Identifying the Best Candidate

By Valerie G. Cardenas

Choosing one candidate for a position out of five can be overwhelming, let alone fifty. Where does an employer begin to differentiate? I’ve heard an array of different responses including: referrals, instincts, a better resume, or great interviewing skills. True that each of these provides useful information about a candidate, however none use objectivity. Selecting the right individual for a position entails understanding more than a first encounter allows, and personality testing alone does not give the cognitive abilities of a candidate.

The solution to hiring the right person is knowing both personality traits and mental aptitudes. The combination of these two provides a great insight to how well they will perform in a given position. Enter The Achiever: a proven assessment used to separate “A” performers from “C” performers (a difference of at least 50% productivity).

It is not an understatement to say that hiring or promoting the wrong person can cost a company thousands of dollars; in time, training, and lost opportunities.

Placing an individual in the most productive environment for their potential is in the best interest of the company. Let’s say that you have a candidate that is very personable and punctual, but is not self motivated or has a slower learning speed. This may suggest that an outside sales position is not in the best interest for the candidate or company.  Finding this out prior to hiring or promoting the individual is ideal, no?

The Achiever measures an individual’s potential and identifies their true talents and best placement for their skills. It measures six mental aptitudes, ten personality traits, and two validity scales, and then delivers specific conclusions. Achiever benefits:

• Determines the fit of candidates for a particular position
• Provides insight for the employer with how to engage employees
• Provides objective analysis
• Identifies improvement areas
• Describes their personality traits and mental aptitudes
• Enhances team building

The results are formed from Benchmarking, which provides a range of scores required for successful performance of a particular job. The reliability of this assessment is unrivaled, and the reason I have depended on it for myself and businesses that I consult. It identifies the best candidate for administrative, sales and management positions, and others. I cannot emphasize enough how crucial to a business’ success it is to understand the potential and the improvement areas of its employees.

If you are interested in learning more, please give us a call at 775.826.8282, we would love to answer your questions.

Your Business Success is in the Hands of Your Employees

By Valerie G. Cardenas

Getting the right people on the job is mission critical for all companies. Employees, whether staff or management, can make or break an organization.

Companies frequently call on my business consulting services to help with employee and hiring issues, and I’m never surprised when I hear that request. One thing I’ve learned in my years in business and as a business consultant is that hiring and managing employees is right up there with productivity systems, sales and marketing as driving factors for profits.

There’s really no mystery to choosing the right person for the job, but there are some methods of going about it that, while well understood by some, are inconsistently applied at best. I’ve had people tell me that they hire based on “gut-reactions” to people; others go for the consensus, hiring-by-committee approach. And, while I know that almost any approach, these included, can work some of the time, in business, I encourage clients to seek out approaches that can better “their hand” with new positions and further enhance results over time.

I always tell my clients that a successful hiring process includes

1. Hiring process
2. Policy and procedures
3. Orientation
4. Training and development
5. Management/leadership that will retain the employee.

Strategic Hiring for Success

Strategic Essentials uses a predictive index that gives us a very good idea of how someone will perform in specific work situations. And once we have this analysis, we go several steps further. We look at the personality and expectations of the potential manager and teammates to make sure we’re setting up new hires to be successful – for themselves and for the company.  This information can be used to coach all parties on development needs, playing to the individual’s strengths and how to offset what may be perceived as challenges.

The right hiring, development and management practices can have a tremendous impact on your overall organization. But the best way to explain this would be with real-world examples, so here are a few examples from Strategic Essentials files.

Case Brief: Good Employees Mean Vacation Time

A family-run distribution company came to Strategic Essentials with what they saw as an insurmountable problem. They could not take a vacation or more than one day away from their 70-hour workweeks without jeopardizing their production.

In addition to business consulting, they specifically needed to find someone – that perfect someone – who could be comfortable in a warehouse setting, work with out-dated computer systems (at least at first), learn thousands of products, be ready to shoulder increasing responsibility, and be highly detailed.

This one hire was the lynchpin for further expansion and development. We found this individual by screening through numerous people, many of whom seemed competent. We needed exactly the right person, and we found that person. The difference for the company was profound. The leadership is now taking vacations, and the staff is capable of keeping the company running successfully in their absence.

Case Brief: Too Much Business

A business came to me with what seems at first glance to be an enviable problem: too much business. They had basic needs such as manageable systems and structure. But even more, they had few staff guidelines, no job descriptions, along with poor attitudes and job performance from staff.

Their hiring challenge went past bringing people into the door. It encompassed bringing the RIGHT people in, and then motivating them and giving them performance guidelines. Job satisfaction and productivity amongst their staff was critically low.

Through a mix of consulting and organizational development, this client developed standards, hiring practices, management techniques, and accountability. This focus and combination was what this firm needed to shift their organizational culture and their results!

Case Brief: Disruptive Staff in a Non-Profit Corporation

Non-profit corporations attract employees with a passion for their cause. This is a good thing, but for one non-profit that came to us, that same passion was holding them back and burning out some of their key staff.  One employee was also particularly disruptive.

Our first task with this group was to work with the leadership on management skills and handling disruptive situations in the workplace. Our goal was to improve workplace satisfaction. Because their non-profit guidelines made it almost impossible to let the disruptive staff member go, we worked on effective leadership.

And we worked on understanding what to look for while hiring for new positions to lessen the potential of similar challenges in the future. It takes more than a passion for a cause to be effective for the cause.

Hiring coupled with managing well affects every aspect of a company, from productivity, to workplace satisfaction, to worry-free vacations for top management. It is just one piece – but a very important one – for business success.

Goal Setting: Find the ROI – Measure Your Goals

By Valerie G. Cardenas

“You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.” – Paul J. Meyer

Have you heard this business quotation before? It’s one of my favorites because it’s absolutely true. Unless you have a strategy for measuring your goals, you have no way of keeping your business on track and no way of knowing when you’ve achieved success.

Good management of goals begins with setting measurable goals. (You may recall my reference to SMART goals in previous blogs – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Tangible goals.)

If you’ve set measurable goals, then you’ve asked some basic questions, such as: How much? How many? By when?  Now you’re ready to measure.

Choose Measurements that Can be Managed for ROI

Every business is different, so measurement strategies and types vary. But here are a few standards to get you thinking about measuring your business goals and determining your Return on Investment (ROI):

General Business Measurements

• Dollars per contracts signed
• Number of call-backs per 100 jobs
• Increased your profit  by [insert your goal percentage here]

Sales Measurements

• New accounts as a percentage of total accounts
• Number of new accounts per day
• Percentage of referral business to your total business

Ask yourself: How can you track your success? Or, what does success look like to you?

Remember the quote we started with: You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it.

Set up Dynamic, Motivational Measurements of Achievement

Once you establish measurements, then share them and your checkpoints reached – even if the sharing is just with yourself. We humans need to celebrate our achievements!

Create the visual that works for you. It might be a chart that shows your upward progress, a graph that compares, counts, or illustrates checkpoints reached. It might be pins on a map, numbers on a spreadsheet, and it might be the old-fashioned thermometer graphic that you fill in as you reach your checkpoints.

Celebrating the checkpoints reached along the way to ultimate success builds confidence and keeps us motivated. And that, finally, leads to the grand celebration when we’ve reached all the checkpoints along the way and we stand at the goal itself. Success.

2010 – It’s Time to Make the Sale!

We all know that great productivity methods and advanced business leadership skills depend for success on a third element: sales. And if ever there was a time in our economy to boost our sales techniques and improve results, it’s now.

As we go into 2010, my clients are telling me that they are hitting the road with tighter workforces, tighter margins and greater needs for productivity in all departments, especially in sales. In response, I’ve teamed up with a national sales expert for a 10-workshop series I’m calling Make the Sale! – Powerful Selling Strategies for Business Owners.

We’ve set this up for business owners because owners are (or should be!) the best sales people in their business.

Business owners who learn to sell can typically outsell anyone they hire to sell, even while running their business. Much to my chagrin, I outsold every sales person that ever worked for me. Why? Because business owners have the passion, belief and know-how to answer client questions and deliver on their commitments, as well as make decisions on the spot.

Think of this Make the Sale! series as our gift to you, a self-propelled economic stimulus package for you to put in place immediately. I’m jazzed about Make the Sale! because my clients need it. You need it; in fact, we all need big sales to pull us out of the slumps of 2009. I hope you can make it a part of your 2010; I’m sure that this program can make a difference for your business.

The Sales Strategies Details

Make the Sale! is a 10-session series providing beginning to advanced sales techniques for business owners. Don’t forget: We’re focusing on owners because the higher you go in the organization, the better your sales techniques need to be. The workshops are limited to 15 participants, and designed for owners of small to medium-sized businesses. This is an in-depth, in-person course, the only one of its kind offered in northern Nevada.

The sales techniques learned during Make the Sale! – Powerful Selling Strategies for Business Owners are based on individual preferences and personalities, and you’ll build your style through real-world application, using your own strengths to create personal sales techniques that will work for you in your ongoing businesses.

Make the Sale! includes sessions focused on defining target markets, developing personal sales approaches, planning for and conducting a sales interview, determining individual buying motives, closing sales, and everything that comes in between.

The course begins Feb. 5, 2010, and meets weekly on Wednesdays for 10 sessions. So, my final question to you is: Are you ready to make a powerful leap forward into 2010? I hope so, and I hope to see you there. (Click here to read more about this series on my dedicated Make the Sale! Web pages.)

Realizing the Personal Aspect of All Productivity

Recently in one of my business coaching workshops, a client hit the nail right on the head when it comes to company productivity.

“Let me see if I’ve got this right,” he said, “What you’re saying is that company productivity is really all about personal productivity. It’s all about us.”

You can imagine my response: “Excellent,” I said. “Gold Stars.”  All productivity, whether your company is a small firm or a global corporation, derives from the personal. And what does that mean to you, the leader or owner of a company?

It means that your company’s productivity begins (or ends) with your personal leadership and productivity. You get your team to be more productive by setting an example of personal productivity.

Leadership Matters in Productivity

Productivity starts at the top, in your office. Think of who has the most invested in your company or department. I’d wager that that person is you. If you own the business, it’s your money on the line. If you’re the managing executive of a department, it’s your career and reputation on the line. Your investment in productivity is huge.

Now, consider the essential nature of productivity. If I’m on your sales force, I can bring in all the work in the world, but if it can’t be done within budget and without cost overruns or rework or, at worst,  orders cannot even be filled, then we do not get the net result we’re looking for.

In fact, we do our business more harm than good when we over-sell and under-deliver; i.e., when productivity cannot meet needs. This is no small order, either, and is especially challenging now that many workforces have been reduced and everyone has to be more productive without having a nervous breakdown.

Productivity can mean the difference between survival or not and/or profitability or not.  Right down to whether the business owner can pull a paycheck or not.

So, when my client said, “It’s all about us,” you can see, he was right. Productivity begins with you, the leader, personally, and it is also fundamental to your net profit.

– Success begins with a blueprint.
Valerie

Leadership and Crisis

Leadership and Crisis

By David Byrd, President, LMI

Pick up any newspaper today and you will read about economic crisis. Turn your TV to any news broadcast, and you will hear about economic crisis. I was with a group of business executives yesterday, and we talked about economic crisis. We are being overwhelmed with negative news and fearful conversation regarding the issues of the current, global economic crisis. But with all the bombardment of negative news and fearful conversations leaders must still lead. How do we do that?

During times of crisis a leader’s greatest enemy is fear. During crisis most people respond from the emotion of fear. This is a natural response that can be traced back to our ancestral roots. The emotion of fear was designed to protect us from any imposing dangers. However, many people have developed the habit of responding to any crisis situation form the emotion of fear, and that poses three significant problems for leaders:

Fear paralyzes productive actions. Fear leads to negative attitudes which, in turn, get in the way of positive, productive actions.

Fear attracts and supports failure. Negative attitudes find comfort in failure. They offer an instant and comfortable excuse to quit, point blame, or procrastinate.

Fear eliminates ownership of possible solutions. Fear destroys creative energy. Fear causes us to think of ourselves as victims and victims have no solutions.

How do effective leaders respond to the natural, human emotion of fear? The effective leader knows that there are only two options in responding to crisis…Positive Actions or Negative Beliefs!

The leaders who respond with negative beliefs nullify their leadership position by joining the ranks of the fearful. When a leader responds to crisis from the emotion of fear, his or her position as leader is no longer effective. The leader has chosen to simply join the crowd, and any attempts at leading will be overlooked by those who are expected to follow.

The effective leader knows that there is only one productive option inresponding to crisis… Positive Actions! You have to consistently fight your normal responses to fear because effective leadership demands positive, productive, and effective actions. This current economic crisis will be managed by effective leaders. In challenging times, effective leaders step up to the plate and lead with positive action plans and consistent high pay off activities. I wish you Godspeed in your significant role as an effective leader!

LMI JOURNAL, VOLUME II, NUMBER 10

Leadership Management Institute

Reprinted with permission

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For more information about Strategic Essentials small business training and education programs or our coaching and consultation services please call 775.826.8282 today!

Strategic Essentials primarily serves business owners, business leaders, entrepreneurs, managers, supervisors and decision makers in Reno, Sparks, Carson City, Tahoe, Truckee Meadows and surrounding communities.

Strategic Essentials is a Managing Partner for Leadership Management International.

Strategic Essentials, Inc. 775-826-8282

www.strategicessentials.com

Business Communication

Communication: The Essential Connection

By Paul J. Meyer

Business success depends on the ability to communicate more than ever before with the continuous acceleration of technology and international competition. Effective business communication can make the difference between mediocrity and market leadership. And skillful communication can even make the difference between being employed and not being employed! More than for any other reason, people lose their jobs because of inability to get along with other people. Communication is intricately woven throughout effective and satisfying interpersonal relationships; and relationships are the basis of success in the business world as well as in the home and with friends.

Achieving long-term business goals always requires covering the basics: careful planning, accurate research and preparation, getting the right people together, and obtaining necessary financial and technological resources. Effective communication provides the positive relationships and mutual understanding that are essential for successfully covering these basics; without communication, any project and its potential for future returns evaporate. Businesspeople daily communicate their goals, concerns, performance feedback, and appreciation to those they work with and for. Skillful communication creates the human synergy that turns ideas into profitable ventures.

Communication is the essential human connection —  understanding others and being understood. As the essential human connection, skillful communication enables you to meet professional and personal goals. It is the conduit for mutual understanding and change. Without communication, you accomplish only what you can do alone, which inevitably is only a fraction of what you can do in joint effort with others. Communication – the human connection – is the key to career and personal success.

Rewards of Successful Communication

Good communicators go above and beyond ordinary means and methods of sending messages; they express a unique human touch in their communication. Human behavior experts have long said the most universal need is to understand and to be understood. Insightful and effective communicators meet these most basic human needs when they interact with others.

Consider the profound positive influence you have on people when you understand and communicate effectively with them:

You can:

• Earn their loyalty and respect.
• Help them sort out problems and find solutions.
• Sell them products or services that enhance their life.
• Strengthen their self image and boost their self-confidence.
• Direct them when they are lost or confused.
• Correct them when they are in error.
• Encourage them when they are discouraged.
• Inspire them to be more than they have been.
• Equip them to become happier, better, and more successful.
• Influence the course of their life.

Investment of time and energy to skillfully communicate with others always pays rewarding benefits! These rewards are far-reaching and mutually beneficial. New, exciting business goals are reached as communication prevents crisis situations, saves time and effort, enriches relationships, and increases productivity.

What goals have you established that more skillful communication would help you reach? Is the payoff – the reward – of reaching these goals worth the time and effort required? These are questions only you can answer for each goal you have identified as important. Adjustments in your communication style not only help you reach your goals but also allow you to experience the satisfaction of helping others achieve their goals.

Communication Skills Can Be Learned

A common misconception is that some people are “born communicators.” These born communicators supposedly communicate well because they have inborn traits and skills beyond the reach of others. Unfortunately, this erroneous idea discourages many people from attempting to become better communicators, when, in reality, everyone can learn to communicate effectively.

When considering some great contemporary communicators, it would be easy to conclude that people like Ronald Reagan, Mother Teresa, Billy Graham, Barbara Walters, Lee Iacocca, Margaret Thatcher, and others were born communicators. Yet, each of them had to work hard at perfecting their communication skills. Many other famous communicators from the pages of history overcame severe hindrances to convey their messages to the world. Helen Keller, for example, overcame the crushing dual handicap of blindness and deafness to bear a far-reaching message of courage and hope. From a wheelchair, Franklin D. Roosevelt inspired strength and valor in a whole nation. Winston Churchill suffered from a severe childhood speech impediment that required extensive speech therapy into early adulthood.

The point is that anyone can become a successful communicator. And one who is already a good communicator can become better. Choice, not chance, determines human destiny. Failure to make that choice may result in significant consequences – job failure, loss of money, lack of constructive change, broken relationships, or even the loss of life dreams.

In contrast, for the individual who chooses to become a better communicator, new found abilities, a wellspring of enthusiasm, and positive relationships are just around the corner. Improved communication and success, of course, never come looking for you. You must work at becoming a better communicator. Identify specific communication skills to develop that will help you reach specific goals. Effective communication enhances productivity in every area of business – planning, goal setting, negotiating, and selling.

Setting Communication Goals

To improve in any area of life, you must move from mere wishing to setting goals and taking action. This is true for any area of your life, and it is true in enhancing your communication ability. Setting communication goals enables you to reach other worthwhile professional and personal goals you have established for yourself. To move ahead, begin now to set specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and tangible goals to improve your communication.

Relate each communication goal to some other worthwhile professional and personal goal you have established for yourself. Improving your communication skills empowers you to climb the ladder of success and even put extensions on that ladder!

Setting goals for improving your communication abilities often involves developing or strengthening certain intangible personality characteristics like empathy and understanding. Setting specific action steps for these kinds of intangible goals is challenging, but possible. In learning empathy, for instance, you can develop creative action steps for integrating this characteristic into your personality.

First, you could choose to begin improving your listening skills. Another step would be to concentrate on learning to ask open-ended questions. To develop empathy, you can ask others about their hopes and dreams, and you can spend time simply observing people and attempting to understand their viewpoints. Identifying specific action steps for personality goals like increasing your capacity for empathy requires commitment and creativity, but these personality goals are the key to becoming an authentic communicator.