Your sales force—bet they’re fairly important to you, right? 

I understand how you feel because in my work, the sales force is very important to me, as well. 

When leading a sales force, your objective is to see them become sales champions, which involves topgrading. If you are unfamiliar with the term, ‘topgrading,’ my previous HRTools.com Insight, “Recruit and Develop Sales Champions: Topgrading Your Sales Force” covers it. 

Next, as referenced in the Insight mentioned above, I will review the term, ‘spot and remove,’ as it applies to leading a sales force.    

What do you do when faced with underperforming or ‘C’ level sales performers, who can end up hurting everyone else within the organization, and possibly hurting that which you’ve worked so hard to build? 

It’s painful. And everyone feels it. When you are faced with ‘C’ level sales performers, who simply do not possess the tools to do the job—for the sake of everyone—you may have to ‘spot and remove’ those performers. 

Now, I’m not talking about those ‘B’ level performers who, with some development, coaching and mentoring, have the potential to move up to an ‘A’ performance level. In contrast, you know it when you see it: those performers who will never rise above a ‘C’ level. What’s even more problematic, unfortunately, those poor performers can also drag down everyone else. 

No business can afford to allow this to happen, especially in these times. Instead, face it; you’ve made a mistake and action is required. You may have to end up spotting and removing those hiring mistakes. What’s more, you will want to figure out what went wrong and correct it. Because if you don’t, you stand the chance of losing ground on all the positives that you’ve worked so hard to achieve. 

So spotting and removing works hand-in-hand with topgrading your sales force. By spotting and removing those hiring mistakes as quickly as possible, you can avoid putting yourself in an even more frustrating position—where ultimately you may have to eliminate the bottom 20 percent of your sales force. Instead, you want to put yourself in the position of seeing that your entire sales team is driving at 100 percent. 

Perhaps I can even help you learn from one of my battlefield mistakes. I once made the mistake of putting a high producer into a management position when he didn’t belong there. It was a premature decision, and I was looking to bridge a gap. 

This multimillion-dollar-a-year performer ended up struggling for a year. He almost went into a tailspin; and only after extensive coaching and mentoring, did he work his way out of it and into performing well as a manager. Luckily we had the resources to work with him, but it was painful and it was a tall order. 

Here are my suggestions for avoiding such painful experiences:

1. Schedule multiple interviews, which will include taking multiple steps, as you develop your prescreening and selection processes.
2. Utilize professionally developed, scientifically based applicant assessment tools. These tools will help you objectively compare data, which is based on the results from those applying for your sales positions. For example, those positions can include solution selling, tangible selling, or consultative-based, etc. sales positions. You will want to be able to objectively compare and evaluate the data from your applicant-pool assessments.
3. Prepare to use the same approach, as described in number two above, when you’re developing training programs for your sales force. After they are hired, and they are onboard—and you’re looking to move people around or promote them—you will want to continue utilizing appropriately designed assessment tools.  
4. Develop metrics. These indicators will help you measure what is working versus what is not working. Why is ‘such and such’ working or why isn’t it working? Since you’re dealing with people, you will always have someone who isn’t working out for some reason. And you want to be able to look back at metric indicators and figure out why. 

In closing out this discussion, it’s very important more than ever right now to be careful when making your hiring decisions. Because of these tough economic times, you may be seeing some fairly desperate people. 

Understandably, most job seekers are trying hard to sell themselves, so it’s critical that you get the right people into the right jobs. If you don’t, three months from now, you could be faced with even bigger problems. If you hire the wrong person, it can be a problem for the entire organization, and no one can afford that right now.

Some relatively new terms are floating around sales performance circles. One is ‘top grading’ and the other is ‘spot-removing.’ 

In order to shed some light on their relevance and significance, I’ll break them both down in separate Insights. This Insight focuses on ‘top grading,’ which is a term normally applied to an organization’s sales force. 

Top grading serves to connect an organization with high performing sales people, and then develop them, as they are the ones who keep moving those performance bars higher.

What business wouldn’t want to recruit, hire and train top-tier talent for its sales teams? Of course, top grading your sales force is important during all business cycles. But, especially in this down economy, we all greatly appreciate those high performers who can and do make all the difference. All organizations need world-class sales performers, particularly now. 

We can also greatly appreciate that a sales position is the single most difficult position within any organization. Also, in terms of succession planning and building out your sales teams, you want the highest possible performing team in place. 

So how do you go about figuring that out? First, you have got to get some ‘A’ sales players, and then you will always have your ‘Bs.’ Given that, you need a process and a plan to get those people moving forward. You want your ‘As’ to move forward to ‘A+’ positions; and you want your ‘Bs’ to move forward to those ‘B+’ positions; and you want the ‘B+s’ to move to the ‘A’ positions, and so on. 

Not only that, you will find that your ‘A+s’ are the ones who will attract other high achievers, and they will also help you manage peers and help you avoid hiring the ‘C’ players, who most likely will not become high performers.   

That’s it. The above represents your classic model. It actually hasn’t changed much in 40 to 50 years. But now it’s got that label, ‘top grading.’ Businesses have always looked at their sales force planning processes that way, but they may not have consciously realized it, as they do today. 

Again, this strategy represents a very critical one, especially during this very down economy period. As you can understand, organizations cannot afford to make even one poor hiring decision. You could, literally, be one hire away from pulling your organization way ahead of a tidal wave or the chopping block. These days, something can happen that was not anticipated, and most organizations cannot afford to just turn over people, mostly because they don’t have the safety net anymore. 

Businesses expect a certain and acceptable rate of turnover within a sales force. The entire process is extremely difficult, and not everyone is cut out for those types of positions that are constantly driving sales and revenues. You have your great hires and, then again, you have some sales people who can slow down everything that you have worked hard to achieve. 

So your objective with top grading is to fine-tune the recruiting/hiring process so that:   

1. You are only hiring top performers for your sales force;
2. You are not hiring poor performers; and
3. You know how to quickly weed out poor performers before they do any damage. 

As a closing note for this Insight, I want to add that it’s not always about hiring the wrong person. It’s interesting, too, as admittedly I’ve even fallen into this trap myself. You successfully coach and develop (with some possible mentoring, as well) a sales person to that ‘A’ performance level. And, ideally, this is the result you’re looking for with a top grading approach. 

Next, however, we can all have a tendency to move into what I describe as the “player-coach syndrome.” This happens when you take your best player and you start rationalizing that he/she, too, would be a great coach. 

So, guess what can happen next? You took a ‘C’ player and top graded him/her to a level ‘A’ player; then you put this individual into a management role, which all too often can end up to be a failing arrangement for everyone. As you can see, then, faulty thinking can cause poor decisions to be made, which can end up with people failing at many levels. And no one, especially a formerly top performing sales person, wants to admit failure. 

Unfortunately, I see the above play out almost more than a poor hiring decision, so perhaps you can take some valuable lessons from the field with this example!

A team of disengaged, disenfranchised and unproductive employees can be challenging to any business leader. If left ignored or unchallenged, employees like this can eventually turn the workplace into a toxic environment. 

Earlier in my career, I realized that most working relationships can show marked improvements when people practice thinking before speaking. I’ll share an experience to help illustrate.    

A few years ago, I led a team of 12 managers. This team included a diverse group of individuals. I found myself repeating to them, “Row the boat in the same direction.” About 20 percent of these team members continually wanted to use tennis rackets as rowing oars, figuratively speaking of course. So my challenge was to get them collectively rowing toward the ideal: a collaborative team environment. Plain and simple, they were not behaving as a healthy functioning team. 

So, here follows how I handled the situation. Of course, I wanted to lead them toward becoming a high performance team. I started out by figuring out how to communicate with those 20 percent referenced above. I had to seriously ‘crack the code’ with them. I had to think really hard and it took a lot of practice. In other words, I had to practice thinking before speaking. 

Looking back, interestingly enough, that strategy made all the difference. We needed to find some common ground, so I set out to tap into what was really important to each one of them. Once I cracked that code, I was in a better position to lead the team. So as I worked to follow these two basic steps below, 12 managers began developing a foundation of mutual understanding and team rapport:   

1. Acknowledging, in an individual sense, what was important to each one of them.
2. Engaging them in personal conversations or letting them know I was interested in them on a personal level. I dropped them personal notes or simply asked how their weekend was; whatever worked to engage them in conversations. For instance, “How was that baseball game this weekend?” 

As I figured this out, and stepped more into their worlds, the team gathered momentum and got up to speed on a business level. As it turned out, everyone got together and worked to support and help these individuals along. It worked, and the team was transformed by 100 percent. In fact, after spending six fiscal periods together, we were the top performing team in our organization. So, we went from being an average-performing team to one that no one could touch. That success took place because we were all rowing 100 percent in the same direction. 

As a final note, especially now during these dire economic times, it is very important to remember communication nuances. Many people today are feeling uneasy and, as they say, ready for that next shoe to drop. Employees are worried. Vendors are wondering, “Are we going to have to raise prices?” Other businesses are thinking, “Are we going to have to restructure?” Or, “Are we going to keep your business?” Some business strategists might be thinking, “Are we going to have to renegotiate our contracts?” As we know, invariably, these issues have a cascading effect across the board, affecting all stakeholders. 

These are very good times to practice thinking before speaking.

“The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.”

                                                                                                            ---Mark Twain 

Have you heard the saying, “Sometimes, it’s best to count to ten before you speak?” 

I further say to those in the business of leading people or supervising employees: I highly recommend that you install a filtering device of “think before you speak” into your brain. If such a permanent implant were possible, I would wager that business leaders would realize major strides in how well others respond to them. 

If you think about it, as a best practice, this strategy cuts across human performance, company performance, customer performance and, basically, all performance areas of an organization. If we take just one simple statement, for instance, made in haste or without forethought; this one simple, regrettable statement can take you back-peddling, explaining and apologizing—to any number of groups—including employees, clients, vendors, stakeholders, peers, etc. 

Personally, I work very hard to praise others with whom I come in contact. I also strive to listen two-thirds of the time, and, at the most, speak one-third of the time. Experience has shown me that it works better when I listen more than I talk. Listening also helps me become better aware of what might be coming. 

If you’re someone who is working to overcome the tendency to speak before thinking, I’ll share one of my secrets. I wish that I would have grasped sooner the awareness that everyone processes communication differently. Because of this, I find that it’s very helpful to take the time to know and better understand my audience. When those opportunities are not present, however, those are the times that I doubly apply the above-mentioned filtering device. 

This approach is also somewhat self-serving, because I find that it saves valuable time and energy for us busy managers. As you may know, recovering from damaging communications can end up costing a lot in terms of redundancies and unproductive time. When we’re operating in damage-control mode, we also end up working overtime to rebuild the trust, cooperation and credibility that we lost in the process. 

What do I do in order to practice this concept of thinking before I speak? Here are a few practical tips that you might find helpful: 

1. Practice, practice, practice. Think about delivery and how you are processing it. How do you apply the filter within your communication skills?
2. Perform a self appraisal. Put the mirror in front of you, so to speak, and ask yourself, “Do I really think that conversation went as well as it could have?” No one is perfect, and no one should expect perfection of someone—and if you do, then that’s an entirely different topic to discuss. The point of self-appraisal, meanwhile, is to try and continuously improve and tweak that ‘filter’ a bit.
3. Avoid using “You should do this,” and “You should do that,” type of statements when preparing to speak with someone. When this happens, it’s as though you are pointing a finger at someone and telling that person what he/she needs to do. It’s very autocratic and dictatorial, and that is how those statements are interpreted. That type of tone is rarely well received.
4. Use “I” statements as much as possible. I believe this is a critical point and technique to use, especially when managing and coaching employees and, likewise, you can find it valuable just in general communication with others. A manager’s delivery is normally more effective when he/she says, “Here is what I have experienced in the past,” or “This is how I would approach this situation.” This approach helps you turn it around on yourself, and allows you to reference your experiences to communicate and influence the direction you want others to go. 

As a closing note, I have always found it worthwhile to remember my goals in management, and how developing and tweaking my communication skills with others should work in concert with those goals. Thinking before I speak rarely fails me when I am striving to develop and maintain solid business relationships.

Are your employees giving it, and you, their best? 

In another HRTools.com Insight, I described how personal coaches help drive employee performances to peak levels. We see evidence of how well this approach works in the professional sports world, for example, with player coaches who drive the performances of million-dollar, world-class athletes. 

As Ara Parasheghian, former college football coach, most notably for the University of Notre Dame, said, “A good coach will make his players see what they can be rather than what they are.” 

Personal coaches take on significant responsibilities for other human beings. Therefore, it is important that coaches-to-be participate in a well developed training program. Here are some points you will want to consider when developing such a program: 

1. To begin with, you will want to establish a formalized process.
2. Determine your baseline. Get everyone involved and determine their views. What do they think a training program is? Was it effective for them? What does coaching mean to them? What parts of any previous coaching experiences were successful? What preconceived notions do they have about a coaching program?
3. Develop a personal coaching training program that is completely separate from a regular training program. This point is important if you want this training program to be successful, and if you want to ensure that you get a return on your investment.
4. Make it transparent. If a problem surfaces or if participants get off track and adjustments are required—it’s similar to any change in management—you will need collaborators and team leaders. These individuals are the evangelists who drive this new program. They are the ones who can be very transparent and say, “It’s working here, or it is not working there, so we need to make some tweaks.”
5. Keep in mind that coached employees are emotionally engaged and invested. If they don’t get anything back from the coaching program, invariably they will become frustrated. There needs to be 360-degree communication. Once you begin a coaching session, it’s essential that feedback is given right away and that no one is left hanging. If employees feel left hanging or forgotten about, you will find that sort of outcome is probably the quickest way to lower your employees’ level of enthusiasm about working for your company.
6. Outline your steps and include an action plan. Detail how the coached employee will be moved from his or her current place to another place. Be pragmatic and systematic. Decide how you will approach the plan and how the communication will work with the coached employee. You want to make sure you are communicating effectively, so employees don’t later feel that the coach was being unfair or inaccurate. Again, that 360-degree communication flow is important. 

A formalized training program can serve employers in various ways. For instance, I once worked with a struggling, family-owned business that finally admitted, as Parasheghian’s quote implies, “We need to take a step back and evaluate where we are versus where we can be, considering the skill sets and talents we have.” In other words, they needed to remove the ‘halo effect’ from that organization where everyone seemed perfect and no one wanted to step on any toes. 

Looking back now—stepping back was a tough call to make, on their part. 

So this family-owned business participated in an assessment in order to figure out who was good at doing what—and who was not good at doing what they were trying to do—and we began developing a formalized plan. 

This is exactly what they needed to do, and I am certain that it all worked out primarily because the company’s founder was willing to take a step back and say, “You know what? I am committed to making this plan work. I want to grow this company, and I know that we have to go through this process. So I am willing to look into this realistic mirror that you’re holding in front of me and figure out where we need to go from here.” 

It was a daunting task, but through a well developed personal coaching training program, they turned it into an opportunity to move from a struggling position to a more successful place.

Effective coaches keep ladder climbers from falling off the steps.

Whether or not you follow professional sports, you probably know—even at that level—  player coaches are responsible for driving the performances of million-dollar, world-class athletes. 

In the business world, personal coaches help drive employee performances to peak levels, as well. Well-coached employees know better how to prevail at office politics, excel in all communication arenas and yes, even achieve greater successes in the face of challenging bosses.  

While coaching and mentoring utilize distinctively different approaches, as explained in my previous HRTools.com Insights, effective coaching does incorporate some mentoring aspects. Those aspects include working with employees to: 

• help them take a better look at themselves and
• influence them to examine how they interact with other employees, their subordinates, their boss, their manager, etc. 

In other words, a personal business coach will hold up a mirror so employees can figure out their true reflections. 

As you can imagine, business, or personal, coaching is a huge responsibility and employers will want to avoid making mistakes. I’ll share one commonly made mistake. 

Some organizations might blend the roles of training, coaching and mentoring and assign one person to handle all three. These three areas require distinctly different techniques. Expecting one individual to combine all these roles and apply them to one single employee is a mistake. Also, it is vitally important that organizations have coaches who have acquired the proper skill sets, backgrounds and experiences before they are assigned this responsibility. 

Here is an example to help illustrate my point. You may have someone who is training an employee, and this trainer is someone who has done this job for a long time. So you charge this employee, who has 15 years experience doing ‘x, y and z,’ to help the trainee by walking through each specific step of the task. In other words, this trainer is supposed to show the trainee how to complete the task in order to be a high performer. 

The above represents an effective strategy, but also is where the differences begin. An ability to train someone does not mean that this individual also has the ability to coach an employee. For instance, if an employee has an issue communicating with his/her boss, it will take someone with specific skills and the background to effectively coach an employee and help him/her remedy this situation. A personal business coach will know how to approach and diagnose the issue and help the employee work through it. On the other hand, a trainer may not necessarily know what a coach has been trained to recognize—or know what areas specifically need attention. For instance, a strained boss and employee relationship may need to be encouraged to follow the process of re-engagement, which can be achieved through masterful coaching techniques. 

While it may seem as though personal business coaching is therapeutic, it is more about achieving results. If a boss and an employee are facing ‘issues,’ a coach’s job is to help influence that relationship so that the players can achieve higher productivity and score winning points for the organization.

Leaders with the power to influence and teach can skillfully improve performance.  

Everyone has probably heard the expression, “She (or he) knows how to bring out the best in people.” 

Business leaders involved in coaching and mentoring ideally should have that objective as their primary goal. After talking with hundreds of clients, I understand that performance improvement is a major concern among employers. 

If you read my previous Insight titled, “Everyone Wins! Coach and Mentor Employees to Higher Performances,” you learned why leadership training is recommended and how it significantly enhances both coaching and mentoring skills. 

That said, it’s important to understand that, technically speaking, coaching and mentoring are not the same. Later, I’ll explain the downside of mixing up these two roles and how doing so ultimately ends up sending mixed messages. 

OK, let’s review the components of both—coaching and mentoring—so you can compare and contrast, as a way to help you assess your needs and make your planning decisions. 

Mentoring

• Builds upon a one-on-one relationship
• Tends to take on much more of a personal involvement
• Takes on a very positive and no-pressure tone
• Seeks to advance the mentee forward personally 
• Serves as a knowledge source
• Engages in a neutral way, usually with no work or professionally related agenda 

Coaching

• Builds upon a professional relationship
• Lasers in on tasks and performance (task-driven and task-oriented)
• Works in concert with company or organizational goals
• Implies an authoritative role and involves work-related expectations
• Engages the coached in supporting the team or unit direction and vision 

Words of caution: It is very important that when developing mentoring and coaching relationships that you not mix up these components or objectives into one bucket, so to speak. 

For example, if you are mentoring someone about their career, you don’t want to get into a position where you are throwing in some coaching-performance issues. For a mentoring relationship to work, and to be effective for both people, it’s critical that it is an open and honest, 360-degree type dialogue. Otherwise, you end up with a heap of mixed messages all over the place, and the goals get intertwined. 

Basically, mentoring is more about influence and is power-free; whereas, coaching is more about job performance and is normally based on someone having authority in the relationship. 

Since your coaching and mentoring missions and objectives are completely different, you will need to make a clear distinction between the two types of relationships. So your strategies for carrying out each type of program will be completely different. 

Coaching and mentoring have great potential for improving performance in the workplace. It’s important to recognize the distinct differences and objectives of each, however, in order to avoid canceling out any advantages you’re striving to gain. Again, you will want to keep in mind that both coaching and mentoring carry great responsibilities, requiring high levels of leadership skills and abilities, so training is always advisable.

“It's going to be a process with this team…So we're not going to see a finished product for a while.”

                                                                                 ------Phil Jackson 

Whether you oversee a professional sports team, or any other team, you are in the business of performance management. 

Some observers might think that managers should coach the weak and mentor the strong. I disagree with that statement, and I’ll explain why. 

The stakes are high, and basically managers want employees to help them succeed. Although the goals are the same, overall employee-development practices overlap. Since your goals are to increase employee productivity and improve performance, you will coach performing employees as an integral part of the mentoring process. 

Give the best your best attention, and don’t give up on the underperformers. 

Generally managers and supervisors perform a variety of roles, one of which is employee development. The responsibility for developing performing employees can take many forms, and it is a process. From the very start, then, you would want to see managers and supervisors developing one-on-one coaching and mentoring relationships with their performing employees.  

At the other end of the employee-performance scale are the underperforming employees. As another form of development, managers will want to counsel these employees. This technique is part of the coaching process, and your managers should know when and how to counsel underperforming workers. So ideally, these coaching and counseling techniques work in concert with each other. 

While it may seem as though these delineations are mere nuances or parsing of words, it’s important that managers be clear in their own minds how these various techniques take form in the workplace. The semantics represent technical distinctions. It’s helpful to understand these differences in order to minimize confusion and realize the full benefits of the employee-development processes. 

Ultimately, again, you have your performing employees—who hopefully make up the majority of your workforce—and when they are the benefactors of a good employee-mentoring program, the organization and the employees are well-rewarded.

Then you have your underperformers—who hopefully make up the minority of your workforce—and when they are the benefactors of a good employee-coaching program, the organization and the employees are also well-rewarded. 

Leadership needs to ensure that managers are developed to serve as coaches and mentors. 

Coaching and mentoring employees is a huge responsibility. Leadership should make sure those managers and supervisors who serve in coaching and mentoring roles receive proper training. Not everyone is equipped with the natural instincts to perform as an effective coach or mentor. 

Effective coaching requires specific skills; it is a learning technique, one that takes development. While everyone in the organization may generally understand coaching as a concept, this understanding doesn’t mean that they automatically know how to coach employees.   

For example, you may have an IT manager who supervises a number of employees. This manager probably has a lot more tenure, is more experienced and possesses a higher skill level. While this individual has moved up in their career, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they instinctively know how to coach other employees, although they may know how to mentor them. 

So coaching and mentoring helps leverage your managers’ experiences and accelerates employee learning and development. If performance management is skillfully executed, your employees and business will significantly benefit in rewarding ways. 

With this coaching and mentoring foundation set, I will review the employee development process in more depth in future Insights.

Picture this: You’re hosting a marathon event, the long-distance, foot-race kind of event that covers 26 miles. You’re recruiting for experienced and non-experienced runners, along with organizers, volunteers, entertainers, cheerleaders, etc.—you need talented and skillful people to help you pull off a successful event. Now can you imagine retaining all these people without establishing the starting position for the race, the outlay of the running course and where the finish line will be?

Successful marathon-event organizers obviously plan ahead and communicate countless details. Can you imagine the chaos if organizers of the Boston Marathon or New York City Marathon failed to anticipate what it takes to lead and manage over 40,000 people including runners, spectators, volunteers and other participants? To attract world-class runners annually, they anticipate what runners need to perform and they prepare way in advance for what the public expects.

Even organizers of smaller, lesser-known marathons must instill confidence that each and every running step of their races are accounted for including the starting, middle and finish points. In order to achieve their goals, the successful organizers apply recruitment strategies similar to employee recruitment strategies that successful business organizers use.

Taking it from the running streets of Boston and New York City to the main streets of America’s businesses…
An employee recruitment strategy serves as a laser for attracting and retaining star performers. Star performers are more apt to successfully ‘run the right course’ for your business because you plotted it out ahead of time. This is why successful employers take advantage of employee recruitment strategies—to ensure they have the right people in the right jobs. This is important, because the people you add to your team(s) are the purveyors or ambassadors for you and your organization. They are the ones who will represent your company culture, and they are the ones who will take care of your customers or clients.

I’ve seen the unintended consequences of what happens when employers inadvertently hire mismatches for jobs. Unfortunately these employers end up cleaning up messes, making apologies and losing out on revenues. It happens all too often: A new hire is a great person, yet performs unsuccessfully in a role that does not match their talents, skills or passions. For instance, you may have someone with a “sales personality” assigned to a customer service role. This sales-personality type may be somewhat overzealous, and doesn’t listen well. This can be a problem because although this person is a fine individual, they are not the right person for this particular job.

To avoid such unintended consequences, here are a few tips and pointers…
Adding new employees to your organization is a major investment. First, you want to define the position, which may require a job description. These tasks aren’t simply a luxury for a big or larger company. All employers should diligently do their research in order to leverage efficiencies. In effect, you want to create a very straight-forward career path for this position. So define opportunities and refine job goals.

When I speak to small or medium-sized businesses, they typically tell me that they do not have the resources to do this kind of research. My response is, “If you’re going to add people to your company, you’ve got to find the resources to do that first.”

Again, adding employees is an investment so it should have its own line item. The good news is—it can be done inexpensively. For instance, software programs are available to help you do that. There are even state-run institutions of higher learning, such as technical centers, that can help you do that. Then, there are local and national human resource associations; and, of course, if you’re a client of a professional employer organization (PEO), you have highly knowledgeable and certified professionals and resources available to you.

Your business can reap many rewards or benefits from having a comprehensive employee recruitment strategy, as it will help you:     

1. Attract the right people with the right skills, experiences, talents, etc.
2. Hire the right people for the right jobs.
3. Reduce employee turnover costs, which also reduces service disruptions
4. Maintain a consistent process that helps minimize liability.
5. Find time for coaching engaged and productive employees (instead of time spent on finding and interviewing applicants to replace employees lost to high turnover rates).
6. Strengthen your foundation for sustaining high employee morale, which is especially important since employees drive desired business outcomes.
7. Provide a mechanism for identifying future talent needs.

The ebb and flow of a business can be as difficult and challenging as running or organizing a marathon race. Employee recruitment strategies can help employers stay competitive for the tough races ahead.

Bryan Wempen is Manager of Strategic Alliances for PeopleClues. During the past 15 years, Bryan has become a nationally respected authority on strategic staffing operations.

Imagine the world without Post-it Notes.

According to a 3M Company Web site page, "The Whole Story" describes how the organization’s culture fostered the development of Post-it Notes. Today, almost 30 years later, this product is sold and used around the world and was developed through 3M’s "bootlegging" policy, which encourages technical employees to spend at least 15 percent of their time on projects of their own choosing.

Why after all these years do you suppose 3M continues this policy? Because as this 3M product and other world-changing innovations demonstrate: An organization can be well rewarded by mandating out-of-bounds thinking, as discussed in my previous Insight.

How to get started.

Mandating and managing out-of-bounds thinking almost sounds counterintuitive. Nonetheless, a business can take steps to harness the power of entrepreneurial ideas. For starters, a business can:

1. implement collaborative meetings or sessions;
2. involve entire teams, including those from the top to the bottom;
3. give every employee a voice; and
4. incentivize and reward innovative ideas that are implemented.

I know of many companies that achieve a higher success rate when they apply this strategy. Sometimes certain employee voices, especially the meek, need to be louder and heard from more often. If invited to or allowed to speak up, even the "under-spoken" can share an idea that can save you millions of dollars. On the other hand, your top-level managers, or more vocal leaders, can fall short when it comes to innovative ideas, because they’re too close to the business.

I'll give you an example.

As a small business owner, let’s suppose you become aware of a shipping issue where the shipping expenses are not working for you. At the end of the day, you find out that packages are not making their way to the discount-rating categories, effectively robbing you of cost-savings from optimal-shipping options. Worse yet, you discover you are paying extra shipping charges every day that end up costing you an extra $25,000 a year.

Because you are busy running your business, you don’t have time to ask every single employee in the supply chain for their suggestions. You also want to avoid unnecessary down-time by interrupting individual employees working to assemble, package, ship, etc. your products.

All totaled, you are losing out on cost-saving opportunities. There is a high likelihood that one or more of your employees would have ideas that could resolve your problems. Someone who, if given the opportunity, could say, "If we did it this way, then maybe we could save some money."

In hindsight, if you had taken steps to harness entrepreneurial thinking in a collaborative way, you would have a process in place. 

A collaborative process would have already fostered an engaged workforce culture with employees committed to innovative thinking. In effect, these employees would be constantly on the prowl looking for and collaborating on innovative and fresh ideas and solutions. This culture would be already flourishing because you have been encouraging and rewarding employees.

So in order for entrepreneurial ideas to flourish, employers cannot be timid about allowing out-of-bounds thinking—there should be no walls or constraints. Not only that, leaders should encourage and nourish creativity and innovative thinking. This type of entrepreneurial culture requires a supportive and positive leadership style. The results are amazing; I know it, because I’ve seen it happen.

Bryan Wempen is Manager of Strategic Alliances for PeopleClues. During the past 15 years, Bryan has become a nationally respected authority on strategic staffing operations.

‘Why Didn’t I Think of That?’ 

I consider entrepreneurs, or those walking around with an entrepreneurial spirit, as an organization’s most valuable assets. In my experience, I have seen how proactive and creative thinkers benefit organizations and their stakeholders. These are the everyday people who challenge or push against conventional or stale business ideologies, which can often stymie an organization. These proactive idea producers are no longer considered as those who only operate separately and apart from an organization. In fact, some employers require that their employees come up with creative and innovative ideas.

What Happens with Everyday Entrepreneurs?

This is important because stale or outdated ways of doing business can rob an organization’s potential to take care of its clients. People with a stake in the company—and the ones who got them there or who are there to take them to a higher level—significantly benefit when that entrepreneurial spirit is not confined.

This point leads us to the question: What happens with ‘everyday’ entrepreneurs?  Some people are naturally driven to come up with new ideas that challenge and improve upon 10-year-old ways (or sometimes even longer time periods) of doing things. When everyday entrepreneurs are allowed the latitude to think creatively and develop innovative ideas, we usually see positive and dynamic domino effects.

Moreover, we can realize nearly endless possibilities of these positive domino effects. Entrepreneurs are known to come up with ways and ideas for creating new potential outcomes, whether they are business or personal outcomes. These ideas are the ones that elicit responses such as “I hadn’t really thought about doing it that way before.”

This point leads us to a couple more questions: (1) How can an organization harness this creativity? (2) How can an organization avoid making mistakes when handling their entrepreneurial ideas? 

Progressive Organizations Succeed by Breaking Down Walls

Unfortunately ‘Corporate America’ tends to put everyone in a box. This box is really a part of the ‘50s, ‘60s and ‘70s management-style approaches.

Today’s rapidly changing business environment thrives on a more progressive thought-mapping approach. Normally business thoughts tend to heavily lean toward thinking, ‘We need to make more money.’ Of course that is true, but we need innovative thinking, too. For instance, ‘How do we really create something amazing for clients? Let’s break down the walls, collaborate and do something amazing.’

Imagine This: The 80-20 Approach

So I believe that businesses need to foster a passion for creativity. Employers should encourage everyone in an organization to concentrate on developing and building upon good ideas. Imagine, if we executed our business game plan 80 percent of the time without fail, then encouraged, challenged and compensated to innovate, innovate, and innovate the remaining 20 percent of the time for both our clients and organization.

Get Ahead of the Game, Make Everyday Entrepreneurial Thinking Mandatory

To breathe new life into your organization, you can strategically plan to mandate the power of this potential force. For one, employers can require that teams or individual employees come up with creative and innovative ideas.

In fact, Google, the organization responsible for the internationally known Internet search-engine service, is a prime example of making innovative thinking a company mandate. Everyone in that organization is required to come up with a certain number of new ideas. It is a part of employee performance reviews, and nothing is considered out of bounds. It makes for a very innovative and engaging culture.  

In my next HRTools Insight, we will review steps for harnessing the power of entrepreneurial ideas, so start planning to get ahead of the game.

Bryan Wempen is Manager of Strategic Alliances for PeopleClues. During the past 15 years, Bryan has become a nationally respected authority on strategic staffing operations.