full commitment to defined course of action is the only path to sustainable competitive advantage. This requires tradeoffs – you can’t be all things to all people. What are you not going to do?

8. Is your strategy contaminated by bias?
Are there certain assumptions that your business leaders have made and are making regarding you products, services, customers, pricing, market share, customer experience, etc, that will keep you from fully implementing a successful strategy? If so, then get rid of them. Bias has no place in business or in your business strategy.

9. Is your leadership team fully committed?
Many good strategies fail to be executed because of a lack of commitment among the leadership team, where just one or two nonbelievers can strangle a strategic change at birth.

10. Have you translated your strategy into a strategic execution plan? Clearly define where you are going, and make sure everyone knows the specific actions they need to take to play their part.  Ensure your budget and resource allocation is aligned with your strategy. Strategy comes first!  Effort spent aligning the budget with the strategy will pay off many times over.

So how did your company do? Regardless of how well or poorly your company did, this exercise should provide successful business leaders with many unanswered questions and areas for improvement that will help their companies grow and be profitable.

For those of us in the talent acquisition business this exercise presents us with some unique opportunities.  Asking these 10 questions of our prospective clients, as part of our needs analysis process, can provide us with a great deal of information about the opportunity and positions us as a true valued partner in helping our clients grow and succeed. Helping our clients address some of these questions, will give us a much better feel for the type of talent required to implement and manage the business strategy.

Your business could have the best business strategy, one that passes the McKinsey pressure test with flying colors, but without the right people, in the right places, without top talent, without “A players” your strategy is not worth the paper that it is printed on.

And companies like ours can help find that talent.

“Today more than ever, the fate of an organization depends on its ability to recruit, retain, and, when necessary, replace talent.”

–        Emmett C. Murphy, Talent IQ

In his best selling book, Talent IQ, Emmett Murphy lays out a very clear and researched process for increasing your company’s productivity and profitability. It all starts with identifying your company’s Top Talent, improving the talent that is not quite Top, and when necessary removing the talent that can’t be improved. It is this last group that Murphy refers to as Talent-on-the-bubble.

Warren Brueggeman, former head of GE Nuclear Energy once said, “You know when the decision is not to improve, but remove when you no longer hold a positive expectation that an individual will make a contribution. It’s intuitive but is backed up by a trail of accumulated evidence and mishaps, some explained and some not, that tell you the risk of continuing is too great. It’s all about the risk, first to your customers, then to your stakeholders, employees and associates, the ones who will bear the burden when all is said and done.”

Chances are good that every company has its fair share of talent-on-the-bubble. The question is can you readily identify them? To help you here are some common traits of the types of employees who fall into this category.

1. Procrastinator – a fence sitter; dislikes investing his/her energy; avoids commitment.
2. Gossip – hostile; critical of others; spreads lies; intends to harm others.
3. Manipulator – contemptuous; deceives others by inventing/distorting information; convinces others to shun those he/she wishes to harm.
4. Black Hole – hostile; unresponsive; territorial and unproductive.
5. Stonewaller – an obstructionist; challenges the legitimacy or need of another party for information or support.
6. Bully – hostile; attacks someone’s character or the quality of their work; threatens employees with dismissal or a similar fate if they do not comply with his/her demands.
7. Predator – irresponsible; feeds off of other’s insecurities; uses or destroys others to increase personal power; feels confident that he/she can hunt and destroy.

Recognize anyone? If you currently have employees in your company who exhibit any of the above traits ask the following questions.

1. Can they change, can they improve?
2. How destructive are these traits, to fellow employees, to customers, to company reputation, to stakeholders?
3. Can they be replaced by better talent, by Top Talent?
4. How quickly can they be removed?

One of the consistent themes that Murphy heard in his research was how difficult it was to fire someone, especially when the person doing the firing was responsible for the hiring. It is always difficult to admit a mistake was made. But when you consider the alternative and how much your talent-on-the-bubble is impacting your company’s productivity and profit, there is no choice.

Just remember the immortal words of The Donald, “You’re fired!”

Chances are that you or someone that you know has been impacted by the recent economic upheaval of the past few years. Companies have downsized, closed plants, relocated, moved operations off-shore and even outsourced or automated many jobs. These were themes that played out across the country and continue to have a ripple effect even in our business of talent acquisition and recruiting. The fact that in many cases numbers of employees were laid off at the same time gave some comfort to those being laid off, not my fault, it’s the economy.

When we speak to candidates that have had this experience the vast majority still express surprise that they were part of a group that was laid off. Not surprised that the lay off occurred, but that they were part of the group. We also talk to many candidates whose work history shows one or more instance of being passed over for promotion, being demoted or being asked to leave for lack of performance. They too express surprise that it happened to them. None of them saw any indication or noticed the signs of trouble or at least they are not willing to admit to it.

Granted, if a company decides to relocate its operation, decides to eliminate a line of business or simply goes out of business for whatever reason, an employee’s job performance or lack thereof did not make this happen. However, if an employee is laid off and his/her position still exists, that employee should have seen the lay off coming, could possibly have prevented it from happening, or at the very least, left before it did happen.

In his best selling book, Intellectual Capital, author Thomas Stewart offers seven questions that every employee should always be asking themselves no matter what position they hold in the company. Here are Stewart’s Seven Signs of Trouble.

1. Are you learning? If you can’t say what you have learned in the past six months, nor what you expect to learn in the next six months then you are in trouble. When there is nothing you can learn where you are, you’ve got to move on. If your job has become easy, someone will come in and do it for less.
2. If your job were open, would you get it? Benchmark your skills regularly. Research postings for jobs in your field, with your company’s competitors. What skills are required, what skills are desirable? Do you have them? If not get them.
3. Are you being milked? If your company is keeping you from broadening your skills and experience under the pretext that you are the only one who can do a certain type of job for the company, then you are being taken advantage of, being milked for your intellectual capital. If you are being held back from advancing with your company, begin looking elsewhere.
4. Do you know what you contribute? If you can’t give anyone a two minute summary of what you do and why it matters, chances are that your boss can’t either.
5. What would you do if your job disappeared tomorrow? If you can’t answer this question, you haven’t thought about the marketable skills that you have. More and more you have to sell yourself inside your company.
6. Are you having Fun? If your work isn’t fun then you won’t be up for new challenges. Get your heart into your work. Make it fun.
7. Are you worried about your job? If you are, you probably should be.

Did any of these questions click with you? We plan to use these questions in some form or other when we screen and interview our candidates for our clients. We will also encourage our candidates to continue to ask themselves these questions throughout their careers. We don’t want them to be surprised and run into trouble on their career highway.

Also watch out for that sign that says Slow Men At Work, you don’t want to be one of them.

Years ago I read a great cartoon that showed a dog owner talking to his dog. The cartoon was about what the owner was saying to the dog and what the dog actually heard. The dog had just made a mess of the owner’s kitchen and the owner is letting the dog have it. “Rover, how many time have I told you? The kitchen is not your play area. This is where I cook and it must be clean. Bad dog Rover, bad dog!”  This is what the dog heard, “Rover, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah? Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah Rover, blah blah!”

I thought of this cartoon recently during a conversation I was having with a friend who is a VP of Sales for a successful technology company in Austin, TX. I was asking him about his experience in sales and how he approaches his prospects, and what he does that makes him successful. He said that when he first started out in sales his approach to selling was not unlike every other salesman, cold call enough prospects, make your pitch, ask for the appointment, send product literature, make the appointment, demonstrate the features, functions and benefits of your product/service and go for the close. “I was successful, but it was purely a numbers game,” he said. “I knew that if I got in front of enough decision makers, I would close a certain number of deals, and make money for my company and myself. It was more about me and my company than it was about the customer and his/her problems.”

He went on to say that at some point in his career, he realized that he was no different from other successful salesmen and that his company and products/services although good, were not that much different from his competition. He could imagine that when he was talking to his prospects, they were not always hearing everything that he was saying. He sounded too much like every one else. His success had more to do with being at the right place at the right time with a solution that was acceptable and affordable to his prospects. There was no big differentiator.

At some point he decided to change, to approach each prospect with one goal in mind, to be Unforgettable. Since then he has achieved greater success with his current company, increased sales, increased profit margin and hired and trained a very successful sales force. But more importantly, each and every prospect and customer remembers him, he brings something to the relationship that no other sales person brings, he brings ideas.

Our conversation ended, much too soon and my friend was unwilling to give me the process that he goes through when he has an appointment with a decision maker. He is my friend, but he is also a successful salesperson who doesn’t want to reveal all of his secrets. I have an idea of what his process is and I think it would look something like the 10 Step Checklist for a C-level Appointment proposed by Barbara Geraghty in her best selling book, Visionary Selling.

Here is the check list.

1. Prepare, prepare, prepare – Can’t do enough of this. There is more information available on companies, decision makers, customers, competing products/services etc that should eliminate the use of the term “cold call”. This is also where the ideas that you can give to your prospects and customers come from.
2. Enter the meeting with the essential ingredient: self-confidence – Your preparation breeds self-confidence – you know your product/service, you know your company’s ability to deliver and implement the best solution for the client and you can demonstrate the value of your product/service to your customer.
3. Display your honor and respect – You are not there to waste time, to chit-chat, to inquire about the customer’s family, friends or fishing exploits. You are there to help solve a business problem and to demonstrate your product/service can solve that problem within a reasonable amount of time. Value your customer’s time. Honor his/her position in their company.
4. Ask pertinent, insightful questions, and Listen! – Listen for clues, listen for problems, listen for opportunities to frame or re-frame the best solution, listen for issues, and listen for the Pain. Listen for Yes!
5. Trust your instincts – Nothing happens in a sales call according to plan. The best that you can do is react to something that you heard form your customer. Don’t wait for the customer to ask for the contract (they never will) if you feel that the time is right to close, then close.
6. Communicate concisely and courageously – Remember that a wealth of information about your company, products/services, customers etc creates a poverty of attention. Be clear, concise and don’t be afraid to make bold statements about your product/service, your company, solutions but only if they are true and verifiable.
7. Present your most powerful idea – In most cases, the ideas that you present center around solving the customer’s problem with your products/services, but not always. This is where my friend in Austin makes his difference known. He often suggests ideas that have nothing to do with his products/services. He knows enough about what his company is capable of delivering and thus knows his company’s products/services have limitations. He also knows his competitors products/services, has done enough preparation and by asking the right questions and listening, also knows what the customer needs. It may not always be your product or service. But you will be Unforgettable.
8. If your ideas are not what the customer needs, keep asking questions – Sometimes your best ideas, best solutions, best alternatives may still not address you customer’s issues. In that case, time permitting; more questions should uncover more opportunities.
9. Make the close natural but scripted – Make sure that when you go for the close that you address all of the issues, questions, concerns and problems that you uncovered in the meeting and how your company and products/services satisfies and solves them. Make sure the ROI is front and center and in alignment with what the customer is willing to invest. Don’t wing the close, it is too important.
10. Play to win – Sounds like a cliché but it is true. By helping the customer find a solution to his/her problems, whether the solution is from your products/services or some other competitor, your customer wins. And either way you come out the bigger winner, you become Unforgettable.

So, when you have a conversation with your prospects or customers is it similar to the owner/dog conversation from the cartoon or is what you have to say so different that your customer hears every word? Are you Unforgettable?

As for me, I am going to take my dogs in to the vet to have there ears checked. I would hate to think that all that they hear when I speak to them is their names and a bunch of ‘blah blah blah blah”.

“Building a great team in business takes clear thinking, a strong strategy, and an understanding of the big picture. All these factors are necessary and important, but if you can’t assess candidates in the job interview, you’re not going to put that understanding into practical application, day-today, year-to-year. There is no more important business decision – not one – than who to hire.”–   Doug Hardy, Monster.com

You have done all the hard work. You have gotten a great deal of information about the position you are trying to fill. You know the requirements, the experience, the education and the personality of the ideal candidate. You have covered the compensation package and know that it is reasonable. If you are a 3^rd party recruiter you have cleared the fee. You have sourced, screened, selected and interviewed numerous candidates and presented a slate of qualified, interested and available candidates to the hiring manager. The interviews take place and none of your candidates are made an offer.

Sound familiar? This ever happened to you?

You then begin to question your work, your understanding of the position, your ability to recruit the right candidates for your client. Even the feedback from the hiring manager doesn’t quite mesh with what you knew about each candidate and the position. Something went wrong in the interview, and you had no control of that part of the hiring process.

The truth is that you have no idea how good the hiring managers, the decision makers are at interviewing. Most hiring managers dread the interview. They dread it because they have little or no training in how to effectively perform the task. And study after study has shown that most hiring decisions are made within the first two minutes of the interview.

And yet there is no more important business decision than who to hire.

In a book entitled “Boost Your Hiring IQ” author Carole Martin, the Interview Coach, offers up a simple 50 question test to rate your interviewing skills and help you see where you need to strengthen your skills and your ability to ask better questions.

Martin’s contention is that most candidates, especially those coming from recruiters, are much better prepared for the job interview than are the people conducting the interview.

Based on the type of information the interviewer is seeking, the test offers up three questions. The interviewer then picks what he/she considers to be the strongest question. The questions are then rated as strongest, mediocre, weakest and depending on which question was chosen the interviewer gets points, 5 points for the strongest, 3 points for the mediocre and 0 points for the weakest. Add up the points at the end of the IQ test and your score range gives your Hiring IQ.

Here is an example.

Learning why the applicant wants to work for your company you could ask;

1. What is it that interests you most about the position/company?
2. What attracted you to this particular job posting?
3. How would you compare this position to your current or last position?

The strongest question is __________

Everyone in a position to interview candidates should have an Interview IQ score and periodically retake the test and continue improving those interviewing skills.

Martin then offers up five rules to improve your hiring process. After all you could be a good interviewer with a good IQ score but unless you follow these five rules you will be just that, a good interviewer.

The five rules are:

1. Assess the job before the interview. What is the role of the job?
2. Identify the job’s “key factors” for success.
3. Prepare questions to ask during the interview.
4. Include all interviewers in the plan/process.
5. Objectively review the results and rate the candidate after the interview.

All of us in the recruiting and talent acquisition business have an opportunity to help our clients, our hiring managers get better at interviewing. The better they become at interviewing, more of our candidates will be hired and contribute to the success of the hiring company.

The questions that are never asked but should be asked at the very beginning of the engagement are,” How good are you at interviewing? What is your Interviewing IQ? Would you mind taking an Interviewing IQ test?” It is much better to get this information early in the engagement than to not get it at all and hope that all your hard work pays off. Yet, I wonder if any of us are confident enough to ask these questions. I for one intend to find out.

Now, what question did you feel was the strongest?  The strongest was C. Were you right? Then give yourself 5 points.

Finally someone has come out and said what we in the business of recruiting and talent acquisition have known all along, recruiting is hard. It is finding needles in haystacks. And we are always in search of the data behind the data, the metadata.

Think about what we do, day in and day out to help our clients hire the very best talent for their positions. We begin by sourcing for candidates using a number of channels, LinkedIn, job postings, internal databases, external resume/job boards, industry specific directories to name just a few in order to gather the first bit of data on our candidates. Then we review the resumes and screen for more data that helps us develop a smaller pool of candidates more closely aligned to the qualifications and requirements for the position. We may at this point conduct a phone screen/interview gathering more data behind the data that we have to create a smaller pool of better qualified candidates. We then either conduct a face to face interview, or present the candidates directly to the hiring manager to gather more data behind the data that we have. And at some point we may check references to gather more data.

All of this data gathering, this searching for the data behind the data should result in our client making an offer to one of our candidates, who will accept and become a great employee.

And yet with all of this data gathering much of what we do is based on our gut, on how we feel about that candidate, as Jobs said. In fact in a recent study of experienced management recruiters, the majority surveyed felt that better than 80% of hiring decisions were based on how the person(s) interviewing and selecting candidates felt about the candidates. Did the candidates make them “feel good”, was there good chemistry.

In his NYT best selling book, How to Land Your Dream Job, Jeffrey Fox lists the following things that will make decision makers feel good about hiring someone.

The candidate:

• Will fit in with the other employees well enough to neither be destructive nor self-destruct.
• Is technically competent or trainable.
• Answers questions directly, honestly, and concisely.
• Is affordable, is within the means of the organization.
• Shows genuine interest in the company and the job.
• Demonstrates having done homework on the company, and is knowledgeable about the issues facing the company.
• Values the purpose of the company and therefore values the purpose of the job.
• Is nice, well mannered and likeable.
• Has enthusiasm, pep, energy. Laughs.
• Is smart enough.
• Has an”I can do it. I can get it done. I will do it. No problem” attitude.
• Asks positively phrased questions that cause the interviewer to think and which engage the interviewer.
• Takes notes.
• Does not invade other people’s physical or social space.
• Sends a thank you note to each interviewer.

So if a candidate did and exhibited all of Fox’s suggestions would you hire him? Would your metadata search support your decision? Or would your gut cloud your decision.

One thing I know for sure and you don’t need to be a MAC person to say this, Steve Jobs was right, Recruiting is hard.

And even Bill Gates would agree.

In his groundbreaking book, Intellectual Capital, author Thomas Stewart writes “The management of talent, your human capital is part of an uncertain and complex endeavor that must deal with technology and competitors that won’t stand still, must formulate strategy and place multi-million dollar bets on the basis of highly imperfect information, and that adds to the mix the most intangible and least describable asset of all, plain old good business judgment.”

And we thought your job was easy! And maybe your boss did as well. Managing talent may be the most important and yet underappreciated job in any company. Rarely does a Talent Manager, HR leader or what ever title you use, have a seat at the table; rarely are they consulted on business strategy or rewarded proportionally for the success of the company. And yet most CEOs would say that “our people are our most important asset.”

The true leaders in Talent Management are all involved with establishing policy and implementing procedures for everything from sourcing, screening, selecting, on boarding, succession planning, retention, career advancement, training and when the occasion arises firing, downsizing and outplacement of the workforce. They are also directly involved in many cases in delivering the expected results of these processes, namely, top talent or A-Players.

So why the disconnect? Why is this critical role so underappreciated? The answers could be many depending on your point of view and your familiarity with the job requirement. Remember the old adage that in order to fully appreciate what a person does you need first to walk a mile or two in his/her shoes. Even if the shoes are bright red pumps in size eight and a half double D.

In my role as CEO of Q4B, I have had the pleasure of working with Talent Managers many of whom I would consider leaders in their field. I am also involved in growing and managing our company and managing our talent as well. I think this give me a unique perspective. My response to the question, why so underappreciated is that it is all about time, bandwidth and prioritizing.

If you are in a talent management position ask yourself the following questions.

1. Is your talent acquisition and retention process more reactive than proactive?
2. Can your internal recruiting engine source and screen high quality candidates consistently?
3. Is your internal process capable of reacting to a spike in hiring demand?
4. Do your customers (hiring managers) work with you as an equal partner to help the company succeed?
5. Do your bosses (C-level) consider what you do as strategic and critical to the company’s success and profitability?
6. Are your processes aligned with the goals of the company?
7. How much time do you and your recruiters spend on activity that is of low value to your customers (hiring managers and candidates)?
8. Do you agree that “our people are our most important asset” or would you say that your talent pipeline is your most important asset?
9. Do you wish you had more time to plan, analyze and improve your processes and deliverables?

Good talent management leaders, those who do have a seat at the table and who are appreciated by their company’s leadership team (C-level and board) have a keen understanding of their own capabilities, the capacity and bandwidth of their internal staff and are willing to bring in external resources in order to hire, promote and retain the best talent for their company. This willingness to utilize outside resources gives them the time they need to plan, analyze and improve those processes, thus making their contribution more valuable to the success of the company.

Good talent management leaders also have one other trait in common. It is that intangible and hard to describe asset that Stewart talks about, “plain old good business judgment.”

Do you have it?

“If you ignore the opportunity to lead, you risk turning into a ‘sheepwalker’ – someone who fights to protect the status quo at all costs, never asking if obedience is doing you or your organization any good.”  – Seth Godin, Tribes

There has been a good deal written recently about leadership, what it is and who exemplifies it. Much of the buzz has been generated by Steve Jobs’s decision to step down from the day to day running of Apple for undisclosed health reasons. If you wanted to place a picture next to the definition of leadership in the dictionary, Jobs’s would certainly be a popular choice. As one analyst recently said, “Jobs is Apple.”

But is leadership a quality that only a few can possess? Is leadership an activity that only a few can perform? The answer is actually No to both questions. Leadership is not a function of position or role that we play, being a manager does not necessarily mean that you are a leader. Just as being a leader does not necessarily mean that you are in a manager role.

Charlie Sheppard, President of Management Communications Systems and the developer of the widely successful training program, Leadership is a Choice, suggests that there a three basic ways that people become leaders and they are:

• Trait Theory – Some personality traits may lead some people naturally into leadership roles. Some traits make it easier to lead, but even those people “born with it” still have to choose to lead. Many “born with it” never make the choice.
• Great Events Theory – A crisis or important event may cause a person to rise to the occasion, which brings out extraordinary leadership qualities in an ordinary person. The challenge is that once the crisis or important event dissipates, so will the leadership competency. It is not sustainable because the leadership occurred not out of choice, but as a result of an external circumstance.
• Choice Theory – People choose to become leaders. People learn leadership skills. This is the most common way that people become leaders.

For those of us in the talent acquisition recruiting business we have the opportunity of working with leaders and people who choose to become leaders everyday. Many of the decision makers, business unit leaders, talent managers, business owners, HR Directors, C-level executives are leaders. Many of the candidates that we source, screen and select for our clients possess some leadership qualities and have chosen a leadership career path. A number of positions that we help our clients fill have “possesses leadership qualities” as criteria for hire.

So, what are those leadership qualities that leaders have and those who choose to become leaders would like to possess?

Jeffrey Fox, NYT best selling author, suggests five things that leaders should do to demonstrate leadership.

• Be Visible – Whether you are leading a team, a business unit, a department, a division or a company you need to be out front, leading the charge and others will follow. Don’t hunker down in your office reading month old reports.
• Know Your Customers – This means both internal and external. If your company sells product or services you, the leader need to meet your customers and understand what they want, what they are saying about your company, product or service. The same holds true for your internal customers. Make customer service your number one priority.
• Be Innovative – Don’t stand still. Look for new processes, products, services, markets, technologies that you, your group, department, division or company can either develop, produce, deliver, implement or enhance.
• Create a Winning Culture – Hire only “A-Players”. Get rid of all mediocre employees. Make sure that you and any one under you making a hiring decision understands what type of person you want to hire and what type of person you don’t want to hire. Don’t let the hiring process stop at the offer acceptance stage. Have a world class on-boarding process that attracts and keeps winners.
• Train and Support Future Leaders – Think Succession Planning, and plan to replace yourself. Foster an atmosphere of success, acknowledge effort, use failures as a learning experience, encourage risk taking, never assess blame. Lead.

Those of you who are leaders may already be doing what Fox suggests and certainly more could be added to the list of leadership qualities. This is just a sample. For those of you who would choose to become leaders, this list is a good place to start and to compare the qualities that you currently possess to identify where you need to improve. Remember leadership can be learned.

Maybe none of us will ever become another Steve Jobs, but as Seth Godin says in Tribes, “We need You to lead us.”

Want to be a leader? It is your choice.

hoop·la - /ˈhuplɑ/ noun . 1. bustling excitement or activity; commotion; hullabaloo; to-do. 2. sensational publicity; ballyhoo.

In a recent article written by John Roach for msnbc.com entitled “The revolution at work is here”, the suggestion is made that the promise of the dot.com internet era of the late ‘90s of how drastically the new technology would change where and how we work is now just being delivered.

Roach then goes on to interview Rick Hutley, VP of Global Innovation for Cisco Systems. In the interview, Hutley talks about how Cisco has implemented and encouraged the use of web, cloud, collaboration tools and new technology (most of it theirs) to create a different workspace or work environment and how much of an impact it has had on Cisco’s bottom line.

“There’s a degree of re-enacted hoopla,” Hutley acknowledged as he talked about the workspace revolution, “but it is fundamentally changing now, there is no question.”

Cisco has been able to realize a 40% increase in workspace utilization, they are doing more with less space, which translates into a $1.4 billion net benefit and includes $560 million in reduced travel expenses and a further $150 million from telecommuting.

Sounds impressive, yet you would expect a company like Cisco to be at the forefront of this workspace revolution. It is to a certain extent their technology that is leading the revolution. But what about non-technology companies, companies who just use technology to manage their business, are they part of this revolution? The answer can be found in the types of people that companies hire, people who have the right competencies to thrive in the new work environments.

Here is a short list of some of the key competencies that companies should look for in any candidate, whether your company is already embracing or is looking to embrace such things as collaborative work groups, virtual positions, telecommuting.

1.   Organization and Planning – Plans, organizes, schedules and budgets in an efficient, productive manner. Focuses on key priorities.

2.   Follow-through on commitments – Lives up to verbal and written agreements, regardless of personal cost.

3.   Proactivity – Acts without being told what to do. Brings new ideas to the company.

4.   Flexibility/Adaptability – Adjusts quickly to changing priorities and conditions. Copes effectively with complexity and change.

5.   Work Ethic – Possesses a strong willingness to hard and sometimes long hours to get the job done. Has a track record of working hard.

6.   Communication – Speaks and writes clearly and articulately without being overly verbose or talkative. Maintains this standard in all forms of written communication including e-mail.

7.   Teamwork – Reaches out to peers and cooperates with managers to establish an overall collaborative working relationship.

One of the reasons that it took so long for most companies to join the workspace revolution was not the fact that the technology wasn’t available. It was and to some extent still is a matter of trust, a matter of having the right people who could work well in the new work environment.

Our company, Q4B, has since its beginning been part of this revolution. We have offices in two cities, team members in locations away from those cities and take advantage of new technology to keep everyone connected. We also look for many if not all of the competencies listed above when we hire internally. We are small by comparison to Cisco, but we too have realized the cost benefits in working this way.

I know that there was a great deal of excitement, activity and commotion back in the early days of web technology, with all of us looking to quickly benefit form its application. It did not happen quickly. It is happening now and that is why in our company we are quietly celebrating with a degree of re-enacted hoopla.

Let the party continue!