Employee Recognition: The Yum Brands Way

Fortune has a feature article this week about David Novak, the CEO of Yum Brands.  The article focuses on the leadership development efforts at Yum Brands, with a specific emphasis on the employee recognition program at the firm.  Yum Brands has a lot of fun with employee recognition, but they also take it very seriously.  They know that it's vitally important, and they stress the need for leaders at all levels to recognize the contributions of key employees.  However, they also do it with a smile and a joke - they have fun with it.   Here's an excerpt from the article:

As in all things, the way it's done makes all the difference. Every company offers recognition -- a trophy, a plaque, a ceremonial dinner. It typically accomplishes little, for two big reasons: It happens long after the performance that's being recognized, and it's impersonal. The Yum version is the opposite. Faster is better. "You go into a meeting, and somebody blows you away by something," Novak says. "You get up, go back to your office, get your Yum award out, and you go back and say, 'God, that's so great.' Boom! You give him a recognition award. That's the best recognition of all."

And it must be personal. Every Yum acknowledgement -- a rubber chicken, a cheesehead (used at Pizza Hut), a roof tile -- can be written on, and it must carry a handwritten message. "You want to give away a piece of yourself," says Novak. 

These two attributes are so crucial: it must be immediate and personal.   I would add a third criteria.  Recognition must be about behavior, not just results.  You have to identify the key behaviors that you want to reinforce, and you must recognize the individuals who engage in these activities.  People must understand what you think is important for achieving the broader objectives of the organization.  Moreover, they must know that you not only care about achieving the desired results; you also care about how people about achieving those goals.   

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Hiring Unqualified Candidates: Why Do We Make That Mistake?

Samuel A. Swift and Don A. Moore of the University of California at Berkeley, Zachariah S. Sharek of Carnegie Mellon University, and and Francesca Gino of the Harvard Business School have conducted some fascinating new research that might explain why we often make the mistake of hiring someone who isn't as qualified as we think he or she is.  The scholars find that, "Across all our studies, the results suggest that experts take high performance as evidence of high ability and do not sufficiently discount it by the ease with which that performance was achieved."    How does this problem manifest itself?  Imagine that you are looking at a candidate for a sales position who worked in a high-flying business that was growing very rapidly.    You might fail to account for the fact that it is much easier being a sales person in that type of company as opposed to working for a mature company with low organic growth. 

The scholars conducted several experimental studies which showed that people often select candidates who have excelled at easier jobs/tasks over those individuals who may have performed slightly worse at a much more challenging task.   The scholars also looked at actual admissions data for graduate schools of business.   They found that students are at an advantage if they went to an undergraduate institution with a grade inflation problem!  In other words, if you went to a school that gave out easy A's, you have a better shot at getting into a good MBA program; the admissions officers are not doing a good enough job evaluating the difficulty level of various undergraduate programs. 

As a business school professor, I'm saddened that we appear to be rewarding grade inflation.   The study shines a spotlight on an important problem.  The research has much broader implications though; it shows us why many kinds of organizations may make poor hiring decisions. 

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How Can Multinationals Find Talented Candidates? Go Where Firms Don't Hire Many Women

Suppose you are a multinational company searching for highly talented candidates.  You are finding it difficult in certain markets to attract the best people.  Where might you have an easier time finding top notch talent?   HBS Professor Jordan Siegel, MIT's Lynn Pyun, and Hanshin University's B.Y. Cheon have conducted a fascinating study titled, "Multinational firms, labor market discrimination, and the capture of competitive advantage by exploiting the social divide."   These scholars find that global firms can enhance profitability by recruiting and hiring women in countries that traditionally do not have ample opportunities for females to achieve leadership positions in business.  

Siegel and his co-authors focused their research first on South Korea.   According to this article on HBS Working Knowledge, South Korea makes a great setting for this research because, "Universities in South Korea are highly meritocratic about accepting and educating women. Hence, the country sports a large number of highly education, highly qualified women with advanced degrees in business, engineering, economics, and foreign languages - all useful in corporate management."   Unfortunately, the opportunities for these talented women are limited in many traditional Korean companies.   

This research focused on multinationals who were taking advantage of this talented pool of candidates that were not being given sufficient opportunities by domestic firms.  "Even after accounting for unrelated variables, the researchers found that a 10 percent nominal increase in the percentage of female managers (at the level of the then-prevailing glass ceiling) was associated with a  1 percent nominal increase in ROA."  

The researchers are focusing on Japan next, a country that also does not provide wide opportunities for women to assume senior leadership positions in business.  (I just read yesterday that only 1% of Japanese chief executives are women, though 1/2 of university graduates in the country are women).  Interestingly, Siegel's research in Korea suggests that Japanese multinationals might be providing more opportunities for women abroad than they are at home.  His work looked at 37 Japanese firms hiring in Korea, and he found that many of them were hiring female mangers there, but not at home in Japan. 

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Should We Bring Reality TV Into The Workplace?

Should companies actually bring reality television techniques into the workplace?  Does creating your own version of Shark Tank or the Apprentice serve a useful role in the selection process for an attractive new assignment?   Fortune reports that some firms are using these types of competitions, modeled after reality television, to do everything from fun team-building to actually trying to select people for an important new role.  Jennifer Alsever writes,

When insurance executives at Aflac sought employees for plum assignments last year, they abandoned the traditional resumes and job interview routine.  Instead, they found inspiration from reality TV competitions like American Idol.  Aflac employees in search of promotions became "contestants" who would walk into a room inside the company's Columbus, Ga., headquarters and stand before a panel of five Aflac "judges." While cameras rolled, they could do whatever they wanted to sell themselves as the best one for the job. The idea? Get candidates to think on their feet and show a side not seen in a formal interview. Performances ran the gamut -- from the ill-prepared one-minute speech to shticks with personal slogans, PowerPoint presentations, and props. "It was kind of like American Idol in corporate America -- except we didn't ridicule them," says Blake Voltz, Aflac vice president of claims and a judge. "It puts them under the heat, much like they would face if they got the job."

I'm skeptical - very skeptical.   I'm not speaking to this particular situation at Aflac, since we don't know the full details of this selection process.  I'd like to address the broader issue of using this type of competition in this manner.   I acknowledge that we have to see how candidates think on their feet, particularly for certain types of roles.   We do want to see how articulate candidates are, and how well they can present their ideas and proposals.  However, I fear that such competitions can put too much emphasis on how well someone can pitch their ideas, persuade others, and respond smoothly to questions.  Some people can make a great 2 minute pitch, but beyond that, the substance is very thin.  Some people are incredibly intelligent, but they tend to prefer thinking a bit more about questions before providing a response.   I can definitely recall students and classmates who are terrific at offering the 90 second sound bite in response to a professor's question...but beyond that, there wasn't much there.  They could sound incredibly smart and persuasive in those sound bites, but they didn't have the depth of knowledge we would want.  Such competitions described in this Fortune article can give too much credit to those who are very good at sounding smart in small doses.    

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Are Google Interview Brainteasers Useless?

I can remember going on interviews when I was an MBA student at Harvard from 1993-1995.  Certain firms, particularly in the consulting industry, used to love using brainteasers as questions during interviews (along with the usual case interview methodology).  My first experience with such a brainteaser was the following question:  How many gas stations are there in the United States?   The questions allegedly helped the interviewer understand your thought process and your approach to solving problems.  Google, of course, became famous for using such brainteasers often during their job interviews.  One of my former students was asked at a Google interview:  "How many golf balls can you fit in this room?"  

Now, we hear from a senior executive at Google that such questions did not predict effectiveness on the job.   Here's an excerpt from an interview that the New York Times' Adam Bryant conducted with Laszlo Bock, senior vice president of people operations at Google:

"On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.  Instead, what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up.  Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable “meta” information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult." 

I wonder how other firms feel about these types of brainteasers.  Will Google start a trend?  Will other firms finally ditch these silly questions?   I do think that Google's Laszlo Bok is correct - many interviewers are probably more interested in looking smart when they ask these questions, as opposed to truly learning something valuable.  One must also wonder if there's not some element of this line of thought:  "I went through this crucible; you should have to do so as well.  Let's see how you fare."  I'm sure some interviewers think this way when they consider asking one of these brainteasers.  

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Do you care? How to increase employee engagement

In this Fast Company interview, Gallup's Jim Harter comments on the sad state of employee engagement in American corporations.  According to Gallup's research, only 30% of the U.S. population is engaged in the workplace, i.e. deeply committed to their jobs.  52% of the employee population is disengaged, and 18% is actively disengaged, meaning that they are "actively against what the organization, and their boss, is trying to get done."  Those statistics are rather alarming. Some companies, of course, have begun to focus intensively on employee engagement over the last decade.  Harter comments on what leaders need to do to increase employee engagement:

So, what are the qualities of leaders that businesses must now be seeking? According to Harter, it begins with a combination of being results oriented and authentically concerned about the development of every worker. “Some people are better at getting results and some are better at developing. But, we’ve found both are equally important.”  Harter describes the most effective managers as being deeply caring--and capable of seeing, supporting, and adjusting to the differences in people. “They help people build jobs that fit them as an individual person, while still helping them get to the outcome they need from an organization perspective.”

Authentically concerned - it's such a simple, yet powerful idea.  Think about what makes great professors or teachers.  Beyond simply knowing the material or being able to explain concepts clearly, great teaching is about showing students that you care.  My colleague, Jane McKay-Nesbitt, has this great saying about teaching: "They must know that you care before they will care what you know."  The same principle holds true for leaders.  People will not follow you if they do not believe you care about their well-being and development.  Engagement starts with authentic concern. 

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Classic Mistake at a Job Interview

The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed Jennifer Boden, a human resources executive at Amazon.  They asked Boden a series of questions regarding Amazon's recruiting efforts.   Boden offered some keen insights.  I found this particular exchange with the interviewer worth stressing here:

WSJ: What tends to trip candidates up in interviews?

Ms. Boden: Most people will trip up when they focus on where they've been, the name, and they don't focus on what they've done. Or if they can't explain to us the process of how they delivered results.

Boden's observation confirms what I have seen many times over the years.  I often tell students to NOT make the interview a recitation of their resume.  The interviewer has read the resume!  He or she knows where you went to school, what your GPA is, where you interned in prior years, and what awards you have won.  What does the interviewer not know from looking at your resume?  That's the key question.  You have to talk about the major project you accomplished at your internship or the consulting report you put together for a client company as part of a business school course.  You should describe the major community service initiative you led at your university or the honors thesis research project that you completed.  An interview should be focused on telling several stories of hard work, organization, leadership, and achievement.  Be prepared to talk about what you did, what you learned, and how you can apply those lessons to this organization.    

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Engaging Your High Performers

Forbes reported this week on a startling new study by Leadership IQ, a company that does a great deal of work on the assessment of employee engagement.   The firm examined data from 207 companies on employee performance as well as employee engagement.   According to Forbes,

"In 42% of the companies, the employees who do the worst job are the ones who feel the most “engaged.” At the same time, the middle and high performers in those firms feel disconnected from their jobs and not very motivated to come to work every day."

\The article, by Susan Adams, does a very nice job of explaining many of the reasons for this result.  Adams, drawing on a conversation with Mark Murphy (Leadership IQ CEO), argues that the lack of a true meritocracy causes disengagement among high performers.   Company leaders aren't having the difficult conversations with low performers, and they are not properly recognizing the best employees.  I cannot argue with that finding; it seems quite reasonable.

I would argue, however, that one other cause may exist for this alarming finding.  Many companies simply are not investing effectively in leadership development for their top performers.  Notice that I did NOT say that they are not investing ENOUGH.   Many companies are spending a great deal of money on leadership development programs and processes.  However, many organizations are not spending that money WISELY.   We see a litany of problems in many companies:  Too many one-off events exist.  Too many programs lack cohesion.   Too many leadership development events lack clear criteria for determining who should be involved or invited.   Far too little follow-up exists after programs are delivered.  Until firms start designing more effective leadership development activities, and begin spending their resources more effectively, we won't see engagement rise significantly for the highest performers. 

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What Questions Do You Have For Me?

Source: glassdoor.com

You go on an interview, and you answer all the questions posed by the interviewer.  You think that you have performed quite well.  Then the interviewer poses the usual query:  What questions do you have for me?  You don't want to appear befuddled.  You need to have some good questions to pose.  What should you ask? 

Drake Baer has some good questions over at Fast Company. 

He suggests the following inquiries:

1. If I started tomorrow, what's the first project you'd want me to tackle?
2. What are the must-have personality traits for this position? 
3. What would you like to see more from in this position? 
4. Do you like it here? 
5. Why would I not be a fit for this job?

I think that these questions may prove quite useful.  However, I have a slightly different piece of advice to offer as well.  I always advise my students to conduct some field research prior to their interviews.  For a student interviewing at Bose last year, I suggested spending some time in the Bose outlet store in Wrentham, MA.  For a student interviewing this winter at Boston Beer Company, I suggested spending time examining how the company was merchandising and marketing its products at bars, restaurants, and liquor stores.  He really loved that suggestion - what fun research!  In each case, I recommended developing some questions based upon those field visits.   The students both impressed their interviewers with this knowledge of what was happening in the field (as opposed to just what they read on the website or in the 10K).   The questions proved far from generic; they could engage in a really substantive way with the interviewer.  They both got the job that they wanted! 

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The Dark Side of Employee Awards?

Timothy Gubler, Ian Larkin, Lamar Pierce have conducted a provocative new study regarding employee awards.  They collected data about an attendance award program at a private commercial laundry services company in the Midwestern United States.  One of the company's five plants chose to implement an award for good attendance.   Managers wanted to reduce absences and tardiness.   The other four plants did not institute this program.   The program was rather simple.   All employees without an unexcused absence or tardy in the prior month received recognition before their peers, and they became eligible for a drawing for a $75 gift card.  The program lasted for a bit less than a year.  Senior executives at the company eliminated the program because they felt it rewarded behavior that should be expected of everyone.

The scholars studied this program, and they found that the award produced two important unintended consequences.  Here is an excerpt from the paper's abstract:

First, employees game the program, improving timeliness only when eligible for the award, and strategically calling in sick to retain eligibility. Second, employees with perfect pre-program attendance or high productivity suffered a 6% to 8% productivity decrease after program introduction, suggesting they were demotivated by awards for good behavior they already exhibited. Overall, our results suggest the award program decreased plant productivity by 1.4%, and that positive effects from awards are accompanied by more complex employee responses that limit program effectiveness.

I don't think we should be surprised by these results.  When creating any type of incentive or recognition program, we should remember the law of unintended consequences.   Still the paper documents the phenomenon in a powerful way.   I find it particularly interesting that this award program clearly created a perception of injustice.  People felt that people did not merit recognition for simply showing up when they should anyway.  Perceptions of inequity should be top of mind when creating reward programs. These feelings are likely to trigger discontent and unintended consequences.  

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Marissa Mayer and the End of Telecommuting at Yahoo

The Wall Street Journal "At Work" blog has a terrific post about Marissa Mayer's memo to all Yahoo employees essentially ending telecommuting at the firm.   Some people reacted very negatively to her announcement.  How could she ban working from home given the proliferation of technologies that enable virtual collaboration?  What type of message did this move send to working parents trying very hard to juggle professional and personal commitments responsibly?  Would this announcement scare away some terrific talented people? 


The blog post points out, however, that there are significant downsides to extensive telecommuting at a firm.   The bottom line:  Face-to-face interaction does promote more effective collaboration and information sharing in many instances.   People do lose the ability to read nonverbal gestures if they are not physically present at meetings.   Moreover, many ideas get shared when people bump into one another in the hallways or at the cafeteria.   As Saul Kaplan of the Business Innovation Factory argues, innovation occurs through the "random collision of unusual suspects" in many cases.  We can't design or plan those interactions.  However, the right type of working environment at a firm can promote that type of interaction.   If many people work from home, they don't have those opportunities to engage with others in unplanned ways.  


The challenge, though, is that many people may interpret Mayer's move as a belief that telecommuters are simply not working hard enough outside the office. That interpretation may cause a drop in morale at the firm.  In addition, some very talented people may simply not be willing to engage in a lengthy commute each day.   Finally, not all jobs are alike.  While some tasks require intense collaboration and may benefit from having people in the office together, other jobs may not require frequent interaction with colleagues.   Does a blanket policy make sense when work comes in many different forms, and jobs differ significantly in terms of interdependence?  

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Leadership Development is for Top Executives Too!

Building on the last post, I think it's important to address one other problem with leadership development programs.  In many firms, high potentials and mid-level executives attend leadership development programs, receive 360 degree feedback, work with mentors, and receive coaching.   Companies invest a great deal at times to groom these mid-level executives for more senior positions.  However, they do not make a similar investment in members of the top management team. 

What's the problem with that approach?  First, it presumes that people do not need further learning and development once they reach the top level of the organization.  It suggests that they "know it all" at that point.   In fact, members of the top team often can use a break from their day-to-day work to think about broader strategic and leadership issues.  Investing in their development may not only improve their skills and capabilities, but it may help shake the conventional wisdom and groupthink that can emerge from an intact and cohesive team that has worked together for a long time in a particular company.  

Second, mid-level executives receive the wrong message.  They see top executives as not "walking the talk" regarding leadership development.   Somehow, what's good for the troops is not good for the top team.  That can't be the right message to send to future leaders of the organization.  

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The Promise and Peril of HR Software

Michal Lev-Ram wrote an interesting article this week in Fortune magazine.   Lev-Ram examines new HR software systems being sold by the likes of IBM, Oracle, and SAP.   These systems, among other things, attempt to improve the performance review process.   The systems attempt to make goal-setting and performance review a year-round process, as opposed to an event that occurs once or twice per year.  The software includes virtual rewards, as well as methods for distributing real rewards.  The systems also enable employees to set goals throughout the year and track progress, as well as to solicit feedback throughout the year. 

The key question:  Will employees actually USE these types of systems to enhance performance evaluation and constructive feedback?  Or, will employees view these tools as cumbersome, time-consuming, and distracting?  Such systems only create value if employees invest the time to use them.  Moreover, they only help drive talent development if they become more than an evaluative tool.  They have to be formative/developmental tools as well.   If employees view them as strictly evaluative, they aren't likely to enjoy using the systems.  Moreover, they may simply not take the time necessary to obtain optimal value from them. 

In the end, talent development and performance evaluation only will improve if such systems are implemented along with a broader systemic change in processes, norms, and leadership behaviors.  Without such systemic change, new software alone won't have the desired effect.

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What are the Top Five Personality Traits Employers Seek?

Meghan Casserly of Forbes reports on some interesting new research byUniversum, an employer branding firm.   The company surveyed over 400,000 people over the past year, and they tried to identify the top five personality traits that companies desire in job candidates.   The top five are:

1. professionalism
2. high energy
3. confidence
4. self-monitoring
5. intellectual curiosity

What does self-monitoring mean?  It refers to the ability to work independently.  Can a candidate figure out how to plan and complete a project without being told what to do each step of the way?  Interestingly, we know that many employees value autonomy.   Having control over the work you do can lead to higher intrinsic motivation, and ultimately, higher productivity.  However, many employees have a hard time working independently when they are given autonomy for the first time.  They are accustomed to being provided lots of direction and guidance.  Employers rightfully look for candidates who have had some experience working on their own.  They want people who have already worked through the kinks of having autonomy for the first time.

For students entering the workplace after graduation, showing that you can work independently is crucial.  Students should consider the types of projects that they have done at school.  Have they completed a major independent study or thesis?  Have they led a campus organization or planned a major event on campus?   Did they complete a project during an internship?  

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The Problem with Reference Checks

Hiring outside talent always proves challenging.  Does this person have the right capabilities given our needs?  Will they be a cultural fit?  How fast can they hit the ground running?  Can they lead a team effectively?   The interview process sheds some light on these questions, but we still see many hiring mistakes.  Can a good reference check process improve the success rate?   Perhaps, but... Reference checks pose their own set of challenges, as this article by Vicki Elmer at Fortune indicates. 

What's the problem with reference checks?  First, the candidate naturally provides names of folks who are likely to offer positive recommendations.  Second, references often are hesitant to say bad things about former colleagues or employees.  In some cases, they even worry about possible litigation that might result from their comments.  Third, hiring companies may be limited in terms of the people they can contact because of confidentiality concerns. If the candidate's current employer does not know they are searching for a position, a reference check can create a sticky situation. 

How does one overcome these challenges?  Elmer suggests asking better questions when conducting a reference check.  In the end, though, even great questions won't overcome these limitations cited above.  Companies need to examine the entire hiring process and try to find better ways to assess capabilities, evaluate cultural fit, and examine one's ability to collaborate effectively with others.  Firms can begin to improve the search process if they find ways to see the candidate in action.  Asking them to make a presentation on a key topic, work together with other candidates on a team exercise, conducting team interviews, and other such tactics can prove enlightening.  More companies need to embrace these types of interview tactics if they want to improve their batting averages. 

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Retaining Talented New Hires

Jim Newman has written an excellent article for Fast Company regarding retention of talented new hires.  He focuses on the on-boarding process, arguing that an ineffective approach can do irreparable harm.   New hires may be gone in a very short period of time if firms mishandle those crucial days and weeks.  He argues that firms should focus on three things:

1.  Initiate Dialogue Before Orientation

In a number of instances, a significant period of time exists between the date when an individual accepts an offer of employment and the date when they actually start work.  Companies need to keep the lines of communication open with that individual during that time.  They must provide a steady stream of communication, in different forms and from different people. 

2.  Create Executive Leadership Interactions

Giving new hires, even young people joining the company, an opportunity to hear directly from senior leaders can be a powerful retention tool.   People want to know the big picture, and they would like to know that senior leaders are interested in providing development opportunities for them.  Everyone, from the front lines to senior executives, wants to understand how they can contribute to the accomplishment of the organization's broad vision and goals. 

3.  Prioritize team-based on-boarding opportunities

Newman argues that it is crucial to make "employees feel productive as quickly as possible."  Therefore, he recommends quick action to provide "team-specific opportunities that engage recruits in their areas of specialization while testing and expanding their knowledge about the company."   Companies don't want to focus only on the HR nuts and bolts (benefits, policies, etc.).  They also don't want to only focus on generic skills applicable to all employees.  They need to get specific early, so that people understand the skills htey need to be successful in their particular job, and so that they begin to form relationships with key experienced employees who can serve as mentors.  Newman provides a good example:  "For example, sales recruits might spend a week or more cultivating their sales pitches and testing them in simulated client meetings. Over the course of the week, recruits can present to sales managers or learn how to improve their performance based on actual case studies."  

I would add one other thought here.   Firms need to provide a series of early "check-ins" to insure that a new hire's on-boarding process is on track.  Some check-ins should be with the person's direct supervisor.  However, other check-ins might be useful with an HR representative, a peer in their work group, and perhaps a mentor at some higher level in the organization.  These check-ins should be vehicles for two-way communication.  The individual should receive some early constructive feedback and advice, while also being provided an opportunity to offer input on how to make their on-boarding process proceed more smoothly.  

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Retaining Talent: Authentic Socialization

University of North Carolina Professor Brad Staats and his co-authors have published an interesting new study regarding talent retention.  The paper is titled, “Breaking Them In or Revealing Their Best? Reframing Socialization Around Newcomer Self-Expression.”  The scholars conducted a field experiment at Wipro BPO in India.   In this study, they introduced a new type of on-boarding technique for new employees.  The methodology is called "authentic socialization."   It focuses on helping new employees identify their capabilities and strengths, and then finding ways to use them to help the organization achieve its mission and goals.   That method contrasts with the usual on-boarding process, which is more about teaching employees "the way things are done here."  In the UNC Kenan Flagler Business School Research Insights magazine, Staats explains his research:

“Instead of indoctrinating new employees on ‘how things are done around here’ in hopes that they will internalize organizational values, authentic socialization enables newcomers to highlight their unique identities at the very beginning of the employment relationship and bring more of their signature strengths to the job.”

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Classic Hiring Mistake

Patty Azzarello has written a very good column for Fast Company titled, "The 6 Huge Hiring Mistakes Everyone Makes."   Here's one mistake I find particularly useful to highlight:

Admire a past accomplishment too much
Very often a candidate will have an accomplishment in their past that is truly extraordinary. It’s more impressive than anything you’ve ever done and vastly overshadows the accomplishments of the other candidates. Wow! You’re Hired!

• Don’t: Hire the candidate based on this one grand accomplishment alone.
• Don’t: Assume this breakthrough will be repeated for you!
• Do: Make sure they are ahead of the pack on many of the other hiring needs too.
• Do: Make sure to get them to talk about how they will think, learn about, and do the specific things you need now--don’t assume brilliant success on the prior thing will automatically translate to brilliant success on what you need done.

Make sure you will love them just as much for other reasons---for the mainstream work they will do and for their personal contribution to your team. Don’t just hope for a repeat home run.

I'm particularly struck by this piece of advice from Azzarello for several reasons.  First, we often forget that the person probably needed a strong team and organizational support system to achieve that great accomplishment.  Without that support, they may not be able to replicate the success. So, we have to find out if they built the team themselves... do they have the ability to build another great team?  That's very important, but often overlooked.  Second, we need to make sure that the person still has the same drive and determination that they may have had prior to that major accomplishment.  Have they gotten a bit complacent? Are they resting on their laurels?   Third, you have to ask whether their skills transfer to your organization?  In other words, we often think they may are bringing a set of 'best practices' with them to your firm.  However, those practices and processes may not fit your culture, your strategy, your people.  We must remember that success doesn't come from universal best practices... it comes from practices that are tailored to a particular organization, market, culture, etc.   So, you have to ask:  Will those person be able and willing to adapt their approach to our firm if modification and adaptation is needed? 

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Leadership Immersion at Hilton Hotels

Yesterday I had the privilege of attending (and presenting at) the Towers Watson HR Leadership Forum in Falls Church, Virginia.  Prior to my talk, one of the Towers consultants moderated a wonderful panel discussion of HR experts from a variety of different organizations.   During that discussion, I learned about a terrific program at Hilton Hotels.  At Hilton, the top 72 executives in the company take part in an "immersion" experience once per year.    In that immersion, they spend one week per year actually working in one of the company's hotels.   They don't go there just to hold a town hall meeting or "inspect" the work.  They actually work alongside their front-line associates for one week, performing a variety of roles from the front desk to maintenance.   The immersion provides a powerful learning experience for top executives, and it insures that they understand the challenges that front-line employees face. 

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Is Telecommuting Effective or Not?

Christopher Shea of the Wall Street Journal reports on a new research study by E. Glenn Dutcher in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.  Dutcher examines the work of telecommuters through an experimental study.  He finds that their productivity depends on the type of work that they are doing.  If the work is rote and repetitive, then people tend to be more productive in the office than at home.  However, if they are performing creative tasks, then they appear to be more effective at home.   The evidence suggests that an informal work environment may be more conducive to creativity. 

I would add a bit more to this interpretation.  I think the lower productivity for rote work conducted at home may be accounted for by the fact that one has many other options for how to use your time at home.  If you have boring work to do at the office, you may be constrained in your ability to procrastinate while doing other more enjoyable activities.  On the other hand, when you are at home, there may be many more desirable activities that you can pursue instead of the repetitive work associated with your job. 

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