Hire team players
As your organization grows, your management-level employees will play an increasingly significant role in tying the people in your organization together. Without the cooperation of your direct reports and their direct reports, chances are you won’t be able to build or maintain a culture of trust and inclusion.
That’s why Miller wants to find managers who can help build and maintain Virtua Health’s vision, mission and culture from their first week on the job.
To cultivate the right kind of managers, you need to start out with the right kinds of raw materials. Miller says managerial candidates should, first and foremost, mesh with your organizational values.
“When you’re hiring, you first really have to look at the values of the person, what kind of individual are they, are they trustworthy and honest,” Miller says. “You try to measure that through the interview process as well as you can. Obviously, you also have to know whether they’re coming in with the technical skills you need, but those technical skills are very secondary to the values set.
“I’m a firm believer that you can teach a skill set but you can’t teach a values set. A person comes into a position with a values set. If their skills need enhanced, you can provide that, but you can’t provide the values set.”
Miller and his staff get down to the nuts and bolts of a managerial candidate’s values set through a rigorous interviewing process. When you apply for a managerial position at Virtua Health, three or four sets of interviews await — provided you pass the screening tests that are part of the recruitment process.
“If we’re going to hire a manager who is going to be in a position of managing other people, we panel interview them, and the people on that panel could be from all parts of Virtua,” Miller says. “It could be a nursing director, a physical therapist, someone from human resources. There might be four or five people on a panel, and they interview and determine that person’s fit at Virtua Health. Then, if you make it through that round, the individual manager you’re going to be working for does a personal interview.”
Situational interviewing is part of the vetting process at Virtua Health. Miller and his leadership team place potential managers into hypothetical situations that involve challenges the candidate might encounter on the job.
“Usually these are people issues,” Miller says. “We ask them how they would deal with this person if a certain situation occurred. ‘What would your response be to someone who is ineffective; how would you deal with it?’ We would gauge the response partly on how the person feels they would take corrective action on a nonperformance issue and partly on whether they’re doing it kindly and with care, so that the person can self-correct.
“If someone tells us that they’d fire a person after a mistake, we have the wrong manager. What we want them to do is consider how to make this person better, how to improve their skill set.”
The process of performing the proper amount of due diligence on a managerial candidate can be time-consuming, but it’s better to put in the work ahead of time than to backtrack because you made a poor hire.
“I’d rather spend the time on the front end to hire good people than hire someone who is not optimal, someone who ends up costing the organization money and might end up causing the organization damage from which we never recover,” Miller says. “That’s why the work spent upfront in hiring a manager is crucial.”
If you put the right managers in place, they will help you engage your employees, promote your vision and build a positive culture in which employees and management trust each other and are willing to work together toward common goals.
“The biggest challenge I have faced, a challenge just about any leader faces, is to make sure you have the right leadership team on board,” he says. “Whenever you form an organization, you need to put a quality senior management team together. Good leaders beget good leaders; quality people beget quality people. That is the first, and probably the largest, challenge you have as a leader.”
How to reach: Virtua Health, (888) 847-8823 or www.virtua.org
