Q. How do you develop a system for delegating?
Everybody has their strengths and weaknesses, so I use football analogies a lot. If I have a wide receiver who is very quick, I would not put that person as a running back. They wouldn’t be effective in that role. I evaluate my staff and my team regularly about every three months. I try to figure out what they’re doing well or what they were doing well three months ago that they might not be doing well now or where they might have a strength that is better-suited for another role.
When I delegate, I try to give people what I believe is their natural instinct to be successful, and then I let them run with it. For example, if I find that some tasks or duties would be better-suited for someone else or it’s a task that only I can accomplish, then that’s the task that I’ll take. So the formal process as an executive, manager or business owner is that you always have to evaluate your team. We do profiles, so we do a couple profiling standards that rank people on their abilities. The personality profiles let me know if someone is capable of really getting after a project or really capable of managing other people or if the person might work well not so much as a superior but as part of a team.
Q. How can you get an accurate picture of what a person brings to the table?
One of the things I don’t do is I don’t look at the resume during the screening process when we’re looking for a new hire. When I screen people, it’s predicated on a conversation. I can get a pretty good vibe within the first few minutes of meeting someone of what they are. It’s in how they present, the way they come in the door, how they talk, the way they act toward me. I take that, and then I couple that with a technical interview with one of my folks. If I think they have a good personality and could contribute here, I want to know their technical skills. So I never really evaluate people outside of meeting them in person. From that, I can get a much better picture about how someone can fit here and the ways they could be effective.
The reason I don’t look at the resume is that people have had a lot of time to put stuff on the resume. It’s not a free flow; some of that stuff is canned. You can get a false connotation of a person if you just read a resume.
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