Montana Memories

On The Montana Trail!

I hit the trail the end of last month – The Montana Trail, that is.  It was part of the State of Montana’s annual HR conference.  Actually, it was just part of the workshop I did on Role-Based Assessment and the CHI Indicators.  The Montana Trail is a group experience designed to help a large group of people quantify the value of a Role-diverse, coherent team.

The Sheriffs of The Montana Trail

The most exciting part, for me, was finally meeting the team that’s been using Role-Based Assessment to drive change through their state.  Now keep in mind that not only does this state have a visionary Governor but they are also one of the very few states that is gaining in jobs, not losing them.  So you know they’re doing something right and they have the stamina to keep driving till they get everyone home safe from the trail drive.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

With very little preparation from me, the Sheriffs – AKA the HR team -  jumped right in and made the game theirs.  They got their ten gallon hats, found a cowbell for me to call the rounds with, made sure I had pictures to show at the office (and here!), and, in general, made me feel as if I’d known them forever.  (That means a lot to this former New Yorker.)

But I shouldn’t be surprised.  That’s what coherent teams do.

Lessons From My Mother, Revisted

A year ago, I posted the eulogy I gave at my mother’s funeral.  Sunday, I will get my second chance to speak about her as her headstone is unveiled.  The custom is to celebrate the work her soul did on its trip through this life, so I had to think beyond what I originally wrote.  Here is what I’ll say.

My mother brought peace to the world, without ever winning a Nobel Prize for her work.  She just believed that people should get along and so she treated them that way.  She never held a grudge, at least not very firmly.  And she told me that while I didn’t have to be best friends with everyone, at least I had to give them a chance.

I remember her saying this about boys too, when I was dating them.  I remember thinking at that time, you can’t possibly mean this, Mom.  I mean, he might have been polite to you, but you didn’t see him gearing up for a teenage smooch-a-thon.  I always wondered if that would have changed her mind.

But it turns out that she was right.  What she was saying was, don’t make snap judgments on the basis of what you see.  It takes time to experience people, to value what is special about them, and to discover their flaws, fatal and otherwise.  And I realized that she, in her own way, knew the reason that Role-Based Assessment works.  Of course with RBA, you know the answers when you read their report.  As we say, it’s the ‘new way to know’.  But it’s based on something very old and as practical and enduring as a mother’s wisdom.

The Intern Diaries: Week Six

What a week!  All six interns are now Certified Role-Based Assessment Consultants!  Week six and they are more than just onboarded – they’re integrated into our life, as a team and as the individuals that they are.

There was an article in the paper this morning advising workers to ‘brand’ themselves to make themselves layoff-proof.  Not a bad idea but it happens naturally when you, the management,  (a) know people’s Role,  (b) recognize and respect them for it, and (c) don’t force them into tasks they aren’t suited for and, therefore, dislike.

So herewith are their brands, at least as I see it:

Tristan is the techno-suit.  All the nerd stuff and he still dresses for success!

Rebecca is the journalista.  Give her an idea and she turns it into a piece of writing that fits the column width!

Kyle is the ‘give-it-to-me-I’ll-get-it-done’ guy.  I need it, I get it – does it get any better?

Crystal is the campaign planner.  Her favorite place is the conference room, favorite tool is the conference room whiteboard!

Kartik is the organizer.  And re-organizer.  If there is an efficiency to be had, he advocates for it!

And Lindsay is the deal broker.  She knows what’s going on and she knows where we want it to go, so she figures out how to make the contact happen!

Maybe I should have titled this ‘Six Weeks, Six Brands’.  I didn’t know how long it would actually take, given that they are new to the business environment,  but this is just about average for Coherent hires who are given Role-appropriate work scopes.

I’ve said it before: hire for Role and Coherence and you’ll get productuvity and teamwork.

The Intern Diaries: Week Four

Around the fourth day after Mr. Sperm meets Miss Egg, differentiation begins.  (If you slept through high school biology, differentiation is when cells start to get specialized.)

Ok, biology lesson is over.  I was just mulling over how week four of the Interns could be subtitled, The Week of Differentiation.  It isn’t that they weren’t fully formed individuals when they arrived.  It’s how we see them and assign work to them that’s undergone some subtle changes.

Lindsay is continuing to work on social marketing optimization because she’s a star Communicator.  Not surprising.  This line from her Role-Based Assessment pretty well covers why I wanted her for this project:

She will quickly make contacts throughout the organization and get to know almost everyone. She is especially cooperative and will also try to do almost anything she is asked to do. Her focus is on interpersonal interaction and trying to get everyone to work together harmoniously. She won’t do this by direct means but by attempting to broker the arrangements that bring people together in a positive manner. As a result, she is likely to be respected by those she has contact with.

But we needed to get the database cleaned up so despite the fact that she also had this in her report: “She will not want to do organizational tasks…”, there she was in the conference room with some others, working on exactly that task, with music emanating from someone’s laptop, a pile of snacks, and the sunniest of good natures.

Meanwhile, Kartik, the Action Former, whose report included the following, managed to reorganize, clean up, and optimize my consultant certification files.  Here’s Kartik in a nutshell:

This candidate is the type of employee who can be found in the front of the group with marker in hand, developing a list of things that need to be done or important points or assignments. He is the consummate organizer. The key is that he does not organize for the present but as a way of getting things ready for the future. His style is one of handling many things simultaneously. He believes that multi-tasking in a rapidly evolving environment is essential to keep on top of everything.

The others too have their unique qualities and it’s amazing how much more productive they are when we recognize them, give them work they enjoy, and celebrate the results.

It just makes good business sense.

Happy ending: Lindsay has a project beginning Monday that is totally about communicating with people, while Kartik will get a great new organization project!

The Intern Diaries: Week Three

Another amazing week with the Super Six.  Watching them become a subculture is fascinating.  They work intensely on their own, then pair off, then they cluster.  They draw each other in and something wonderful happens.  You can see the attachments as if they were drawn in the air above their heads.  And because they are all so very Coherent (such a special quality, we have begun to capitalize it,) this crazy entrepreneurial world we inhabit doesn’t faze them, even when we are approaching warp speed.

After only two weeks, during which the first five were oriented, given assignments, put through our standard four hour consultant/agent training, and let loose, we asked them to present their projects at our weekly management meeting.  (Our sixth, only being with us for two days operated the technology – they integrated her into their subculture right away!)  And present they did, PowerPoints and all.

So what did I learn from them this week?

Most of the time, Role trumps age and experience.

In plain English, who you are is more important than what you’ve done.  Yes, I did know that in the intellectual sense.  But it never ceases to amaze me, and amazement is the substrate within which you get new appreciation.  You no longer just know.  You *know*.

The Intern Diaries: Week Two

Week two and all our five interns are hard at work doing their thing while I marvel at how unique each one is, just as predicted by their Role-Based Assessment.  And today we agreed to bring on a sixth starting next week.  Another strong Action Former, the perfect addition to our Intern Action Team!

These Action Formers are the organizers on the team, the detail people, those who revel in the chance to learn to do everyone’s job.  What better for our Vision-oriented exec team than those who want to carry out our dreams?

This newest intern started another internship, but instead of giving her a project to manage, they sent her outside to meet people.  Now there are some Action Formers who might like that but not this one – she is strictly an ‘inside’ person.  No wonder she’s asked for a chance with us.

I’m sure they interviewed her at length and certainly read her resume.  (I don’t bother with either.) People who are of each Role will tend to have certain things as typical in their career history and behavior, but the only way to tell for sure what Role someone is, what style they truly have mastered and are comfortable with, is to use Role-Based Assessment.  People can go into jobs and do things because of necessity or outside pressure.  They can make mistakes and be unhappy.  They will vary in their level of coherency.  The ONLY way to cut through all the distractions and find out what the person is really like is to assess them using Role-Based Assessment and save yourself the grief of finding out too late that what they seemed to be in an interview or on a resume is not what they are really like where the rubber meets the road.

Rubber meets road on Monday and new intern will join her peers.  She’ll fit in well and maybe even make some friends in the process.  Most important, she, like the others, will get to play on a team where the coach doesnt tell you what you’re doing wrong, but what you’re doing right.

And I’ll have that market research I’ve been wanting.

Get Out of My Facebook!

If this blog had a subtitle, it would be The Intern Diaries: Day 1.  They arrived today, our new flock of team members – one each for technology, operations, marketing, client services, and communications.  Such a wealth of new energy!

In between getting the drill on who’s who and what’s what around The Gabriel Institute and the obligatory pizza lunch, I tried to get their take on networking technology.  The biggest divide I could think of was LinkedIn vs Facebook, so I was curious where they stood.  They’re onto the economy and there’s no false hope here.  Despite the fact they have an average of another year or so to go, they have no illusions about the job market they’ll emerge into.  But as I expected, they haven’t tuned into LinkedIn for professional networking yet.  Now they all will, and they will be able to put us down as their first business experience – and we’ll be able to tell the world how they did.

We also gave them the HR warnings about being careful what’s on their Facebook page.  The stories flew, and a new dilemma was brought to my hopelessly out of date consciousness: What do you do when your mother wants to friend you on Facebook and you just don’t want her as your friend?

So this is for our new interns’ moms – and dads too.  We tried that ‘be a friend to your kid’ stuff in the 70’s and it didn’t work all that well.  You’ve done a great job, so relax.  We know – we gave your college son or daughter a Role-Based Assessment and that’s why we brought them on board.  They are coherent – the best measure of maturity and potential ever devised – and they have solid Role preferences which we’re going to respect and develop.

So get out of their friendship places and instead, get them to share their Role-Based Assessment reports with you.  You’ll be very proud.

And, by the way, thanks for trusting us with them.  We know they’re precious to you.

Love in the Time of Economic Indicators

Matt’s in love.

This may seem pretty mundane given that it’s Spring and a young man’s fancy is supposed to turn that way.  But Matt is a first class Explorer.  Traveling man for a lot of his professional life.  Not exactly a bon vivant – too hardworking for that – but not a cocooner by nature.

When the economy was rocking, Matt was an executive in the human capital industry, hitting the bright lights in the big cities with pretty young things and being surprised when nothing evolved into the long term.  He’d lament, and I’d laugh and say, you need a Watchdog.  An Explorer needs the one who’ll make a home base for him (or her), even if those travels are just on the web or in the cerebral cortex.  But Watchdogs don’t go for flashdancing.  They’re more the ‘comfort food’ of the relationship world.

So I asked Matt if he was familiar with the theory of one of the world’s great economic experts who said something like this: when the economy is up, it’s easy to find a great job but harder to find love; when the economy’s down, good jobs are hard to find but love is easy.  He guessed Galbraith.  I laughed.  It’s Helen Gurley Brown, former Cosmopolitan editor and author of Sex and the Single Girl.  (I never actually referred to her as an economist but really, her pronouncement is more accurate than the predictions of the average pedigreed academic.)

Matt put it together pretty quickly and realized how distracting his success was to his goal of finding love.  He also admitted how right I was about who he’d really fit with.  But of course I had all the theory behind Role-Based Assessment at my disposal.

So here’s the moral of the story.  The economy is off and is likely to stay that way for a while.  You might as well look for love.  And don’t restrict yourself to the personal kind either.  (Caveat: Do not confuse love and sex!)

Find people you love.  You’ll know when you’re there because you can work easily with them and feel great about it.

Figure out how to create an organization with them and do something.  It doesn’t matter what as long as it’s something you enjoy doing together.  When the economic smoke clears, you might find yourself with everything you ever wanted – a great job and great love.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Just when you think HR has learned that some assessments aren’t right for hiring, you open today’s Wall Street Journal and there’s an ad for a COO position being recruiting by a major search company that asks for a resume and “complete Myers-Briggs personality type test results.”  Then they refer to a free online knockoff of the original, which the publishers of clearly state is not appropriate for hiring.

Enough agony. Now for the ecstasy.

For those of us who are highly motivated by mastery, there is nothing better than the triumph of person over technology.  And for those of us who are highly motivated by affiliation, there is nothing better than doing it as a team.  Today our team finished our first videos on Role-Based Assessment and teaming characteristics!  And this was our first ‘review’:

Speaking as a performer who pays attention to production values kudos on the quality of the clips!   It captures very visually  the Gabriel Institute competitive differentiation.

Overall, that shifts the balance clearly in favor of ecstasy for today!

PS: If you are on Facebook, you can see them here:
A New Way to Know
People as Teams

Visions of Succession

Every so often I think about succession planning.  My own.  But I’m not planning on leaving.  I’m planning on sharing.  Let me explain.

I’m thinking that a lot of CEO problems are caused by people who think they can do a huge job well, all by themselves.  Up till now, our company has been small enough that I could do a credible job myself.  But as we grow bigger, I find it makes much more sense to work with someone else as sort of an extender.  If it was on a shelf at the supermarket it would be called CEO Helper.  I prefer the term VisionMeld(tm).

So how do you find someone to share?  Role-Based Assessment to start, for sure, but I think  asking the candidate to write a Vision Paper really should be part of every recruiting process.

The Vision Paper is a way of explaining to the leadership team of an organization what it is that they are expected to accomplish, the purpose for the venture.  It does not go into precisely how they to achieve it since that isn’t a problem for the CEO to solve alone.  It begins with a bit of the history behind the product or service and goes on to simply describe the end, the goal or the long-term, desired outcome for the organization.  Where most mission statements are vague and general, the Vision Paper is personal.  It’s the best measure of the ability to be an inspiring leader I have ever seen.  And the knack of inspiring and motivating others to follow your dream is the sine qua non of the successful CEO.

I asked a friend what he thought.  Ever practical, he concurred and pointed out that it’s a way of getting to agreement as to what the performance expectations will be.  “You’re just trying to find someone who can do the job.  To lead a company successfully, you need to know where you’re going and the Vision Paper is your roadmap,” he said.

I guess I’m just more mystical than he is.  For me, the energy that goes into writing a Vision Paper reflects back on the author in an almost magical way. If it resonates, you probably have a good basis for a VisionMeld(tm) – and for sharing and succeeding.