Retention: How David Lee Roth Can Help You Predict Who Will Leave Your Team

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

If recruiting is the yin, then retention of talented team members is the yang of any successful business. For real estate companies in particular, there is so much emphasis on recruiting that retention often receives less emphasis, or is completely ignored.

This is a shame because it takes less effort to retain a productive person on your team than it does to acquire, train, and coach a new person to the same level of productivity. So, why do we ignore such an important priority? Because, like the weeds in your garden, the factors that cause someone to leave creep in slowly and often go unnoticed until they choke out productivity. By the time the plant looks sick, it’s too late.

The key to reversing this trend comes in identifying the early warning signals that a person is becoming dissatisfied. Here is some research that was published in Fast Company that illustrates how this principle plays itself out in schools:

“Walk into an urban high school and look around at the kids. Roughly half of them will drop out of school. If you knew which ones, you might be able to steer them toward a different path. But you can’t solve a problem until you can spot it, and how do you spot a future dropout?

Some Johns Hopkins University researchers, frustrated by the high-school-dropout rate, went looking for early-warning signs among students in Philadelphia. What were the telltale markers of a student who wouldn’t graduate? Their analysis came back with astonishing clarity. Pouring over eighth-grade attendance records, they found hundreds of students who had missed more than one out of every five class days. Of those frequent absentees, 78% eventually quit high school. Similarly, of the eighth graders who had failed either English or Math, three out of four dropped out. No other factor — gender, race, age, or standardized-test scores — had the predictive power of those two patterns.

The researchers concluded that the school district could identify more than half of the students who would be likely to drop out before they even set foot in high school.

The early-warning flags didn’t solve the dropout problem, of course, any more than a smoke alarm can put out a fire. But policy analysts at the National High School Center, armed with this information, were then able to review almost a dozen dropout-prevention programs with documented success that could be targeted toward the most at-risk kids.”

Isn’t this interesting? Measuring a few very simple things lead to a prediction of something as complex as who would stay in school. This certainly begs the question: Are there similar factors that you could be measuring to predict those who are at risk of leaving your organization?

In order to find these factors for your organization, it may take some focus and creativity. To get your mind working, the article goes on to share another example of how paying attention to early warning signs is critical to predicting problems that can significantly impact your business. The example comes from an unexpected source—the rock band Van Halen, and lead singer David Lee Roth.

“[In the ‘80s] Van Halen did dozens of shows every year, and at each venue, the band would show up with nine 18-wheelers full of gear. Because of the technical complexity, the band’s standard contract with venues was thick and convoluted — Roth, in his inimitable way, said in his autobiography that it read ‘like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages.’ A typical ‘article’ in the contract might say, ‘There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes.’

Van Halen buried a special clause in the middle of the contract. It was called Article 126 and it required a special bowl of M&Ms be provided for the band backstage. It read, ‘There will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.’ So when Roth would arrive at a new venue, he’d walk backstage and glance at the M&M bowl. If he saw a brown M&M, he’d demand a line check of the entire production. ‘Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error,’ he wrote. ‘They didn’t read the contract…. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show.'”

So, what are the brown M&Ms that will predict a breakdown in the retention strategy for your business? Smart operators like David Lee Roth understand that it’s much easier to take small innovative steps to detect an upcoming failure than deal with the expensive and painful consequences after it happens.

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. Comments or questions are welcome. If you’re an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the “comments” link below.

What Is Talent?

Monday, February 22, 2010

One of the things that we often hear when talking to executive teams about recruiting is that they want to hire talented individuals. Additionally, most of their frustration with the hiring process comes from interacting with candidates whom they perceive as low quality.

With this issue causing such angst in the hiring process, have you ever tried to come up with a clear-cut
definition of “talent?” Certainly, common factors such as level of education, work history, and personality are going to contribute to a person’s talent, but these characteristics don’t seem to capture the whole picture. Is it possible that we have a tough time recognizing talent because we don’t know what we’re looking for?

Recruiting guru, Peter Weddle, seems to think so. In a recent article, he points out that there are an unprecedented number of experienced, highly-educated individuals who have lost their jobs and are available in today’s labor pool:

“Ironically, even though millions of Americans are now in the job market looking for work, a large percentage of employers believe there is a shortage of individuals with talent. While their email boxes and mailrooms are filled to overflowing with resumes, they see themselves as increasingly challenged to find, recruit and retain workers who have the critical skills and/or the commitment to superior performance necessary for organizational success in the global marketplace.”

Weddle goes on to offer a great definition of talent. In practice, a person of talent is someone who has one or both of two attributes:

“They have a skill that is critical to organizational success and a track record which demonstrates their ability to use that skill effectively on-the-job.”

and/or

“They perform at a superior level on-the-job which sets a standard that encourages their coworkers to upgrade the caliber of their work, as well.”

If you have the responsibility of recruiting for your organization, it is important to read both parts of this definition a couple of times to let the information sink into your brain. Many hiring mistakes are made because hiring managers either don’t understand these principles, or they choose to abandon them in the midst of the hiring process.

Here’s how you can begin to apply these principles to your hiring process:

Identify the skills that are critical to your organization’s success. Take a quick mental inventory of those who perform at a high level. What skills do they all have in common? As much as possible, go down to the task level. Only at the task level can you make appropriate comparisons between those who are currently performing well in your organization, and candidates who desire a career change and think they’d like to work in your organization.
Don’t compromise on track record. If you’ve determined that one of the critical skills necessary to perform well in the role for which you’re hiring is making cold calls, then don’t hire someone who doesn’t have a track record of making cold calls. It’s that simple. It’s financially too risky to have blind faith that a new hire will pick up a critical skill necessary for a new position. It’s better to source more candidates and find someone who possesses the necessary skills.
Stop hiring below average people. I know that no one tries to make lousy hires, but we do talk ourselves into accepting candidates that should be screened out. Ask yourself honestly: Do I envision this candidate being in the top 25% of individuals who work in this position? If you can’t see this happening, then consider a different candidate. It is important that the “new blood” in and organization raise the quality of the group—not the other way around.

Once you have a clear picture of what talent is for your organization, you can more passionately pursue those candidates who will be able to successfully apply their talent in your organization.

Another List Of Excellent Manager Behavior?

Monday, February 15, 2010

I’ll bet most of us have read countless books and articles that claim to provide the most essential characteristics, traits, or behaviors of great managers. We all know that with so many “MOST IMPORTANT” lists, they can’t all be true.

That fact has never seemed to keep me from reading the newest list, claiming to have discovered the latest. Why? Because every list seems to resonate with what I know to be true. Namely, that becoming a good manager differs from situation to situation and requires such a vast array of traits that we may never exhaust discovering and dissecting them all.

But this doesn’t mean that I’ll give up reading these list. On the contrary…each list contains elements of truth we can use to measure ourselves against. We’ll never have all of the desired characteristics, but it doesn’t hurt to try.

So…here’s yet another list: This list was compiled from answers given by students of Kathryn Britton in an article titled Becoming an Excellent Manager: Where to Start and 12 Clues in Positive Psychology News Daily.

Britton began by asking students, “Have you had a manager that you thought was truly excellent?” This was followed by, “If so, describe his or her management style and explain why you found it so good.”

She distilled all comments and, in her words, “Here’s what we settled on:”

Supports career development. Gives stretch assignments. Mentors.
Knows how to do the job. Leads by example. Technical competence.
Cares about people beyond work performance. Helps people with practical needs.
Gives autonomy.
Communicates well within team – e.g., gives clear directions.
Has an open door — is accessible to employees.
Asks for people’s opinions and acts on the information. Is willing to learn from others.
Is positive and cheerful. Values humor. Detoxes stress.
Shares information. Enables employees. Watches for occasions where help is needed and gives it in a way that increases rather decreases employee confidence.
Bears the brunt of mistakes. Shields employees. Deals well with errors and failures.
Gives credit for good performance. Gives feedback well.
Trusts employees and is trustworthy.

Is this the greatest list you’ve ever read? Probably not. But that’s not the point. This list conveys what people say they like in their managers. Mark the ones you already do naturally and pat yourself on the back- Job well done. Now, pick a few more and work on developing them. It may not be “THE LIST” but let’s never stop learning…

Editor’s Note: This article was written by Dr. David Mashburn. Dave is a Clinical and Consulting Psychologist, Partner at Tidemark, Inc. and a regular contributor to WorkPuzzle. Comments or questions are welcome. If you’re an email subscriber, reply to this WorkPuzzle email. If you read the blog directly from the web, you can click the “comments” link below.

Resilience In Children / Coaching Agents

Wednesday, February 10, 2010

What’s more important? A new agent’s knowledge of the business, or their confidence in their ability to be successful once they’re out on their own? Training and coaching new agents requires that you know what’s going on in their heads…not just when you’re training them, but after they’ve left the support and energy of the training room and have begun to take the steps required to earn business.

Here’s what often happens: They are excited to learn, they soak up all the great training, and then they go home and try to put into action what they’ve learned…they stumble, make mistakes and begin the negative internal dialogue that slowly leads to inertia. I’m sure you’ve encountered an agent who is in a slump or who has just begun their career and appears to suddenly have little confidence in their abilities. New research might be helpful in addressing this pattern before it surfaces.

Preventing these funks and building lasting confidence takes more than an optimistic pep talk. It takes figuring out what might be going on between the ears that could undermine performance. Most people at some point (and some more than others) have a tendency to get into ruts of negative self-talk and believe false things about themselves and their abilities.

There is a great deal of research on the impact on negative self-talk. Negative self-talk is the barely conscious, blatantly negative explanations of who we are, how we are perceived, and how we perform.

One group particularly prone to negative self-talk is teenagers. An estimated two million 12- to 17-year-olds experience clinical depression annually. In light of this, there is a group of researchers from University of Pennsylvania’s Positive Psychology Center, who have found that building resilience in younger children can help thwart depression before it starts. The pair has developed school-based curricula that teach educators, parents, and ultimately kids the core skills of resilience.

Psychologists Karen Reivich and Jane Gillham have conducted 17 studies of nearly 2,500 middle-school students and have demonstrated that if resilience training is taught before kids enter this sensitive period, depressive symptoms can be reduced long after the training.

“A key resilience-building skill they teach is how to identify the link between self-talk (in essence, what’s playing on kids’ ‘internal radios’) —and kids’ feelings and behaviors, says Gillham. Negative self-talk can create self-fulfilling prophecies, leading kids to behave in ways that create new situations that only reinforce the negative thoughts they have about themselves. Say, for example, that a child does poorly on an algebra test. That may prompt her to think, ‘I can’t do math,’ fueling feelings of discouragement and sadness. Because of those thoughts, she stops studying and then bombs the next exam. A downward spiral ensues.

‘A lot of what we’re trying to do is interrupt that process,’ says Gillham. Her approach to positive psychology teaches teachers and parents how to help kids challenge negative self-talk and see disappointments from other angles. Perhaps the hypothetical girl did poorly on the algebra test because it’s an area of math that she finds difficult, though she excels at fractions; perhaps she felt groggy during the exam because she didn’t sleep well the night before. Once the faulty link in those thought patterns has been identified, adults can encourage kids to come up with ways to best tackle the problem. Positive education also encourages kids to identify and embrace their strengths.” (Lindsay Lyon – US NEWS)

The key is to predict and intercept negative thoughts before they derail teens into the downward spiral of depression. So, what would happen if preparing new agents also included resilience training? What if we spent more time discussing individual strengths that will help compensate for the inevitable difficulties? We all know that what happens between the ears is half the battle – Why not anticipate the negative self-talk that is predictable in brand new agents and help inoculate against this internal disease early on?

I’ll bet that the best managers and trainers do some form of this, and may not even know what they’ve been doing until now. It makes sense – We’re onto something when intuitive logic meets research findings.

And if you haven’t thought of it yet… try using this proactive coaching strategy with anyone who is venturing out for the first time in anything. They’ll appreciated it, I’m sure.

Getting Ahead At Work: Three Components To Working Well

Monday, February 08, 2010

Most of you know that I carefully follow the latest research in the fairly new field of Positive Psychology. You also know by now that Positive Psychology is based on rigorous standardized research that investigates the causes of human flourishing in various domains. There has been a huge outpouring of research money allocated for this. The findings are fascinating and can help you, and your organization.

Some of the questions being asked include, “How do people flourish at work”…or “What kind of behavior leads to success?” Michael Frese, Professor of Organizational Psychology at Germany’s University of Giessen, believes he has identified an answer.

What you’re about to read may seem obvious, but much of science is studying the obvious and distilling it down to its most intricate core elements, so we can then say, “Of course!”

Frese claims there are certain “active behaviors,” that he defines as responsible for the majority of flourishing on the job. These active behaviors are comprised of three components:

“The first is self-starting behavior; self-starters do things not just because a boss demands it, but because they see those things as being important.

The second component is proactive behavior, or actions that people take when they think of future opportunities and prepare for them now.

The third is persistence in the face of professional obstacles.”

Frese says that each of these three things must be consistently in play to lead to positive results and impact. He goes on to say that, “Every job you can imagine—from blue-collar to starchy white—can be discussed and described in this way.”

We often use the term “personal initiative,” but now we know just what this means. We can operationally define it and ask people to take it (initiative that is), not just because it will help the company, but because it will help them.

In a recent article in The US News and World Report, writer Lindsay Lyon reports:

“His studies of employees suggest that people who engage in a high degree of active behavior at work are more successful on the job—they gain more empowerment, meaning they have greater control over their work and their work is more complex; they gain even more personal initiative; and they find new jobs more easily if they become unemployed. Those findings hold true across many different workplaces and countries, he says. And active behavior not only pays off for the individual, he’s found, but can change the workplace environment for the better, even boosting a firm’s income.”

This evidence is robust enough to warrant some consideration into ways you can more effectively observe and encourage more “active behaviors” as you coach, critique, and reward your employees.

What Bill Walsh Can Teach You About Coaching And Recruiting – Part 4

Wednesday, February 03, 2010

We’ll finish up our discussion about Bill Walsh today. If you’re just tuning in, you may want to read the previous discussions (1, 2, 3).

This weekend is the Super Bowl. As you probably know, it will feature the Indianapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints. What you may not know, is much about the coaches of these teams.

For both coaches, this is their first appearance in the Super Bowl. So, I would imagine they are probably more than a little nervous. When the Saints coach, Sean Payton, wanted to get the pre-game practice week off to a good start, what you do you think he did? The San Jose Mercury News reported that he followed in Bill Walsh’s footsteps:

“Sean Payton had taken a few pages from the playbook of the late coaching great Bill Walsh before. Not quite like this, though. Ever focused on the mood of his players, the Saints’ head coach kicked off Super Bowl week by donning a bellhop uniform and helping with luggage when the team bus showed up at its downtown Miami hotel on Monday.

Drew Brees and the Saints’ six other Pro Bowl players joined him, hoping to ease whatever tension accompanied the Saints on the first Super Bowl trip in the club’s 43-year history.

‘We’re always wanting to steal a pretty good idea,’ Payton said. ‘I think Bill Walsh, a long time ago, had a pretty good idea, and we just kind of took it like one of his offensive plays and ran with it.’

When Walsh coached the 1981 49ers to the first of five Super Bowls for that franchise, he did essentially the same thing. The Joe Montana-led Niners beat Cincinnati 26-21.”

Sean Payton was primarily trained by coaching legend, Bill Parcells, in the Dallas Cowboy franchise, but with this type of stunt, do you think he has spent some time studying Bill Walsh’s methodologies? Probably a safe bet.

What about Jim Caldwell? This is great story. Caldwell spent the first part of his career as an assistant coach at seven different colleges in the midwest. He was finally awarded the head coaching job at Wake Forest in 1993.

His record at Wake Forest was dismal. Over the next eight years, he lead the team to 26 wins and 63 losses (he was 12 – 52 inside the notably weak ACC conference). I’m not sure if he got fired after the 2000 season, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did. In 2001, he took an assistant coaching job with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers under the supervision of their head coach, Tony Dungy.

In 2002, Caldwell followed Dungy to Indianapolis, where Dungy took the helm of the Colts. Dungy lead the Colts on a remarkable run over the next seven years. Dungy compiled a record of 85 wins and 27 losses, making the playoffs every year. Additionally, the Colts won the Super Bowl in 2006.

In 2008, when Dungy announced his retirement, he named his successor as Jim Caldwell. You wouldn’t think this would be a good choice based on his track record, but Dungy had spent the previous seven years teaching Caldwell his system and felt confident that he could carry on that system after his departure.

Dungy was right. Caldwell compiled a 14 win – 2 loss record this year as a “rookie” coach. This is the best start by a rookie head coach in NFL history. It has been quite a remarkable turnaround from his performance at Wake Forest. What changed? I believe that he simply executed Tony Dungy’s system.

Any idea where Tony Dungy learned to coach? You guessed it—from those heavily influenced by Bill Walsh. In fact, many of today’s most successful NFL coaches trace their coaching philosophies back to Wal sh:

So, we learned from our previous discussions that Walsh had “a magic wand” when if came to quarterbacks—anyone who played inside his system would perform remarkably better. It now also appears that Bill Walsh may have had the same effect on coaches. In the end, this speaks to the power and wisdom of the system that he conceived and perfected during his coaching career.

From a business perspective, every owner wants to build a business system that not only works (profitable) but can also be predictably duplicated (scalable). Bill Walsh did just that in the very competitive arena of professional football…not by focusing his efforts on hiring better talent, but by building a better system to plug that talent into. As described in Walsh’s book, The Score Takes Care of Itself:

“Walsh was not presumptuous enough to write a book that would guarantee good leadership; rather, Walsh sought to help us understand the ways we can increase the probability of success: ‘That’s what it all comes down to, namely, intelligently and relentlessly seeking solutions that will increase your chance of prevailing in a competitive environment. When you do that, the score will take care of itself.’ ”

Enjoy the Super Bowl this weekend, and see if you can detect some of Bill Walsh’s legacy unfold in the action on the field.