Strategic Discipline Blog

When you move into hiring phase for your business are you absolutely sure what you are looking for?  In fact when you look at your current staff positions are you confident each of your people know exactly what’s required of them to fulfill their jobs on a daily basis? 

I’m reminded of a quote from Flight of the Buffalo by Ralph C. Stayer & James Belasco, “Do the people in your company know how well they’ve done before they go home every night?  People perform what they measure – help the performers to measure the “right” stuff."

The beauty of Topgrading’ s Job Summary Scorecard is that it not only serves as a fundamental tool and helping your determine if you’re hiring the right person, it can help you develop a tool to recognize, evaluate, and monitor your current employees and ensure they are measuring up to your “A” standards.  Visit Topgrading's website to learn more about Topgrading. 

Your Job Summary Scorecard is not something to be taken lightly.  Its starts with simple yet practical elements, including the description of the company (something that should be the same for every position) and then a description of the mission of the specific position.  Then the hard work begins.  The next step is to determine 5-9 accountabilities for this position that you can measure.  This is to determine if the person is meeting your “A” standard of achievement.  The measure for this should be the exacting metric you establish.   When you interview you are speculating whether or not this person can achieve these high standards based on the Topgrading Interview Process, CIDS (Chronological In-Depth Structured Interview). Based on the thoroughness of this process you should be able to have a pretty good idea whether their previous track record and degree of resourcefulness can meet these standards.

The beauty of this Scorecard here is that it can replicate as the tool you use to judge your present talent in these positions.  Don’t you want your current people to meet or exceed “A” standards?  Doesn’t it make sense to evaluate your current people to these same exacting standards of performance?  Yet I’m sure most of you haven’t taken the time to develop such a measurement tool.  If you had you’d be using in in review process.  You do have a review process?

The Job Summary Scorecard continues by identifying up to 50 Competencies that this position may require.  It’s best if at the top of your discovery you list the 12-15 Competencies that you’ve discovered are critical to success in this position.  This way you can concentrate on your candidates and current people on how well they do in what will have the most enduring impact in their success. 

The competencies and the accountabilities provide room for you to grade each candidate, position and make comments on their performance.  A minimum acceptable standard should be established for competencies.  The ratings for accountabilities are simply 5 = Excellent, 4 = Very Good, 3 = Good, 2 = Fair, 1 = Poor or NA.  What’s the acceptable standard in your business? 

One of the first things we ask our clients to do each quarter, especially if their desire is to have their organization Topgraded, is to perform a performance review.  This has been described in Talent Review, and which I plan to describe in a future blog as well.

There are a lot of elements to get right in order to drive success for your business in 2013.  People may or may not be at the forefront of your priorities this year.  Just remember the fundamental Jim Collins for all Good to Great companies was, “First Who, then What!”  If you don’t have the right people in the right place doing the right things, the majority of your initiatives and execution to reach your priorities will be challenged at take-off.

Let’s take a look at something I delved into in my personal life last blog, shallowness.  It’s about disposing/exposing the shadow in your leadership abilities.  It’s an important part of ascending the leadership ladder for you and your executive team.  It’s also one reason one Strategic Discipline and specifically meeting rhythms work so well to enable growth.