When you’re interviewing
job candidates, Bill Fink’s got one important piece of advice
for you: Shut up and listen.
The worst thing CEOs can do
is waste valuable minutes
championing the merits of their
companies instead of vetting
the skill sets of potential employees. As founder, owner, president and CEO of Area Wide
Protective Inc., Fink has become
something of an expert on the
subject of interviewing. He’s
listened to hundreds of job
candidates while increasing the payroll at his temporary traffic
control service provider from
139 employees in 2002 to 610 in
2007.
During that same time, he has
also asked interviewees a lot of
questions. His favorite? “Tell
me how you made your last job
bigger than how you found it.”
The question not only helps
him gauge a respondent’s
growth potential, it also introduces that person to an atmosphere of growth that has fueled
the company to 2007 revenue
of $27 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Fink about how to develop a
customized training template
after you’ve listened to and chosen the best new hire.
Don’t approach training with a onesize-fits-all mentality. A common
mistake in business is the
notion that one size fits all in
training. To me, only the most
rudimentary aspects of company
orientation are one-size-fits-all.
Past that, training should be
customized to the individual,
especially at entry-level management positions and above.
What we do is look at the relative strengths and weaknesses
of the individual, and then we
customize training and orientation to enhance those strengths
and bolster the weaknesses.
For example, ‘This guy is a
superb public speaker, but he
doesn’t have an organized-enough mind. We need to get
him into some training where he
will be better able to organize
his thoughts, his day, his time.’
No two people are alike. No
two people bring the same skill
set or strengths and weaknesses
to an organization, and that’s a
good thing. But, at the same
time then, if no two people are
alike, then no two training protocols are alike, either, nor
should they be.
Get buy-in through inclusion. Turf
battles within organizations are
ridiculous. They waste time, and
they’re destructive. The best way
to fight that is to be inclusive.
In terms of developing a training template for Joe, new middle manger, I can leave that to
the vice president of human resources and say, ‘That’s his turf.’
But if Joe doesn’t become a
better time manager than he
was when he walked in the
door, we’re all going to be looking at the VP of HR and saying,
‘What the hell happened here?’
But if we all bought in from the
beginning, then it’s a collective
failure, and the turfiness doesn’t
manifest itself.
Once (the VP of HR) develops a training protocol for Joe,
he’ll present that to us. Then
the rest of the senior staff will
say, ‘Don’t you think it would
be better to dwell on this portion of the training a little
more than the other?’
Then there’s buy-in. We’ve all
had our hand in crafting the
best plan possible.
For the important areas of
the company’s future, a collective approach works best and
produces the best results.
Encourage healthy debate. Debate
is good, and it is not window
dressing. I don’t want 100 yesmen or -women.
The first thing is setting sincere and honest ground rules.
For most of the employees,
even if they’re senior staff members, when the boss is
present, the implication is
always there that (they’re) really expected to take the boss’s
point of view.
I make it clear that at a meeting, ‘Yes, I will make the decision at the end of the day, but
for right now, in the course of
this discussion, we are all
equals, and every opinion is
equal. I will judge you more by
your ability to stake out and
articulate a position.’
Over time, they get comfortable with that and very good
and spirited debate follows.
From that debate comes
invariably the right answer.
Sell change. Selling change
effectively to your people is the
most important sale that a company makes. It’s not landing the
million-dollar account.
What you have to do to sell
change is to accurately and passionately portray the features
and the benefits of the improvement that will occur once that
change is made. Depending on
the level of change, speak to the
change agents personally. Look
at their faces. Answer their
questions.
If a physician came to you
today and said, ‘You need a total
hip replacement,’ he would first
have to make a convincing case:
‘The pain you’ve been having,
it’s going to get better once the
surgery happens. You’re going
to have a six-month rehab, but,
at the end of the day, you’re
going to be able to do more of
the things that you want to do,
and you’re going to be able to do them better then you did
before.’
That’s an oversimplified example, but a lot of CEOs and
upper-level management get irritated and angry when their people don’t accept change, and
you end up saying something
like, ‘This is what we’re doing.
Take it, or leave it.’
Sure, you can mandate
change, but you’re not going to
get the morale and the motivation that you’d get if you effectively sold change. It’s one thing
[for your employees] to say, ‘I
understand where you’re going
here. I suppose I can go along
with this.’ That’s not a sale.
A sale is, ‘Wow, you’re right.
We really are going to be better
off. This really will work.’ That’s
the reaction that I want.
HOW TO REACH: Area Wide Protective Inc., (330) 644-0655 or www.awptrafficsafety.com