We’ve been waiting since about 2007. It’s time to stop waiting and go for it. If your business isn’t ready to expand and grow now, you risk losing out on top talent because your competition isn’t waiting. They’re snapping up the best of the best right now. If you’re looking for a new job, it’s time to check out the companies you want to work for. They are hungry for talented people.

Our economy should be in growth mode for the next six years (except for a small downturn in 2014) predicts economist Alan Beaulieu of Institute Trend Research, guest speaker at the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG) this month. Banks have money to lend. Businesses have money to spend. 2012 will be a fruitful year for all who take advantage of what are sure to be game-changing opportunities.

Employment trends

If CEOs don’t rate talent management as their number-one priority, it’s probably their number two. Starting now, every manager in your business should be thinking strategically and proactively about attracting and retaining the talent you will need to stay competitive. Top on HR guru John Sullivan’s list of 2012 trends are:

• Hiring competition will be intense and happen at a breathtaking pace in innovative industries like high tech and medical technologies. (You’ll often have to decide whether you have time to develop an internal candidate or need to recruit for ready skills.)
• Retention issues will dramatically increase and may become the highest economic impact area in talent management. (Even highly engaged employees will stick around only until a better opportunity comes along.)
• Employers need to begin using a combination of internal and external social media to manage and develop employees.
• More companies will realize that teamwork, learning, development, recruiting and other forms of sharing can be achieved remotely.
• Employer branding will return. (Branding and building talent communities are the only two long-term recruiting strategies.)
• Candidates will finally get the positive experience they deserve, now that the competition for talent is increasing.

My top three pieces of advice for companies and candidates in 2012

Businesses:

1. Retain your talent with a personalized approach for every employee and say good-bye to retention strategies that put everyone in the same basket. One size never fits all, no matter what you’re trying to squeeze into where.
2. Whenever possible, trust your people to work from wherever they want to work to improve both recruiting and retention. If you don’t trust your employees, they shouldn’t be working for you.
3. Get rid of all unnecessary bureaucracy and let your people use their creativity, skills and intuition to achieve your goals faster and better.

Candidates:

1. Look inside yourself to determine what you are truly passionate about doing and what skills you need to learn or update to do your dream job. Things are opening up and it’s a good time to reevaluate what’s possible for you personally.
2. Look for clues about the culture of companies you’re interested in. For example: do job postings list only requirements and responsibilities, or do they also include opportunities for employee growth and development? Research everything you can find on a company to ensure that you and the company are a match.
3. The best companies take time to write their job postings and the career sections of their websites. Build mutual respect by giving them quality responses, and don’t respond at all to jobs you are not qualified to do.

“Go for it now. The future is promised to no one.”—Wayne Dyer

Kathleen Quinn Votaw is founder and CEO of TalenTrust, a unique recruitment firm that helps companies find exceptional talent to accelerate their growth. TalenTrust LLC is located in Golden, CO. Kathleen  recently completed a two-year term as president of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), Denver. Reach Kathleen at kvotaw@talentrust.com or 303-838-3334 x5.

The father of two sons became suddenly, and terminally, ill. One son works for a company that gave him a day off to attend his father’s funeral. The other son works for New Belgium Brewing. He got three weeks off to spend with his father before he died. That’s love in the workplace.

Love (acts of kindness and compassion) happens in workplaces everywhere, although certainly not enough. Most people, including most CEOs, speak about those acts as “good management skills,” going “above and beyond,” or something similar—but not as “love.” Love is a scary word when it refers to anything related to work in America. I propose that we get over it.

CEOs who are courageous enough to name “love” as part of their corporate culture and recognize it as a major factor in profitability are as rare as children who don’t believe in Santa Claus. Kim Jordan, cofounder and CEO of New Belgium, is one of those rare CEOs. She spoke about the benefits of love and other “soft” traits at the recent Association for Corporate Growth (ACG) social enterprise luncheon—and probably made believers of everyone there.

Soft talk and actions drive profits

What does love in the workplace look like at New Belgium? It’s not just actions and not just “soft” talk, but the combination of talk and action that permeates the brand, culture, and operations at New Belgium. For example:

• The CEO refers to the approximately 450 people employed there as her “coworkers;” not “my staff” or “my team.”
• The company is built on sustainable practices, social responsibility, and purposeful giving back. At their one-year anniversary, every person gets a bicycle to encourage the joy, freedom, community—and sustainability that riding a bike offers. “If it’s not fun, it’s not sustainable.” One percent of sales (not profits) is donated to various programs and communities.
• The books are open, and the company is also an ESOP, meaning that every employee is an owner—and with ownership come both rights and responsibility. As Kim puts it, being an “open book” company and not offering ownership is like inviting people for dinner and allowing them to smell the food but not allowing them to eat.
• The competition? They’re successful and make good beers too, but New Belgium focuses on its own particular magic and they don’t worry about anyone else’s ability to capture it.
• Rituals and celebration are core values, and everyone participates in them.

“Heads, hands and hearts” drive profitability at New Belgium, rather than the “experienced, professional skills and expertise” you hear driving it in most companies. The product, in this case beer, is the manifestation of “our love and talent,” according to Kim. It’s no surprise that The Wall Street Journal lists New Belgium as one of the top 15 companies to work for in the country; and that’s one of many such awards.

Love and sustainability

It takes courage for a CEO, male or female, to speak out about love and other “feminine” traits that are considered by many to be inconsequential or irrelevant in achieving business success. Although almost every company these days mentions that their employees are their most valuable asset, you would never know it by their actions. All too many companies are like the one mentioned above that allowed just one day off—after—the employee’s father had died.

By having the courage to stand out and talk about the loving environments that every company should aspire to create, Kim Jordan, and a small but growing, number of CEOs, are making a case for better business practices. Anyone who thinks that business is just about numbers will never create a truly sustainable enterprise. They will surely be outperformed by companies where everyone feels the love—and has the courage to say so.

Kathleen Quinn Votaw is founder and CEO of TalenTrust, a unique recruitment firm that helps companies find exceptional talent to accelerate their growth. TalenTrust LLC is located in Golden, CO. Kathleen  recently completed a two-year term as president of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), Denver. Reach Kathleen at kvotaw@talentrust.com or 303-838-3334 x5.

Shoot for the moon and other values to live by: Lessons I’ve learned from John, John and John…

By Kathleen QuinnVotaw

John, my father, is an Irish immigrant who used to tell me every night at dinner, “Shoot for the moon honey; if you only get halfway there I’ll be proud of you.” His father, John, never left the Old Country, but raised five remarkable boys alone. John, my son, is my pride and joy. And John, my brother, is my rock.

I thought appreciatively of the Johns in my life and what they’ve taught me as I listened to John Kelley, Chairman and CEO of CereScan, speak at the monthly Association for Corporate Growth (ACG) luncheon. John is the former CEO of McData and a seasoned executive who speaks knowingly about ethics, where they come from and what happens when they’re absent. What sparked my reminiscences was his remark that honor starts with the family; that family values are the foundation for everything. As he continued, it occurred to me that he shares the values of so many that I care about.

John Kelley said there is a great need in America for more ethical leadership and that we all need to rise up to the efforts of our grandparents who lived in an era of doing the right thing, the principled thing. Our personal ethics are what should guide us in raising our families, and in leading our businesses, universities, communities and government.

I told John I’d like to hear more, and he sent me a copy of the 2010 commencement speech he gave at Heidelberg University. In it, he poses some interesting questions along with offering powerful insight. Two points in particular resonated with me:

•  Is the saying, “Winning is not everything; it is the only thing,” now a core value we live by? What coach Vince Lombardi, who is credited with coining the phrase, actually said was: “Winning is not everything; wanting to win is.” John’s point: What is right is right, no matter what the circumstances are.
•  Have we forgotten what can happen when seemingly good people don’t adhere to their ethics, virtues and values? Is going against the rules okay if you don’t get caught? John’s point: Reputation is what you get when everyone else is watching. Character comes from what you do when no one else is around to see it.

How often do we talk in our families about what winning means if it’s at someone else’s expense? How often do we let someone laugh away bad behavior with a quip like, “At least I didn’t get caught”? Ethics and values get passed from generation to generation in two ways: by modeling them within the family and sticking tightly to them out in the world; and by speaking regularly about what they are and what they mean.

As Robert Fulghum, author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten said, “Don’t worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.” We need to instill our values in every way our children will absorb them. It’s the only way to ensure that ethics permeate our families and our lives.

John, my father, encouraged me every night at dinner to try hard, and he gave me permission to fail by saying he’d still be proud if I didn’t make it. I’m sure that family value
has much to do with my entrepreneurial spirit. And my husband, whose name is Andy, is about as close in values to a John as you can get.

Thanksgiving month is a perfect time to not only think about what our family values are and what that means to the larger community, but to express them in words and deeds. I know they’ll be part of our Thanksgiving dinner conversation, and I can’t think of a
better Thanksgiving wish for you. Shoot for the moon!

Kathleen Quinn Votaw is founder and CEO of TalenTrust, a unique recruitment firm that helps companies find exceptional talent to accelerate their growth. TalenTrust LLC is located in Golden, CO. Kathleen  recently completed a two-year term as president of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), Denver. Reach Kathleen at kvotaw@talentrust.com or 303-838-3334 x5.

How Steve Jobs got the A+ players and kept them:The genius who knew it was all about the people

By Kathleen Quinn Votaw

Steve Jobs’ creative brilliance went beyond designing products. He applied his perfectionism equally to designing his team. Let me quote him on something I’ve been telling my clients for years: “Recruiting is hard.” Steve Jobs has left us bits of wisdom about hiring and retaining talent that should live on in businesses everywhere. Here are some of my favorite themes from his philosophy.

On choosing the right people

“I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1.Given that, you’re well advised to go after the cream of the cream….A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.“—Steve Jobs

“Finding the needles in the haystack” is what Jobs called finding his A+ players. His belief was that after you’ve sourced using the various channels: LinkedIn, job boards, internal databases, external directories and whatever else you can find; reviewed all the resumes; and had your one-hour interview; what you have left is your gut. It’s not a candidate’s resume or the answers they give to your cleverly-phrased questions; it really gets down to how you feel being with this person. And that you get from the metadata according to Jobs, whose favorite interview question was “Why are you here?”—a question that would get anyone’s metadata flowing.

Steve Jobs believed that recruiting was the most important thing he did. He managed all of the recruiting for his team; never delegating it. Everyone who made it to a Steve Jobs interview had to be really smart; competence was his “ante.” But his real issue, he says, was “Are they going to fall in love with Apple?” Because he believed that if they did, everything else would take care of itself. If people put what was best for Apple before what was best for themselves, they were probably a culture fit.

On building a world-changing culture

“We’ve interviewed people where nine out of ten employees thought the candidate was terrific, one employee really had a problem with the candidate, and therefore we didn’t hire him.”—Steve Jobs

 Jobs didn’t believe that major work could be accomplished by one person, or even a few people. Yes, he said, some people, like Michelangelo, could do a single thing magnificently, but huge projects require “legions” of extraordinary people. And those people have to be managed right, which means a culture that supports them. To him, it was critical that everyone on his team respected everyone else.

Recruiting perfection wasn’t enough for Jobs, nor is it for any company. In Jobs’ world, creating an environment that makes people appreciate that they work with people as talented as they are, and that their work is bigger than any single individual, is equally important. Jobs built cultures where employees understood that their work could influence the world, and he communicated a strong, clear vision of how that would happen.

On leading with a clear, compelling vision

“Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful, that’s what matters to me.”—Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs once said, “I want to put a ding in the universe.” I don’t think there’s a question in anyone’s mind that he succeeded. And the credit? It always went to his field of A+ players. He put his faith in his people, not in technology, which for him was just tools that either worked or didn’t. He believed that people were basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.

He knew the Mac would sell “zillions,” but he and his people built it for themselves, not for the market value. It was his people who were the judges of whether it was a great product or not. Market research wasn’t necessary.

As his former, and estranged, business partner John Scully put it, Jobs’ early team was made up of “people who had clearly never built a commercial product before but they believed in Steve and they believed in his vision.” From the Mac to the iMacs, the iPods, the iPhones and the iPads, Jobs’ vision drove unbelievable innovation—which he believed came from people meeting in the hallways or calling each other late at night with a new idea or the solution to a problem.

On being excellent

“For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”—Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs believed that we don’t get the chance to do that many things, so each thing we do should truly be excellent—because it’s our life. A good thing for all of us to remember as we strive to succeed in this competitive business environment….

Kathleen Quinn Votaw is founder and CEO of TalenTrust, a unique recruitment firm that helps companies find exceptional talent to accelerate their growth. TalenTrust LLC is located in Golden, CO. Kathleen  recently completed a two-year term as president of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), Denver. Reach Kathleen at kvotaw@talentrust.com or 303-838-3334 x5.

By Kathleen Quinn Votaw

 It starts when you’re a kid. You fall down, scrape your knee and cry—and some well-meaning adult says, “That didn’t hurt.” It continues as you grow older and lose the championship game…or your first love…or a dream job…and what sustenance do you get to recover your self-esteem? Probably a comment like, “You’ll get over it.” Do you remember how that felt?

 What is it that makes so many people forget the Golden Rule, “treat others as you’d like to be treated;” or better, the Platinum Rule, “treat others the way they want to be treated”? Being courteous, kind, polite, and allowing people to maintain their dignity stems from respect. Respect is often in short supply, in families and in workplaces. If your company’s foundation is built on earning and paying respect, you’ve gained a powerful business advantage.

 Building a respectful business

 Southwest Airlines’ founder Herbert Kelleher used to say that you have to treat your employees right, like they were customers, and then they’ll treat your customers right. He said it was Southwest’s powerful competitive weapon. You can’t argue with that; respect is contagious and Southwest proved it.

 I would take it further and say it’s also true that if you are genuinely respectful, you wouldn’t treat your employees any differently than you would your customers or your suppliers or the man on the street. Respectfulness, like other aspects of a person’s character, has to be genuine or it’s hypocrisy.  You can’t turn respect on and off depending on whom you’re talking to. We can all see around that.

 So the first step in building a respectful environment is treating everyone in the same confirming way, both inside and outside your business. That way you earn respect (by being kind and not being hypocritical) and the people around you will tend to do the same.

 It’s a small world—and how you treat employees and everyone else you come in contact with gets out into the marketplace. Enough said.

 Returning calls and e-mails and other ways to show respect

 Frequent, honest communication is a foundation for building respect and trust in any organization. Responding quickly to people shows that you are listening and that you care. There are many other ways to ensure that you have a respectful environment, and they work together to create a workplace that goes a long way toward making you an employer of choice:

 Pay a fair wage, and be consistent throughout your business.

• Set expectations so employees know what they need to do to succeed; and train them so they have the opportunity to succeed.
• Encourage employees to express their ideas and opinions, and then listen and respond.
• Require managers to take the time to understand what their people want in addition to wages, and know what’s going on in their lives.
• Empower individuals and don’t micromanage.
• Provide opportunities for employees to see the results of their work.
• Recognize and reward individual achievements and behaviors and celebrate often.
• Support your community and engage employees in the activities.
• Deal with problems right away; don’t ever let them fester.

 Whatever steps you take to build a respectful environment, be sure you do so out of genuine interest and concern for your employees. They’ll know the difference, just as you knew as a child that your bleeding knee hurt and you never quite got over losing that championship game.

Kathleen Quinn Votaw is founder and CEO of TalenTrust, a unique recruitment firm that helps companies find exceptional talent to accelerate their growth. TalenTrust LLC is located in Golden, CO. Kathleen  recently completed a two-year term as president of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), Denver. Reach Kathleen at kvotaw@talentrust.com or 303-838-3334 x5.

Most businesses are founded on a new or better idea and a hope and a prayer. Unlike Cochlear Americas (www.cochlearamericas.com), they don’t have the benefit of:

• A product that will fundamentally change peoples’ lives
• Hundreds of thousands of prospective customers worldwide in a market guaranteed to grow
• A built-in mission that evokes passion in employees

 No one appreciates these market advantages more than Chris Smith, President of Cochlear Americas: “It is amazing to be able to work for a company and see every day the impact of what you do.” In fact, Chris delights in the potential to bring hearing and new life to people of every age, babies to seniors, through cochlear implants. “Hear now. And always.” Even the tagline pulls at your heartstrings.

 Those points were just background to Chris Smith’s key message in his presentation to the Association for Corporate Growth (www.acg.org/denver) in early August. Despite Cochlear’s exceptional market position, Chris emphasized that you achieve sustainable growth by building a culture of servitude and community, which is based on hiring first for character and culture, and hiring second for competency—something I have been espousing for years. This is usually the great “aha!” for all those companies that do exactly the opposite.

 Hiring for character and culture

It’s almost an adage in this country that you “hire for competence, but fire for character.” Although it’s true that none of us wants to fly on an airplane built by an apprentice, you can hire an apprentice and teach the necessary mechanical skills. What cannot be taught are the ethics that keep that apprentice from covering up a small crack in the fuselage instead of reporting or repairing it. Whatever else your business has going for it, it won’t matter unless you hire people with good character to fulfill your purpose.

 There’s nothing neutral about character. Employees who do not share your corporate culture dilute it. They detract from the essence that defines your company and drives your achievement. Hiring good cultural matches not only helps to ensure a sustainable future for your business, it’s cost effective—leading to higher retention, engagement, and deeper relationships with customers. If you find that you have to fire someone for character, damage has already been done.

Unfortunately, it’s not easy to know for certain whether the person you want to hire is a good match with your culture. Having a laser clear understanding of your company culture and developing carefully thought-out questions will help. Do you know what makes you unique? Can you define, specifically, what your values are? Can you describe what your work environment is like day to day? When everyone in your organization answers these kinds of questions the same, you can ask them of candidates and measure their responses against yours.

If the character fits with your culture, interview that person a second time to assess their competency.

Which comes first, serving or leading?

One of the companies I most admire is the cable company WOW! (www.wowway.com). Their simple philosophy of living up to their name is cultivated and nurtured by four values, one of which is “servanthood.” To WOW!, and its CEO Colleen Abdoulah, this means deriving genuine satisfaction from taking care of each other and their customers. Hiring authentically “people-first” employees surely has much to do with Wow!’s exceptional growth and its year-after-year top rankings in many service categories, including the 2011 Consumer Reports magazine top service provider for Internet and television services.

Robert Greenleaf introduced the concept of “servant-leadership” in a 1970 essay describing the different choices people make in their leadership styles, either on the side of putting themselves first, or serving the needs of others first. “Leader-first” types are driven by power and acquiring material things. Servant-leaders take responsibility for the well-being of people and community. Greenleaf believed that only people who are content and motivated can reach their targets and fulfill a set of expectations.

It follows that if you have a culture of servitude, your managers are servant-leaders and share certain values about how to best support and promote the wellbeing of people, whether employees or customers. Can you hire people who have spent a lifetime putting themselves first and expect to train them to do otherwise? Probably not, no matter how competent their skills are. When you’re looking for effective new leaders, first make sure servanthood is central to their character before assessing other leadership competencies.

Fans and community

It makes sense to create a community of customer fans so that you can understand what’s important to them and develop your product or service offerings accordingly. Equally important, and less considered, is developing a culture of community that makes employees raving fans of your company.

Raving-fan employees are as obsessed with serving each other as they are with serving their customers. You can’t fake this obsession, and you can’t buy it. It’s based on sincerity, respect and integrity. Community is the natural outcome when you build your culture around the common good character of your employees, whose leaders care about their wellbeing.

A sense of community harnesses your collective talents and energies to achieve the big ideas—and to sweat the small stuff that employees busy battling egos and turf issues avoid or ignore. It’s often your attention to taking care of details that wins the business.

A guarantee

No one would suggest that a business can succeed without competent employees. What’s important to understand is that the long list of “required” competencies companies use as the first phase in screening candidates is the wrong way to go about finding the right people. Look first for the kind of character and culture fit that spawn servant leaders and a sense of community. Then train your people in any skills they lack. No matter what your product or service, you’ll have the advantage, and I can almost guarantee that your company will fulfill its potential and purpose.

Kathleen Quinn Votaw is founder and CEO of TalenTrust, a unique recruitment firm that helps companies find exceptional talent to accelerate their growth. TalenTrust LLC is located in Golden, CO. Kathleen is president of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), Denver. Reach Kathleen at kvotaw@talentrust.comor 303-838-3334 x5

It’s astounding what people can accomplish when they get the right support, something that women in business still lack—even in the 21^st Century. It’s for this reason that The Women’s College at the University of Denver is announcing The Center for the Advancement of Business Leadership and Entrepreneurship (ABLE) for Women this fall—the first such center in the region. The objective is to advance women in all phases and forms of entrepreneurship and business ownership.

 “But,” you’re probably thinking; and yes, what you’ve read is true. Women currently earn six of every ten college degrees. Nearly 50 percent of students in law school are women. And more than 50 percent of women in business are in management, professional and related occupations. That sounds pretty good, like women have made it. But look up toward the ceiling and you’ll see a different story.

 What happens to those women lawyers? Well, they’ll get passed over for partner status this year by more than two-to-one (Lexis Nexis). And women managers? Only 2.6 percent of them are CEOs of F500 companies. That’s twelve women out of 500. And they make just 85 percent of what their male counterparts get in compensation (Catalyst). Women on boards? An amazing 40 percent of the world’s largest publicly listed companies have not appointed a single woman to their board.

 This, despite the fact that:

 Companies with more female executives and directors perform better (McKinsey&CO).

• Women leaders are more assertive and persuasive, more willing to take risks, and more able to bring people around to their point of view because they have stronger interpersonal skills (Pepperdine).
• Companies with a mix of male and female leaders, with their differing attitudes regarding risk, collaboration and ambiguity, will outperform a competitor that relies on the leadership of a single sex (Rosener, University of California).

 Does this mean women are better leaders than men? Of course not! What it does mean is that women and men together create more successful companies. In today’s global, competitive business environment, it means we need more women CEOs, more women on boards, and perhaps more shared “inside-outside” leadership, as David Thompson first suggested in his book, Blueprint to a Billion.

It will take women leaders helping other women succeed; men mentoring and supporting women leaders; and programs like ABLE for Women to take us where we need to go, from both gender and business perspectives.

ABLE for Women

More than 50 percent of businesses in this country are women-owned. Only about three percent of them achieve the $1 million mark in revenue, half the number of male-owned companies that do. According to Lynn Gangone, dean of The Women’s College at DU, Denver has the second largest percentage of women-owned start-ups in the country, making it an ideal location for supporting women in creating and sustaining businesses of significant means.

With the objective of empowering women in the Rocky Mountain West, ABLE will deliver educational programs, experiential learning opportunities, and resources for building a network of support—all designed to help get women to their next level.

Workshops and events will cover topics on such things as market research, sales, franchising, and project management. A Profit Matters Review will provide the opportunity for women to present their business plan to a panel of advisors and get their advice. And the Entrepreneurial Studies Certificate program is designed to guide women in launching and managing a business venture.

Using characteristically women-oriented traits, ABLE programs are based on collaboration and inclusiveness. Organizations like “The Coolest Women in IT” and “Count Me In“ will be involved—and events like “make mine a million $ business conference;” the Colorado Women Veterans Conference and Healthfair Expo; and a virtual summit planned for spring 2012 in conjunction with the Canadian Consulate, are part of the plan. And, importantly, the Entrepreneurial Studies program will be open to women throughout the community, regardless of their educational background.

 Women on ABLE’s founders committee are business women and CEOs—women who understand both the challenges and opportunities of starting and growing a business. (Disclosure: I’m on this committee.) Jeanne Callahan, who has an extensive entrepreneurial background and owns several successful Denver businesses herself, has been named ABLE’s director. There is more information at: www.womenscollege.du.edu/able.

 With ABLE as their clearing house, women will have the knowledge and support to start a company and grow it to heights they didn’t think possible.

Kathleen Quinn Votaw is founder and CEO of TalenTrust, a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) firm that helps companies accelerate their growth by hiring exceptional talent. TalenTrust LLC is located in Golden, CO. Kathleen is president of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), Denver. Reach Kathleen at kvotaw@talentrust.comor 303-838-3334 x5.

By Kathleen Quinn Votaw

 The year 2025 will be as different from today as today is from 1900. More change is coming in the next 25 years than we’ve experienced in the last 100 years. And knowledge is doubling every 6 to 18 months. These, well, terrifying statistics from futurist Jack

Uldrich should jump-start your thinking about what kind of future you’re creating for your business. How can you handle what’s coming? According to Uldrich, you should be doing three things to prepare for tomorrow:

• Think exponentially.
• Unlearn a lot of what you know.
• Believe in and do the impossible.

 Creating a “best practices” culture

What sparked my future thinking was a recent presentation by Dennis Donovan, HR veteran and former HR executive at Home Depot, who offered a formula for dealing with the accelerated rate of change we are all trying to manage:

 VA = Q x A x E

 VA stands for value added; Q is quality in what you do; A is acceptance within your organization; and E is how well you execute. This formula has everything to do with building an organizational culture of people who can think on their feet, unlearn what no longer works, and believe that you’ll be doing things tomorrow that don’t even exist today. Tomorrow’s workforce will need to change internally at a rate that exceeds the rate of change in the market. That level of velocity demands a new set of cultural best practices to sustain it.

Finding highly qualified applicants is only going to get more competitive, especially for technical positions. But every member of a team is critical to overall success. Some companies will settle for less-than-perfect candidates or pay more in compensation than they can afford. I would advise, instead, that you  create the kind of culture that attracts and retains the right people, though it may mean giving up some of the traditional management practices you have championed.

 A future-based culture:

• Defines and hires for the competencies needed now as well as in the future
• Builds acceptance and appreciation for a unit’s work and contribution to the organization and makes sure that everyone throughout the organization understands what each team does
• Makes sure team members are recognized for their achievements in and outside their immediate department
• Incorporates flexible work schedules, telecommuting, job-sharing and other work programs that accommodate preferences and lifestyles for employees
• Offers the best training and career development opportunities the organization can afford
• Offers competitive and attractive compensation and benefits
• Sets and adheres to high standards
• Understands what makes the organization a “best place to work” and promotes it in the market
• Stays flexible in making arrangements with older workers who might be of benefit and offers consulting, part-time and other options to retain the experience and knowledge of those people
• Decentralizes decision-making, empowering employees to make decisions on the spot
• Ensures that managers enable and encourage innovation and feedback
• Communicates so that the entire organization understands and is aligned around the vision and goals
• Adapts
• Is accountable

 And doesn’t:

• Think quarter-to-quarter, which is not viable or competitive over the long term
• Communicate to candidates, employees, or the market in any way that’s not direct and true
• Retain practices for the sake of tradition, rather than efficiency or productivity
• Tolerate a “not my job mentality”

  Is your company open to, and ready to plan for a compelling future? Speed is your best future friend, so make its acquaintance now.

Kathleen Quinn Votaw is founder and CEO of TalenTrust, a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) firm that helps companies accelerate their growth by hiring exceptional talent. TalenTrust LLC is located in Golden, CO. Kathleen is president of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), Denver. Reach Kathleen at kvotaw@talentrust.com or 303-838-3334 x5.

Ah, but you can—and do it before you hire

By Kathleen Quinn Votaw

What do you do with an employee who takes a few pens or paper clips home now and again? What about someone who’s chronically late to work … and the person who’s prone to emotional outbursts? Each of these employees is a thief of sorts—whether they’re stealing supplies, time, or everyone’s productivity. What other breaches of integrity are these people capable of, and how much will it cost you?

You’ll be able to weed out candidates likely to engage in theft, drug use, workplace violence and many other undesirable or deviant behaviors if you add an integrity test to your battery of pre-hire assessments. It’s all part of finding and keeping top talent—and ensuring a culture of integrity.

Assessing your assessments

A number of assessments help you hire the right people for your company. The first is often a background check—necessary, but not every future troublemaker has a history of problems. Or the kind of problems they have may not be caught in a background check.

Criminal records, for example, will only tell you about offences where the candidate was prosecuted and convicted. Credit checks, which the majority of employers conduct at least for select jobs, tell you whether someone was late paying a bill, or has declared bankruptcy. But they don’t tell you the circumstances around these defaults, which could have been the fact that they lost their job or had a major budget-breaking illness in the family. There has been a backlash against credit checks, which many people consider an invasion of privacy, and some states have now outlawed them.

What you need to augment background screening is a tool that provides a better understanding of the emotional makeup of candidates and predicts likely future behavior. Integrity tests give you this information with accuracy that stems from the common characteristics found in people with low integrity, such as being dishonest and unreliable. According to Crimcheck.com, about 30 percent of applicants score below standard on integrity tests, allowing you to save time and money by eliminating this bottom third from consideration.

Integrity tests are not a replacement for background checks. They are a cost-effective addition to the various assessments you already include to ensure that your hiring due diligence is what it should be.

 The cost of low integrity hires

 Although integrity testing has been around in one form or another since the 1950s, psychologist Kelly Dages has found new applications for it in organizations. Dages was looking for a less controversial alternative to bank credit checks and determined that testing for integrity is not only a good predictor of loan defaults, but also foretells costly bad behavior at work.

 For example, the securities organization ASIS International recently studied a major North American retailer that began using an integrity test in about 600 of its 1,900 locations. After a year, the sites using integrity testing saw an “inventory shrink” (aka theft shrinkage) of 35 percent. And their employee turnover improved by 13 percent, saving the cost of rehiring and retraining.

Similarly, Cornell University cites a hospitality company that screened 29,000 applicants for integrity, and hired about 6,100 of them. The workers’ compensation claims for the new employees were compared to those of current employees who had not been screened for integrity. The data showed that the average annual cost per employee for workers’ compensation was more than three times higher for unscreened existing employees than for the new hires who had been screened for integrity.

The savings realized by screening out potentially expensive hiring mistakes and reducing theft and absenteeism more than make up for the typically reasonable cost of conducting integrity tests.

Affirm integrity / affirm your culture

Workplace integrity isn’t just about stealing. It’s also about how people treat their fellow employees and your customers. Employees’ behaviors and interactions with one another can influence and even define your culture.

The consequences of hiring people who lie or steal; drink or take drugs on the job; have emotional or even violent outbursts; show racial, ethnic or gender prejudice; risk safety; can’t commit; are consistently late; or resent supervision have enormous impact on both people and work environment. Integrity tests reveal all of these behavioral characteristics by measuring attitudes and motivations that predict likely future behavior.

 By affirming the integrity of candidates as part of your hiring process, you ensure that your culture is built on values like honesty, trustworthiness and reliability. With a culture built on those kinds of values, I predict your future success.

Kathleen Quinn Votaw is founder and CEO of TalenTrust, a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) firm that helps companies accelerate their growth by hiring exceptional talent. TalenTrust LLC is located in Golden, CO. Kathleen is president of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), Denver. Reach Kathleen at kvotaw@talentrust.com or 303-838-3334 x5.

What do you honor?

Say it’s something soft

By Kathleen Quinn Votaw

Honor is a “soft topic” that helped drive Fortune 500® Company DaVita from $1.5 to $6.5 billion in revenue over the past ten years. DaVita’s Chairman and CEO, Kent Thiry, insists that what you honor will grow, and he has proved his point many times over since focusing on the softer side of business. DaVita’s list of awards is lengthy: a top company to work for; top for leaders; tops in training, innovation, and sustainability; and remarkable by every other measure.

Oops, did I say “measure”? The benefits of “soft” usually can’t be accounted for in numbers, evidence to many that characteristics like honor and core values aren’t results oriented. DaVita, a leading provider of kidney care with more than 30,000 employees nationwide, tells a different story.

“Create a community around core values and everything else will come,” advises Kent Thiry, who spoke recently at Denver’s Association for Corporate Growth (ACG). Instead of focusing on revenues, he says, focus on your leadership behaviors and honoring the behaviors that demonstrate your company values. For example, if you honor the value of being on time, you’ll find that everyone is on time.

People focus on six principles at DaVita: recruit, review, reward, revere, reinforce and reality check. Their core values integrate with each principle, which means that everything from hiring to scoring is based on their values: service excellence, integrity, team, continuous improvement, accountability, fulfillment and fun. Everyone in the company gets a report card on core values.

Like a family Thanksgiving or Christmas, the company honors their values with traditions and rituals. A CEO giving out rewards dressed like Robin Hood? Yes, it’s all part of the ritual around rewarding excellence and having fun.

Honor is kind of an old fashioned concept, meaning integrity in your beliefs or values. You rarely hear the word these days except when discussing military honor codes, or in conjunction with fraternities and sororities. We should use it more in business. We talk mainly about the measureable aspects of business: product development, marketing, accounting, distribution—the things you really can’t honor. We need to realize that it’s the things we don’t talk about enough, the “soft” factors, that determine how well we do at the measurable tasks.

DaVita’s core values aren’t different from those of most companies. The fact that they honor them, openly and enthusiastically, is different.

When you think about building your business, what do you honor? What things are most important to you? When you know, “reveal it, live it, and speak your dreams to your people,” by Mr. Thiry’s counsel.

When you know and honor your “why” you can easily find the how that will yield the results you want.

Kathleen Quinn Votaw is founder and CEO of TalenTrust, a Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO) firm that helps companies accelerate their growth by hiring exceptional talent. TalenTrust LLC is located in Golden, CO. Kathleen is president of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), Denver. Reach Kathleen at kvotaw@talentrust.com or 303-838-3334 x5.