Business Without the Bullsh*t: 49 Secrets and Shortcuts You Need to Know (14 page)

You can’t be a great boss if you don’t hire the right people. You don’t just want people who can do the job—you want people who will excel and whose contributions will help you and your firm be more successful. Here’s how:

Study your best employees to determine the characteristics that differentiate them from the average ones. Find out what drives your best people to be the best. Discover which talents and skills are crucial to success in your unique business environment.

Then create interview questions that will reveal whether the candidate can be exceptional in your specific organization.

It’s absurd to expect somebody extraordinary to walk through the door when you want them to. Rather than wait until your moment of greatest need, interview candidates all the time, even if you don’t have any job openings.

Use a combination of e-mail and social networking to keep in
touch with the best applicants. That way you’ll have exceptional candidates ready when you have a spot for them.

You can’t identify somebody extraordinary by asking ordinary interview questions. Rather than something like “What is your greatest achievement?” ask the candidate to write down some achievements—two from grade school, two from high school, two from college, and two post-college—with at least one being business-related.

Then ask which achievement makes the candidate proudest. This will let you delve into his or her core motivations.

Extraordinary employees are resilient—a character trait that emerges only from life experience. When you’re interviewing, probe for defining moments when the candidate encountered disappointments and yet managed to move forward.

Exceptional employees will have personal experiences that illustrate their resilience, which helps employees shrug off the frustrations that are part of any high-performance job.

Many people are successful only when somebody else is providing the motivation. For example, many top athletes (even Olympians!) slack off when a coach is not “riding herd.” This is not necessarily a bad thing, but maintaining that level of coaching will take a lot of effort on your part.

So unless you plan to spend a lot of your time providing motivation, look for employees who haven’t depended on the constant attention of a boss to be successful.

Experience can be misleading, especially in a business environment, where things are always changing. As many hiring managers have learned (to their dismay), some “experienced” candidates have just had the same bad experience over and over.

Rather than focusing on what candidates did in the past, focus on whether they have the attitude and basic skills that will make them extraordinary in the future.

Extraordinary employees are usually likable—but plenty of likable people are particularly good at convincing employers that they have talents they don’t actually possess.

Never hire a candidate unless you’ve talked to somebody who says you’d be crazy
not
to hire that person. Ideally you should research and locate the reference yourself, rather than simply calling the ones on the candidate’s résumé.

If you’re the boss, it’s very much in your interest to have short meetings that work toward a goal as quickly as possible, so your employees can get back to doing real work. Here’s how to keep your meetings brief and to the point:

Many useless meetings have amorphous goals such as “sharing information.” However, unless you’ve got time to waste, it’s crazy to tie people up in a meeting unless there’s something important to be decided on.

If you can’t pinpoint why you’re calling a meeting, don’t call it. Once you do know why you’re calling the meeting, create an agenda that explains the goal of the meeting and the steps that are to be taken at the meeting to achieve that goal. For example:

1. Discuss current status.

2. Brainstorm how to get back on target.

3. Reach agreement on recommendations.

If you want your meetings to go quickly, avoid disseminating information via PowerPoint presentations. In most cases it’s more efficient for people to skim that information than to have it spoon-fed from the podium.

To avoid unnecessary presentations, create briefing documents that can be scanned quickly either before or during the meeting, and that provide sufficient information that attendees can intelligently discuss the issues on the agenda.

It may not be practical to completely avoid presentations, but presumably everybody at the meeting knows how to read. Think of it this way: if a meeting is important enough to hold, it’s important enough to have a background document for attendees to read beforehand.

If you’ve followed the first three steps, there’s no reason
any
meeting should last more than an hour. An hour is about as long as most people can focus on a single subject anyway, which is why most college classes are an hour long.

If the meeting starts to meander, yank it back to the agenda. Table any new issues that surface for another meeting. If latecomers barge in, don’t waste everyone else’s time catching them up.

By the way, some people come late to meetings specifically to show that they’re important by making everyone else wait. Refusing to go over material that’s already been discussed squelches this annoying behavior before it gets out of hand.

If the meeting was important enough to hold, it was important enough to document the results of the meeting. Meeting minutes
should therefore be distributed to the attendees while the meeting is still fresh in their minds.

The minutes should begin with a statement of whether the meeting achieved its goal. The minutes should match the agenda, thereby documenting whether the meeting goal was achieved. Example:

1. Acme has a temporary freeze on new purchases, which is delaying the sale of our widget inventory.

2. Two main approaches to breaking the logjam were discussed. The first approach is a one-time-only discount that might convince Acme to buy now. The second approach is to meet with Acme’s CFO to discuss making an exception.

3. The consensus at the meeting was that a discount would create a bad precedent. Instead we will have our CFO call Acme’s CFO to discuss the situation and propose a meeting.

4. We will provide the results of that call via e-mail prior to our next meeting.