I enjoy Tory Johnson’s articles from the abcnews.com website. Her latest offering, Bad Bosses Can Infect an Entire Business, is a quick read with a strong point. Employees need positive reinforcement. Some styles (High I) require more while other styles (High C) do not. Some employees are rewarded by praise while others are rewarded by money. Part of our business at Select Metrix is to identify these items in employees so that their managers can be more effective in leading them.

The takeaway quote from this article (emphasis mine):

Study after study confirms that workers are more committed to their jobs and are more productive when they know that management appreciates their efforts. In fact, the majority of people quit their bosses, not their jobs, when they opt to leave their positions.

I never like to see fat words such as “study after study,” but I have read this fact in other articles, I have seen it first-hand at our customers and I have personally left good paying jobs because of a poor manager. There is nothing as dangerous to employee retention as a manager who believes they are insulated from effectively reinforcing their team.

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We posted on this topic in our old blog (predates The Hire Sense) and it is worth bumping up to this version. Paul DiModica writes in BDM News about one of the best sales tools around, the Lost Sales Analysis. I will warn you that this article is quite theoretical but I found it captivating.

The lost sales analysis is more effective than percent of quota attainment as a measurement tool, because it measures not just the sales success of an account manager against some predetermined sales quota, but it also measures their success against competitors based on lost sales.

The example he provides is excellent – even a numbers-challenged person like myself can understand the approach. I’ll leave that information for you to read. He bolded point to end the article:

The key to successful sales forecasting is understanding where the sales numbers are, where they need to be, and where they came from.

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In one of my previous sales lives, I worked for 2 different companies in a highly specialized, technical field. The companies were competitors – I worked for the larger company first that had a highly recognized name in the market. The company was approximately 200 employees strong with worldwide sales.

I worked for the smaller company about 2 years after resigning from the first company. The smaller company was family owned and had . . . how do I say it? . . . no name recognition. The company had 7 employees and 3 of them were related.

I describe these 2 settings for you to make a point about hiring based on experience. When I was with the larger company, we had a fully staffed marketing department that effectively leveraged our market-leading position. We also had an established distributor network that covered the choicest territories for our product line. My main responsibility, as a Regional Sales Manager, was to qualify leads effectively. The position was a tremendous learning experience and I was handsomely rewarded through the commission plan.

The smaller company was a completely different story and a real learning experience for me. I sauntered into the position expecting my qualifying skills to put me on the fast track to revenue. What I learned was that I needed to go find my own prospects with a limited (to say the least) set of resources. What an eye opener! My prospecting skills were laughable and I ended up wasting much time trying to put my gameplan together. I eventually was laid off as the company began to contract down to blood relatives due to many internal problems.

The point here is simple – hiring a salesperson based on their experience is a high-risk strategy. The lesson here is that I was skilled at selling for a company with a strong market capitalization and I was successful in that role. However, those skills did not directly translate to success at the smaller, unknown company.

To top it all off, the smaller company had a better product based on superior technology.

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I had lunch yesterday with an old friend of mine whom I used to work with at a previous job in the technology market. He now owns his own handyman business and we were discussing past employment mistakes on our parts. I mentioned how we observe candidate behaviors during the hiring process with the understanding that this is the best they have to offer. What I mean is that they are displaying their best behavior, compliance, formality, etc. If a candidate appears to be somewhat inappropriate at this stage, they will not magically become better once they are on your payroll.

My friend’s point was that candidates are observing employers in the same manner. He passed on what appeared to be a strong product manager opportunity simply because the President was condescending and short on their initial phone call. My friend had left a voicemail for the President after being referred to him by a previous employer. My friend was driving in his pickup truck when the President called him back later in the day.

The short conversation ended after the President complained that it sounded like my friend was driving a semi since it was noisy on the call. The President told him to call him back later when he wasn’t in his vehicle. Now, there was an edge and an attitude in the tone of the President during the call.

My friend thought about that call on his way to his job that afternoon. He came to the conclusion that he could not work for that President. He never called him back.

Maybe the President was in a foul mood after dealing with a difficult task or maybe he was simply frustrated with his lack of success at finding the right Product Manager (my friend fit the unique criteria almost perfectly). Maybe my friend would not have been the best fit or maybe he would have been. The point is that the behavior and attitude of the President removed the opportunity to discover the abilities of a strong candidate.

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It’s Friday so let’s lighten up with another anecdote. Here is an incident that I ran into during a panel interview. I would like to add this was the first time we met the candidate. The candidate repeatedly asked for permission to start up his computer and run us through a PowerPoint presentation.

We denied his requests, but he kept asking. Finally, we relented and allowed him to do it.

The problem he had, unbeknownst to him, was that this interview occurred in the middle of winter and his laptop was extremely cold from being in his car. After several embarrassing attempts to start his computer, he finally gave up. He turned to all 6 of us and asked, “You still like me, don’t you?”

We all sat there in stunned silence.

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Monster’s June Newsletter provides the latest trends for candidate traffic to their site. Monday and Tuesday’s are their busiest days. The traffic now starts to pick up on Sunday and starts to taper off on Wednesday with the lowest amount of traffic hitting the site on Saturdays. We have had much success with Tuesday postings and but I think we will test some Sunday and Monday postings to see what happens. I would continue to post your ads the beginning of the week to take advantage of this specific monster.com traffic pattern and we’ll post later on our results.

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I was worried that title was going to be “Moron Leaders.” Deeper article here from Selling Power that provides The Nine “P”s of Great Leadership. This comprehensive article is a quick read with much usable data.

I particularly like their take on character as opposed to the article in the previous post. From the Nine “P”s:

Principles. Do the right thing all the time, not just when it€™s convenient and not just when you know somebody is watching. Strive to lead with credibility, integrity, vulnerability, accountability, and steadfastness.

A descriptive explanation as opposed to a cluttered topic intermixing character, personality and style. One more excellent excerpt from the article:

People. A leader continually learns what his people need to do their best; he focuses on his people€™s strengths and works hard to get the best out of them.

Focus on strengths and negate weaknesses. A common mistake we see in training salespeople is the attempt to train a weakness into a strength. A fool’s folly. Training should focus on negating weaknesses and little beyond that point. Strengths should be trained to the point where they become differentiating assets.

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CareerBuilder has an article out regarding the 5 Key Traits of Great Leaders. As you know, we enjoy lists at The Hire Sense. The author provides a fair explanation of each trait and I doubt anyone would argue with any of the traits. Here they are:

1. You must have a vision.
2. You must have passion.
3. You must learn to be a great decision maker.
4. You must be a team builder.
5. You must have character.

Again, who would argue with these 5? Well, I will…with the last one. First, an excerpt from the author’s explanation of that point (emphasis mine):

Without character, all the other “keys” are for naught. That’s because your innate character strengths and limitations play a critical role in your leadership style. The real question is, are you aware of just what role they play? All great leaders have taken steps to learn about their individual personality and what part it plays in their leadership style.

So what’s your leadership style? If you don’t know, there are many leadership style assessments available on the market.

Yes, we offer a leadership style assessment for managers and executives. However, we do not equate these assessments to a person’s character or personality. Instead, they are representative of their leadership and communication style. Character and personality are poor choices of words for assessing.

Character matters immensely, but it is far from defined by leadership style.

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In a recent article on the Tightening Labor Market from the SHRM website (membership required) 2 recent surveys go beyond the unemployment rates and the number of new jobs created to show the demand for talented workers is increasing. Both of the surveys were conducted by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.

The first one surveyed 3,000 job seekers and found that among those landing jobs in the first quarter, the median job search lasted just 2.7 months, more than a month shorter than the peak of 4.0 months reached in the third quarter of 2004. It was the lowest job-search time recorded since the second quarter of 2001, when search times fell to a record low of 2.1 months.

The second survey confirmed the struggle to find skilled wiorkers, conducted during the first week of April among 100 human resource executives. In the survey, 66 percent said it was becoming more difficult to find qualified candidates and/or retain workers on the payroll. A quarter of respondents said they were already experiencing a severe shortage of workers.

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I came across an article on Comfort Zones from a couple of years ago that discusses motivating salespeople and well worth the read. The author has this to say why sales managers don€™t push their salespeople out of their comfort zone.

Many managers who are in their own “comfort zone” will not challenge this situation even though they know that the person concerned could achieve a lot more. The manager’s “comfort zone” tells them that it is perhaps too time consuming or counter productive to upset the “apple cart” and that letting the status quo remain is the best option.

He goes on to say that this happens for 2 reasons, the first being a lack of personal motivation along with focus and the second being simply a lack of good management. The end result is a company that accepts average performance and average results.

Insightful, but I would like to take this one step further. At times, the organization causes this disconnect. This disconnect often results from misalignment between corporate direction (revenue growth) and the commission/bonus structure rewards for the sales team.

If you are having a problem getting your salespeople to grow their territories, the first place to look is in your compensation structure. Is it truly rewarding the behavior you need to grow revenue? Is it realistic or attainable? If yes, then look at your salespeople. Are you providing the right rewards that will motivate each team member to increase their sales.

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