- 5 Pivotal Points Often Overlooked in Hiring

The hiring process is fraught with uncertainty. Making the right hire is no sure thing, despite the increasingly large array of sophisticated tools available to managers. We see job candidates scrutinized, resumes inspected, credentials probed, and yet when all is said and done the selection process is still much more of an art than a science. Very often the moment of truth comes when a newly-hired employee undergoes his first training session to learn the intricacies
of his new job. And it is at this juncture when employers start to see things they never saw during the job interview and second thoughts sometimes begin creeping into their heads.

Training a new employee is something most companies think about independently of the hiring process. Yet the two functions are very much linked because they share the same common denominator – the person who gets hired is the same person who must later be trained. But how often do companies consider trainability as a hiring factor and rank it as highly in importance as things like experience and education? There are a number of characteristics that contribute to making an employee “trainable.” Knowing what these characteristics are and giving them their
proper weight is something that hiring managers often fail to do. Here are some pivotal points
that are often overlooked but would serve employers well when they assess job candidates:

1. Is the candidate enthusiastic? Enthusiasm can be contagious. What’s more, an eager
   employee is likely to approach training with a positive attitude. This means faster assimilation
   into the new job and fewer headaches for the manager that is responsible for training her!
   Enthusiasm is not as easily measurable as more traditional credentials but it is no less important.
2. Don’t discount the quick learners! When you think about the kind of qualities that make an
   employee trainable, one comes to mind right away – the ability to catch on to things quickly.
   Some managers already know this. A few of them like to test employees during interviews by
   introducing a series of inter-related puzzles, solving the first two, and asking the candidate to
   solve the third. However you choose to measure it, an aptitude for fast learning is something that
   employers will inevitably want to see in the person they ultimately hire, and it is a trait that they
   should seek out and value.
3. There is no substitute for perseverance and dependability. What do you call a person who
   always follow through on her commitments, is always true to her word, and always completes
   her assignments on time? Some would call that person an ideal employee. Others might call her
   an impossible dream. Either way, no conscientious employee should ever discount the value of
   perseverance and dependability when making a hiring selection. A person like this is not only
   likely to be an ideal employee but an ideal trainee as well.
4. How well does the candidate adapt to change? Nothing is as certain as change. This is
   especially true in today’s business climate. Yet some handle it better than others. A person
   who handles it well is at a big advantage when he has to learn new things and adjust to new
   circumstances. Hiring managers should check candidates’ backgrounds for situations where
   changes were required and try to ascertain how well candidates handled them. When making the
   choice for the job, they should take adaptability into serious consideration.
5. Don’t confuse confidence with arrogance. A confident person is a good learner but an
   arrogant person can’t learn because he already knows everything. It’s important for a hiring
   official to be able to tell the difference. In order to be trainable, a person needs to possess a
   large dose of humility. Real learning entails deference to others, respect for their knowledge and
   experience, and a willingness to ask for advice. True confidence and self-respect is a good thing.
   Pride and arrogance is not. It’s often hard to tell the difference when meeting someone for the
   first time. But the wise hiring manager will make sure he knows the job candidate well enough
   so that he is able to make that crucial distinction.

Hiring will never be an exact science. But maybe that’s a good thing. Some of the most
important characteristics that define a great employee are those that can’t be easily measured.
When thinking about whom they are going to hire, employers also need to think about whom
they are going to need to train. The rule of thumb they should always remember is: when making
a pivotal hiring choice, don’t overlook any pivotal points.

Kenneth McCall builds creative and innovative tools for customer seeking self storage units. Kenneth is the director of operations at storage.com which provides Washington D.C. self storage listings, and storage units in many locations across the country. In his spare time he likes to get outside, ideally with a boat and waterskis.

Do you want to throw your stapler across the cubicle wasteland? Are you sick and tired of insane office politics? Is your boss an ape? How are you feeling today? A little frustrated? Did you get another meaningless memo from top level management? Well today I am going to write about frustration at the office. Not only how you can deal with frustration, but also how you as a leader can contribute to reducing frustration levels. As always I would love your feedback if you have some advice to share with me and other readers.

First of all: What is frustration?

I like the definition of Frustration as described in Wikipedia, “it is a common emotional response to opposition. Related to anger and disappointment, it arises from the perceived resistance to the fulfillment of individual will. The greater the obstruction, and the greater the will, the more the frustration is likely to be.” – Frustration is a feeling. Like happiness, anger, disappointment or joy. So this leads me to the next question…

Why are you feeling frustrated?

Frustration is normally a reaction to an obstacle beyond your control. You cannot solve your problem because of company politics you can’t change. You can’t perform well, because your co-workers are slowing you down. It can be related to work overload and stress. Remember that frustration is a feeling; a feeling is often a response to something around you. So if you could change the cause of the frustration, would you stop feeling frustrated? Yes, most likely. But you can’t change it? That’s the freaking problem you say? Calm down….

A coin has two sides. If you can’t fix the cause, can you fix the response? Just imagine if feeling is a choice, you can choose to be angry, happy, frustrated, joyful or sad? Is it even possible to make a choice to feel better? Just imagine that it is possible.

Than this change:
From: Something happened –> you responded
To: Something happened –> you choose your response

How would that change your day? You got the power to make a decision about your response to events in your life. Just try it. It might be hard, it might be close to impossible, but it is possible.

When you work with feelings involved you might end up making a bad call, you might send an angry e-mail or tell your boss things you shouldn’t. Being able to control your response might help you to succeed in your job.

This is not a classic “get rid of the obstacle”-advice. In business there will always be annoying obstacles. Maybe we need to choose our attitude?

So why are there obstacles in the first place…

You still do not understand the insane memo that makes your job close to impossible? I have experienced workers being frustrated because there is a fundamental lack of knowledge, information and understanding. Your focus is often on your job in specific. You are being told to “register orders in the system” and now you need to find some kind of information that you do not understand why it is needed. It makes your task about 30 seconds longer to complete, resulting in you handling 20 % less during your day. Could it be that somebody is working on what you input? Is their day effected by this change? Is their work load reduced with 40 seconds? If so it makes sense. Is the delivery pace to customers improved? Take a helicopter view at your organization, and see all the processes as a whole. From a new customer to the first delivered product, how many people are involved in this process? Could your job affect others in this chain?

You might get a better understanding by climbing into the helicopter for a top down view of the entire company.

Dealing with frustration

You can choose your response to an event. It is your choice to be frustrated or not, if you master this way of thinking, you’ll be provided with a great weapon against irrational thinking. But I must admit that it is close to impossible to control your own feelings at any given time. Sometimes you would rather throw your computer out the window, and that can be understandable. So what do you do when frustration strikes? It might be hard to recognize and act accordingly as it is your emotional center that is in control of you. But make sure, not to answer emails and avoid your boss. If you have some kind of music device, plug it into your ears and go for a 10 minute walk outdoors. When you calm down do this:

1. Ask yourself why you got frustrated? Can you identify the real source?
2. Can you do anything to prevent this from happening in the future?
3. Who needs to be involved to remove the source?
4. Who else is being frustrated?
5. Could some kind of improvement affect other people as well?
6. Will a potential change make things better?
7. Is this something that management should be involved in?

Frustration is an energy demanding reaction and it should be systematic analyzed to remove sources.

Leading frustrated employees

Remember that frustration is a reaction? It is a response to something. What can you as a leader do to reduce frustration amongst your staff? Knowledge is essential, make sure to involve people and share knowledge. Is there anything you can do to remove the source? Acknowledge that there is a real reason for frustration, identify why and see what you can do about it. By just talking to the employees and maybe even explain why you can’t do something might be helpful. Help employees to see the big picture of your business it might help them to understand your thoughts.

This is the circle of involvement, if you try to follow this way of working you might be able to reduce stress and frustration among your employees and be proactive.

I hope you enjoy my blog and feel free to subscribe. Thank you so much for reading, you rock!

Motivational Gardener

Micromanagement is a curse word in the world of business. What is micromanagement? This article is written with the micromanager in mind, if you micromanage you are destroying your work environment. You are standing in your employee’s way. Why do managers get carried away in details? Do you know if you are micromanaging in the first place, and what are the signs to look for? I am going to take a look at the signs of micromanagement presence and the short term and long term effects of micromanagement.

Why is Micromanagement a bad thing?

First I want to discuss the problems with micromanagement. If you go to Wikipedia to look up the word micromanagement you will find the word “symptoms” in the table of contents. Symptoms are used with sickness and illness. Cancer and diarrhea have symptoms. Like cancer MM will kill team spirit and enthusiasm. High morale and enthusiasm are strong driving factors when it comes to motivation. When you MM you will end up killing those forces that really give your employees momentum. If one employee is micromanaged, several will still end up seeing you as a micromanaging boss, as rumors travel fast, and let’s face it micromanagement is easy to spot. It displays a lack of trust, and most employees need trust to thrive.

“Bad Management Behavior”, “Lack of Recognition”, “Lack of Respect” and “Management not allowing the employees to make decisions”. These are 4 out of the 10 top reasons why people quit their job. All are signs of micromanagement. I will get back to you later what you need to do when you feel the urge to micromanage someone.

Why do you Micromanage in the first place?

Let’s think about it for a minute. Most likely you feel dissatisfied with the employees’ performance or results. You feel that you could do a better job yourself, or you want to force someone out of the company by setting too high of standards. You might be under pressure yourself to get high results? Are you insecure about your own competence, or insecure about the employee’s competence?

Internal reasons for Micromanagement
Managers personality, detail oriented, emotional and job insecurity, strong drive for results, lack of trust.

External reasons for Micromanagement
Some external reasons for MM is Company culture, performance pressure, financial hardship and conscious choice of tactics.

The Effects of Micromanagement

MM is a destructive way of leadership and you will destroy trust, you will kill morale, and you will damage your line of communication. I work in Telecom and so I think that micromanaging fills your life’s land lines with noise. You will get disengaged employees and creativity will drop. Employees self esteem will drop, and over time performance will drop as well. All in all you are a large contributor to a hostile and dysfunctional work environment. You need to ask yourself if it is really worth it. I wrote earlier that the employee that is being micromanaged needs to take a look in the mirror before blaming the manager for the micromanaging behavior. The same goes for you, take a look in the mirror and figure out the true reason why you micromanage in the first place. You need to know if you are increasing performance or if you are destroying it.

What should you do instead of micromanage?

What drives employee engagement? This is my spring board when it comes to deciding what you should do at work in any scenario. Engaged employees produce amazing results, there is no doubt about it. Look at Zappos, look at Southwest Airlines, look at any other great company; employee engagement is the main building block of a winning culture. Lack of employee engagement is like building a tower on water, you might manage to build a large one, but it won’t go as high as it would with a good foundation.

Keyword: Trust
Trust is important to drive employee engagement. Have faith in your employees and leave them room to perform. You will soon see an increase in productivity. Trust will also give you valuable feedback, as MM leads to employees shutting down the communication lines to you. If you are satisfied with the overall performance and you want to keep the employee in the future, implement trust.

Keyword: Time
You spend a lot of time micromanaging, is it worth it? Could you be better at time management? Should you focus on growth strategies instead of being detail oriented?

Keyword: Communication
When you micromanage you are shutting down communication lines. Your employees will stop talking to you in fear of becoming micromanaged. Laying low will become a strategy in your office, resulting in no communication, no engagement, no growth and you will not have enough information to do your own job good enough.

Implement Trust, Free Time and Communicate

Display trust, become a better communicator. Try to motivate performance and use positive feedback to accomplish your desired outcome. Be clear about what you want in results. Engage the employee in conversations, and LISTEN, ask questions and listen. Talk with the employee and display trust until you are sure that the message is understood. You need to know that MM is damaging on the work environment and micromanagement is a result of unhealthy communication skills.

You Care

One of the reasons why you are a control freak * is that you care more about the outcome or results than your employees. At least you fool yourself to think so. But is it true that you care? If so, you need to show that you care in a better way. You will think of your own interference as constructive and beneficial, in reality you are in the way. I assume you care, if not you might be driven by the feelings of power and superiority. In that case you might end up losing your own job soon.

* I needed to use the term control freak, because if you read the Micromanagement article at Wikipedia you will find a “see also” section. There is one link: “Control Freak”

Micromanagement is Psychology

If you feel that you lack the trust of your employees and you have been micromanaging for a while, there is hope. You need to know more about motivation, employee engagement, personality traits, human behavior and a bit of positive psychology. There are several books on the topic and the evidence that micromanagement is devastating is humongous! Being humble, apologizing to your employees and being open about your challenges is a good start, as you need to start building trust, and it takes time. Try to find a mentor or coach that can help you before it is too late, after all, you want to do a good job too.

I got a lot of questions about micromanagement after writing a post called ”Dealing with Micromanagement”. I wrote about how you as an employee should deal with micromanagement, but soon realized that you where interested in more views on this subject, and I hope this article will help you to realize your challenges. Or it could help you to understand your boss, if you are the one being micromanaged. I also want to specify that micromanagement does not need to be bad and might be necessary from time to time, good communicators manage to pull this off in a positive style without the negative fuzz.
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Work philosophy kind of got my way today. Is it possible to teach a team to work hard together without a leader or manager? The team is responsible for reaching the goals. The team is responsible for filing the reports. The team is responsible for training and getting the job done? Or will a team crumble without supervision? How will no manager impact results and productivity? Will they all slack? Does the team need incentives, or should intrinsic motivation be enough? I would love if I was redundant at work, and if I for some reason disappear, I would know that things would still be great.

Anybody want to join my philosophic corner?