Finding Game-Changing Talent with a Creative Sourcing Plan

If there is one thing that I know to be true about business, it is that the people on your senior team and in your company are the deciding factors in whether or not your company can scale effectively. I can not tell you the number of times that one of my clients has brought on a new team member and been absolutely awed by how game-changing that addition became. For example, just recently, one of our clients brought on a new human resources head and was stunned by the positive transformation she generated in the company. 

When I tell partners and colleagues about stories such as this, I’m always met with the same question: how exactly can I attract that type of game-changing talent? In the business climate we live in today, attracting top talent can be challenging: now more than ever, individuals have the option to apply to and work for companies all over the world. However, this shouldn’t scare you. With a creative and regimented talent sourcing plan, you too can put your company in a position to attract great talent. 

A good creative sourcing plan should leverage three resources: community partnerships, talent recruitment agencies, and being opportunistic: 

1. Community partnerships: Oftentimes amazing talent will be right in your backyard; you just need to know where to look. Community partnerships can be a powerful way to find that talent. Are there local universities, nonprofits organizations or boards that could connect you with potential employees? Once you identify individuals or organizations that may have potential employees, you can begin to build consistent partnerships with them. For example, I used to work closely with a professor at the University of Denver to find interns. This partnership gave me access to students that the professor thought were good fits instead of me trying to go through the school’s career center, which dozens of other companies were doing.

2. Talent recruitment agencies: Although this isn’t necessarily the most creative, talent recruitment agencies can be helpful. Your time and energy are valuable resources, so if you can afford to spend cash on recruitment agencies, it could be a worthwhile investment. 

3. Being Opportunistic: As a leader, you should always be keeping an eye out for potential talent. What this means is that if you meet someone amazing as you are going through your day-to-day-life, recruit them. You can’t plan to meet people like this, but you should be prepared to. To be prepared, you should be able to communicate your mission, speak to why you provide a valuable experience and have business cards on hand. 

These three avenues are each a viable way to find great talent and ones that I have personally used in the past. If you would like to discuss your sourcing plan further, feel free to reach out to me at emartin@pfd-group.com.

Quarterly Themes: Creating alignment and Boosting Team Morale

As we have been working in a pandemic for more than a year, there is one thing that all the leaders I have spoken with have agreed upon: we and our teams are exhausted. I am a big believer in optimism, but I am an equally large proponent of addressing what Admiral James Stockdale calls the “brutal facts of your current reality,” and, in this moment, addressing the brutal facts means recognizing that team morale and alignment may be suffering. 

One powerful way to re-inspire your team and bring energy (and fun!) back into your workplace is to announce a quarterly theme that you and your team can rally behind. Quarterly themes are generally created by gathering a representative from each department and/or your leadership team for a quick 45 minute meeting.

In the meeting, you and your team should consider where your company is at, upcoming priorities and future goals. The most important thing to remember while creating this team is that it should create a “win x4;” a win for the company, a win for customers, a win for the employees, and a win for the community. By ensuring that your theme is one that will motivate your employees and create value for customers and community, you will effectively be drawing in a crowd of individuals who will support your work. 

As an example, this quarter we at PFD have decided that our quarterly theme would be “Paddle!” We wanted to capture the idea that in order to catch a great wave of change, you have to put in significant effort to ensure that the wave does not pass you by. As a company, we have several key thrusts in the works, which led us to choose a theme that will remind us to keep paddling so that we can catch a wave that will generate enormous benefits for our team and community. 

Q3 2021 Theme: Paddle! The Key Thrusts have been generalized so as not to give away our strategy.

If you would like more inspiration on potential themes for our company, check out some of our past themes:

Q2 2020 Theme: “Our Finest Hour”. For this theme, we were in the height of uncertainty with the pandemic, and we were searching for empowerment in our team. We found inspiration from another period of history marked with fear and uncertainty, WWII, and specifically Winston’ Churchill’s “This Was Their Finest Hour” speech. It was because of this speech that we decided to rise to the challenge - making that quarter “Our Finest Hour” - and finding creative ways to positively impact 1,000 lives. If you would like to read more about this theme, check out this blog post here.

Q1 2021 Theme: And… Action! For this quarter, we wanted to inspire our team to be very action-oriented, so to accomplish this end, we had our team track their use and adoption of our new project-management software. By ensuring the team used the project management software, they had a clear means to track progress on their projects, thus inspiring action. There also was a celebratory component, as we also had our team members submit photos of the different things they were doing - both within work and outside of work - to commemorate all that been done during the quarter.

Q3 2020 Theme: Partner Pinball (names removed this blog post). For this theme, we wanted our team members to engage with key partners throughout the quarter to help facilitate a strong launch to a project. A star was added next to the name of each partner engaged, to make sure we kept the focus on partners present and at the forefront. The relationships we have with CEOs and other leaders are critical to our success, so we wanted to focus on treating those partners well for the duration of the quarter.

If you would like more help creating your quarterly theme, I recommend this 9-minute video: Developing a Theme for Your Team.

The Talent Flywheel: The secret to creating a repeatable talent recruitment and development process

TRANSCRIPT:

One of the things that we have seen with a lot of CEOs in the marketplace these days, is that they have not developed a repeatable process to find, select, and develop great talent. As a result, their impact and their growth, while okay, is far less than it could be. One of the things that we've seen in our Scaling Up practice, and all the great clients that we get to coach, is leadership is key. It's all about finding, developing, growing, and retaining the absolute best players out there. 

So, we have put together a tool called the Talent Flywheel. Many of you may be familiar with the great work that Jim Collins has done on strategy flywheels to drive growth, and so we’ve found you can take the same core of that tool and apply it to the people in your team to drive incredible growth.  The purpose of this Talent flywheel is to get clear about the key steps on recruiting, selecting, developing and retaining the right leaders in the right roles, so it becomes a repeatable process for your organization. We want you to be able to get the best leaders into these roles that tie to their superpowers to drive your growth and fully realize your vision.

Step 1: CEO is accountable for stewarding culture and overcommunicating

The first step of a talent flywheel belongs to you as the CEO. It is so key that you steward your organization's culture. A key element of that includes: being very clear with your senior team what your organization’s core values are. They should understand the principles that guide every decision you and your team make. As you work to discover those, to reinforce them, and to cascade them down in the organization one of the key steps is to overcommunicate those core values. Repeat yourself so many times until your team is making fun of you -  that's how you know it's starting to set in.

Step 2: Learning and growth mindset and culture

The second step is stewarding and developing a learning and growth mindset and all of your people. It is key that when you're bringing new leaders into the company that they have a learning mindset. Any great scaling up company is a learning organization. We all constantly need to be growing and learning as the world is constantly changing all around us. All the information we need is out there is just a click or two away, but if we're not asking the right questions, if we're not using a learning mindset, our growth is going to be so much slower than it could be - and a lot less fun. 

Step 3: Unique and valuable employee experience

The third key element of the talent flywheel is making sure to create and reinforce a unique and valuable employee experience. If you think back to some of the key elements of your company strategy, we want to make sure we have a strategy that's unique and valuable to your core customer. The same logic applies to your employees. You will  want to make sure that you are selecting the best talent you possibly can that fits your culture, and once you got them you want them to stay. You want to go off for them things that are valuable to your employees that no one else. It's a key part of reinforcing the culture and thinking about your overall employee experience. What are your benefits? What is the work environment like? How are you investing in their growth? How are you making sure they've got a better future and they have today? As you look at these different things that you're doing for your employees, make sure you are offering them, individually and especially collectively, a set of benefits and opportunities that no one else can. If they are the right fit for your organization, this will help ensure employee retention, as they will never want to leave.

Step 4: Clear strategic direction from the senior team 

The fourth step to the talent flywheel is ensuring you have a clear and focused strategic direction from the senior team. Right now with all the uncertainty out there, there's unlimited opportunities and possibility for growing your organization; however, if every senior leader has a different vision for where you're going and what success looks like, your growth will be slowed, it will be more political, and it will be a lot less fun. So it is really critical to spend the time with your senior team on your strategy. We recommend, either two days a quarter or at least a half day per month, that you spend the time to clarify and reinforce your culture, that you get so clear what mountain is it that we are climbing, and for the current quarter, how do we stay focused on those opportunities that will lead to our greatest growth. It is important that the senior team do this collectively. While the CEO can help guide this, this needs to be a collaborative effort, because the process that your senior team goes through to create this focused strategy is just as important as the outcome.  This is because this process creates buy-in to ensure good implementation of the strategic plan.

Step 5: Transparency: KPIs and brutal facts

 The fifth element of the Talent Flywheel really caters to what A-Players want. A-Players want to win, and they want to know the difference they're making individually and collectively. So this step is really important. Where the leadership team is focusing, those metrics must be very visible so that everyone can track the progress of what's working and what's not working.  If there are brutal facts (i.e. any material fact that could impact business operations) and there will always be brutal facts, it's so important they get raised. When brutal facts surface, we can deal with them. They may reflect great challenges and they capture huge opportunities in front of us - or both. As we surface the brutal facts, we can identify them, we can figure out what the plan is to take advantage of them, and we can be successful together. We can surface these facts to drive rigorous discussions  with the leadership team, and align to this strategic direction that we discuss the previous step, so that we never lose sight of where we're going and that we will prevail in the end.

Step 6: Videos and stories that reinforce the core values told with emotion

With all the work that you've done to steward and reinforce the culture, to set a clear strategy, to bring the right people into the organization, and to have that learning mindset, step number six is where it starts coming together. This is where we start having great stories of impact that allow future A-Players to find your team, and to want to join your team as they realize you have a very unique and valuable employee experience for them.  This step will also allow you to  leverage all this talent that you have internally, because your current A-Players will know who the other A-Players are out there. They know who their friends are, and they will recruit them because they want to be around other A-Players. Making sure you have a process for your A-Players to refer other A-Players to your organization is absolutely key, because this will help them to take ownership of the recruiting and selection process to make sure we are bringing the right people in the organization to fuel our growth.

Step 7: Repeatable, strong, applicant pools: Topgrading, Job Scorecard, and referrals

Step number seven is all about making this a repeatable process which is so key for our growth. Right now, we know we're going to go fishing every time that we need great talent that are also a good cultural fit, which takes time and energy. As we get the flywheel moving, we will spend less time and energy on each candidate. As the CEO, you should always be recruiting, and your senior team should always be recruiting. When you come across great talent, make sure to get their contact information - reach out to them and put them early on in the process to start seeing your core value videos and the other ways you will be able to signal to them what do you unique and valuable experience it would be for that applicant to join your organization. Having a  strong pool is critically important, and how we screen is just as important. We have had tremendous success both internally and with our clients using the Topgrading process. The Topgrading process brings a whole new level of rigor to hiring. Many companies tend to hire quickly and fire slowly - on average are getting a hire right about half of the time. This is not good for the company and it's not good for that applicant.  With Topgrading, we see our clients getting much closer to a 90% success rate in hiring, and with the cost of a bad hire at 10 to 14 times their salary, getting this right is critical. 

Using the Talent flywheel is so key for your future growth and success. The Talent Flywheel will give you a repeatable process to identify, select, develop, and retain the top talent that you will need to make the impact that you want to in the world.

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How We Can Use Covid-19 as an Opportunity to Create a New, Better Normal

At this point, we have heard repeatedly that Covid-19 has created a ‘new normal’. Implicit in this concept of this ‘new normal’ is fear – fear that we will not recover from this crisis, fear that we will not make it out of this crisis alive, and fear that we will not be able to adapt to and take on the challenges that this crisis-induced ‘new normal’ poses.

But what if we used Covid-19 as an opportunity to create not only a new normal, but a new, better normal?  

We seem to have this collective nostalgia for the old normal, before this giant mess occurred. But in the midst of this unprecedented mess, we also have the unprecedented opportunity to reflect and ask ourselves – was what we were doing really working? Not only do we have the opportunity to ask these important questions, but we can also take this time to rethink how we are running our businesses to create new and better experiences for our employees and community overall.

One major theme of this new normal is isolation. In response to this virus, we have created measures where we isolate ourselves away from our friends and workspaces to prevent the spread of the virus. Importantly, I am not advocating for rash and unwise decisions to be made when we regard isolation as we move through this post Covid-19 world; rather, I would like to discuss isolation in an honest way that brings to light just how much isolation impacts us, so we can include it in the conversation going forward.

When we think of isolation, we don’t give it the credit it deserves in how it impacts us. We often regard experiences of isolation as “painful”, but we tend to consider this sort of pain as more abstract or metaphorical, separating it from other types of pain (i.e. physical pain) that we experience. Sure, we acknowledge that isolation isn’t ideal, but when we feel the impacts of isolation and loneliness, we don’t tend to name isolation as the problem – we internalize the blame, and we think that there is something wrong with us for feeling the way that we do. We might think that we should be able to handle the inconvenience of isolation without much of an issue, but our brains disagree. They simply don’t work that way.

Ample evidence exists to show just how detrimental isolation can be. The pain arising from isolation is a legitimate type of pain, and it is more similar to physical pain than we once might have thought. Modern neuroscience backs this up: Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tests show that the pain associated with social exclusion and isolation closely resembles physical pain, as the same neural pathways are activated. This means that our brains have a hard time telling the difference between physical pain and social pain because it is registered in the same place. Further, isolation and loneliness has been shown to have long-term mental and physical health effects. When we say that isolation is painful, we are not talking about some abstract pain that we should be able to ignore. We are talking about real, concrete pain that we have been able to see in our brains. This world of isolation that we have created is incredibly painful to live in.

But is this painful isolation just a consequence of this post Covid-19 ‘new normal’?

No, it isn’t. We were isolated long before Covid-19, we just tended to ignore it and not take it seriously. In fact, one study from NPR shows that loneliness was on the rise in the United States long before the virus hit our shores – as more than three in five Americans reported feeling lonely in 2019 – one report even showing a 13% rise in loneliness from 2018. Isolation was already trending upwards, but we are now forced to look at it in a more brutal and honest way.

What is also important to note about the modern science about loneliness and isolation is that it does not prize just any connection over no connection. In fact, parallel to the studies on isolation are studies on exclusion, which show that if we feel excluded from the people around us, we experience the same neurological response of pain in our brains. Intuitively, we know this to be true as well. We’ve all been in these super toxic environments, and even if we are surrounded by people, the lack of meaningful connection in these situations is also isolating and painful. In fact, the same NPR study mentioned earlier cites modern workplace culture as a potential contributing factor to our increased loneliness. What we really need is positive connections where we can empower others and be empowered, and foster growth for ourselves.

This photo was taken from our May 2019 Workshop with Shannon Susko, before the pandemic hit and social distancing measures were put in place

So how do we create a new, better normal out of this isolated one?

We can use our businesses as a force to make real, positive changes in the lives of our employees by fostering a culture in which positive relationships can be formed. The average American works about 90,000 hours in their lifetime – so if you and your employees are having to deal with a painful, isolated, and toxic work environment, it is very unlikely that you can live a positive, fulfilled life. What we need to do is create work environments that foster meaningful connection – both inside our companies and out.

We can do this by:

• Focusing on the foundational elements of our business – our core purpose and core values – so we can intentionally create a culture that is meaningful to us.

• Intentionally hiring and training people to create a positive and empowering culture that people love to come to every day.

• Giving back to the community especially in times of need, so we can create meaningful connections between our business and the broader community.

• Taking care of yourself and your employees by creating intentional peer relationships with other forward-thinking CEO’s that you can trust. At PFD, we offer both Comprehensive Coaching Services as well as a CEO Growth Forum to build a community and support around you to tackle isolation to help you thrive

Covid-19 has given us a brutally honest lesson in isolation, which, frankly, is a problem that we have been ignoring with for a long time. However, with this unprecedented virus comes an unprecedented opportunity to rethink how we are doing business, so we can create a new, better normal together.  

If you are interested in learning more about our comprehensive coaching engagement that will give you support as you navigate Covid-19 and scale your business, click here to schedule a call:

If you are interested in learning more about our new CEO Growth Forum, that will build a trusted peer community of CEOs around you, click here:

Our Finest Hour

We live in a time that is undoubtedly marked by fear.

There have been several events in recent memory that have instilled a culture of fear in our society – the most recent of which is, as we all know, the emergence of Covid-19 as a global pandemic. Further, in America, we have seen the second economic recession in twelve years, contributing to thirty million unemployment claims filed since mid-March. The fear we feel might well be justified, but it is also disempowering to everyone.

We also all know by now that Covid-19 will be in the history textbooks. While we might want to dwell on the magnitude of the situation, we should also remember that history not only remembers the large, defining events but also the leaders that stepped up to face those challenges and empower others to do the same. We remember the terrible Civil War, but we also remember Abraham Lincoln and Harriet Tubman. We remember segregation, but we also remember Martin Luther King Jr. Despite the hardships and difficulties of their times, we remember incredible leaders like Mohandas Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Nelson Mandela for their bravery and service to others.

Source: The International Churchill Society

One particular leader that inspired us during this time is Winston Churchill. When we talk about an era that is marked by fear and anxiety, a quintessential example is Great Britain during WWII. To the left, you will see the ending of one of Churchill’s most famous speeches – “This Was Their Finest Hour”. Preceding this speech, France was overtaken, and the United States had not joined the War effort yet, essentially leaving Great Britain to fight the Nazi empire alone. As the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Churchill had to stiffen his resolve, to fight, and to inspire his nation to do the same. Eighty years later, this is still widely regarded to be one of the best and most important speeches ever given. Even though we face different circumstances, we decided there was great wisdom to be gleaned from Winston Churchill.

In this era of Covid-19, we asked ourselves, “What can we do, so that someone, one thousand years from now, could say that this was our finest hour?” In our community, we have seen many examples of how people have made this ‘their finest hour’. We see how our healthcare heroes and our frontline essential workers show us every day how to make a difference. We greatly enjoy seeing John Krasinski’s weekly installment of Some Good News, and the positivity that is spread through that. We are inspired by the parades of cars throughout the neighborhoods celebrating our local high school graduates. We know that there is incredible power within communities where people support one other. We wanted to be a part of that movement.

At PFD, we decided to gamify our positive impact. We know the power of Quarterly Themes and how they can strengthen morale, so we decided that our theme this quarter is “Our Finest Hour”. We set a goal for ourselves, even in this time of self-isolation, to positively impact 1,000 lives. We made the visual you see to the right, modeled after WWII propaganda posters to pay homage to our inspiration and to track our progress.

To meet our goal and to make this “Our Finest Hour” we decided:

• We can coach our clients so they can navigate the uncertainty and make the best possible impact on their employees. We are so blessed to work with a wide range of CEOs that truly care about their teams and their community.

• We can rally entrepreneurs in our area to buy meals for our healthcare heroes – both supporting a local business and our healthcare workers

• We can support our own team by investing in tools that allow them to work safely from home and encouraging them to practice self-care. The person who is writing this blog post, Emmalee, has asthma, so she is especially grateful for this one.

• We can keep our commitments to our summer interns, so that they don’t have their work cancelled like so many other college students.

• We can launch a CEO Growth Forum using proven strategy and execution frameworks to create confidence and clarity for entrepreneurs that are navigating an especially challenging portion of history.

• We can work intently and creatively to figure out how to hit our revenue targets for this year, so we have the resources to also hit our corporate giving targets to support non-profits that were hit especially hard by the recession.

• We can be a voice of positivity and empowerment. This is not to diminish the hardships of our time, but to offer a way forward through this crisis and to support and recognize the ingenuity and spirit of humanity.

Our Quarterly theme printed, so our progress can be tracked & shared

We might facing difficult circumstances that will alter the course of history, but history will also remember the great leaders of our time that rose to the challenges. We want to be among the leaders that step up to face the challenges of Covid-19 and empower others to continue to do well by their community. We know that business can be an incredible platform with which we can transform lives, and we want to be just one company that intentionally creates that impact. We are so incredibly humbled and inspired by the tenacity and altruism of our clients and community, and we are very excited to continue to serve them, no matter what lies ahead.