Recognize raw materials
To find the future leaders of your organization, you need to find out what your top performers value in a company and what they believe a leader should be. You need to take a detailed look at their past performance and how they’ve handled tasks that have required them to lead.
“You have to look at it in a couple of ways,” Pasky says. “You have to look at it from their overall background, what they’ve been good at and successful at. You listen to what they are looking for, not just from a compensation standpoint, but the question I always ask is, ‘What is important to you in the leadership of a company you’d work for, and what is important in the leadership of an individual you’d work for every day?’ They’re questions that aren’t expected, and I think the answers can be very telling.”
Pasky doesn’t want to hear answers that might indicate the person isn’t interested in working as part of a team. An employee with a lone-wolf mentality might get the sale, but that person could also be damaging to your culture as you grow.
“An answer I don’t want to hear is, ‘A good leader is someone who leaves me alone and lets me do my job,’” Pasky says. “Don’t you think a good leader is someone who should be engaged in what we’re doing? Someone who wants to help you do better at your job and remove barriers for you?”
You need to employ people who value the opportunity to work at your company because they believe in your company’s mission and are intrigued by the way your company does business. Every new promotion or recruit will be motivated on some level by personal ego. It’s a part of human nature. But you can’t populate your leadership positions with people who are motivated to succeed for purely personal reasons.
“There are indicators you can look at to determine if someone is a cultural fit for your organization,” Pasky says. “They should place a high value on the opportunity to be a part of your company, not just valuing the positions for which they are interviewing. They should have a similar work ethic, a similar definition of what a good business is, what a good corporation is. They need to have a similar definition for what makes a top performer and they are in tune with how you compensate a top performer. All of those things begin to make up your culture.”
It can be difficult to evaluate something subjective like work ethic without actually seeing the candidate in action. But the questions you ask in the recruiting and interviewing process can allow you to start sketching a mental picture and can at least allow you to make a first round of cuts in your search.
“You can check references, which is a basic thing. But what you can do is describe your environment and how your people work, and just watch how someone reacts to that,” Pasky says.
“I’ll describe my workday, my calendar and the hours I work. I won’t say whether you should do the same thing as me or you shouldn’t. I’ll just describe my world and watch how people react. If they seem like they wouldn’t want to do something like what I’m describing, they probably are not going to want the job.”
It also helps to know how a candidate views a company’s role in the community. Your company’s stand on involvement in community functions might seem like something of minimal concern when you’re trying to gauge how a prospective manager will fit into your company. But it speaks to whether your values and priorities as an organization match the values and priorities of the candidate.
If you and the candidate don’t see eye to eye on community involvement, chances are you embrace different values systems, and the hire could lead to cultural discord.
“People need to understand how the company they work for views their role in the community,” Pasky says. “That gives them a sense of the style of the company and how they’re going to be treated. For some people, they don’t care. They want to show up, work hard, do a good job, get their paycheck and be left alone. They probably don’t want to be a part of a company that has an activity that they have to be engaged in four times a week.
“And it works the other way. If someone wants to work for a company that emphasizes community involvement, but the company just doesn’t do that, the person won’t be happy. When it all drills down, it still drills down to a style fit between the person and the company.”
