Connect with your people
To find out what drives your employees, managers and executives — what they fear, what gives them a sense of purpose, what stimulates their ego — you need to set up a well-defined process of communication and information-gathering that begins when a job candidate first arrives for an interview and continues throughout the hiring process and all the way up the company ladder.
At Kenexa, Karsan and his leadership team have formulated a structured interview process that aims to find the basic drivers for a given job candidate.
“We use a technique called ‘structured interviews,’ and around the structured interviews, we research the best kinds of questions to ask so that we get pr
edictive analysis on the probability of that individual working out or not working out here,” Karsan says.
“Whatever dimension you’re talking about, those individuals tend to have a certain amount of preponderance, a certain direction that they lean. You can ask questions for one dimension, like ‘How do you handle fear?’ But in general, what you do is put the process in place for structured interviews, and that is a way to attract the right kinds of people to the company and ensure healthy long-term relationships.”
Once Kenexa hires an employee, Karsan and his leadership team make sure that person is taking regular stock of themselves and how their drivers and tendencies play into the mission and goals of the company as a whole.
You don’t have to implement those kinds of regular personal gut-checks on a grand scale. In fact, it helps if it occurs in smaller discussion groups with peers. Karsan has made daily, monthly and quarterly meetings — which he calls “huddles” — a part of every employee’s work life at Kenexa.
“A huddle is basically a meeting, so for example, at 6:05 p.m. Eastern Time, the six or seven people that form the leadership team have a daily huddle. The daily huddle follows a predetermined agenda, which centers on what happened today, what is the most important outcome that was achieved today, what is the most important outcome that you’re going to achieve tomorrow and what are you stuck on. With six or seven people, it takes maybe 15 minutes. Everyone at Kenexa goes through some form of a daily huddle, and that is cascaded throughout the organization.”
In many cases, the team that immediately surrounds a manager or employee can serve as the best possible mirror. You can dictate the need to leverage ego, greed, fear, love and purpose from a 30,000-foot level, but the execution and implementation is going to occur far closer to the ground.
“If it is someone who you work with really closely, those six or seven people on that daily huddle team, then it becomes a matter of experience and know-how,” Karsan says. “There is a level of awareness where you just instinctively know on an individual basis what it takes to move the ball forward.”
Whether your company is in a crisis state or simply trying to stay the course, setting the stage for communication and giving employees standards and practices by which to govern themselves and their teams, and doing it from the top, is critical. As much as you set the stage for using employees’ internal drivers to move the business forward, in the end, all you can do is guide them. They’ll come to their own conclusions.
“The single biggest mistake I see leaders making is that they view communication as a one-way street,” Karsan says. “When you are talking or writing, the question that people ask themselves is, ‘How can I say this in the best possible way?’ But if you replace the question with, ‘How can the recipient hear this in the most effective way?’ you might have a different answer.
“All communication is driven by two things: a rational component and an emotional component. If you can attach both components in a bandwith that is tied into the receiver, who is receiving information in a manner that is most effective and efficient for them, then you are the most successful.”
How to reach: Kenexa, (877) 971-9171 or www.kenexa.com
