December 17, 2003
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-- It Just Goes To Show You - Promoting The Wrong Employee Costs $$$
-- Perfect Labor Storm Alerts # 51 to #55
-- New articles posted on the Success Performance Solutions website.
-- "Too many workers are lousy at their jobs"
-- An Employee Evaluation System that Finally Works
-- Managing by Values(tm) - Aligning People, Culture, Strategy and Process
-- Take the Age Test.....More Questions
-- FirstView(tm) - PreScreen Candidates Quickly, Easily and Inexpensively for as little as $15
-- For Front-Line Managers and Supervisors Only
-- Employee Evaluations Made Easy - 360s too!
-- A Manager's Guide to Managing the Generation Mix - Only $9.95

Greetings!

Welcome to this week's issue of The Total View.

You can take the rest of the year off. You deserve it.

Productivity in the U.S. is up 9.4 percent. What this means to workers in this United States is that they have produced in 2000 hours what it used to take 2184 hours.

That increased productivity is equivalent to 23 fewer days needed to produce the same product or service as before all the layoffs, downsizing, and buyouts. By my calculation, everyone should be on holiday! Just in case you are not already basking in the sun and relaxing from a lot of hard work, take a break and enjoy this week's issue of The Total View.

The Total View is written and published each Wednesday by Ira S. Wolfe, founder of Success Performance Solutions. (Yes, Ira writes every article, every week!)

Ira S. Wolfe ©2003 - All Rights Reserved. Reprints and other distribution by permission only.

To learn more about Success Performance Solutions or read back issues of The Total View, visit our website at www.super- solutions.com.

It Just Goes To Show You - Promoting The Wrong Employee Costs $$$
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Last month Randy was the subject of my column. Randy you might recall was the super-star employee promoted to manager who failed miserably. In that column I wrote:

"The life cycle of Randy-like employees is repeated day after day in thousands of businesses every day. What takes place when a potential super-star gets drunk with his own success? How and why does this happen? Was Randy, with all his talent and smarts, a victim of the organizational culture or was his behavior predictable and inevitable? "

Just a mere three weeks after publication, "Randy" made the front cover of the December 15, 2003 issue of Business Week. Well it wasn't really Randy but Philip Condit.

Philip M. Condit is now the former chief executive officer of Boeing Co. He abruptly resigned just a few days earlier.

What went wrong? Plain and simple, according to Business Week, this was a "tale of a manager promoted beyond his competence and blind to his own shortcomings. The skills that made him a brilliant engineer - obsessive problem solving and an ability to envision elegant design solutions - were of less use in an executive position. Although always a bold visionary, Condit was frequently indecisive and isolated."

Geez, sounds like Randy doesn't it.

No one questioned Condit's competence as an engineer. But as happens over and over again, the reward for loyalty and success in technical positions does not ensure success in management and executive roles. Nevertheless, Mr Condit was promoted to the top position of a $50-plus billion dollar company.

It didn't take long however for Condit to expose his shortcomings as a manager. In the end, his strategies failed and his ethical conduct was questioned.

How many times must this happen? A brilliant and highly skilled technician wows his superiors and colleagues for years. The ultimate reward for his or her contributions is a promotion into a position that requires radically different skills than those that got him recognized in the first place. And whether it is a board of directors or a team of senior executives who recommended him in the first place, the tendency after the fact is to give the newly promoted leader more slack and more and more time.

Believing the devil you know is better than the devil you don't, failures continue and losses mount longer than they should. As these well-intentioned execs now become infected with a chronic case of denial, profits begin to dive, morale plummets and the competition begins to gain the advantage.

How can it be that so many smart business people keep making such poor decisions when it comes to selecting the right people to lead their organizations?

Measuring the quality of a new employee isn't easy, but it is possible with advances in psychometric technology. The 2003 Benchmark Report, a nationwide survey of companies done by Staffing.org and the Human Capital Metrics Consortium, showed less than 30 percent of organizations actually use assessments to quantify new employee quality, a meager 1 percent increase from last year to this year.

The vast majority of companies still put their faith in traditional methods such as the interview and reference checks. This flies in the face of good business practice when studies and research prove time and time again that the odds of an interview identifying employee quality is just slightly better than flipping a coin. Job matching - a combination of behavioral interviewing, background and reference checks and psychometric testing - ensures job suitability more than 8 out of 10 times. Psychometric assessment of candidates for hire and employees for development is one way to gain a competitive edge over the competition in winning the war for talent.

TotalView - A Predictable and Reliable Job Matching System

Perfect Labor Storm Alerts # 51 to #55
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Fact #51