WorkPuzzle

Execution Failure and Rescue: Lessons from Healthcare.gov - Part 2

In last weeks edition I described some of the challenges, chronicled in a recent Time Magazine article, on the healthcare.gov website's initial issues. It’s a compelling story, that when dissected, leaves us all with reminders of the differences between how projects can go wrong and what can be done to right them.

I previously listed three ingredients (principles) that when missing in any worthy endeavor will lead to failure; but conversely, when done well can lead to a successful execution. I also promised to draw parallels to HiringCenter successes.

Last weeks edition described the first and most important principle:

Metric Driven Leadership to Oversee and Drive the Effort 

The second ingredient is:

A Central Dashboard to Monitor, Measure and Improve each Important Metric.

Quoting again from the Time magazine article:

“One of the things that shocked Burt and Park's team most (the healthcare.com rescue team)--'among many jaw-dropping aspects of what we found,' as one put it--'was that the people running healthcare.gov had no "dashboard," no quick way for engineers to measure what was going on at the website, such as how many people were using it, what the response times were for various click-throughs and where traffic was getting tied up.' So late into the night of Oct. 18, Burt and the others spent about five hours coding and putting up a dashboard.”

Can you imagine this? You have developed one of the largest scaled projects known to developed countries, a system that will draw incredible scrutiny, and you have no way to monitor, measure or improve anything.  No idea what is wrong or how to fix it.

One of the first things we did, at Tidemark, as we were developing HiringCenter, was to create a dashboard. This allowed our clients (and us) to constantly monitor progress among the many tasks that must be performed with each candidate within the massive pipeline.

Those of our clients who practice ingredient one (metric driven leadership to oversee and drive the effort), seem to naturally utilize principle two exemplified by the HiringCenter Dashboard. Conversely those who don’t have ingredient one typically abandon the Dashboard. You can probably guess what results appear when these essential pieces are lacking. Sooner or later someone says... “this isn’t working."  

Which brings us to the third ingredient:

 A Sense of Urgency

 According to TIME, one of the technology consultants (Abbott) who had worked on the rescue site said:

“To this day he cannot figure out who was supposed to have been in charge of the healthcare.gov launch. Instead he saw multiple contractors bickering with one another and no one taking ownership for anything. Someone would have to be put in charge, he told Zients. Beyond that, Abbott recalls, "there was a total lack of urgency" despite the fact that the website was becoming a national joke and crippling the Obama presidency."

TIME then goes on to describe the rescue teams mentality:

"We need to stay focused on the most urgent issues, The stand-up culture--identify problem, solve problem, try again--was typical of the rescue squad's ethic."

What was the eventual result of the rescue squads overhaul of the website?

“On Sunday, Dec. 1, Zients issued a public report card showing the website's turnaround. A series of hardware upgrades had dramatically increased capacity; the system was now able to handle at least 50,000 simultaneous users and probably more. There had been more than 400 bug fixes. Uptimes had gone from an abysmal 43% at the beginning of November to 95%. And Kim and her team had knocked the error rate from 6% down to 0.5%. Average response time--once a ridiculous eight seconds per page--was down to 0.343 seconds.”

Impressive isn’t it?

Assessing the issues, solutions and steps involved in this example, we at Tidemark have considered requiring new to HiringCenter clients to agree to use only the  "best practices" established by us over the last 9 years and screen out those who don’t agree. So far we haven’t done this. What do you think? Would this be helpful?

For those of you who practice the principals listed above throughout every facet of HiringCenter we thank you. You make us look good, and it is our hope that we improve the efficiency, predictability and reliability of your new agent recruiting.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Execution Failure and Rescue: Lessons from HealthCare.gov

The key ingredients to HiringCenter success are no different than those responsible for rescuing the HealthCare.gov website; ingredients the recent administration had sorely lacked and had to discover the hard way.

Time magazine sets up the scene:

“Last Oct. 17—more than two weeks after the launch of HealthCare.gov—White House press secretary Jay Carney was going through what one senior Obama aide calls 'probably the most painful press briefing we’ve ever seen.' Pressed repeatedly on when the site would be fixed, the best he could say was that 'they are making improvements every day.'

“They” were, in fact, not making improvements, except by chance, much as you or I might reboot or otherwise play with our computer; a shot in the dark fix. Yet barely six weeks later, HealthCare.gov was working well and on its way to performing even better.

This is the story of a team of unknown—except in elite technology circles—coders and troubleshooters who dropped what they were doing in various enterprises across the country and came together in mid-October to save the website. In about a tenth of the time that a crew of usual-suspects (Washington contractors had spent over $300 million building a site that didn’t work) this ad hoc team rescued it and, arguably, Obama's chance at a health-reform legacy.”

The remainder of this article describes the drama associated with this technology crisis and boiled down the ultimate rescue to principles essential to execution success; principles that coincidentally guide every one of our clients in their HiringCenter results.

Principle I:  Metric driven leadership to oversee and drive the effort   

"In the meetings prior to the launch, President Obama always would end each session by saying, 'I want to remind the team that this only works if the technology works.' The problem, of course, was that no one in the meetings had any idea whether the technology worked, nor did the President and his chief of staff have the inclination to dig in and find out. The President may have had the right instinct when he repeatedly reminded his team about the technology. But in the end he was as aloof from the people and facts he needed to avoid this catastrophe as he was from the people who ended up fixing it.”

The Blaze website summarizes the Time article this way:

 “When it became clear that the website had major flaws and needed working, the Obama administration rushed to assemble a team to fix it. This involved bringing in some of the brightest tech minds from the private sector.

However, as the team slowly came together, they found that the website’s problems were bigger than they initially imagined.

Mike Abbott , for example, is known in the tech industry for being the man who developed Twitter’s technology into what it is today. He was shocked by what he found when he was brought on to rescue healthcare.gov.

'Abbott could not find … leadership. He says that to this day he cannot figure out who was supposed to have been in charge of the Healthare.gov launch,' Time reported. 'Instead he saw multiple contractors bickering with one another and no one taking ownership for anything. Someone would have to be put in charge, he told Zients.'"

According to additional comments from "Time": “Jeff Zients isn't a techie himself. He's a business executive, one of those people for whom control--achieved by lists, schedules, deadlines and incessant focus on his targeted data points--seems to be everything.

This story thus far resonates with everything we at Tidemark have come to understand about HiringCenter results: Our best performing clients ensure that those responsible for the oversite of each piece of the HiringCenter process is someone with a proven history of measurement and execution. Everyone involved knows who is in charge, and who oversees each metric in the process. Do you?

In the next edition I will share more of this interesting story and the final two principles that drive success. 

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Shrimp Fishing and Recruiting - Really?

If you are a Tidemark client and user of HiringCenter, you've experienced the occasional interview that can't end fast enough. The candidate who is scheduled for an hour of your valuable time and then turns out to be a dud. 

During a recent checkup meeting with some of our newer clients at Berkshire Hathaway Home Services Georgia, a manager shared a disturbing (but funny) story about one of her first candidate interviews.

The candidate showed up "high on something," sweating profusely, bragging that she was "in the sexual prime" of her life, and asked if she could have "some of your candies," only to sweep the entire platter into her large purse. At this point in the interview the dazed manager began looking around her office attempting to locate the hidden cameras, certain that Alan Funt would spring out at anytime.  

After hearing this brief narrative, I think many of us considered such an interview to be a waste of time and had some real doubts about the success of recruiting in general.

However, CEO Dan Foresman stood up and said, "Recruiting is like shrimp fishing." Over the next several minutes he had us all captivated by his incredible expertise when it comes to shrimp fishing, and also its relationship to this type of "early in the pipeline" recruiting. 

My recollection of Dan's tale was as follows. Dan was once a captain of a shrimp boat. In the winter shrimp fishing is basically throwing down the nets and hauling them in predominantly with shrimp. This is because shrimp don't mind cold water, whereas catfish and crab don't like it. Bringing up only shrimp in your nets is a great feeling and is similar to experienced agent and new licensee recruiting:  you know what you have in the net. 

When using services such as HiringCenter for recruiting you don't know exactly what you're going to get. This is more like summer shrimp fishing. As Dan explains it: "When that net comes up... It's not full of just great shrimp. Oh no! It comes up with mostly everything else you can imagine.  You sort through catfish, crab, trash and everything else you can imagine. In fact, the crab bite your ankles, the catfish sting your hand, the trash smells, but it must be done to get to the shrimp." 

Although that sounds like a lot of unpleasant work at times, the shrimp fisherman chooses to fish for both the winter and summer season. The fisherman realizes that he has made an investment in his boat, nets, crew, etc. so the more shrimp the more success.

The analogy is painfully clear. Nothing worth acquiring is obtained without a screening or selection process. Whether its gold, silver, diamonds, shrimp or agents, you have to be able to sort through the whole to find what you really want. 

Back to recruiting: Dan and most of our clients tell us that even when they are "winter" recruiting for experienced agents, the conversion rate is 20% or 1 in 5. With new-to-Real Estate- HiringCenter recruiting our clients average 20-25% on conversion from interview to hire. So what actually might feel like summer shrimp fishing, where there might be a few crab and catfish, in the end the odds of landing shrimp who stay on your boat is really no different. 

The bottom line is someone has invested in the boat, the license to fish, the nets, the fuel and the sonar equipment. With HiringCenter, the captains have even invested in deck hands further up stream to sort through much of the debris before you even see the net.

This sorting is done by Tidemark and your own Recruiting Coordinator.  What they want you, as a manager, to understand is that sorting through a few "catfish and crab" is time consuming but ultimately successful.

To increase the hires in every season is a reasonable outcome for their investment. Do you have 2 or 3 hours a month to do that sorting? 

We realize that some managers in certain seasons will get more catfish than shrimp, but as long as the net gain of excellent candidates are coming in the door somewhere, it should give us all hope for our own "big catch." 

By the end of our time with BHHS Georgia, and Dan's great analogy, every one of their excellent group of managers understood this message. They also understood that after all, "summer shrimp fishing" is what they ask their agents to do every day of the year.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Why Hiring Candidates Who “Hit the Ground Running” Will Eventually Kill Your Company

Dave and I had the privilege of spending time at two major real estate industry conferences over the last month.  I love this time of year because we get to interact with many real estate industry leaders, owners, and managers.

We learn a bunch by spending face-to-face time with our clients and other thought leaders during these times.  The most insightful information almost always comes in the one-on-one conversations.  So, we seek out opportunities to engage in as many of these discussions as possible.

In future WorkPuzzles, Dave and I will both share some of the things we learned at these conferences.  Today, however, I wanted shed some light on a myth that is alive and well in the real estate industry.

Over the last month, I’ve heard at least a dozen managers tell me that their primary objective in hiring is to engage candidates who can “hit the ground running” and make a quick contribution to their offices.

This typically means hiring an experienced agent who is working for a competitor or a new person that is already licensed or near the end of their licensing process.

If all other things were equal, of course it would make sense to use this criteria.  But what happens when this criteria takes priority over other criteria?

I’m going to let one of the most successful hiring companies in the world answer that question.  It’s not a real estate company, but they are in an industry where speed, competence, and successful hiring are just as critical to their business model as it is to yours.

The company is LinkedIn, and the details of their hiring practices were recently published by Max Nison on the Quartz financial news aggregator.  Here is an excerpt from Nison’s article:

“The thing that you start to hear as you get bigger, when someone talks about a candidate they want to hire, they often start talking about how they’re excited because this person will hit the ground running,” LinkedIn’s Dan Shapero tells Quartz. “And hitting the ground running is a very short-term benefit.”

Shapero’s organization has certainly gotten bigger. He heads LinkedIn’s Talent Solutions group, which provides tools for recruiters and is by far the most profitable of its three major divisions. It produced $245.6 million in revenue last quarter, 55% of the company’s total. In Q2 of 2011, the first time LinkedIn reported earnings after its IPO, the division made $58.6 million.

The better way to hire, Shapero says, is to think about long-term potential and cultural fit.

“I’m trying to change the language on a team so they’re not talking about hitting the ground running, but about long-term potential,” Shapero says. “Who, over the course of two or three years, is going to have the biggest possible impact on the organization? That pivot has changed the way we think about new hires.”

Some of his most successful people, he says, don’t have a background typical of the job they have. They take a bit longer to get going, but it’s worth it.

“There was something in them, a fit with who we want to aspire to be as a company, a real aptitude, and a real motivation that we saw something in and were willing to take a bet and wait a little longer to see play out,” Shapero says.

Let’s imagine you’re wandering around the halls of LinkedIn and you’re listening in on what your counterparts (hiring managers) are talking about in their team meetings.    You’d be hearing many of the same topics you discuss in your team meetings—how to hire people who can make a contribution quickly.

Many real estate hiring managers think this issue is unique to the real estate industry. Nonsense!  This problem exists everywhere humans run companies.  Every hiring manager has to fight the urge to grab the short-term benefit at the expense of long-term progress.

There is more to this story that I’ll cover in a future blog.  For today, I encourage you to follow the lead of the most profitable division at LinkedIn—focus on hiring people who have the highest long-term potential for your organization. 

Know that this strategy will take more work, patience, and discipline than other methodologies because high-potential candidates are rarely at a place where they can “hit the ground running” when you first meet them. 

Remember what you learned in kindergarten—the tortoise does eventually defeat the hare.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Recruiting the Next Generation

Ben has written extensively on the topic of the aging Real Estate Agent demographic and its threat to derail the future of the traditional Real Estate model.

We have heard similar conversations about this topic repeated among many of our clients and it was a "hot topic" at recent conferences.

So is there any validity in the theory? I did some poking around to find hard data to verify or discount this trend. 

In a recent survey by Imprev (A Real Estate marketing firm) it turns out that finding younger talent is on the minds of most thought leaders in the industry. 

"Although recruiting is a perennial issue, leaders of the nation's major brokerages who were surveyed about the issues that concern them most put an even finer point on it, citing "recruiting younger agents" as their top business challenge; it was selected by 70 percent of respondents. "Recruiting top talent" is the second-most crucial business challenge, specified by 65 percent.

"The real estate business is aging out," said Renwick Congdon, chief executive officer of Imprev, the real estate marketing software firm that works with 150,000 agents and brokers nationwide. "Broker-owners and other top real estate executives are under pressure to find new talent."

And another supporting piece -

National Association of Realtors data show that a mere 6 percent of its membership is under the age of 34 -- and that in the past 15 years, the percentage of members in their 40s has dropped by one-third. Additionally, more than 40 percent of all Realtors are older than 60 and one in four is 65 or older.

Based on the factors discussed in the above paragraph it should come as no surprise to learn the following:

Recruiting is a pervasive topic: When asked the open-ended question, "What is your firm's single biggest challenge today?" nearly 40 percent of the written answers cite recruiting. Profitability garners the second spot, cited by 14 percent of the executives, with 13 percent mentioning technology.

The good news is that the majority of you who read this blog already address this vital challenge and as a result are hopefully ahead of your competitor.

And in finding solutions to this challenge, you are providing the next generation and your consumers (both current and future) an incredible gift.

• Offering the younger talent, an alternative to being underemployed in a possible job with no future.
• For the consumer - More diversity, which can potentially lead to a better match in the style and knowledge of the agent they choose.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Retention: Predicting Who Will Jump Ship in Your Organization

Many of our company’s clients are increasingly focusing on the metric of “net hires.”  While recruiting is critical to any growth strategy, it must be coupled with outstanding retention strategies if growth is going to materialize.

The work of a real estate leader is to create an environment where agents are first attracted to join and then compelled to stay and contribute their talents to the organization.

There are very few tricks and gimmicks that produce long-term success in the quest to retain agents.  If you’re not providing an environment that offers real value, cracks will develop in your proverbial bathtub and water runs downhill.

Today’s topic assumes you have a great bathtub and you’re doing the work of keeping the cracks from developing.   Here’s reality--even under the best of circumstances, good agents will sometimes become disillusioned and leave your organization. 

The question for today:  Can those agents be saved if you were given enough warning of the impending departure?

Yes.  They can be saved, but only if you have enough time (usually several weeks) to solve problems and address issues that are causing the disillusionment. 

How do you get advanced notice that someone is going to leave your organization?  Several years ago, the researchers at the Huntsman School of Business (Utah State University) started putting thought into that question and came up with some surprising answers.

The research was led by associate professor Tim Gardner and focused on the symptoms that lead to voluntary turnover.   Here is a summary of the findings:

[Gardner] was surprised when his research showed, for example, an employee who starts taking more vacation time, punching out at 5 p.m. every day and looking at outside openings on company time, is not necessarily someone who is about to leave.

Gardner discovered, however, one thing most employees had in common before they left was that they began to “disengage” in the workplace.

Here are a few examples of subtle but consistent behavioral changes people often make in the one to two months before they leave their job:

They offered fewer constructive contributions in meetings.

They were more reluctant to commit to long-term projects.

They become more reserved and quiet.

They became less interested in advancing in the organization.

They were less interested in pleasing their boss than before.

They avoided social interactions with their boss and other members of management.

They suggested fewer new ideas or innovative approaches.

They began doing the minimum amount of work needed and no longer went beyond the call of duty.

They were less interested in participating in training and development programs.

Their work productivity went down.

Gardner said if employees were demonstrating at least six of these behaviors, his statistical formula could predict with 80 percent accuracy that they were about to leave the organization.

So think about this:  If you can detect one to two months out a person’s tendency to leave your organization with 80% accuracy, this information could significantly improve the retention percentage of agents on your team.

With this type of foreknowledge, you’d have time to probe for the irritations the agents are experiencing, uncover obstacles that are causing them to lose focus, and solve problems before they become deal-breakers.

How could you execute a system that would make use of this research?  For starters, you could create a simple scorecard that allows you to rate each agent on a scale of 1 to 3 (never, sometimes, frequently) for each question.  

Then color-code (green, yellow, red) your agents w/ a probability of staying in our organization.  Those agents receiving a score of 24 points or higher should probably be marked as red.  Those are the ones that need your attention.

Gardner sums up his research by saying,

“It appears that a person’s attitude can create behaviors that are hard to disguise,” he said. “As the grass starts to look greener on the other side of the fence to you, chances are that others will soon notice that you’ve lost your focus.”

Become proficient at detecting that loss of focus, and you’ll head off retention problems before they become your realty.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Informatica Reveals the Latest Cutting-Edge Recruiting Tactic

A few weeks ago, Laura Montini of Inc. Magazine reported on the Social Recruiting Strategies Conference that took place in San Francisco earlier in the month.

This is a global conference attended by many of the most progressive technology companies in the world.  The purpose of the conference is to promote the idea of using social media to recruit in today’s talent acquisition marketplace.

The keynote speaker was Brad Cook, the global vice president of talent acquisition at Informatica.  You may not have heard of Informatica, but this company has 3,500 employees and operates in 28 countries around the world.  Informatica is one of the worldwide leaders in cloud-based data storage and management technologies.

Considering his background and place in the technology world, Cook gave some unexpected advice during his keynote address.  Here is an excerpt from the article in Inc. Magazine.

"For me social recruiting doesn't mean social media. With the digital age that we have today, nobody knows each other," Cook said.

He recalled how, when he was in the sales department at Cisco Systems, he'd periodically get calls from recruiters asking, how's your job going? Are you looking for a change?

Now Cook is in charge of finding talent for… a software development business--arguably one of the most difficult areas to recruit in right now due to heavy demand for a particular skill set and strong competition from tech giants like Google and Facebook.  

Cook said the best recruiter he's ever worked with is a woman who doesn't incorporate social media into any part of her job. She makes a point of maintaining all of her candidate relationships via phone. "She knows who their grandkids are, what their dogs' names are. She has all of that stuff," Cook said.

 

"The point of this strategy isn't just to make your candidates feel warm and fuzzy. Maintaining these relationships cuts down on the work you have to do in the long run," Cook said.

"You're going to continue to be busy because you've got to go through 10 people to find one. Wouldn't you rather go through five people to find one?" Cook posed. "When you start building those relationships longer-term you can actually get to that point."

Here’s a surprise:   The most effective social recruiting tool available today is already sitting on your desk!  Also, the most effective social recruiting tactic (picking up that phone and calling candidates) is something most real estate hiring managers (who used to be real estate agents) are already proficient at executing.  Isn’t this how you built your real estate business in the first place?

Cook was later asked what kind of technology investments recruiting organizations should be considering.  His answer was surprisingly simple:

“Of course, there is a very important role for modern technology in the recruiting process, especially once you have a candidate who is interested. Applicants should be able to go to a well-designed and informative career page on your site. “

This is where you will get the highest return for your recruiting technology investment.  Many organizations spin their wheels chasing after the latest social technologies that may reduce workload in the short-term, but are not effective because they result in keeping the candidates at an arms-length away.

Here are some applications for the real estate hiring process from Cook’s keynote address:

Talk to New Candidates on the Phone.   Modern technology (social networks, twitter feeds, drip email campaigns) has its place in the recruiting process, but the most progressive and effective hiring managers pick up the phone and talk to candidates.

Talk to Pipeline Candidates on the Phone.  Many hiring managers view the recruiting process as a one-time event.   It’s an interview and then plug the candidate into a drip email campaign and hope for the best.   Progressive and effective recruiters don’t just rely on this tactic—they also frequently pick up the phone and talk to their post-interview pipeline candidates.

Invest in Your Company’s Career Page and Application Process.   Cook ended his keynote address by suggesting, “If you do nothing else at the end of this (conference), go back and apply to your career site…. you need to know what pain you're putting your candidates through. That's the best way to learn how to fix it.”

This is all good advice from some of the top recruiters in the world.

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Join the WorkPuzzle Discussion at the Tidemark Online Community (TMOC)

Engage in the WorkPuzzle discussion by joining the TMOC private social network.  Commenting on a public blog like WorkPuzzle can be a little intimidating, so why not join the discussion inside the privacy of the TMOC discussion group?  

By joining TMOC, you'll get to see who else is in the group and your comments will only be seen by those whom you trust.   Joining TMOC is quick, easy, and free (no kidding…this takes less than 2 minutes).   To get started, click here.

Already of a member of TMOC?  If so, join the WorkPuzzle Dialog Group by clicking on the WorkPuzzle Group icon on the left side of your TMOC homepage.  Questions?   Email the WorkPuzzle editor (workpuzzle@hiringcenter.net) and we'll walk through the process.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Coaching Insight: How to GROW Your Coaching Skills - Part 2

The last two blogs have been introductions to what you will read today. Over the course of the next few weeks I will explain in detail the GROW method.

When it comes to coaching, if you are not working from a proven model it’s very difficult to be effective. More often than not, when you’re “flying by the seat of your pants," you'll end up directing and prodding and have little success as a result.  

As I mentioned last week, the GROW acronym stands for:

Goal

Reality 

Obstacles and Options

Way Forward 

I'll describe each step of the model briefly this week, so you can begin to mull it over. Then, over the course of the next few weeks I'll delve into each phase of this model, so that you can begin to practice it with those you coach. I truly believe that if you learn and practice this model, others will experience you as an excellent coach guiding them to greater heights of performance. 

Goal - This is the end point. What the person would like to achieve. The goal must be concrete, verifiable, measurable, and clear. A person needs to be able to easily recognize when they have arrived. If for instance, the goals were around recruiting, we would set an exact number of New Agent Hires and Experienced Agent Hires a manager would like to achieve by years end. 

Reality- This is the current reality of where you are now and how you arrived there. The more this can be boiled down to specifics the better. To carry over from my recruiting example above, Reality might be how many experienced and/or new agents did you recruit last year, in exact numbers. How did you accomplish that? How many interviews did you have? What percentage of those new agent interviews were converted into licensing school? How many of those converted into hires? How did you build a supportive relationship during the pipeline process? 

Obstacles- These would be the variables that might hinder the person from reaching their goals. Be sure to list them all specifically.

Options- After the Obstacles have been thoroughly explored, begin to brainstorm a possible list of options to overcome the obstacles; this is where the previously described Inner Game questions are applied and achieve their magic.

Way Forward- Once the options have been identified they can be translated into very specific monthly, weekly, daily and hourly action steps that will lead them to their goal. 

Keep in mind that knowing the above model isn't enough. What makes this model work and allows the results you want is how the coach presents the questions throughout each step. This style of questioning is initially presented in Timothy Gallwey’s Inner Game methodology. The GROW model takes the Inner Game premise and expands it to make an extremely powerful coaching tool. Next week I will begin to dissect each of these steps in detail, especially focusing on how to ask the questions? 

Because the Inner Game and the GROW model in my mind will be forever linked; here is another principle of the Inner Game that could be applied to the GROW model practice:

“If the person being coached focuses on what the coach or their peers want, or focuses on appearances or the agenda of others, this will invariably distort every piece of this process and lead to poor results if not failure.”

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Join the WorkPuzzle Discussion at the Tidemark Online Community (TMOC)

Engage in the WorkPuzzle discussion by joining the TMOC private social network.  Commenting on a public blog like WorkPuzzle can be a little intimidating, so why not join the discussion inside the privacy of the TMOC discussion group?  

By joining TMOC, you'll get to see who else is in the group and your comments will only be seen by those whom you trust.   Joining TMOC is quick, easy, and free (no kidding…this takes less than 2 minutes).   To get started, click here.

Already of a member of TMOC?  If so, join the WorkPuzzle Dialog Group by clicking on the WorkPuzzle Group icon on the left side of your TMOC homepage.  Questions?   Email the WorkPuzzle editor (workpuzzle@hiringcenter.net) and we'll walk through the process.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, a Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

PayScale: How the "Zillow of Recruiting" Can Help You Be More Effective at Hiring

Earlier this month, we talked about employment trending outside the real estate industry.  I warned you not to become too inwardly focused as you think about hiring, but instead keep your eyes on the broader employment horizon.

Why would you want to put effort into such a task? 

If the real estate industry is going to grow over the next decade, it must regain its ability to systematically attract new talent from other industries. Real estate companies were once masters at this trade, but many lost their ability to be effective during the downturn. 

This happened as a natural consequence of the real estate industry shrinking from over 1.5 million agents in 2006 to less than one million after the downturn.  During that time period, there were plenty of experienced agents to go around, and there was not an immediate and compelling need to hire from outside the industry.

Now that most real estate markets have started to recover, once again there is energy towards hiring new talent from the outside.  As you make this transition in your organization, don’t make the mistake of assuming that the tactics that work with experienced agents will work similarly with these new-to-real estate candidates. 

Also, much has changed in the broader employment market over the past seven years.  So even the tactics you used before the downturn could be less effective considering today’s job market realities.

To be effective going forward, you’ll need to become a student of what makes the candidates in the “normal job market” tick.  In addition, you’ll need to learn how to craft your message to be heard by today’s talented individuals who will become your next generation of new agents.

To get you started on your quest, I’d like to point you to a company called PayScale.  If you’re not familiar with this company, it’s the leading website people use when they have questions about pay and benefits.   It similar to Zillow, but instead of telling you what your house is worth, it tells you what you’re worth!

When a person is considering a new job, they enter some basic information about their education, experience, and the new job they’re considering.  PayScale then delivers a salary report that outlines what he or she could expect to be paid for a particular job in a particular market.

It’s possible that many of the “new-to-real estate” candidates you interview are using a tool such as PayScale.  If you were to request information on being a real estate agent in my local market (Seattle), you might get a report like this:

 

So, a full-time agent with 10 years of experience operating in the 50^th percentile can expect to make about $60K/year in the Seattle market.   To make $120K (or more) per year, a person would need to be in the 90^th percentile.

While this is all interesting information from the candidate’s perspective, how is it going to help you? 

If PayScale has millions of people entering pay and benefit information, it becomes a rich environment for employment research.  I’m sure that PayScale sells this information (in detailed and specific versions) to all types of companies. 

However, they also make a bunch of this data available to the general public at no cost.  By just reading and digesting the free reports and information, you can get quite an education on the employment market.

I encourage you to view these reports on your own.  In my next couple of WorkPuzzles, I’ll highlight several reports I found most interesting and relevant to  real estate agent hiring.

In the meantime, go to PayScale and find out what they report for agent wages in your market.  It would be interesting to hear from you on how accurate this information is for your area compared to the actuals you have in your company.  Like Zillow, sometimes the estimates done by PayScale are not completely reflective of reality.

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Editor's Note: This article was written by Ben Hess. Ben is the Founding Partner and Managing Director of Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. 

Staying Alive by Tending the Recruiting Fire--Part 2

In my previous blog I questioned what is causing some managers to put recruiting on the proverbial “back-burner” when it comes to prioritizing their regular responsibilities.   Managers wear many hats, but for some they tend to leave the recruiting hat on the hook. 

If the financial motivation is not enough to get this hat squarely on your head, perhaps discussing the tasks associated with recruiting and developing a comfortable process will help.  How comfortable are you with recruiting?  Have you implemented a process that doesn’t feel natural to you?  Yes, getting outside of one’s comfort zone can push us to greater limits, but if the resistance is causing inaction you’re getting nowhere fast. 

I came across an article on RISMedia in which Jeff Smith with Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Bradfield Properties in San Antonio, Texas was highlighted for his recruiting strategy.  According to Jeff, his recruiting success comes from going back to the basics…and that’s how he was able to recruit 35 agents during the summer of 2012.

It’s not only about executing specific tasks on a regular basis, but understanding why they are effective that might help you find a different comfort zone in your recruiting strategy.  The excerpt of this article below speaks to Jeff’s understanding of why he is taking the actions he is taking. I have highlighted the top 5 steps.

Phone calls. Every day Smith dials between 30-100 agents, speaking to the ones he can reach and leaving messages for everyone else.  His voice mail message often includes a call to action such as an invitation to one of his many training events.

Smith’s daily tasks:  Smith spends a minimum of 1.5 hours daily making calls and sets goals for the number dials he will make.  Looking back on his real estate career, Smith says he developed good phone habits when he used to spend five hours a day calling  expired listings in his market.
 


Email. Smith understands that most experienced agents will say they are happy at their current company and not looking to make a change right away.  Due to this, staying in touch over what can sometimes be a long period of time is incredibly important.

Smith’s solution:  Smith uses email and handwritten notes to stay in touch with agents between face-to-face meetings.  Writing three to five emails and notes per day can be a great way to stay personally involved with prospects.  Never underestimate the power of a handwritten note, no matter how digital our world might feel.

Real Estate Schools. Twice a month Smith has lunch with the students at the local real estate school.  He says he loves working with new agents because the process is shorter and he knows he can train them to be successful.

Smith’s Tip:  This success strategy isn’t for everyone but will work if you have an item of value to offer.  Smith most recently did a drawing and gave a way his new e-book as a way to capture the student’s contact information.  He then makes phone calls and sends emails as follow-up and stay in touch with the students after they pass the exam.

Training.  Smith understands that training is imperative, especially for new agents.  Because of this, Smith will often invite students from the local real estate school as well as outside agents to join his regular two-hour training sessions.

A typical question is whether or not he is afraid that agents will attend training to simply swipe and implement his ideas on their own. ‘Absolutely not,’ Smith says.  In fact, his mantra has always been to ‘give away everything I’ve got.’  He makes the point that the more REALTOR® signs seen out in the local market, the better it is for all real estate professionals.  He believes that FSBOs are the only real competition.

Understanding the competition. Smith says keeping his eyes open to opportunity has served him well.  In order to grow, ‘you need to know when to pounce,’ referring to his recent merger as well as the large number of new agents he’s added to the company.

Making sure that agents in his market know he is there to support them in their careers helps to position Smith as a true leader.

Staying in touch with agents through regular phone calls and emails means that when smoothing happens and that agent is ready to make a move, Smith and Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate Bradfield Properties are the logical next choice.

With 19 years of experience in the industry and a track record of growing companies, there are certainly some lessons to be learned from Smith.

Getting back to basics, doing the work, and having the right intentions and attitude, and understanding your market could be all that it takes to hit your talent attraction goals.

So here’s to picking up the phone, writing a note and engaging old school style!

 

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Engage in the WorkPuzzle discussion by joining the TMOC private social network.  Commenting on a public blog like WorkPuzzle can be a little intimidating, so why not join the discussion inside the privacy of the TMOC discussion group?  

By joining TMOC, you'll get to see who else is in the group and your comments will only be seen by those whom you trust.   Joining TMOC is quick, easy, and free (no kidding…this takes less than 2 minutes).   To get started, click here.

Already of a member of TMOC?  If so, join the WorkPuzzle Dialog Group by clicking on the WorkPuzzle Group icon on the left side of your TMOC homepage.  Questions?   Email the WorkPuzzle editor (workpuzzle@hiringcenter.net) and we'll walk through the process.

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Editor's Note: Lee Gray is the Senior Account Manager at Tidemark Inc. Lee is a guest contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. .