Do Your Employees Trust You?

In numerous studies, surveys, and research, employees indicate over and over that trusting their immediate supervisor is one of the most important elements of their job satisfaction.

• Can you honestly say that your direct reports trust you? Do their direct reports trust them?
• How do you know?
• Do you cross your fingers hoping they trust you?
• Have you conducted any anonymous surveys recently? Hired a coach to ask a few tough questions? Solicited feedback from your staff?

Probably NOT.

Implications of a lack of TRUST

The number one reason employees decide to leave their jobs is due to a lack of opportunity. More on this subject in another blog post. The second most common reason is loss of respect for their immediate supervisor/boss. AND there is no faster way to lose respect than the destruction of trust.

How many of the employees in your company have one foot out the door, are actively searching the job boards, or would leave immediately for an appropriate job at a lateral level just to get away from your company?

If general trends hold true for your company, probably about 50% of your staff are open to a better opportunity – they’re trying to see if the grass is greener somewhere else. Of this 50%, what percentage got to the point of seeking greener pastures because they lost respect for their boss — due to no longer trusting that individual?

6 Components of a Trusting Relationship

Let’s delve a little deeper into some of the specific issues that define the level of trust between and employee and her boss. By the way, if I somehow manage to leave out a key issue that you think is important, jump right in and pose your trust issue as a comment.

Communication: I recently put up a blog post on our Leadership Community Blog regarding how communication can affect trust. The more you communicate, the higher the trust. Communication might include telling your staff the reasons behind your requests and commands, it might include tying business results to their activities, it might include conducting one-to-one feedback and coaching sessions.

Being fair: Nothing will destroy a relationship between a boss and her subordinate faster than NOT BEING FAIR. The typical example of a lack of fairness is when the boss sets different levels of performance standards for various team members. When the boss plays favorites, or frequently lets select team members “off the hook”, the rest of the team resents it and loses trust.

Rational and objective: You’ve got your emotions in check. You’re not a mercurial, table-pounding, wall-smacking screamer. You don’t “fly off the handle”. You don’t throw tantrums. The argument with your 17 year old this morning, or the driver who cut you off and then made an obscene gesture at you – doesn’t affect how you treat your people. You never criticize the person or put people down. You’re good at asking questions to solve problems and guiding/coaching your people to solutions.

Their success is important to you: Your staff respects you. They seek your advice on their career. You demonstrate a interest in their success by having occasional conversations about their career – perhaps once a quarter in your one-to-one sessions. You’re able to remove your “boss” hat and put on your “career coach” hat. You can have an deep and objective conversation about their dreams and expectations.

You “have their back”: Your staff will occasionally run into trouble with customers, vendors, suppliers, peers, and those higher up the food chain – like your boss, the board, or other peers on the executive team. Do you “have their back”? Will you stretch your neck out to protect your people. Can they go about the day doing a good job knowing you’ll always have their back.

If not, do they move through the day like frightened rodents, avoiding trouble and trying to fade into the woodwork? Are the members of your team “risk-takers” willing to do what they believe is in the best interest of the company – or do they cower behind you dumping every issue onto your back to solve?

They learn from you: A prime motivator of top talent is that they want to grow and learn. Do you help them reach their potential by giving them challenging assignments, stretching them through coaching to achieve outstanding results, providing meaningful work that is stimulating, learning-oriented, and impactful? Do you send them to classes, webinars, courses to expand their knowledge and skills? For example, do you sit down with each of your direct reports once or twice a year and develop a detailed learning plan to move their capacity to a new level?

Are you failing your team by not focusing on these six components of developing a trusting relationship? When should you decide to stop the typical insanity that takes place in most companies where trust is assumed since people show up for work everyday.

Just showing up is not indicative of trust.

Do you have a plan for how you’ll build trust with your team over the next year? Do you know what to do? If not, pick one of the ideas listed below and start down the path of building a trusting relationship with each of your direct reports.

How to build a Trusting Relationship

Could your executive or managerial team pass a test with flying colors if their staff was asked to score them on the above 6 components. If the answer is anything short of a resounding YES – then perhaps it’s time to conduct an intervention to improve trust:

• Bring in a resource to teach how to build trust
• Turn gaining trust into a process
• Incorporate trust as an element when you conduct 360 degree feedback or employee satisfaction surveys (of course, this is an integral part of your employee engagement and motivation programs – right?)
• Do you score “TRUST” when you evaluate your executives and managers annually? If you don’t score it, and it’s not a component of determining bonuses, why should anyone care? Most employees will do what you measure and reward. If trust is not measured and rewarded – they’ll assume it’s not important to you.
• Send your executives and managers to “charm” school to learn how to develop trust with their subordinates
• Make your team read a book about building trust and discuss it in your next staff meeting
• Force career management discussions at least quarterly with documentation as part of the one-to-one process
• Role model the importance of trust through-out the organization by demonstrating it continually with your direct reports (do you consciously and continuously think about building trust with each of your direct reports)
• Freely distribute information about company performance so everyone can understand the role they play in your overall success
• Publish and promote trust as one of the core values of your company (I assume you’ve already gone through this exercise and your values are loudly proclaimed through-out the company – handing on a banner in the lobby, on the back of business cards, posted everywhere)

If you’re not actively building and improving trust through-out your organization RIGHT NOW, be prepared for high percentage of your best performers to walk out the door as the job market turns over the issue of lack of trust – lack of respect.

Barry Deutsch

Why and How LinkedIn Can Bring More Than Just Top Talent To Your Company

LinkedIn is one of the social media sites that maybe as misunderstood as Twitter. CEO’s and key executives constantly ask me why they should be using either one. They haven’t been able to grasp the impact these can have on their company. The CEO or key executive doesn’t have to actually use either of them, but they should at least encourage the use by the appropriate people in their organization.

LinkedIn is more than just social networking like Facebook. I think of Facebook as a personal social site and LinkedIn as the business people social site. LinkedIn and Facebook serve different purposes.

Unlike Facebook which hides a lot of information about the person, unless you are directly connected, LinkedIn profiles are pretty much open for everyone to review. Granted the person controls what information they chose to display, but whatever they decide it is open to just about everyone. This is actually a good thing.

Since most profiles on LinkedIn are about the person’s professional background it really isn’t too much different than posting one’s resume on-line. This opens up a whole new way to use LinkedIn to benefit your company.

Here are some examples:

Hiring. Why pay thousands of dollars to Monster, Careerbuilder, The Ladders in order to have access to their resume databases? If you are seeking a professional person chances are very high you can locate them on LinkedIn. You can review their background, experiences, accomplishments, awards, education and so on,  for free or a small monthly fee.

In addition you can connect to references, view a list of people with similar backgrounds, identify people in your industry or even specific companies. LinkedIn has provided you and your hiring team not only with a wealth of people, but also given you an enormous amount of information on this person.

Reference Checking. We hear this all the time, people won’t give you references unless they know they will give a good reference. OK, so now you have a way of getting your own references.  LinkedIn allows you find people based on companies. LinkedIn will give you list of people that have worked at a specific company and those currently working at the company. Now you have a list of people independent from the ones the candidate provided you.

Customer Leads. Cold calling has never been the best way to access a company. With LinkedIn your sales people can now develop warm leads. You salesperson can identify a potential customer, find who else in their network has contacts within the company or better yet knows the person your salesperson wants to meet and ask for an introduction. How about asking if they would setup a lunch with the potential customer. This is a powerful tool few sales people use.

Vendors. What a great way to pre-qualify vendors. Go on LinkedIn look for people that have left the company and connect with them. You may learn some things the salesperson will never tell you. Granted depending on the person the information could be bias. That works both ways. As with all information the person collecting the information will have to filter it as they see fit. But I submit having it and ignoring it is better than not having it at all.

Affiliations. Another tool that helps identify potential companies to affiliate with. This is a great way to be introduced to someone you hope to develop a professional business relationship. Often contained within the profile are recommendations that may help you  decide if this is the right company to work alongside.

Open Jobs A component of hiring but this has a different spin. The ability to post open positions  for free or low cost. With LinkedIn groups you can post a job for free and have hundreds of thousands of people be aware of it. In addition, for a reasonable fee you can target specific people, with specific backgrounds, in specific industries only. So you don’t receive hundreds of unqualified resumes.

International Contacts LinkedIn is global site. If you are seeking contacts or considering doing business in a foreign country, LinkedIn may provide the contacts you need to get started. If your company is considering coming to the USA, the level of contacts available to you in just about every business sector is well worth your time to check out.

I could continue, but if I haven’t convinced by now why go on. Even if these reasons don’t work for your company, think beyond the specifics above. Think about how these resources can be utilized in your company. That is the real value of LinkedIn. It opens up so many opportunities that have not been available in the past.

I would encourage everyone to be active on LinkedIn. The benefits far out weigh any drawbacks.

For a lot more information on utilizing LinkedIn or social media to benefit  your company, you can listen some of our past radio shows posted in our audio Library. CLICK HERE to review the shows.

Want some tips on attracting top talent. Download the chapter from our book, You’re NOT The Person I Hired, on sourcing. CLICK HERE to download this chapter.

I welcome your thoughts and feedback.

Brad Remillard

A+B+C = Top Talent. Defining A,B,C.

Top talent = doing the right things, the right way, the first time + ability to get the most from others + intuitive ability to think and work strategically.

Looking deeper into this equation:

A) Do the right things, the right way, the first time deals with the tactical functions of the job. The basic blocking and tackling associated with every position. If a person can’t do these basic functions then everything else is irrelevant. This includes prioritizing the functions of the job or department, dealing timely with the day-to-day issues that arise, eliminating and filtering all the background noise and distractions that come up and ensuring that the job gets done, on time and correctly the first time.

B) The ability to get the most from people begins to separate talent. This deals with not only the ability to manage but also lead. There are hundreds of book on this so I’m going to deal with a very narrow difference between managing and leadership – responsibility and authority.

Managing isn’t as difficult, when as a manager you have responsibility and authority over people. People may not want to do what you need them to do, but often will for fear of the consequences if they don’t. For example, not receive a full bonus, receiving a poor review, risk being fired, lower pay increase or some other discipline. None of these are positive, but the job gets done. At some point your people  will either give up or leave if pushed to far. For this example managing is about fear. How many people in your organization manage this way? I don’t see this meeting the qualification in this equation. In fact, I suggest this is why many people are not and will never be top talent.

Leadership clearly involves managing. Top talent understand this. They are able to get the most out of people and push people beyond what the person thinks they are capable of doing. One aspect of leadership is responsibility without authority. Fear is removed from the equation. Now people do things because they are motivated to perform and want to do the job. It is getting a person you don’t have authority over, that is already working 50 –60 hours a week to do something for you which you have responsibility. Leadership is more about motivating, encouraging, rewarding, respecting, challenging, liking, and communications so everyone understands, than it is fear. People have demonstrate time and time again just how they will exceed everyone,s expectations when they have a leader, instead of a manager.

C) The ability to do A and B  may make a person above average talent, but I don’t think it makes them top talent. C is the area that takes talent to the top level. The intuitive ability to think ahead, anticipate issues, strategically think, see the future and define it, take the theoretical and move it to reality, deal in the vague world of reality, rely on intuition to make correct decision without enough data, respond quickly to crisis without throwing gas on the crisis, use the power of B to rally people, all while improving the department or business. It is this unique set of traits that are hard to define, but everyone knows them when they see them. It isn’t just raw intelligence, although that doesn’t hurt, as much as a blend of intelligence, common sense and intuition.

Interestingly the company’s culture and environment can influence these. That is why someone maybe very successful in one company but not in another.

In order to hire and retain top talent you must first have an effective hiring methodology. One that addresses each of these three. In our experience most companies don’t have a hiring methodology that address all three of these. Most do a good job on A, a fair job on B, and a terrible job on C. In fact, C is rarely addressed in any depth.

Does your hiring process deal effectively with each of these? Are the people involved in hiring properly trained to probe and explore these issues? Do they even agree on these issues? In most companies the hiring team doesn’t even define the culture that same way.

Hiring top talent will never be successful until your organization prioritizes hiring. Once it becomes a priority, an effective hiring methodology for attracting, hiring and retaining top talent will arise.

Want to assess your hiring process. Download our FREE 8 Point Hiring Methodology Assessment Scorecard. How does your company rank on these critical points? CLICK HERE to download.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Brad Remillard

Is Your Sales Candidate a Great Networker?

You’re conducting an interview for a sales professional. This hire is critical to the success of your sales targets next year.

The ability to network masterfully and obtain great leads and opportunities is an important element of selling success in your industry.

How would you measure networking mastery in a potential sales candidate?

Well, let’s first talk about how most hiring executives would measure networking capability:

• How important is networking to your success?
• Tell me about a few opportunities you’ve closed that came to you through a networking contact.
• Do you enjoy networking?
• Will you be able to network in this role to obtain leads and referrals?
• Are you good at networking?

What’s wrong with this picture?

Everything!

Most of the questions are superficial, ambiguous, generic, at 40,000 feet and predicated on the candidate’s ability to “sell” you in the interview that they are good networker. The one question asking for examples of getting the lead through networking is a good start in the right direction.

First, it might be important to define what networking success is for your new sales hire. Without a definition of success, the process of hiring a great networker is dependent upon your perceptions of networking – which may or may not be an accurate reflection of success in this particular role.

Let’s paint a typical example:

You’re a company in an industry where leads are NOT generated through trade shows or conferences. Your company does not generate leads for the sales team through direct mail/postcards/email. Every sale is the result of the sales person uncovering the opportunity through networking, and then getting referred to the decision maker. Your best sales professionals do not rely on responding to RFPs.

The sales rep in your organization must:

• Have a database of decision makers (CFOs/Controllers/VP-Finance) of at least 200.
• 10-15 new opportunities need to be identified each month through referrals and leads.
• Each project needs to be at least $500k in first year revenue.
• The lead time for closure of each project is 4-6 months.
• The average closure rate is 10-12%.

Now we’re armed with some specific information to base our questions on in validating the ability of the candidate to adapt what they’ve done in networking in other organizations to what you need.

One of the greatest weaknesses most hiring executives and managers possess when hiring is the unwillingness/inability/no patience/lack of knowledge in how to probe deeply.

Deep probing is one of the primary keys in getting to the truth in interviewing and moving beyond an actor/actress (good interviewer).

Here are some sample questions to “peel the onion” on whether a candidate is a good networker?

• Take your last 15 closed opportunities. Walk me through where each one came from and the specific tactics you used to make a connection with the decision maker.
• Break down all your leads into 3-4 major categories for me.
• How would you define someone who is a great networker? Where do you fit in that description?
• What have you done to learn how to become a great networker?
• What are you doing right now to improve your ability to master the key sales trait of effective networking?
• How specifically do you obtain leads and referrals from your network? Take me back to the last 10-15 and walk me through how you were able to obtain the lead or referral in each situation.
• What are the top 5 things that you do to nurture your network?
• How do you track your network activities – what tools – systems – analysis do you use?
• What role does social media play in your networking activities?
• Are you on LinkedIn – how do you use it? Tell me about 2-3 success stories in the last year where Linkedin helped you to get to an opportunity that you might not have heard about through more traditional networking tactics?
• What type of networking – referral – goals do you currently have set for yourself? Tell me about a few of the goals in this area that you set for yourself a year or two ago – and have now achieved? Step me through how you achieved those goals.
• Usually networking contacts will not give great leads and referrals to individuals – unless a deep and trusted relationship exists. How do you specifically build deep and trusting relationships with members of your network so that they go out of their way to help you.
• Are you a “connector” within your network? How do you put others together? Share 5-6 recent examples of where you’ve put people together in your network for business purposes.
• Tell us about the last 10 referrals you made to someone who asked you for a referral. How did you make the referral? Did it result in business for the person asking for the referral? How did you handle the “hand-off” to your networking contact? Which ones did you follow-up on and how did you help the networking contact after the initial referral?

These are a few of the questions you can ask to understand deeply a candidate’s claim of being a strong networker. The key is to validate, verify, and vet every single claim and statement. Get names, locations, dates, context, size of project, timeframe, and success that resulted from the referral. Is the amount, size, scope, and effort in networking comparable to your expectations?

To learn more about how to conduct an effective sales interview to measure networking (and all the other traits of success for a sales professional), send us a note to take advantage of our FREE Success Factor Snapshot for a Sales Position you are trying to fill.

Barry Deutsch