With all the layoffs and rumors wreaking havoc on retention policies you might think that hiring good people just got easier.

It didn’t.

With hundreds of responses to every ad, this is the time when your hiring skill really matters; when your ability to recognize jewels where others see only lumps of coal will give you an edge.

Whether the talent market is tight or loose, you should always remember that your next top performer didn’t necessarily

• have the best grades;
• attend a prestigious school;
• work for your competitor or
• even in your industry;
• have a full head of hair that has no gray; or
• fit easily into your comfort zone.

What you want is the person who ‘fits’ your corporate culture, has a great attitude and fills the skills hole in your group—in that order.

One result of hiring talent instead of skills is loyalty.

Real loyalty can’t be bought with either money or stock options, it’s earned through your actions, your willingness to take a chance, to provide the place where the coal has the opportunity to become a diamond.

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Yesterday I mentioned four basic traits of good culture. Today I want to talk about another one that many people, especially those running startups and small companies, often don’t like and don’t implement.

Process.

The problem is that people frequently confuse process and bureaucracy.

• Process is good—it helps to get things done smoothly and efficiently.

• Bureaucracy is bad—it’s process calcified, convoluted, politically corrupted, or just plain unnecessary.

The hallmarks of good process are

• easy-to-use and flexible method of accomplishing various business functions; and
• informal without being haphazard, and neither ambiguous or confusing.

Occasional surveys (internally asking staff and externally asking vendors and customers how things are working) alert you to when processes start to mutate. By creating a skeletal process and a corresponding graphic in areas where it is needed (financial controls, hiring, purchasing, etc.), you lay the framework for your growth in the future, no matter how hectic.

Bureaucracy stems from people, be it a CEO or first level supervisor, who believes that her staff is so incompetent that it is necessary to spell out exactly how every individual action, no matter how small, needs to be done.

To correct this, the manager responsible must

• must recognize and take responsibility;
• reduce his own insecurity;
• increase his belief in his current staff; and whenever possible
• hire people he thinks are smarter than himself!

Bureaucracy is also fed by people’s fear of change, “We’ve always done it like that.” and similar comments are dead giveaways.

Another significant factor that contributes to unnecessary bureaucracy is the failure to align responsibility and authority.

If a person has the responsibility to get something done (design a product, create a Human Resources department, meet a sales quota), she should have enough authority (spend money, hire people, negotiate with outside vendors) to get the job done.

Giving people responsibility without concomitant authority forces them to constantly ask their superiors for permission, thus reducing productivity, and lowering moral.

The final, and most important difference between process and bureaucracy is that people like working for companies with good process in place, and hate working for those mired in bureaucracy.

But not for long—they leave—making bureaucracy-eradication a major tool in the culture and retention game.

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A couple of weeks ago David Zinger wrote a great post regarding the so-called war for talent.

“I have always been troubled by the so called “war for talent.” Now, I am beyond troubled, I am angry with the use of this metaphor for those of us who offer our best in organizations.”

Take a moment to read David’s comments—they are provocative, true and well worth the time.

But I want to focus on something else today.

I have a major problem with ‘talent’—and human capital and human resources and stars—but especially with talent.

As a manager, you do not hire talent, capital, resources or stars.

You hire people.

The people you hire are rated, in the majority of cases, ‘talented’, or even ’stars’, as a direct result of the skill with which you manage them.

I spent more than 20 years as a headhunter and I’ve seen below average employees turn into innovative contributors when exposed to a different manager and the opposite, when acknowledged stars suddenly become non performers because the management changed.

Actually, you don’t really hire people, you hire persons. Individuals with all the quirks, foibles, idiosyncrasies and idiotsyncrasies common to the human race.

And you hire them one at a time.

No manager ever hired a ‘workforce’; they built it, one person at a time.

Plural pronouns not allowed.

So no more talk about talent or resources or capital. Your job is the acquisition, care and feeding of your persons.

And why in the world would you involve yourself or your persons in a war?

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Corporate social responsibility, know as CSR, is fast becoming a significant part of an attractive corporate culture.

Granted, the definitions of CSR are all over the place, but it’s generally agreed that building a positive CSR reputation is necessary to attract, motivate and retain today’s workforce, especially the Millennials.

But how important is it now that all hell’s broken out?

“…corporate social responsibility is no longer a luxury; it is an essential component of a thoughtful business strategy. At a time when customers and investors will be demanding increasing transparency and responsibility from corporations… These efforts must include a commitment to good governance and financial transparency, a commitment to protect and educate their work forces, a commitment to protect the environment, and a commitment to strengthen the communities in which they work… And by engaging staff, businesses can ensure that corporate social responsibility becomes a part of their corporate culture, rather than just a token gesture… In order to survive a sustained recession, companies, communities and the government must work together. Although companies may not be able to sustain the same levels of corporate social responsibility spending in an economic downturn, it is critical for them to retain a healthy commitment to a corporate social responsibility strategy that includes community engagement.”

A lot of CSR isn’t about spending money, it’s an attitude. An attitude that requires honesty, authenticity, transparency and reliability—all of which we seem to be in short supply these days.

Attitude is the ‘a’ in MAP and it’s MAP that has to change. It’s MAP that, at all levels, needs to bring its ego under control and recognize that the world that emerges from the current mess will be different and that CSR is here to stay.

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

By the way, the above quote wasn’t written by anyone in the US, it’s from Kiev, Ukraine. Looks like CSR has gone global, too.

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A blog post from India caught my eye earlier this week. Its premise was that retention starts with hiring (absolutely true) and went on to explain how to create and use “employment branding” for recruiting.

Essentially, pretty much everything that falls under the banner of employment branding also falls within the company’s culture—call it corporate MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™)—along with the necessary processes.

But corporate culture isn’t static, it’s a living organism that shifts and changes as you grow and hire.

So it’s about hiring to match your corporate culture and using your corporate culture to screen candidates, limiting your hiring to people who are at the very least synergistic with your it—something I first wrote about in 1999.

Understand, I’m not disagreeing with what Sourabh said, just with the way he said it.

Using jargon to cast it as ‘branding’ makes it far more complex than it needs to be—especially if you want the knowledge to permeate your organization from top to bottom.

If that’s your goal, then take the time to understand your culture, KISS* it and communicate it to your people through a Cultural Mission Statement; once they understand it they’ll talk about it using language and terms with which they’re comfortable.

The result will be a culture that sounds real and not one invented by the marketing department.

(*KISS = keep it simple, stupid)

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Quick. What’s the first response that comes to mind if your kid asked your opinion (stop laughing) on what was the worst career choice if she wanted good work-life balance?

Law.

Hands down, the horror stories of 80+ hour-work-weeks-that-don’t-end-when-you-make-partner cultures are legion.

But it looks like that’s slowly changing—changes being forced on an industry that desperately wants to keep some of its best and brightest.

Women.

You see, women haven’t been working long enough to be brain-washed into believing that the only thing of value in life is their career, so as life happens in a career that allows almost no time for life they revolted.

Revolted using their feet to leave the halls of legal power for kinder, gentler, saner workplaces.

And it hurt. Hurt in the only way that really mattered; hurt the bottom line.
““It costs a law firm between $200,000 and $500,000 to lose a second-year associate,” Deborah Epstein Henry, founder of Flex-Time Lawyers LLC, said of the investment made in salary and training before a lawyer starts bringing in business.”

Those numbers have enough zeros to catch even a lawyer’s attention. And when you factor in the number who leave you really start adding zeros to the figure.

“About 42% of women leave the profession in mid-career, and many others defect to government or corporate jobs with more manageable hours.”

As women pushed men joined in.

According to Patricia K. Gillette, a partner in employment law at San Francisco-based Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, “What has happened is that Generation Y has aligned themselves with issues that have traditionally been women’s issues — both men and women,” she said of the under-30 crowd. “And you know how it goes when men start wanting things. All of a sudden it looks normal.”

Now, don’t get the idea that this is some kind of universal awakening, but a few large firms have figured it out.

“In pursuit of better economics and diversity, firms have introduced such things as longer maternity leaves, on-site day care and the option of working shorter hours.”

Still, you may want to hold off suggesting law until your grand kids ask.

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Check out my other WW: teamwork can do anything

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The markets are in turmoil, the economy sucks, so what kind of corporate culture makes your small business, company or startup an attractive place to work?

Short answer: a culture of fiscal intelligence.

Long answer: a culture that spends its money wisely, eliminating low ROI frills and cuts without selling the company’s future down the drain.

This doesn’t mean substituting crappy coffee for the good stuff and eliminating free soda.

It does mean listing all the frills—executive and worker alike—and polling your people to find which are really paying off and which can be scrapped—not a decision made by management, but one that your people hash out and agree to before it’s a done deal.

Sometimes good coffee and soda have a higher ROI morale-wise than you would think.

All this should be doubly true for startups, but it often isn’t. Yes, your money is banked and if you’re VC funded, as opposed to angel or bootstrapping, chances are you’re pretty flush. But having it doesn’t mean you need to spend it.

If any company thinks that cushy perks are attractive in this economy think again. Think just how naïve/ignorant/arrogant a candidate must be to expect a large sign-on bonus or fancy perks given current economic conditions. Not to mention how financially stupid any company still offering them appears to a candidate.

The smartest companies build fiscally intelligent corporate cultures from the beginning, so that when they have to tighten down no one is surprised.

Throwing money around is always stupid, whether in business or personally.

I’ve heard from companies of all sizes and managers at all levels why this one candidate was worth X more than anyone else walking and how not getting her could deal a crippling, or even lethal, blow to the company.

If you ever feel that way, remember two inimitable truths.

• If that not having that one specific person could bring down the company it’s unlikely to succeed anyway.

• The candidate who joins you for money will always leave for more money.

Remember, the goal is a lean, mean, innovative, motivated machine—not a lean, mean, depressed one.

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Do you use Google Alerts? I do and one of mine is for ‘corporate culture’. Friday listed a title so intriguing that I just had to click on it.

What caught my eye was Mel Lester’s Natural Selection vs. Intelligent Design on E-Quip Blog—remember that this was an alert for corporate culture.

So I clicked over (and highly recommend that you do,too) and found an excellent article propounding that corporate culture is formed in one of three ways—

• accidentally, through unconnected, random circumstances;
  
• by intentional design; or by a
  
• combination of the two he calls “natural selection”.

Over the last decade or so, corporate culture has gone from intangible, smoke-and-mirrors, touch-feely consultant talk to a recognized, dominant factor in corporate success.

“Harvard business professors John Kotter and John Heskett have conducted some of the most extensive research on this subject. They found that firms with a strong (deliberate) culture built upon a foundation of shared values outperformed other firms by a large margin:

• Their revenue grew more than 4x faster
• Their rate of job creation was 7x higher
• Their stock price grew 12x faster
• Their profit performance was 750% higher”

Mel explains each one, so I don’t have to and then goes on to talk list six steps to create your corporate culture.

1. Assess your current culture
2. Fortify your company values
3. Align strategy with your culture, or visa verse
4. Commit to regular communication
5. Take steps to promote a sense of community
6. Hire for cultural fit (this is critical!)

Good stuff, but exactly how do you hire for cultural fit?

I first wrote about using your culture to screen candidates in 1999 for the MSDN ISV Program Newsletter and have republished several times since then, most recently in response to Guy Kawasaki’s comments about Bob Sutton’s book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t.

Read Screen out turkeys, jerks and a**holes and if you have any questions, or want some help doing it, give me a call at 866.265.7267 between 8 am and 11 pm Pacific time. (Calls are better, email can get blocked by filters.)

And NO charge—I do it for fun.

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Do you consider an offer of help charity?

Here’s the background for my question.

Yes, I earn my living as a coach. But on both of the blogs I write I have a standing offer to my readers for free coaching assistance. Not only has no one taken advantage of me, no one has taken advantage of the offer.

I often help to friends and associates when they hit a snag and my expertise can ease the problem. Again, none have taken advantage of me.

I can afford to do this because what’s often a challenge to one person is easy to another with that particular expertise, so it’s not like I’m offering up the next X years of my life.

That’s the background, here’s what happened.

A guy, call him Jim, and I are volunteers for the same professional organization and have gotten to know each other over the last few years. Jim is CEO of a small, privately-owned company.

To make this short, we were talking on the phone and Jim mentioned that he had to replace a person on his staff and it was critical to make the right choice.

So I offered him some coaching, he said “great,” and I said that I’d send some written material that I used in my practice and then we cold talk.

When I didn’t hear back in a couple of days, I resent the files thinking that they hadn’t gone through (happens all the time).

Jim replied as follows, “I will not waste / take your time without compensation. Perhaps calling it charity is a poor choice, but if I am not paying I will not waste / take your expertise.”

I wasn’t looking for compensation—of course, I wouldn’t have turned it down if it was offered, but in companies such as Jim’s I know that it can be a difficult sell to the owners—but it annoyed me no end that Jim made the decision based on his assumptions.

Didn’t ask/discuss/mention, just decided.

Do you agree with Jim’s actions?  Am I annoyed for no reason?

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