Leadership - The right recruiting process

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interviewing-apllicants Dear readers,

in the last issue we concerned ourselves with the search for the white stone and you received a number of questions that were intended to help you make more of your life and to conduct yourself better. For only people who can conduct themselves properly are also in a position to lead others. Again and again I am asked by top managers at lectures, in workshops or during coaching how to find the right employee and what you need to do, particularly in network marketing, to make employees successful. But what does the management of employees boil down to?

Phases & erroneous beliefs

Employees go through phases in their development. In each phase they require a different form of cooperation and management by their manager. And precisely here lies the stumbling block for successful management of employees. Many managers attempt to treat their employees as they are treated by their superiors. Or they do not take enough time to manage their employees properly and use a combination of carrot and stick. Or they try to treat all employees the same. The only thing that is right in the last method mentioned is that in some form or other there must be a system that allows the to manage the employees systematically. But nothing else. It is important not to succumb to the erroneous belief that all employees must be treated the same. On the contrary.

Although it is important to make management systematic, it should be done with so much individuality that each employee can pass through all the 5 plus 1 phases of development and so develop the greatest potential possible. There are many myths and erroneous opinions about the topic management of employees and most are based on the fact that employees that have sold well and have built up a solid product business can be made into leaders through the career plan of their company – or that this is often their only chance to generate more income and to get more recognition in the company. But precisely in this step lies the challenge for the employee and for the company. Because not everybody who can sell well is also able to be a good manager.

Responsibility of the company

Since Network Marketing consists to a very large extent of managing, training and building up employees and teams, every company in this industry has a great responsibility. Many companies try to measure up to this responsibility by transferring to their most successful s the responsibility of training and instructing the new s in their own structures and in the whole company in the framework of workshops, training sessions and or appearances. In and of itself a well-intentioned system which nevertheless shows weaknesses in the same places as previously the development of sales personnel to s did. Because what has functioned successfully with one employee will not necessarily also function with another.

In the course of my daily work I experience again and again that employees who have the potential to become good s get messed up because attempts are made to provide them with methods that have functions elsewhere in the company but which the new is incapable of putting into practice. Because just as one employee passes through different phases of development so also an passes through various phases of development. For this reason it is an important task of each company to create a management system that allows people who are not so talented to achieve above-average performance and supports them in their development.

The beginning

But I do not want to bore you with considerations that are all too strategic, rather I want in the framework of this article to provide you with practical aids and show you which management tasks you have to fulfill in order to be successful and to communicate some important principle to you that will help you in your day-to-day work. Or let me express t as follows:

What do you think 7 different painters would answer if you asked them what their daily mission consisted of?

What do you think 7 different lawyers would answer to the same question?

And what do you think 7 dentists would answer if you asked them this question?

Very probably most of those questioned would list similar tasks, similar resources and similar principles that they use on a daily basis. And now a provocative question:

What do you think 7 different leaderss from your company or your team would answer to the question what their daily management tasks are, what resources they use and what principles lay the basis for the functioning of everything?

Do you think you would get similar results as in the case of the painters, the lawyers and the dentists?

Now I do not know what it is like in your company or team but I do know the answer I get when I advise a company and train and coach their s. Regardless of whether I ask this question at the level of top management, or at board level or in one of the lower management levels, completely different answers come to the surface and seldom is there an overlap. What can you learn from that for you company or your team? If you succeed in installing a management system in which each manager (independently of the hierarchy) knows exactly what their management tasks are, knows which tools are available and which management principles they should follow, then you have a system in which you employees can develop themselves optimally and achieve above-average performance. As a result you have a clear competitive advantage over your competitors. Let us now begin therefore with the first step in the successful management of employees: recruiting staff.

Recruiting

The first contact you have as a manager with a potential new employee is the recruitment of the employee. Many managers spend a large part of their time and their work on recruiting new staff. This is a decisive moment in which many important aspects of the course are set for the further development of the new employee. And is precisely precisely here that many managers have particular difficulties. At this point I do not want to give you a lecture on where you can recruit new staff, because you company does a lot of good work here so that you can now concentrate on the recruitment process itself. When you have a new employee in front of you, you should ask yourself some important questions in advance, during the preparation and then in the follow-up to the job interview. Your considerations should center on the following questions: 1.Can the new employee fulfill the job? 2. Does the new employee want to fulfill the job? 3. Does the new employee fit in with you and with your team? Let us look at the questions again more closely.

Ability

Again and again managers have difficulties with this first point. Because contrary to accepted opinion here it is not a question of the successes of the past, of the wonderful references from previous workplaces – or the lack of these. In practice managers place too much value on the application documents and/ or the alleged successes of the past so let themselves be misled about what the presence of the person sitting opposite them looks like. As a forward-looking manager the references and application documents are not of much use because they merely give you a picture of what this person was once like.

In addition, most application documents contain no concrete results from the past in any case, but merely paraphrases in coded language that in the final analysis say nothing about the person. For you, however, it is important to recognize and understand what this person is like today. You do not need or want somebody in your team who was once good but today is no longer prepared to provide the performance you need. In your team there is simply no place for “has-beens” – people who were once good. What you need are people who have the right attitude to you, to your company, to your system and to what you want to achieve. Therefore it is important that you recognize and understand the attitude of the person sitting in front of you and that you do not allow yourself to be taken in by flowery language or nice application documents.

What they want

And so we come to the second question. Here is is not a question of how far they will carry out the job in the next few weeks or months but of whether they are prepared to carry out the job still in 3 to 5 years time. And in order to be in a position to answer this question you should ask yourself the following questions:

1. Can the job help the applicant to achieve their personal goals?

2. Does the job support the nature of the applicant?

As a manager you ought to understand that an employee who does a job that does not help them to achieve their goals in the long run and that also does not support them in their nature, such an employee will resign sooner or later. Here it is not a question of supporting every every characteristic of their disposition through work, but rather that the work on a lasting basis boosts their disposition and they can as a result build up their self-confidence. As you will see in the next issue, this is one of the important elements in developing successful employees. Employees change their jobs for three reasons: Either because they will get more money somewhere else, or because they think they will be able to have more fun elsewhere, or because they can be part of a vision somewhere else. Which do you think is the strongest factor? It is your job as a manager to ensure that your employees have the feeling to be working on a great vision. But for that you ought to understand what the attitude of your new applicants is today. Because only in this way will you be able in future to manage and develop your employees so that they will believe in your vision.

Fitting into the team

In the case of the third question we are among other things dealing with values. And now as a manager you are in the firing liner. Can you define your own values clearly and do you know what values your employees should have? Are you unable to collaborate with employees whose values are different from yours? Are you aware that sometimes people whose values are different than yours are precisely the people you need in order to build up and develop a successful team? In practice managers often seek out employees who are either like themselves or who they can keep under control easily.

But if you want to create a team that will enable you to have above-average success, then you will need people with values who complement each other. It is not a question of finding people who are like yourself, but of finding people whose values can complement your values, so that you as a team can achieve more than each of you can on your own. And how do you now find out in the course of the job interview how much the applicant fits in with you.

Filling the gap

The art of a successful job interview does not consist of “sucking” the new applicant into company or the team, but of filling the gap that exists between your point of view and reality. A famous and very successful American airline wellknown for its customer service, Southwest Airlines, has an interesting slogan:

Hired by attitude and trained by skills

Precisely this is the question in your job interview. You want to find out the current attitude of the applicant and you want to be able to assess their abilities in order to encourage and make demands on them in your management system. For this there are a number of questions about attitude which I have found out during my research and have tested and further developed myself so far in over 8,000 job interviews. Questions that are atypical and help you to find out more about the person sitting opposite you. Some of these questions are:

1. When are you happy?

2. What can you do really well?

3. What kind of people do you like?

4. How would you combat our company/ our team if you were one of our competitors?

5. Who are you?

In total 26 questions that can give you further help in your job interview and support you in getting answers to the three questions mentioned above. If you would like to have all 26 questions, you have the exclusive opportunity to download these questions free of charge from here:

Recruiting questions (10)

Use these questions and familiarize yourself with them. They are one of the most effective tools you can apply at the beginning of a collaboration. Do I always use all the questions? No, I don‘t. That is why I have divided the questions into questions I can ask any employee and questions I only ask future managers. It is a selection that you can use individually as needed. In the next issue we will examine the first phase of employee development more precisely and what opportunities are available to you to support and challenge you employees properly in this phase. Remember: Leadership is action and not position. It is your actions that will allow you to appear to be a good manager to your employees – or then again not!

Best regards,

Your coach Nuno F. Assis