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The Total View

December 18, 2002
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-- Experience is not all it's cracked up to be!
-- What we found may surprise you!
-- Too Cool, Calm and Collected
-- Too smart for the job
-- Mistaking the diamonds for glass
-- Looking in all the wrong places
-- Was Managing to Excel what you expected?
-- Unemployment reached 6 percent but....
-- On the road again...and the airways
-- Schedule Your 2003 Events Today

Greetings!

I met Sharon just a few weeks ago. Sharon's boss had engaged - or maybe the more proper word might be "challenged" - us to find what differentiated his stars from his bottom performers.

Sharon's boss and owner of the company, Jeff, was skeptical to say the least that a "personality test" could really predict a successful sales performer in his industry and his organization. Jeff, like many other managers, believed that his industry, selling residential mortgages, was unique and that selling loans - and a lot of them - only required a combination of experience, intelligence, and good work ethic.

Experience is not all it's cracked up to be!
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Unfortunately, six of Jeff's seasoned loan officers, including three with over twenty years of experience, ranked in the bottom half of loans closed during 2002, a historical year for new loans and re- financings. Ironically, five of the top performers had worked as a mortgage loan originator five years or less and two of his top ten had only two years experience. Experience definitely contributed to success but relying on it as a predictive tool for new hires was a 50-50 proposition at best. With the competition for loans being what it is and busy-ness not allowing for long training periods, Jeff's interest was piqued about finding a better way to identify individuals who could sell and originate loans for his company.

What we found may surprise you!
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It did the hiring managers and senior executives.

1. Top performing employees come with a variety of skills and personality traits. The job analysis and benchmarking actually expanded the pool of potentially successful candidates and employees and zeroed in on two key knock-out factors.

How can a job analysis help you?

Too Cool, Calm and Collected
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2. The most striking difference between being a star and a poor performer was a sense of complacency. Experience and abilities were overshadowed by high stability. Over one-half of the employees who missed expectations were frankly being okay not being okay and lacked the urgency to change. Several preferred to be judged by their intentions while the organization measured results. These poor performers believed tomorrow is always another day.

3. Approximately seventy-five percent of the employees they would hire again based on the results of personality, interests, and abilities; two-thirds of these employees were in the top fifty percent of performers.

Too smart for the job
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4. Before we started the process, we were told that these positions required smart and intelligent people. What these managers learned was hiring individuals with more skills than they needed to do the job decreased training time. What they didn't realize was that it also increased the likelihood for boredom and disenchantment with the job, resulting in turnover. It is now clear that hiring individuals with enough of the right skills is more important than hiring employees who have "excess capacity" just in case you need the skills. Organizations that hire individuals with higher general abilities than the job requires need to have rapid growth opportunities or these employees leave for bigger challenges.

5. Of the one-third of those employees not meeting expectations, other factors affecting performance included lack of experience, job dissatisfaction, career mismatches, and manager-employee mismatches. By re- assigning several of these employees to different managers, branches, or jobs, at least half of these employees would remain with the organization and had the potential to become productive employees.

More on job analysis - see CriteriaOne, The Whole Person Approach

Mistaking the diamonds for glass
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6. Our clients initially feared that personality tests would unnecessarily screen out qualified candidates. They discovered just the opposite. Based on the newly developed top performer profile and looking back at their screening criteria, they recognized that they had unintentionally and mistakenly bypassed and overlooked several good prospective employees. As an added benefit, by looking for people with more average abilities and personalities, the size of the qualified labor pool just expanded.

7. Most sales and management jobs only require average abilities with the right personality match. Hiring the best and the brightest is not as important as hiring individuals with the right abilities and a good personality match.

Looking in all the wrong places
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8. Instead of looking for superstars many jobs just require the skills of the average Joe and Mary. That's good news for hiring managers. As one manager told us, "we now know that we don't need to be recruiting MBAs on college campuses but setting up a kiosk in the mall."

Was Managing to Excel what you expected?
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"NO! It was better." was the reaction of one participant at the 2002 Managing to Excel workshops held at the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce. Others told us it was "easy to learn", "great interaction", "perfectly timed", "unique and practical", and "great presentations on tough areas for me to work on."

Managing to Excel 2003 begins on January 8, 2003 at the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce. Managing to Excel is a series of 12 workshops for front line managers, supervisors and team leaders focusing in 12 critical skills including time management, goal setting, problem solving, team building, project management and more.