And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the Circle Game

 – Joni Mitchell

It is difficult to hire and retain productive staff with the competition between companies for new talent. It seems like a revolving door – the minute your team seems aligned, another change occurs.  When you experience the same issues repeatedly, it’s time to step back and think about how to stop the Circle Game.    In this newsletter, as we shoulder through toward the end of the year, let’s step back and organize our talent.  Otherwise, the circles continue.

Whether you’ve been in the workforce for 30 years or 3, work has changed.  Everyone is juggling multiple tasks and projects.  If you’re like me, you’re always trying to check off your work quickly to get it all done, but you can’t remember what you did that morning.  It’s frustratingly hard to make an impact when speed is the priority. Like you, I strive to do a great job, not dial it in. It’s a complex work environment, and I need many other people to help me with my projects which also adds to the confusion.  Add a job opening to this and you’ve got a lot of anxiety.  Anxiety leads to blind spots and mistakes as we go round and round and round in the Circle game.
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You’ll learn how to:

• HIRE with accuracy and efficiency; not with psychic readings
• Build a BENCHMARK for accurate comparison
• ONBOARD for new hires and every promotion
• Use CAREER MAPs to plan future promotions and succession
• RETAIN your employee (aka assets) 

Decades ago, people worked to feed their families.  The job wasn’t important, the money was, and this still occurs.  As time progressed, there were more jobs and education opportunities, so careers became important. Contributing to a company was desirable.  Individuals started to look carefully at their career and employer choices.   Ask a 25-year-old employee if they’d like to work at the company until retirement.  The answer will not be YES. 
If you hire well, you are a step ahead of your business competitors and the other people who are trying to hire great candidates.  While we’ve increased our career savvy, we have not increased effective hiring.  Resumes are perception and competencies do not mean an alignment to your job. Many still believe that they can ‘read’ a candidate to determine whether they’ll fit or not.  There is incredible research that proves that this is not true.  Repeat after me – you are not psychic.


Here are some other ridiculous ideas about hiring:

• Hire by creating a set of competencies that are easy to measure and easy to verify.
• Resumes communicate accurately what the candidate’s experience and skills are.
• By building an Interview Template / Rubric you can predict a good applicant choice.

There are no short cuts, especially the ones above. We wrongly look for a great candidate that we admire and like instead of looking for the best person to fill the job.  Our emotional response is habitual to predictable.  For example, if I’m hiring a Database Administrator and I’m a people person, I’ll be drawn to the most fun DBA. This may not be the best match to the DBA job.  If I’m not familiar with the job, I’ll be left to decide based on the resume, LinkedIn written by the candidate, and psychic readings.   None of this works well.
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In addition, there’s a little thing called Unconscious Bias.  You aren’t aware of it, but little cues like who the person resembles, what colors they wear, or their speech patterns can remind you of other situations that didn’t go well or people you don’t like, creating a bias against the person without real data.  “I just didn’t like him” is a common comment when this occurs.  Here are some examples of biased hiring behaviors:

• Letting one favorite qualification, trait or experience influence all others.
• Letting one disfavored qualification, trait or experience influence all others.
• Preference to people from certain demographics (places, ethnicity, beliefs, preferences).
• Superstition, for example, the first is best.
• Preference based on a candidate’s position relative to the others in the pipeline.

GREAT IDEA: RMA now has an Unconscious Bias 1.5 -hour workshop (face to face or webinar based).  Contact Shawna.Moser@moserit.com for more info.  
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To get real data, you create a custom Job Benchmark designed specifically for the job you are trying to fill.  When Job Benchmarking is implemented properly, it will have a direct effect on the quality of your hiring.  You’ll attract the best candidates and you’ll save time and money by hiring the right people who are strategically matched to fit your company.  This also reduces the learning curve and the cost of onboarding.
There are four steps to creating a valid Job Benchmark:

Define the Job

• Create a Job Description
• Develop 3 – 5 Key Accountabilities for this job that are measurable and doable.
• Create the Job Benchmark for the job role (what must the person with this role do every day to keep the business healthy?)
• Create a Position Profile for candidates.

Identify Candidates

• Ask questions about character, their passion and calling and look for chemistry.  Ask questions about the competencies on the resume and ask for examples.
• Check references.
• Select your top 3 – 5 candidates and compare them to the Job Benchmark you created. Here’s an example: 

Qualify Candidates

• Use a comparison report to compare the candidates to the Job Benchmark and each other to establish 2 potential candidates.
•  Have another final interview and make an offer.

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Great Idea: Here’s an example of two candidates for an outside sales position.  Which one would you pick?  Send your answer to info@russellmartin.com to win fabulous merchandise if you’re right. 

Onboarding

• Negotiate the offer and package.
• Onboard based on the gaps from the Job Benchmark (NOT vanilla onboarding).
• Intentionally integrate the new person to the team(s).

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Creating a Job Benchmark requires you to define the job carefully.  This can be done by combining the profiles of top performers or it can be done by facilitating and creating the job with people who know the job well.  

​Using a Job Benchmark to hire is not sufficient by itself.  Here’s a compliant process to do the rest of the work in addition to the Job Benchmark: 

Hiring is not a project, it’s a process.  Promotion is not a project, it’s a process.  In our Talent GPS book, we show that these are just healthy circles.     

​Hiring kicks off the process.  The new hire starts the first circle with Onboarding, then maps their career and succession.  Once promoted, the circle goes through the same steps at the next level. To summarize, each employee needs to own their career with some help from their boss who is also owning his or her career.  The Job Benchmark identifies strengths and gaps for the employee and the boss.  Strategic plans from the boss help define purpose and goals.  Finally, if you want to be promoted, always have 3 candidates in the queue ready to replace you. Here’s a little chart to help you revisit your goals and options. 

​Order the Talent GPS book from us with all the worksheets to manage your entire talent lifecycle. Use the Promo code OCTOBERTALENT until 11/1/18 and receive this book for only $10.  Includes free shipping.

​When was the last time you started from scratch to figure out what you wanted to do with your life.  The Career Map and templates in the book above start at the very beginning – who are you, where do you want to go, what kind of work makes your heart sing?  The templates help you mindfully revisit your career goals until you are able to solidify what YOU want. Invest in yourself with this focusing tool. 

GREAT IDEA: Visit www.russellmartin.com for a fillable Career Map PDF for only $12 in our web store ($25 value) using the Promo code OCTOBERCAREER.  Valid until 11/1/18.
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Leaders grow leaders while growing their own career.  As busy as you are, embrace a strategic pause to figure out what you want including how to work well with the people you are leading and who lead you. You own the responsibility to maintain your career trajectory.  No one else is going to do it. No one else can do it.  If your boss doesn’t have time for feedback, grab time for him or her on the calendar to meet with you.  Shawna is great at doing this for me.
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Great leaders also have great retention.  If you’re noticing that your turnover is not what it should be, look in the mirror.  Statistics show that employees leave their managers not the company.  Is your busy-ness impacting the engagement of your team? How can you prioritize predictable, regular feedback with your entire team.  Seek council from your peers to get a straight view of the impact your behavior has on your career and your teams.  

The use of heavy tools (MS Project, etc.) and micromanagement (ten pages of task duration) can be so complex that the project timeline must be constantly tweaked.  Trying to lock down the actual work to be done is virtually impossible or minimally prone to error. Enter my blasphemy:  
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• The Project Charter:  
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The Project Charter is the most critical success factor for your project because it answers the important question to the Project Sponsor – “Why are we doing this project instead of spending money on something else?” Do not screw up the project by skipping the Project Charter or your project will be poorly delivered.  There are three ways this can happen:  


1. Skip the Project Charter entirely and jump to the Timeline / Schedule 


If you jump to the timeline/ schedule before you do your first draft of the Project Charter you will build a Project Plan without having any idea what the project is about, who is involved, who’s in charge and what the outcomes are.  That’s ridiculous, right?   


2. Complicate the Project Charter 


Our Project Charter template (check Tools in the  www.russellmartin.com store or contact Shawna.Moser@moserit.com), is designed to be simple, visual and completed in 45 minutes or less.  It’s always a draft, so expect things to change as you learn more about your project.  If your Project Charter takes longer than a half day to complete, no one will do it.  Creating a ‘lean’ Project Charter can drive important engagement and compliance.   


3. Do the Project Charter Collaboratively  


Skipping the Project Charter is common. Most people don’t know what it is and why you need it. To understand and share WHY you are doing this project must be discussed with all the Stakeholders.   


Our Project Charter template used in our workshops strive to complete the basic Charter in 45 minutes or less.  The only way this makes sense is if you accept that the Project Charter is a draft and will be until the project is done.  It will change of course.  You can’t possibly know what’s going to happen (note… see how agile like this is?) By documenting the Business Objective (Two choices: Increase Revenue OR Avoid Cost), the visual Scope Diagram with clear roles, the Project Objectives (what will the customer HAVE when done that they don’t have now?), Time/Cost/Quality Prioritization Risk and Constraints.  The last two items to be defined are Project Governance (who is in charge and what are their boundaries?) and Project Change Management (Pre-emptive Change messaging and who can change the requirements).  These two, when done well, help mitigate the risk that people will skip your meetings and show up way too late in a project to get their opinions in. 


Project Timelines / Schedules:  


I don’t believe in duration (sorry). Documenting the time for each task in a Project Schedule is insane – you don’t have time to be that detailed. There are many pitfalls.   

• Giving your stakeholders a task duration without talking to them is project suicide.  How dare you guess how long their work will take?  
• If someone says “it will take 2 hours” does that mean 2 hours consecutively or 2 hours over the next six weeks?  Multitasking has made duration almost impossible. 
   

Most cloud-based and application project management applications drive dates by using task duration.   The dates you enter are treated as fixed dates by the tools and they replace duration.   It’s tough to find a tool that just lets you enter due dates for tasks, not duration.  Trello, and BaseCamp are examples of tools that do.  

At the end of MANAGE, the customer feels like the work is done.  The tasks are completed, etc.  I call this Customer DONE. But you, as Project Manager need to clean things up a bit.  REVIEW (often ignored) creates tasks for the Project Manager to do a Retrospective, archive, and complete the transition from PROJECT to PROCESS.  In IT, we used to call that ‘put it into production’.  I call that Project Done.    Seriously, the customer is sick of you any way at this point.   ​