Longleaf System & Network Specialists

Managed IT Service Provider

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Rebooting Your Productivity System

By Tamara McLendon —

People often judge productivity systems in a binary sort of way. It’s great, or it’s a waste of time. “Oh, that system didn’t work for me. Once I stopped doing it, my life got out of control again.”

Well, you’re not wrong. You have to actually follow the plan in order for the plan to work. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the plan isn’t the right one for you. Depending on how your brain works, or your job, or your team dynamic, you can find a system that works well for you for the long term.

But what does “works well” actually mean? Does it mean 100 percent perfection? Does it mean that as soon as you stray off the path even just a little bit, you’ve failed?

No, of course not. It means that it’s a plan you can stick to most of the time, and that when you lose your mojo, you can get it back again.

We all have those weeks. In our team, we’re often managing simultaneous on-boarding and upgrade projects, but throw in a hurricane-related outage and our engineers start looking a little glassy-eyed.

Once it’s all dealt with and they are able to think straight again, it would be so easy for them to give in to the chaos as their new normal. But that doesn’t do them, their team, or their clients any favors.

The better approach is to step back, take a deep breath, and reboot, just like you do with your PC when it starts acting weird.

Here’s the reboot routine I use, and that I recommend my colleagues use when they’re feeling overwhelmed or finally coming up for air after a rough week. You’ll need to turn off the world for an hour, but the time always pays off in increased control when you turn it back on again. So let your boss and teammates know that you’re going dark for an hour, or come in early/stay late to get some quiet time.

Get “in” to empty

You have to start somewhere to put some order to the chaos. Until you know what you’re looking at, you can’t really start to think about what’s important. In GTD terms, they call it “getting ‘in’ to empty.” You handle any inbox or free-range paper, you clear out your email inbox and your voicemail, and you create some space around you.

This doesn’t mean you actually do whatever tasks are unearthed, unless they’re shorter than 2 minutes in duration. But you do wrap your brain around what needs doing. Capture the actions you need to take, and file any resource material in the place you’d naturally look for it when it comes time to do it.

If you do this every morning, not just when things get crazy, it’ll prevent things from getting crazy in the first place.

Ok, so now you have a clean desk, and you’ve triaged your inboxes. But you’re still staring at a pile of to-dos, some with hard deadlines, and no time to do them all.

Renegotiate your commitments

The next step is to look at your deadlines and commitments you’ve made to yourself and others, and renegotiate as needed. They might be glaring at your accusingly from your calendar or your Next Actions list, or maybe they’re just haunting you from the back of your mind.

If a realistic assessment tells you that you can’t get it all done in the timeframe you’ve committed to, you have to own up to it and set some new expectations. They should be based in an evaluation of each item’s importance and urgency, and in your true priorities. Think about your areas of focus for work and home, maybe review your job description or consult your manager, and talk to your partner and kids about what’s really important to them.

Maybe during your chaotic week, you breezily agreed to three major deliverables by next weekend and you promised your teenager you’d take her to opening night of the new Marvel movie, but you’d forgotten that you’re out of town at a conference on Thursday and Friday. There’s no way you’re going to get it all done. What is most important? What is truly urgent?

In the cold light of day, you realize that you’ll only be able to get the one most important deliverable done by Thursday. If you scale down the second one, you can deliver it on Friday. But, frankly, you’re going to have to decline the third. And that movie with your kid? An explanation, an apology, and a discussion of acceptable alternatives is needed.

The most important part of this step is to communicate these decisions. It’s OK to renegotiate ahead of time. What is not OK is to stay silent and just hope they don’t notice when you miss the deadline. That’s a breach of your commitment. And you want to be someone who is trusted to follow through, in all the areas of your life.

Getting to work

You’ve cleared some space and you’ve set new expectations. Now you can turn the world back on again, and actually do the work. But you’re not going to open your email and just react to what’s arrived in the last 10 minutes, or jump on your colleague’s request just because they’re standing in your doorway. You can capture those tasks as Next Actions, but then you’re going to thoughtfully review your list and make your own choice about where to start.

The GTD approach says that you should choose your next action based on four criteria.

  1. You know you have two hours before your lunch meeting. Or just 10 minutes before the end of the work day. What can you make real progress on during that time?
  2. What condition is your brain in? If you’re fresh and feeling creative, or if you’re brain-dead and exhausted, pick a Next Action that you can be successful with. There’s little point in starting a strategic planning session if your brain is only capable of doing some filing and calling it a day.
  3. Where are you, and what tools do you have at your disposal? Assuming it’s not the sort of task that’s so important and urgent that you better get yourself to the right Context right now, you’ll choose from only those tasks that are actually available to you in that moment. Am I working at the office where I have everything I could ever need, or am I balancing a laptop on my knees at the auto shop, where the wifi is spotty at best?
  4. Urgency and importance. How timely and high-stakes are the Next Actions on your list? If you can’t tell definitively which task is most important, then they’re about equal, so don’t agonize over it. Just pick the oldest one.

Keep it going

You’ve picked your Next Action, and you’re getting to work. Great! But there’s another critical step in digging out from the chaos, to help you prevent it next time. When you’re done working on that first task, update its Next Action description. Either you’re done and can mark it complete, or there will be a next step. In that case, you’ll relabel it with the very next, physical action you need to take to move it forward.

Don’t leave it as it was when you started – that description probably isn’t accurate anymore. The task isn’t “Read about B2B marketing best practices.” You’ve done that, so the task is now, “Write a B2B marketing plan outline based on the best practices you just read about.”

By doing these two things — keeping your Next Actions up to date and making a daily routine of getting “in” to empty — you can stay on top of your system most of the time. And when things do go off the rails, and they will, you don’t throw up your hands in defeat. No need for dramatics. Just take a minute, reboot, and then get back to work.

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Stepping Away from the Business to Get a Better Look

By Tamara McLendon –

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a new technique we were using to carve out time to work strategically on our business – we were going to walk away from the business for three weeks. I promised then that I’d write about the lessons learned, so here we are.

It was a terrific trip. We walked through castles and ruins, hunted for fossils on the coast, communed with sheep high on windswept moors, and savored a fair number of pints at the local pub.

Before we left, our management team had conversations about what the sticky spots were going to be and set up some guidelines to ensure that we were all clear on when contact was justified and/or required. We tried to provide a decision-tree that would help the team feel confident that they were making the right call, and help Harvey and I gain some peace of mind that no news really was good news.

The Rules of Engagement

Harvey’s rules were focused on customer service and serious technology outages.

Is the issue Mission Critical? If so, has one of these criteria been met:

  • Every known possible remedy has been attempted.
  • The duration of the outage is greater than our promised service levels.
  • A customer relationship is at risk.

If yes, then the Service Manager should contact Harvey via text message. He will respond with guidance, but will not put his hands on a keyboard. In fact, he didn’t even bring his laptop, and I certainly wasn’t going to loan him mine!

My rules included a list of events that would warrant contact in the areas of HR, legal, payroll, benefits, and finance. Is there a legal problem? Is an employee resigning? Yes, please contact me. If we get a letter from the IRS, for goodness’ sake, tell me! And in all cases, contact should be through our Project Manager, who is also acting as my back-up in areas of administration. I’d already notified our benefits consultant that I’d be away, and gave her the heads-up that our PM had authority to execute on previously made decisions in my absence.

Not a lot of rules, but they were big ones. We assumed that, for the most part, the management team would be able to handle the vast majority of typical events. It was the out-of-the-ordinary that we needed to give some guidance on.

What happened while we were out?

We returned to work to find the company still humming along. The place hadn’t collapsed and, while the team was nice enough to say they missed us, they did just fine in our absence.

On the technical side, things went quite smoothly. Harvey was notified a once or twice of outages and major client issues, but the team worked through it independently. They notified him, but just to keep him in the loop, not to ask for his participation.

Things were a little rougher on the administrative side. We had a data glitch in our financial software due to me trying to do month-end invoicing from abroad. The delay in my regular bookkeeping activities meant that our customer payment portal was out of date. And when the team had to run a customer invoice off of the regular cycle, they had to dig the relevant procedure out of our regular month-end invoicing documentation.

Our Project Manager faced the brunt of these gaps, and he knocked it out of the park. But he shouldn’t have had to. I had a big gap in our finance procedures and documentation.

Identify the Gaps

This was the purpose of the whole exercise. Yes, we wanted a real vacation, which we hadn’t had in a long time, but the goal was to step aside and see what gaps would emerge in our process.

It turns out that the assumption we all made – that the technical side would be where the holes where – was incorrect. Harvey has been delegating and cross-training over the last year, and the result is that he no longer needs to act as an engineer on a daily basis.

To be fair, we did get a little lucky. Almost as soon as we returned, a long-time client had a major outage that Harvey did have to play a role in resolving. He did get hands-on to help with an immediate work-around so that the client was supported, but then he retreated to a position of adviser to the engineering team. And as predicted, they got the job done.

The problems we faced while on the trip itself all lay on the administrative side. My insistence on keeping all of the bookkeeping tasks to myself had caused most of the problems. Message received!

Within a week of returning home, I contacted a highly recommended bookkeeper and set her to the task. I’m no longer responsible for the day-to-day bookkeeping tasks (logging receipts and deposits, matching up expenses with accounts, etc.). My job now is to feed the raw data to the bookkeeper as it comes in. I still pay the bills and set up payroll. And as CFO, I’ll review the reports she sends me and take any necessary actions.

We also learned that we need to tighten up our admin and finance SOPs, so that’s on my actions list for the coming weeks.

Backfilling with Strategic Focus

The reassignment of these day-to-day tasks has freed up a couple of hours a day for both Harvey and me.

Harvey’s been reading voraciously about product development, sales best practices, marketing, and M&A. He’s owning his position as CEO in away that he’s never had the bandwidth to in the past. He’s working with the service team to recast his Rules of Engagement to meet the needs of the company now that he’s back at work, but not returning to an an engineering role.

I’m working with our new bookkeeper to streamline our data flow and communication, and with our Project Manager to fill our documentation gaps. I’ve always been a big reader of business books, but I’m revisiting topics that will help me step up my game. This morning, the topic was financial projections. Tomorrow, I’ll be asking for input on dashboards and metrics. Thursday, writing documentation is on my to-do list.

Thanks to this freedom to refocus on the big picture, I’ll also take a moment to revisit our functional org chart, which I also wrote about in the previous blog post.

Right now, that org chart says that I expect to spend 25 hours per week in my combined role as President & CFO, and then another 15 on Marketing, Bookkeeping, and HR. But I frequently overspent time on the Bookkeeping side. At this point, I feel confident that I can leave just 5 hours total in Bookkeeping and HR, and reassign the other 10 to my executive functions and to ramp up my Marketing work.

Harvey has 15 hours booked on the org chart as a Systems Engineer (which he always overshot, so it was more like 20 to 25 hours in practice), which he’ll be able to reallocate to his role as CEO.

 

The result of stepping away from our business for three weeks was that we shook loose the several lingering gaps in our processes, and identified the next steps to help us grow as an organization, a team, and as executives. We reset our own expectations, and that of the team, for our roles within the company, and were able to write new job descriptions that emphasize the big picture and the long-term.

And, not for nothin’, we were able to take our kids on a three-week trip to the UK! How is that a thing we even got to do? It’s crazy! And it’s entirely thanks to this amazing team we have. They’re the reason the trip could happen, and why the business is successful, and why our customers are happy.

I know, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that no matter what happens with any individual — me and Harvey included — the business will continue doing its good work and providing a good quality of life for those involved. It has a life of it’s own now, and Harvey and I are just contributors. That’s a very comforting thought.

 

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Technology at the Top

By Nick Wiley –

We’ve all been there. We’ve started new jobs, stumbled our way through the first few weeks of training, planted our collective rears in freshly-Lysoled office chairs, and put our heads down ready to take on the world. Then in walks our supervisor or seasoned colleague with some exciting news:

I know they taught you to do it a certain way in corporate training, but this is how we do it in this department. This is where we store our files. This is the printer we use.

Imagine, for a moment, that every single team in your company is operating exactly the same way. Independent of each other. Disjointed. In many ways, you don’t work for a company. You work for a collection of mini-companies.

In all my years of IT engineering and consulting, I have never had a meeting with an IT manager who wasn’t riddled with angst and long-running frustration from years of supporting disparate systems for the collection of mini-companies they’ve themselves charged with supporting. As a result, IT has gotten a reputation as a reactive, thankless field staffed primarily with curmudgeons who’d rather not be helping you. Rest assured — your friends in IT aren’t crabby because they have anything against you. They’re crabby because they know you probably aren’t going to take their advice when you ask them for better solutions.

Why aren’t you going to take their advice? Because your boss didn’t tell you to. Your expectation is that you’re going to follow your own preferences, or your immediate department’s protocols — not your corporate standard operating procedure.

A 2017 survey of 388 CEOs by Gartner revealed that only 42% had started to take real control of their business technologies through a “digital business transformation”, and that “half of CEOs have no digital success metric.” We know that what gets measured gets managed, so what does it mean for your business that you haven’t addressed your technology in a strategic way?

I’ll state the problem as clearly as possible: Companies have problems that need solving. Companies have access to IT professionals, internal or external, that solve problems for a living. With surprising frequency, the leaders of those companies haven’t created an environment where their IT professionals can solve those problems.

What can executives do?

If you are an owner or executive, the first step is to address your company’s technology head on, even if you hate it, fear it, or have no personal interest in it.

Strategic Planning

Engage in the process of choosing whole-company technology solutions for communication, work management, finances, project management, etc. and then bake those solutions into the entire company’s culture. Then, pull those technologies and the experts you’ve hired to manage them into your strategic planning. A suggested framework might look something like this:

  • Work with company leadership and their teams to identify business problems
    • This should be a thorough process that includes interviews with staffers and analysis of critical processes
  • Coordinate with IT to organize and assign priority to the problems identified
    • Complicated problems that require change in employee behavior are always very difficult to implement. But, that doesn’t mean that tackling them isn’t worth it. Plan accordingly and limit the number of problems to solve each year.
  • Flesh out targeted problems into achievable goals
    • Set metrics that clearly define progress and ultimate success

Set Employee Expectations

It may sound extreme, but consider adjustments to compensation plans that include incentives for proper use of company-owned tech. You’ll be amazed at how quickly employees start to follow the rules when they become “part of the job.” Document and include procedures that standardize and define your company’s tech culture. Some examples might include:

  • Communication: i.e. when to use e-mail vs. phone vs. chat?
  • Password management
  • Accurate, consistent use of company ERP/CRM/file storage
  • Continuing technology & security education

Without that direction, teams and individuals will begin inventing their own solutions for all the problems technology can solve. I’ve literally consulted for a company that hired people to pick up papers from one printer and scan them into another disparate system on the other side of the room. All day long. You can do the math on how much that was really costing them.

Be Consistent

I have observed over the years that many executives, while often individually tech-savvy, tend to isolate themselves in a bubble of non-standard technology. This phenomenon is most sterotypically witnessed in the arms of the bright young CEO, hellbent on their “need” to carry a Macbook or Surface despite company policy demanding their uglier, more rugged, more-Thinkpaddy, and objectively more-supportable counterparts.

There is a superior alternative. Work hand-in-hand with your IT experts to develop policies and procedures, then hold yourself accountable to said procedures. If it’s a good idea for non-executives to change passwords frequently, it’s an even better idea for executives to do so. If it’s important for data-entry to be accurate, fast, and consistent, it’s just as important for reporting, analytics, and decision-making to be accurate, fast, and consistent. To revisit the original example — your IT manager doesn’t want you to carry an ugly black plastic laptop because they want you to be miserable — they want it because parts, service, and replacement are available within 24 hrs in almost any location in the known world.

By facing technology head-on, you’ll see improvements in communication, efficiency, profitability, free time, company morale, accountability and reporting, practically every facet of your day-to-day life. Leaving IT out of your strategic goals is like sleeping on a cheap mattress and wondering why your back hurts.

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Carving Out Time to Work Strategically

By Tamara McLendon –

There’s a saying among business owners and executives that it’s important to find time to work on your business, not just in your business.

It’s especially problematic, I think, for professional services business owners. They are usually subject matter experts who started as sole practitioners, then hired staff to help out with administrative tasks or deliverables, but who still spend much their days doing the work of it.

For Harvey and I, that means that Harvey still fights against the tide of technical work, and I still get lost in the weeds on bookkeeping or basic HR tasks. You might be faced with different sorts of tasks as an attorney, doctor, accountant, or financial services professional, but the basic issue is the same – how do you carve out time for the bigger picture when you’re still responsible for so much of the day-to-day minutia?

I can’t speak for Harvey, but I’ve found three particular strategies to be the most useful.

Daily Areas of Focus

I only started using this method recently, thanks to a suggestion from my mentor and friend, Kathy Atkins at The Lattitude Group. I was seeking a solution to this exact issue: How do I ensure that I’m spending enough time moving my big-picture goals forward, rather than floundering in a sea of daily tasks?

She suggested that I think about assigning an area of focus or type of work to each day of the week, on a recurring schedule. It so happened that the five days of each work week was a perfect fit for categories of work, but I played around with two-week cycles, and even a weird and disturbing 9-day cycle that left me in worse shape than I started.

Each morning, I start with three things: My calendar, my to-do list, and my area of focus for the day. For example, today is Thursday, which is Processes Day. I will make sure to complete my calendared and dated Next Actions (like writing this blog post), but will then move on to examining and revising the organization of our standard operating procedures for the areas of finance, marketing, and HR.

Tomorrow, Friday, is Research & Strategy Day. I’m planning to read the next two chapters in Blue Ocean Strategy and review our business, sales, and marketing plans to pull out any logical Next Actions.

I know what specific tasks I’ll be working on ahead of time because as I scan my to-do list and projects list, I pull out a couple of high-priority items within the appropriate area of focus and make them my have-to’s for the day.

By giving each day a theme in this way, I’m ensuring that I’m not allowing my time to be controlled by the squeaky wheels of my day. Instead, I’m in control of where I want my time to be spent, and I’m actively directing my time toward projects that will have a long-term impact on our business.

It does beg the question, though. What do you do when this intentional focus on strategy threatens to push aside the necessary day-to-day tasks you would otherwise be doing? How can you be sure you’re allocating your time properly, and how to do you know you really do need to delegate?

Functional Org Chart

Typical organizational charts include one box for each staff person and simply show the position of that individual in the group, and who they report to. It’s a missed opportunity to show the actual work that needs to be done, and who is accountable for it.

Our org chart has one box for each area of responsibility, not each person, and as a small company, that means each person may occupy more than one box.

Our Support Desk staffers are accountable to doing good IT support work. That’s it. Therefore, each person is represented by a single box.

Systems Engineers, however, split their time between escalated IT support and proactive project work. They are represented in two boxes – one in the Service Desk and one in the Projects department. But now they, in essence, have two bosses. How can they determine how much time they spend in each role? Well, right there in the Service Desk box it says “30 hours” and in the Projects box it says “10 hours.”

At the management and executive level, the same thing applies, with even more boxes. One of our managers splits his time between being our Systems Manager (5h), our Support Desk Manager (10h), and a Systems Engineer 3 who works on both Service (10h) and Projects (10h). Each role is given a set number of hours and if he notices that the balance of work is shifting, he considers whether it’s a time management problem, or if the needs of the position are changing. Maybe it’s time to shuffle responsibilities or adjust our Systems strategy. It’s a starting point for discussion with his direct manager and with the leadership team as a whole. The functional org chart has given us a tool to recognize it and then act.

In my role, I’m the President (15h), the CFO (10h), the HR Contact (5h), the Marketing Director (5h), and the Bookkeeper (5h). Each of those roles gets a certain number of hours each month and defined set of responsibilities. If I’m supposed to spend just 5 hours per week on bookkeeping, but am really spending 15, that eats away at all of those other areas.

In my Weekly Review, I look at my boxes on the org chart, evaluating whether the way I’m actually spending my time matches up with the ideal. If not, why is that? Has one particular area grown unwieldy? Could we automate or streamline, or do we need additional staff? Am I just dodging areas that are harder to wrap my head around?

We encourage everyone to do the same in their regular reviews of their own performance and goals. It’s a great way to set expectations and address potential issues between employees and their managers.

If you go through this exercise and find that an ideal allocation of time would have you spending 10 hours or more of your time each week on strategic projects with long-term impact, but the reality is that you rarely spend more than 3 hours, you have some thinking to do about why, and some actions to take to resolve it.

Third-Party Accountability

Identifying the problem is great, but developing and executing a solution is another thing entirely. The strategic projects are rarely things that have a hard deadline, or someone else who will give you dirty looks if you don’t make it a priority.

They’re self-inflicted tasks, and those are always the first to get tossed aside when anything more interesting or seemingly more urgent shows up. Staying on-task is a challenge when you may be the only one who notices that it’s not getting done.

That’s one of the biggest reasons we have a relationship with a strategic business consultant, the aforementioned Kathy Atkins. Yes, she’s an expert in finance, and operations, and staffing, and all the other things we need her expertise on. But even if all we got from her was the accountability on execution, it would still be worth every dime.

For staffers, they have built-in accountability already. Presumably, they have to walk into a meeting with you or their direct manager and report on their progress. But who’s meeting do you walk into with your report? You’re the boss, and owing yourself a progress report isn’t nearly as compelling as owing it to someone else who doesn’t even work for you.

We started our year-long engagement with The Lattitude Group with a series of meetings to determine our strategic projects and assignments that would get us where we want to go in the long term. Then, each month, we walk into that meeting room (or, video conference in, for those of us who are based in another state) with an update on what we’ve done so far, what obstacles we’re facing, and what we plan to do about it.

It creates an urgency and accountability to projects that, in truth, can be done any time. Or never.

One of those projects was the creation of the functional org chart. That’s the kind of thing we could have managed without, but not nearly as well. I was personally tasked with formulating a new budget building and tracking process. Yes, we could have hobbled along with the old system, but the new one is much better. It was challenging enough and required enough deep digging from me that I’m confident I would have put it off as long as I could.

But I had to walk into that room with Kathy and the rest of the team, and I didn’t want to be the one who hadn’t accomplished my task.

You have to choose your third-party accountability person carefully. They have to be flexible enough that, when you find a way to improve or change the project that truly is for the better, they’ll allow it. But they have to be tough enough that, if you stroll in there with half-baked deliverables or excuses, they’ll call you out. In front of your staff, if necessary.

Thankfully, Kathy is exactly that person for us. She holds us accountable, but also gives us room to evolve the plan if needed. She absolutely holds us all accountable, including me and my business partner. We get no slack just because we write the checks.

Walk Away

I said I had three ways to address this issue. But I actually have three ways that have actually been put into practice. There’s a fourth one that we’re just on the verge of trying out. And it’s scary one.

One of these big strategic projects we identified was to remove Harvey and I from the day-to-day operations as much as possible. And each project needs to have a measurable outcome.

How do you know if you’ve successfully removed yourself from the business? You walk away.

It needs to be for a long enough period of time that it’s a really good test. So, we’re stepping away for three weeks this summer. This post will probably be scheduled to go live while we’re incognito, so I won’t even be allowed to check that it went up the way it was supposed to.

The staff will have authority to act independently in all things. We’ve cross-trained in everything we can think of. We’ve documented every issue that’s come up since we started planning this nine months ago. We’ve hired more staff to ensure that we never have coverage issues.

But there are going to be unpredictable issues. I’m guessing we’ll come back to a list of gaps they’ve identified in our documentation and processes, which will make their way onto someone’s to-do list.

We also have a release valve. Harvey’s writing a document that formalizes where the line is between “Use your judgement,” and “This is the Doomsday. Please contact me.” In the unlikely circumstance where it truly threatens the company’s long-term success or would cause an unacceptable level of customer hardship, they are authorized to contact us for advice.

But that’s where it ends. We are not authorized to do any of the actual work ourselves.

My hope is that three weeks is long enough to weaken our old work patterns. The rest of the management team will continue own the day-to-day operations, and Harvey and I will come back to newly focused positions that are almost exclusively strategic in nature.

I have complete faith that the staff is ready for it. It’s really a matter of whether Harvey and I are ready to let go. We’ll see. I’ll write a post on our return that talks about what we learned.

 

That’s four ways in total to carve out the time to work strategically. The next post is going to dove-tail nicely into this one. Sales Engineer Nick Wiley is going to write about a way to spend all that strategic time you’re carving out – developing and participating in your business’s technology strategy. It’s about time we talked about technology in this technology company blog!

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Interviewing for Cultural Fit

By Tamara McLendon —

We’ve had the good fortune to expand our team by four new people in the last month, and we’ll plan to add two more next month. As we’ve worked our way through the hiring process many times now, we’ve learned some lessons about what’s really most important to us in a new hire and what processes serve us best. As a professional services company, it’s not just about skills and knowledge. It’s also about attitude and behavior.

We’re currently making good use of two complementary ideas as we’re hiring, both of which help us identify people who are a good fit for our culture – who have the right attitude and behave in positive ways that are good for the team and our customers.

The People Analyzer

First, we’ve incorporated one of the key take-aways from the book Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, by Gino Wickman.

He explains that there are two components to assessing how well a person is likely to perform in your organization:

  • Are they the right person? Do they share the values of your organization and have an attitude of ownership and teamwork?
  • And are they in the right seat? Do they understand the requirements of the job you have available, do they really want that job, and are they capable of performing well in it?

He uses an individual assessment tool that he calls the People Analyzer – a sort of ridiculous name for a really useful spreadsheet. Your columns are your necessary cultural factors and attitudes, along with the three necessary characteristics for how the person engages with the specific position: Getting it, Wanting it, and being Capable of it (GWC).

We’ve used this tool as we’re hiring, and also with existing staff to ensure that we’re know where there’s work to be done. It helps us identify people who are great for the company, but in the wrong position. If it’s possible, they get reassigned into a position that’s a better fit. People who are on the line, get coaching and training in an attempt to help them reach our threshold. It gives us a shared vocabulary to talk about areas of improvement.

It’s also cuts through the dithering that we tend to do while considering whether a low performer should be terminated. It sucks, and we’d love to avoid it, but it’s necessary. By removing the emotions from it, we all clearly see what needs to be done. It’s somewhat startling how quickly you find out whether people are a good fit for your company, and whether they’re in the right job.

Here’s what it looks like in action. This is a truncated version of ours, with fictional employees:

Employee Honest Responsible Accurate GET IT WANT IT CAPABLE OF IT
Tom + + +/- + + +
Jerry +/- – + + – +
Threshold + +/- +/- + + +

Your rows are each of your employees. Your columns are the characteristics of historically successful Longleaf employees. In addition to what you see above, our real spreadsheet has columns for: Team-Oriented, Problem-Solver, Coachable, Accepting of Change, and Self-Directed Learner. We quickly assess each individual’s characteristics, marking them as always acceptable, so-so, and lacking.

In the example above, Tom is above the threshold in all but being Accurate, so he’ll receive some coaching or training there. He gets it, wants it, and is capable of it. He’s the right person in the right seat.

Jerry is a concern. He’s below our acceptable threshold for being Honest and Responsible. He’s above the threshold for being Accurate, and if these other two characteristics were his only issues, we’d offer him some coaching and training, and reevaluate in 30 days. But the deal killer is that, while he gets it and is capable of it, he doesn’t really want it. Our decision here is whether to coach for Honesty and Responsibility and also move him into a more suitable position, or let him go as soon as possible.

This example is for people already on staff. Clearly, it’s harder to get this level of knowledge about a job applicant that you’ve just met. We try, and it’s a useful exercise, but we also apply a second assessment technique.

‘Brown Shorts’ Interviews

The second tool we use is the major lesson we learned from the book Hiring for Attitude: A Revolutionary Approach to Recruiting and Selecting People with Both Tremendous Skills and Superb Attitude, by Mark Murphy. He relates the story of Southwest Airlines, which uses an unconventional interviewing technique to quickly cull out applicants who aren’t a good fit for the company’s values and culture.

He suggests an interviewing methodology that focuses on eliciting the behaviors you are trying to assess, right in the interview. After identifying the characteristics of your highest performers, just as you use for the People Analyzer above, you formulate your questions to identify people who share those characteristics.

By doing this part first, before even assessing whether someone has the necessary skills for the job, he claims that you avoid getting carried away in the excitement of finding the right skill set and overlooking some obvious red flags in the person’s attitudes or behaviors.

At Southwest, Murphy says, they invite all of the applicants into a room. Most are wearing what they’d consider to be interview-worthy suits or business formal wear. They’re invited to change into more casual clothing, which is provided in a range of sizes (hence the “brown shorts” title), since it’s going to be a long day, and they might as well get comfortable. Anyone who chooses not to change is weeded out on the spot.

It seems a little insane at first to eliminate people based on whether they are willing to get so casual in such a high-stakes meeting, but it’s important to remember that the Southwest culture and brand is one that encourages employees to relax and have fun, even when the stakes are high. They’re encouraged to banter with customers, to have a sense of humor as they solve problems, and to take initiative and ownership in each role.

A person who is too rigid won’t fit in, and won’t be able to flip that switch to be a comfortably casual person during customer interactions.

Southwest’s culture is about casual and fun professionalism, and that’s how they identify the right people. So what is our culture, and how we do we identify the right people? Our culture is based on those success characteristics from the People Analyzer above: Honest, Responsible, Team-Oriented, Problem-Solver, etc. We call our style of communication, internally and with clients, “Friendly Professionalism”.

Great. So how on earth do you interview for that? For the usual job-seeker, it’s their job to give the answers that they think you want to hear. They’re not trying to give answers that will help you both judge whether they’re truly a good fit. Even if they wanted to, they don’t yet know enough about your company to know what that would be.

The book suggests formulating your interview questions to get at each of those characteristics, and then to prepare a rubric that includes example responses so that the interviewer isn’t depending on their one emotional response to the candidate. Instead, they read their notes, recall the answer, compare it to the rubric, and then assign a score.

The questions also need to be directed so that, whether the applicant knows it or not, they’re giving you the information you want.

The example that sticks with me is for natural problem-solving tendencies. If I ask someone, “Are you a problem solver? Do you enjoy it?”, of course, they’ll give me an enthusiastic “Yes.” If I ask them, “Tell me about a problem you encountered and how you resolved it,” they’ll tell me all about it, but that won’t give me a clue as to whether they’re a natural problem-solver.

But actually I ask them, “Tell me about a challenging problem you encountered at work.” Full stop. If they tell me about the problem and then also tell me about the solution, in detail, with enthusiasm, now we’re onto something. If they tell me about the problem, and they tell me that they passed the buck, or blamed someone else, or complained that it was too hard, that also tells me something I need to know.

I also ask the question, “What is something you could have done to improve the working relationship you have with your current manager?” They have a couple of options. They can tell me that they can’t imagine any way to improve it, because they’re super-human and never makes any mistakes. Or they can tell me that, while they had a great relationship, they probably could have communicated more clearly, or taken greater initiative, and (bonus points) they had already taken action toward that goal.

That tells me a few things. They pay attention to cues from their manager and take them seriously. They are open to feedback and improvement. And they’re not afraid to be vulnerable and open with an interviewer who has the power to hire them, or not. This is a person who would fit well within our culture.

After the interview, all of the points are tallied, and anyone who receives a high grade is scheduled for an in-person technical interview with the hiring manager.

This approach has worked well, whether we’re putting ads on LinkedIn or are working with a recruiter. It works whether I’m doing the interviews, or I’ve delegated it to another trusted and long-term leader on the team.

By putting culture first, we’re side-stepping the issues that we used to have – people who weren’t enthusiastic about the work, who didn’t take pride in a job well done, and who weren’t good teammates.

We can train for technical skills. It’s much harder to do that with values, attitudes, and natural tendencies to action. By starting with those factors, we have the best chance of hiring people who will be successful in our environment and of retaining them for the long-term.

 

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