An organization’s most significant asset is the intellectual capital of their employees – how they think, invent, create and respond. Therefore, every organization needs employees who are the right fit for the job – employees who have the right talents, skills and experience – they connect to customers and drive results. This makes the sourcing and selection process both more critical and more difficult.

No longer will most any employee be able to do any job. Fit matters. And to find employees who fit the role, the organization now needs a greater list of candidates to select from – to ensure the attributes needed to drive performance exist within the candidate. This focus on fit now requires a fuller pipeline of viable candidates. And one of the greatest ways to fill the talent pipeline is to use your workforce’s connections and sourcing ability.

Consider the following ways to use your workforce to identify, find and recruit A-level (the right fit) employees:

1. Clearly identify the talent profile of for each role (this should identify the talents, skills and experience needed to be effective in the role). Share this information with all employees. Now employees know the attributes needed to be effective in each role.

2. Have all employees take a talent assessment, to be better aware of their natural abilities (talents and strengths) and to become familiar with the nomenclature of talents. Having a common language of talents allows the organization to better define, discuss and understand what attributes are key for each role, and what attributes must be sourced.

3. Provide talent scout business cards to all employees; these cards have the employees’ name and “Talent Scout” as their role. Coach employees to give cards to those people they see in their normal day who exhibit the talents and attitudes needed in company roles. Invite these people to find out more about the company. This starts to fill the talent pipeline so that when openings do happen, the organization has already started to source good fit candidates.

4. Have employees talk about open company roles to their (social and professional) networks.

No longer can management be solely responsible for sourcing all talent. Employees see and talk to (talented) people all day. They are connected to personal and professional networks. Be sure they know what attributes encourage great “fit” in each role and send them out to the world to scout for (the right) talent.

A client of mine travels extensively. He couldn’t always do this. There was a time when he was too concerned to leave because he didn’t have a team capable of handling the business in his absence. They would goof off and do as little as possible. So he never left. And the business suffered.

So here is what I worked on to help him get out of the office and get focused on adding greater value to his business:

1. We defined the performance attributes of every job (what attributes are necessary for an employee to be successful in the job). This gave us a clear picture of which jobs had people who were a good fit, and those who were not adding any value. We first realigned existing staff – right people in the right jobs.

2. We then reviewed the now “open” jobs (open because we didn’t have anyone in the organization who had the right success attributes for the jobs) and sourced candidates from the large amount of unemployed talent (because of the recession). The clarity of knowing what we specifically needed, coupled with a larger job candidate supply, allowed for successful hiring. Time consuming but critical for the success of the company.

3. With the right people in the right roles, we then created clear daily performance expectations that defined what needed to be done but allowed employees to develop how to complete the work. This inspired employee ownership; they became more emotionally connected to their work and workplace. And with the right employees in the right roles, they welcomed the ability to do their work in their best way.

With the right employees in the right roles, so much more work gets done. Employees who are in roles that play to their talents, strengths and passions, feel more capable and competent. They like what they do. They feel part of a family. This kind of employees doesn’t goof off when the boss is away.

I present more of this process in the book Fire Up! Your Employees and Smoke Your Competition.

In an earlier blog post, author Seth Godin suggested that we end the annual reviews, big sales meetings and other large events, and instead, move to “frequent cheap communication” – that is, constant meaningful contact.

Let’s see the value of this in the workplace.

Constant contact (communication) with employees provides:
1. A venue for providing feedback to reward exceptional performance and to correct problem performance.
2. A connection to employees’ ideas, social connections and thoughts to drive business opportunities.
3. The ability to relate to employees as people – that critical personal connection that drives loyalty and inspires performance.

Constant contact with customers provides:
1. The venue to ask meaningful questions about service levels, needs, values and expectations.
2. The ability to assess new products, services and ideas before they are fully invested in or initiated.
3. The ability to relate to customers as people – that critical personal connection that inspires loyalty.

Remember that communication is the method to move today’s enormous amounts of information. It is less effective if delayed until a major event. It is most effective in the personal one-on-one connection that happens regularly, clearly and intentionally.

Is it a requirement of your culture to stay connected to your customers?

Is it part of your management and leadership style to stay connected to your employees?

In today’s instant information age, check in on the frequency that you stay in touch. Constantly ask what your employees and customers think. Then get good at listening and using what they tell you.

For more information on connecting to and inspiring employees, check out Fire Up! Your Employees and Smoke Your Competition, and other tools at www.LiveFiredUp.com.

But even though you aren’t great at everything, you are great at some things. Find those and build them into your job and you excel. Find those and you have the potential to move from good to great.

Today’s best performance happens (supported by Gallup, Marcus Buckingham, Daniel Pink, Seth Godin) when an employee is both good at what the job requires and likes doing it. This means today’s managers must function more as “engage-and-inspire” coaches than “command-and-control” sergeants. They must get better at building strong relationships to know their employees’ talents, values and interests, to find ways to activate their emotional connection to their work. And it all starts with a clear understanding of what employees are good at – because great performance can never happen if employees do not feel capable and competent.

I am working with an organization that is in the process of changing its hiring process away from using standard job descriptions requiring candidates to have similar work experience. Remember, just because an employee has done a job before does not ensure the employee was both good at the job and liked doing it – both now required for exceptional performance. Instead, this organization now uses a Talent Matrix, a summary of the key talents, team talents and core skills that will encourage success in the role. They look for people are are naturally capable and interested in the responsibilities of the job. From this information they can better advertize what they need, source candidates that are a better fit and more successfully hire higher performing people.

At a time when employees are now more in front of customers (and therefore constantly building or destroying your brand), hiring the right employee is now the most critical component of activating sustainable and exceptional performance. This requires finding employees who are capable, competent and passionate about the responsibilities of the job. When these employees are hired, they are good at and interested in doing exceptional things for customers, which actives customer loyalty and strong results.

Call to action:
Do you know how to hire in an intellectual age? Do you know the attributes that will make an employee successful in each role?

Resources to get you where you need to be:
Check out Awesomely Simple by John Spence and my book, Fire Up! Your Employees and Smoke Your Competition. Contact me if you need my help to learn how to attract and hire the right employees.

So what do they do off the field that helps them realize their greatness? What helps them move from good to great, from ordinary to extraordinary? And what can this tell us about encouraging championship behavior in the workplace?

Champions first know their talents; their natural aptitudes start them out as “good.” What helps them achieve champion (exceptional) status is an intrinsic passion for what they do; this provides the energy, drive and focus to commit to the extra work, effort and disciplined achievement to move from good to great.

So let’s talk workplace. Good employees are those who can do the job. Great employees are those who have the passion to excel at the job. They do things both in and out of the workplace to improve, grow, learn and achieve. They excitedly go to training programs, watch videos and buy resources, even with their own money. They set goals for themselves that are many times greater than the goals their managers set. Passion drives excellence. Passion creates champions.

Marcus Buckingham presents in his book First Break All the Rules, that 65% of employees do just enough not to get fired. They are good, not great. They are not champions. Core to this is they are either in jobs that don’t play to what they are good at (the don’t feel capable or competent), or they are good at the job but don’t love it (the find it boring).

To learn how to activate your employees’ passion, you must first be able to connect through a regular and recurring dialog – person-to-person. In this dialog you learn about the things that move and inspire your employee. You start to gather critical information to help you realign an employee to a role that he is both good at doing and passionate about doing, or make modifications to an employee’s existing role to include more of what appeals to the employee.

Consider the following questions to connect with your employees and to gather critical information:
1. What do you love most (least) about this job?
2. If you could work in any area of the company, what area would it be and what job would you want? Why?
3. What are you talents, values and interests? What do you love to do outside of work? What matters to you in and out of work? What do you think you are capable of being great at?

These several questions allow you see into your employees to better understand what matters to them and what moves them. And when you know what moves them, you can activate their passionate response – the response that leads them to “championship” performance, because champions are what your customers and business need.

Please forward this to someone who can benefit from it and contact me to show you how to activate the “champion” in your employees.

This struck me today as I was reading Frank Rich’s Op-Ed in the NY Times about balloon boy. Reading this weeks piles of press and tons of tweets on the balloon boy hoax made me think of George Saunders great essay, “The Braindead Megaphone” (be sure to read it if you have not). His point is that we always listen to the loudest voice – the media, the politician, anyone with a microphone, large television or radio audience, anyone with large network followers. And because it is the loudest, we follow. Lemmings. Autobots. Just because it can be said, does not mean that it is true. And just because it is the loudest does not mean it is true. It is time to fact check. It is time to pack our brains when we pack our lunches and fight the urge to pass on rumors. And a rumor is something that has not been substantiated with fact.

Remember the children’s game, “whisper down the lane” where a message is whispered to one person at one end of a circle, and each -person whispers the message to the next. The message at the end is different from the beginning. This is how information moves today. Someone hears something (may or not be true) and passes it on from network to network. Two problems. First, the message is frequently passed on without any critical thinking or assessment (rumor started). Then, as it moves, it morphs into an even greater rumor (rumor embellished) – mostly because those hearing it and passing it on are also not checking the facts. Start a discussion of health care and some have morphed the message to death camps. Start a discussion about a flu strain and we have people saying that vaccines are intentionally infecting people. Start a discussion about equality and we have people fearing the breakdown of families. Check your facts. Stop spreading rumors.

Want to see what I mean? Carve out one hour and review all the tweets, Facebook posts, radio, TV and text messages you receive. Then evaluate:
• How many were meaningful?
• How many were true?
• How many made a difference?
• How many added value?
• Which are worthy of passing on?

We have an amazing world where scientific information doubles every 2-3 years. The pace of change is extraordinary, meaning that we have access to more and more information every day. Our ability to access this information and to be connected to networks of people now changes how we use this information. We must become more critical in our assessment and evaluation of information. If we are relying on the information to make an informed decision (politics, health, investing, workplace, family) then we must check our facts, own our decisions and stop spreading rumors. Not that we have to do that with everything. If you like green grapes better than red, tweet, text or e-mail. But if is about healthcare, a new business competitor in town or something that will affect your health, check the facts.

We are in age that lets us constantly communicate. In the past when we had less technology, the critical issue was expanding the communication process (the movement of information) so that we could get more information out to people. In business, managers were more informed (and could be) than their employees; managers were in charge because they had information employees did not have. Managers had the facts.

Today, technology has put communication in the hands of everyone. Now, both managers and employees have access to similar information; the information hierarchy has changed. No longer is a manager in charge because she has access to more information. Today, managers are in charge because they bring their teams together and direct the process to gather, assess and use information in a meaningful way. Information movement (communication) has changed how we manage. Information movement has changed what we say and how we say it. And this great movement has created the need to learn how to determine fact from fiction, both at work and in life.

We know that most of what politicians say is perspective. Though it would be great if they were mandated to only say what is true (think of how much less we would hear from them), we must be able to assess fact from fiction, truth from rumor. Just because something is said does not make it true. I would love to see a small “r” (r for “rumor”) added to texts, tweets and others posts, indicating that the statement has not been fact-checked. Then I would know whether I could rely on the information to make a meaningful decision. I know that will never happen so I know it is up to each of us to become better at critical thinking and evaluating what we hear to be able to separate chat and rumor from fact.

Our success is in our ability to use information – at work or in life. We are connected more now than ever before to networks of people who spread their ideas and comments around at the speed of the click. There is great success in this. There is also a great potential for failure. Though in my work with companies I always encourage managements to constantly include employees in discussions about what they hear and see (the are in fact the eyes and ears of every organization), great managers must help their employees learn to be better at critical thinking and information evaluation. This improves the quality of the information they bring to and use in the organization. And seeing this in the workplace, educates them to do it in life.

Information is good. Meaningful and factual information is better. Since we can never require and ensure politicians, businesses, celebrities and others who share information to present only fact, we must own the fact-checking process. Commit today to share only meaningful and accurate information. Improve your critical thinking, your review of information and your evaluation based on fact. Watch out for the brain-dead megaphone – the loudest voice – that insists you listen because it is loud (loud may mean volume but it also may mean celebrity, frequency and pervasiveness).

So before you spread a rumor, think, evaluate and check the facts. Then if it is something that should be passed on, decide on the best way so that is well understood.

Catch my interview with Jim Lobaito at BizTalk Radio at www.Biztalkradioshow.com; it overviews Fire Up! Your Employees and Smoke Your Competition, its approach, and how to easily and successfully implement a fired up! attitude in your workplace. See the “For Managers” section in the right column, or go to the Products page for more information. Get your copy today.