Motivation to do the
work is the universal trait of success.
If you want to improve your interviewing
effectiveness, consider this simple idea the next time you’re conducting an
interview:
New Hire Success =
Ability to Do the Work Times Motivation to Do the Work
Ability is actually quite simple to assess, especially if you use the two-question interview approach I suggested in an earlier post. Motivation to
do the work, on the other hand, is a bit more complex, and quite frankly, more
important, since this is the universal trait of success.
To get the motivation part right you need to uncover the
candidate’s intrinsic interest in doing the actual
work required (not competency to do
it), the new hire’s likely relationship with the hiring manager, and the
person’s ability to work effectively in the company’s inherent culture.
Collectively, competency in relationship to interest and fit drives
motivation.
Most interviewers get much of the competency part right, but
miss on the fit and motivation part. Since I could write a whole book on this topic, I’ll use this post to
focus only on the cultural fit part, since this is the hardest to pin down. For
example, in a recent online training program I asked 50 hiring managers from
the same company to define their culture. Here were just some of their
responses:
1) work hard, play hard
2) have a sense of humor
3) fast-paced
4) friendly and warm
5) like a box of chocolates
6) intense
7) a place to create your own
destiny
8) youthful and exuberant, but
wanted to hire people of all ages
9) collaborative, but independent
10) getting too bureaucratic
In other words it was everything, yet nothing.
If you don’t want to try the random approach,
here are some ideas you might want to use to assess cultural fit:
Pace and Position
on the Corporate Life Cycle:
having worked on more than 1,000 different hiring search assignments and
projects, it’s pretty clear that the dominant driver of company culture is the
pace of the organization and where it is on the
corporate life cycle. Companies that are growing fast and moving
from an entrepreneurial start-up to a well-managed company are culturally far
different than large scale-organizations that are well-run, but slow to change
course. Messed-up companies on life support are a different breed entirely.
Examining the environment of a person’s best accomplishments provides a good
sense of the types of cultures where the person thrives.
Job Structure: some jobs are more free-flowing (creative
marketing), others highly structured (accounting), some are heavily supervised
(call center), and others allow for more independence (field sales reps). In
addition, I like to categorize jobs by their primary emphasis (maintain,
improve, build, create, etc.) and match people accordingly, based on their past
accomplishments. When the job structure and the company pace are
out-of-alignment, like implementing public reporting systems in a Facebook-like
organization, expect cultural shock throughout the company.
Managerial Style: Blanchard’s
Situational Leadership Model suggests that managers need to adapt their style to best suit
their subordinates’ needs. Since few managers are adaptable enough to do this,
a simpler solution is for managers to hire people who already fit their
preferred style. Managerial style ranges from the very directive to the very
loose with big steps like supervisor, trainer, coach and delegator filling the
spaces in-between. Subordinate needs vary from those requiring heavy direction
and supervision to those wanting none. The in-betweens include those that are
trainable, coachable and manageable. Since the relationship with a person’s
manager is so important to job satisfaction, performance and motivation, it’s
vital to get this part of the assessment correct. Few companies even consider
it, hoping to fix the problem later.
Adaptability and
DISC: I recently described a super quick means to categorize a person’s personality into four
dominant styles: Director, Influencer, Supporter and Controller. The point of
the post was to suggest that many people can adjust their style to handle
changing circumstances, and many can’t. To improve the chance of a good
cultural fit, it’s best to find people who have successfully adapted to
different cultures and rapid changes in the past. Rigid people fight change, so
look for this and avoid hiring people who haven’t demonstrated an ability to
perform at peak levels in a variety of different situations.
Cultural fit is hard to describe and more
difficult to assess. Start by examining a person’s major accomplishments and
dig into the organizational pace, the types of jobs where the person excelled,
the style of the person’s best managers, and the person’s ability to modify
their business personality to changing conditions. This will give you a good
picture of the candidate’s ability to fit your culture. Cultural fit drives
motivation. It should drive your assessment, as well.
courtesy :- http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20121112112646-15454-cultural-fit-is-much-more-than-affability
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