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Put on Your 3D Interview Glasses and Hire Three-Dimensional People
You should hire three-dimensional people who have depth, breadth, and length. I am not a fan of the prevailing belief system among hiring managers that you have to make a trade-off between technical depth and breadth of interpersonal competence for example. I cringe when I hear a hiring manager say something like “the guy can’t…
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But the Problem Actually IS Complicated! Seven Reasons to Build a Model to Solve It
Have you ever had a conversation with a colleague that sounded something like this? You: This is a complicated problem. There are a lot of variables to consider and many of them are interdependent. Colleague: I get that, but you need to simplify it somehow or no one is going to understand it. You: The problem…
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Growing a Company Culture: What Kind of Trellis Are You Building?
I have been talking with my advisory board a lot about company culture lately. I recommend Teague’s recent post in which he explains why he thinks you can’t “build” company culture, you have to “grow” it. I like his analogy of training a bonsai tree or cultivating a vine on a trellis. It takes patience and…
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The Proliferation of Undoable Jobs and How To Recognize Them
A friend was recently describing jobs that a head hunter was sending her way. The totally unrealistic scope, scale, and complexity of the jobs reminded me of a trend I observed a number of years ago which I started referring to as the “proliferation of undoable jobs.” What makes a job undoable? 1. Job titles…
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Four Keys to Building Your Credibility as You Start a New Job
When you start a new job, you want to hit the ground running and build your credibility without stepping on those political landmines that can derail your plans. Here are four keys to building your credibility. First, avoid the ingratiating informers. Informers want to increase their power and influence in exchange for telling you who…
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How To Help a Boss or a Client Who Is Determined and Wrong
We are standing in the elevator and I ask my colleague, “how’s the donkey?” She replies, “dead.” We both sigh and the other people in the elevator look at us uncomfortably. A week before, my colleague’s boss made a decision that he wanted her to implement immediately. She was sure he was going to regret…
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Three Keys to Measuring and Managing Customer Satisfaction
All of us think we can whip up a customer satisfaction survey with a rating scale, send it out, and tabulate the results. What’s so hard about that? What could possibly go wrong? Here are three keys to getting it right. First, customers form their views based on the end-to-end customer service, not just on…
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Four Best Questions to Hire Someone Who Will Hit the Ground Running
Do you need to hire someone who can hit the ground running? Forget trying to find someone who will know how to do the whole job before they arrive because even if the job is similar to one they have already done, the operating environment is always different, often in subtle and important ways. What you…
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Ten Thousand Hours and Ten-Minute YouTube Videos
If you invested 10,000 hours learning how to learn, you might be better than average at a lot of things. In his bestseller, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell sets out his interpretation of data which seem to show that the success of top performers in many fields is better explained by fortunate opportunities to get more practice…