Your job during one-on-one interviews is to sell the candidate on joining your company without appearing desperate, and grilling them to see if they can handle the pressure.
You’re a salesman/interrogator.  You want them to like you, but also to feel vulnerable.

This may sound harsh, but it’s very effective: my goal when interviewing someone is make feel like they won’t get the job, yet make them want it more than ever.  This will pay off when it comes time to negotiating a salary when you offer them the job.

The old adage of, ‘hire for attitude, train for skill’ doesn’t work anymore.  A good attitude can’t overcome a lack of skills, and when you’re growing at 100% revenue growth a year, you need the people that will get the job done right away.

What should you do? I coach and mentor CEOs to go attract those who have proven skills and a personality.

Brad and Geoff Smart wrote an awesome book called Topgrading It’s one of the best systems for interviewing candidates and determining why you should bring someone into your organization. Topgrading recommends ‘leaning out’ two years into the future with every prospective candidate and determining what they have to achieve for you to be happy that you hired them at the end of those two years. Once you’ve started this ‘scorecard’ for the role, construct your job description around the milestones your candidate needs to have achieved after two years.

Once you have a tight job description, then you can interview against it to make sure that candidates have what it takes.

I’ve never been a good student.  I got about 64% in both high school & university.  I’ve never felt smart.  I’ve often felt like I have no idea what I’m really doing.  And I often feel like I must be doing something wrong otherwise how could it be so easy?  My mind would spin with thoughts of ‘How could someone that was always told by the education system they were a C or D student actually be smart enough to really teach CEOs how to grow companies?’

Something started to change for me about 6 years ago, when I was already 38 years old.  I was taking a course trying to learn how to get better as a leader and I came across my ‘unique ability’.  I realized that I’m awesome at using quick intuitive alternatives to help CEOs reverse engineer their dreams.  Like architects help homeowners put their ideas into blueprints and get them built into a home, I help CEOs get the ideas out of the heads, and help them build the teams and systems to make their dreams happen.  To me it feels easy.  To me I wonder why they’d pay me to do what feels so simple.  And to me I keep thinking I’d do it for free – but my kids like to eat and I like expensive toys.  So I gotta charge for it. From there, I became a more effective business coach.

Once I learned what I was great at, I began eliminating everything else from my day-to-day.  I began to focus on finding clients that fit me.  I found that I work best with young, fun, entrepreneurial, high viral, high growth, pre-public companies.  My ideas resonate with them.  They get huge value from my systems.  And they feel like I’m cheap compared to paying for someone with my skills full time.

The more time I spend in my ‘unique ability’ now coaching & mentoring CEOs and the teams running entrepreneurial companies the more I feel I’m on my game.  Malcolm Gladwell said a person needs at least 10,000 hours to be an expert.  I’ve been coaching or building entrepreneurial companies for 60,000 hours (45,000 hours alone in the franchising space).  No wonder I’ve more than maintained my nerve.  My company is growing very fast and I’m helping tons of great companies globally with my coaching programs & training DVDs on leading and building companies.

I realize now that the teachers and professors who told me I didn’t know what I was doing had never built a company.  They’d never run great teams of people to lead. They had however perhaps unknowingly destroyed my nerve and confidence for years upon years.  Five years ago I started writing down the things I’d accomplished each week.  Weekly writing down my successes like this helped re-build my confidence.  Now companies that I helped build and lead are case studies in textbooks and are studied at MBA programs around the USA & Canada.   And last year I was the highest rated lecturer at MIT’s Entrepreneurial Masters Program.  It wasn’t easy but I have definitely got my nerve back.

A quote I read by Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 has given me the confidence now that I’m smart and perhaps my teachers weren’t as smart as I thought…

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement.”

If Monkeys could be Business Mentors

I threw out the corporate 360 Reviews years ago in favor of something I made up that I call ‘Monkeys Looking Sideways’.

Years ago at a seminar I heard a story about monkeys in a tree.  When the monkey at the top looked down all he saw was smiling monkeys looking up.  However, the monkeys below had an entirely different view.

It was at this seminar that I thought about doing 360 Reviews live and in front of the rest of the team.  I always try to build teams that embrace healthy conflict and that want to build more trust.  Well open communication like this takes trust up to an awesome level.  I built this exercise so everyone on a team would know what everyone else thought and they’d hear it in person so they could grow together.

The Monkeys Looking Sideways exercise works like this.

Essentially it is a verbal, in person, group 360 feedback. Ideally get everyone out of the office for a half to a full day.  It’s a great exercise to do on company or team retreats too.

1) Give everyone 1 pad of Post It Notes and a pen.
2) Do the review of the groups leader or CEO first.
3) Have each person write down the TOP 5 things that the person being reviewed:

a) Should continue
b) Should improve on

4) Then with the person being review staying in their seats, have one person at a time stand up and read out each post it note.  Start with all the positives first and then they read the stuff to work on second.
5) The person being reviewed can only say thank you or ask a clarifying question.  There is no debate.
6) Have all of the Post It Notes put up on a flip chart and give them to the person being reviewed so they can type them up and refer to them in their one-on-one coaching meetings with their supervisor over the year to keep working on improving.
7) Repeat the process for each person in the room.

This exercise done properly takes about 45 min per person but will be way more effective than the garbage that comes out of any online or 3rd party 360 Review Process.

In addition to using it in your company try it with an EO, YPO Forum or TEC/Vistage group on a retreat too.  It’d be awesome…

Zappos Gets Culture

This post is from a guest blog post I wrote last week for McNeill Nakamoto a great Vancouver recruiting firm.  Jessica Rozitis kindly let me re-run it here.

In October, I had the opportunity to visit the current cultural buzz factory ‘Zappos’ the billion dollar online shoe store.

I got a unique opportunity to have dinner with their CEO Tony Hsieh & their COO Alfred Lin.  The following day which was Saturday they set up a 90 minute exclusive tour for 12 of us followed by an additional 90 minute  behind the scenes Q&A session where they really opened up to us.

To start with – I was intrigued and a little bit cynical.  Where they REALLY as good as all this press was saying ?

I’d been the Chief Operating Officer for 1-800-GOT-JUNK? during the heyday of the companies growth and cultural buzz.  During the midst of my tenure I was lucky to be there when we ranked #1 Company to Work For in BC two years in a row by BC Business Magazine and then ranked #2 in all of Canada to Work For.  I knew how the whole culture thing worked.  I saw how we cranked it up – and I saw it go up and down at various points during our growth.  We were having tours & Q&A’s of our company every Friday during those days too.  Were they really this good ? What did they do differently ?

I’d also helped build a couple other companies over the years with awesome cultures. College Pro Painters was where I cut my teeth with culture, and Ubarter.com was where I had fun trying it the dotcom way.  1-800- GOT-JUNK? was where we nailed it.

So with Zappos, I just wanted to see if they were REALLY as good as all their press said (and I’ve had lots of experience getting Free PR too)…..

Here is what I learned at Zappos.  I wouldn’t say I was blown away – I wasn’t – but it was damn good and I learned.  I was and still am in awe of HOW DEEPLY rooted their CEO & COO both live the core values that eminate throughout the company.  I have to go back on a weekday now too – to be fair – in an office that seats 700 people only about 20 were milling about.  My bet is the energy is mind blowing when they bring me back.

Key Points I saw and learned:

—First 10 hires are the most important people to ever hire.  They hire everyone else and they set the direction of the company culturally.

—Core values first…Make all your decisions based on them.  They asked employees what the core values should be and they call each other on them daily.

—They grade employees on how they are living the core values in all roles, two times a year.

—They bring job candidates from the airport in a shuttle. And after they drop off the candidate they ask the driver for his thoughts on the candidates fit culturally – the interview starts at the airport.

—To figure out your company core values they really pushed to have us ask ourselves what are our own personal core values….the company values come out of those.

—Core values should be short phrases not just single words like “passion”

—They tell the employees that they are responsible for care taking the core values.

—Culture is like what makes a flock of birds work with out leaders as they all fly and turn as a group. It’s their cultural DNA.

—As their CEO Tony said – if you don’t fire people for not following core values they become a meaningless plaque on the wall (the values – not the people)

—In 2003 they decided they wanted to be about customer service. So they cut a profitable model of drop shipping to REALLY focus on Customer Experience – and um – it’s working.

—Most important thing they’ve done is exceed expectations.

—Every year they print and give out a Culture Book (I got copies of 2008 & 2009) and it is only edited for grammar and spelling.

—Tony is obsessed with Happiness  – and suggests we all read the “Happiness Hypothesis”

—I think their quirky decorating of all workstations is a little bit too cluttered, dusty, and could use a few days of junk removal – but if that’s the only negative I found then even a guy with all my A.D.D. could turn a blind eye.

These guys GET Culture.  I only wish I could buy shares in the company.  Too bad Amazon bought the whole company for over $900 Million a few months ago.

Cameron Herold, BackPocket COO at Zappos

Some say I’m not a good listener – but I sure try.  I’ve actually learned a ton about listening over the years of being a CEO coach.  I’m actually a great listener when I shut up and don’t cut people off while they are talking.

This is a photo of Katie Reiach, Founder of www.SparkGroup.ca and I.  She’s the woman who led the PR Team of 6 people for me at 1-800-GOT-JUNK? when I was there as COO years back.

As Katie put it when she sent me this photo from a www.TEDx.com event – it’s a slightly traumatizing photo of both – but it’s proof that I listen    Especially when there is something to be heard.

In Jim Collins book Good to Great, he describes the process of hiring as getting the right people ‘on the bus,’ the wrong people ‘off the bus,’ and ‘everybody in the right seats.’ He just never really explains how to make all of that happen.

Collins also talked about the ‘Merry Pranksters’ who drove around the United States back in the early sixties on their bus called ‘Further,’ tripping on acid. I’m not suggesting that you trip on acid to build your business–you’d get some weird press and some truly unexpected consequences if you did–but Collins talks about this group because when they were planning the trip around the United States that would last a year, they needed to make sure they only had people on the bus that they wanted to spend time with, and with whom they could have meaningful experiences.

In addition to finding the right people, the Merry Pranksters needed to get the negative people, the low performing people, or the high performing people who had bad values, off their bus. Collins does a good job of using the Pranksters as a model for building your team.

It’s worth adding that business people do not obsess enough about the wrong people getting off the bus. This is crucial to completing Collins’ final step in the process, which is getting people into the right seats.

As a business coach and mentor, I help companies get the right people into their organization and the wrong people out of it, so they can begin to really drive the business faster and further.