Jim Collins is featured in the most recent episode of EOtv (Entrepreneur’s Organization) discussing his 6 attributes for the “right” employees in any organization. As with most of Collins’ writings/speeches, I agree wholeheartedly. Assuming all of your employees and new hires had these six attributes, organizational alignment and subsequent growth/profitability would be relatively easy.
However, this is much easier said than done. Knowing these six criteria (below) will ensure “right” hires is one thing, but being able to accurately assess that candidate sitting in front of you is a whole other ballgame.
Collin’s list of six is as follows:
The right people…
1. share your core values
2. do not need to be tightly managed
3. do what they say they will do
4. understand they have “responsibilities” vs. a “job”
5. have window and mirror maturity
6. are passionate about everything
I’m going to expand a bit on number one, because I believe it is absolutely the most important of the six! In fact, if you can be sure that a candidate inherently shares your core values, much of rest of Collin’s list will naturally fall into line. This is not to diminish the other 5, I think they are very important as well. However, evaluating candidates on these 5 is much more straightforward than ensuring that candidates share your core values.
Sharing Your Core Values
I believe there are four key things to consider and incorporate into your interviewing process to determine whether or not a particular candidate shares your core values.
1) Know thyself. Before you can assess whether or not a person shares your company core values, you must know what your real core values are! This may seem like a no-brainer, but it’s amazing to me how many organizations I encounter who have never really defined their core values, or have never defined them honestly and accurately. Creating core values statements was a very hot thing to do in the 90s, and thus, many companies have a statement somewhere. Often its buried in the “About Us” section of their website or tucked away somewhere in the HR offices. Many of these statements were written by the Human Resources Dept., or worse yet, Marketing. Consequently, they all read something like this, “XYC Company has a proud history standing for exceptional customer service, uncompromising integrity, impeccable quality, blah, blah, blah”.
Core values are the underpinnings of your behaviors as an organization and if they merely describe all the virtuous things you would like be, versus what you really are, you take all the life (and usefulness) out of them. Employees quickly recognize the incongruencies and quickly dismiss the whole thing as nothing more than the latest “program”. In fact, when a values statement is done right, it may not be something you want to share with your customers or the general public at all. Values statements should be a barometer and a guidepost for internal behavior, not marketing speak.
Note: If you feel like your values statement doesn’t describe you well, or you’ve never really investigated your values; Hire a consultant to help you do so. Do not try to do it internally, as you will not gain accurate data. The good news is that a good consultant/facilitator should be able to help you identify & clarify your core values in 1/2 day, 1 day at the most. Of course, the hard work of effectively communicating and utilizing those values in your key processes is yours to handle after the consultant is gone.
2) Apply them. Once you feel you have identified your values accurately, then you can begin applying them in interviews/assessment. Interviewing questions must be “behavioral” in nature, and should pertain directly to your core values. i.e. If one of your core values is “Innovation“, you can ask questions like - “Tell me about something you developed from scratch or something you dramatically improved in your current organization?” This is a basic example, but you get the idea. The most effective way to evaluate a candidate’s values is to look closely at their pattern of behaviors and then work to decipher what is driving those behaviors. You can think of yourself as a CSI (Crime Scene Investigator), trying to build a “profile” of the candidate’s personal core values. One of my mentors in this area used to say that “once you know a person’s core values, you know how they will behave in nearly every situation”. This is absolutely right on when you are able to develop an accurate “values profile” for a candidate/employee.
3.Don’t work in a vaccuum. I have interviewed over 4000 people in my career and even I don’t completely trust my first judgement of a candidate. You must interview candidates multiple times and use multiple interviewers to be sure you are getting it right. I believe group interviews are the very best method, because everyone in the room hears the same answer from the candidate. Many times their will be different interpretations of a candidate’s answer to a key question. This is great! This is where the meatiest discussion happens and eventually where the best hire (or no-hire decisions) are made.
One thing we use at KeyStone to help build this “values profile” is a personal core values assessment. This asks some very generic behavioral/values type questions and is something we ask a candidate to fill out before interviewing with us. We then probe further in areas of interest or areas that overlap or contradict the client’s core values. This works very well for executive level positions but it may not be practical for lower level positions with greater volumes of openings and potential candidates.
4. One last set of eyes. Especially for key or higher level hires, always bring in at least one person from outside your organization (who knows the organization well) and get their perspective on a candidate. This can be an Industrial Psychologist, or it can just be a person who is closely associated in some way to your organization. We all have blindspots and those spots are usually very visible to people outside of our company. Two key things on this however. Number one, don’t assume that an Industrial Psychologist will do a great job just because they have a “process” or “system” for evaluating candidates. If you haven’t worked with a particular Psychologist in the past, they are no more knowledgable of your culture and values than someone off the street. I’ve seen this mistake made many times. Secondly, be very clear with the outsiders on what you want them to evaluate. i.e. “We feel this candidate is definitely Innovative, but we’re concerned about their general “Respectfulness and Friendliness” as these are core values to our organization - can you please pay special attention to these areas when you meet with this candidate on our behalf”
Of course you will also want to ask a candidate’s references values oriented questions as well. i.e. “Where would you rank Bill in terms of his ability to innovate? Can you give me some examples?”
The biggest thing to remember is in every step of the process, you are incorporating core values. If you do this, you will have a very solid understanding of how “right” this candidate is when that offer is finally made.
Of course, given time and space considerations I haven’t written about every single step of a well done interview/assessment process, but hopefully the points above cover most of the bases as it pertains to assessing values fit. As always, I’m interested in your thoughts/comments.
Mike Frommelt