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Is Seeing Really Believing?
Something I hear frequently from clients is, “I wish I had a day/week/month to see my candidates do the job. Then I would make fewer hiring mistakes.” It is, of course, an intriguing idea. We test drive cars before we buy them. Why not try out people before we...
Lost Communication and the Death of Process
The business world is both transient and stable. People and priorities change, but as long as the organization is in existence it has processes that continue on. When the information gets disseminated is becomes institutional knowledge. We often connect this with...
CEO Accountability…Really!
I could fill up this post with examples of CEOs that got raises when the performance of the company they were running got worse. But, that’s too depressing. Rather, here’s a story about Tim Cook and other Apple executives getting their pay cut because the company did...
Why Clarity in Family Succession Planning Matters
I have some family owned businesses as clients. They do have an extra critical dynamic which makes them different from other businesses. As one owner said to me when trying to make a difficult retain/fire decision about a family member, “If Pat goes and then works...
Learning to Manage
I cannot tell you how many times I have worked with a client who has told me some sort of story about how they promote from within, but have a problem with the supervisors and/or managers not being able to let go of wanting to do the technical work instead of managing...
Leadership, Strategy, and Championships
Like many other businesses, baseball has undergone a significant change in how it uses data to evaluate talent (see Moneyball). As with all paradigm changes, this has encountered a fair amount of resistance, but now every team in the league uses some form of...
What Implicit Bias Looks Like
The idea of implicit bias has been making its way into the business vernacular. It involves the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. As you probably gathered from the definition, implicit bias is...
The Challenge in Finding Good Performance Data
In validating tests, getting a hold of good individual performance data is key. But, it is also one of the more difficult parts of the process to get right. Intuitively, we all think we can judge performance well (sort of like we all think we are good interviewers). ...
The Wells Fargo Avalanche
My summer posting hiatus is almost up. In the meantime, here's a good read: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/wells-fargos-avalanche-dennis-adsit?trk=mp-author-card Dennis beat me to the punch here. 5,300 people (at least) doing something wrong is not some individual...
How Far Will You Go to Emphasize a Culture of Customer Service?
I am a regular listener to the podcast of This American Life. Recently, they had a segment on customer satisfaction and L.L. Bean’s extreme version interpreting it (“Our products are guaranteed to give 100% satisfaction in every way. Return anything purchased from us...
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