Grit and the Want-To Factor (™): High Doers for Your Company's Success

In her groundbreaking 2013 Ted Talk, viewed by more than 25 million people, award-winning author, psychologist, and professor Angela Lee Duckworth explores the question, “who is successful and why.”

The answer boils down less to talent, she says, and more to an X factor known as “grit.” But what exactly is grit? 

“Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals,” said Duckworth in the Ted Talk. “Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality.” 

The Want-To Factor (™)

Grit also happens to be one of the pinnacles of PFD Group’s “Want-To Factor,” a trademarked designation that identifies the ultimate doers of any group. People with high Want-To Factors are the most likely to get things done. Not only do they see a vision for the future, but they also mentally visualize completing the necessary tasks to make that vision a reality. 

Importantly, none of the elements that contribute to higher Want-To Factors are directly related to talent, a fact that is backed up by Duckworth’s research.

“Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent.”

How to Find High Want-To Candidates

Following a rigorous hiring process can significantly increase your ability to find, recognize and hire talent with high Want-To Factors. One such method is the Topgrading Method, a 12-step process that improves “the productivity, profitability, and progress of an organization by recruiting, hiring, and developing teams of top performers.”

We also recommend taking the principles outlined by Jim Collins on strategy flywheels and apply them to your recruiting process. We’ve built such a tool, which we’ve called the Talent Flywheel, which can help you build key steps on recruiting, selecting, developing and retaining the right leaders in the right roles, so it becomes a repeatable process for your organization. 

Hire For Core Values

While ambition can lead to higher Want-To Factors, it is also critical to avoid confusing ambition with blind ambition–or employees seeking only personal wins. Instead, it is important to bring in A-Players who have a built-in community mindset. 

This community mindset is another reason why it is critical to have and hire against a strong set of core values. As people increasingly select work environments that align with their personal beliefs, companies with strong Core Values stand to attract the best of the best among these belief-driven employees. 

On a side note, hiring team members that fit our core values is a central topic in my upcoming book, The Mentorship Engine, which I co-wrote with Ramsey Jay Jr. Stay tuned for information on that book coming soon! 

Hiring from Non-Traditional Sources

To find amazing employees, you may also consider detouring away from traditional hiring sources, although you likely won’t have to veer much farther beyond your own backyard. 

Exploring community partnerships can provide new pathways to finding A Players with high Want-To Factors. Are there local universities, nonprofit organizations or board of directors that could connect you with potential employees? 

Part of your business strategy is to invest in your community. Building relationships with other community leaders can help you meet those goals, while also leading you to great new sources of talent. 

Need help identifying candidates with high Want-To scores? The PFD Group can help. That’s what we do every day, as we consult with 100+ satisfied global business leaders. For more information, contact us for an introductory call.

At PFD Group, we have built a Want-To-Score (™ pending), which is a designation that identifies the ultimate doers of any group. These are the people who are most likely to get things done. They have the grit and tenacity to not only see the vision for the future, but also have the vision of how to see the necessary tasks are completed to make this vision a reality 

If you’d like to learn more about how to identify your Want-To players or how to build the ideal annual planning meeting, contact us for more information.

Biggest Hiring Mistakes of 2022

Motivational leader Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, is famously known for his analogy comparing business to a bus. 

“First,” writes Collins, “if you begin with the ‘who’ rather than the ‘what,’ you can more easily adapt to a changing world. The people you want on the bus are the ones who roll with the proverbial rock slides. The ones who say, “Hey, I got on this bus because of who else is on it; if we need to change direction to be more successful, fine with me.” 

In 2022, as the business world adapted to a post-Covid world era, it seems that leaders continue to be flummoxed by the principles of getting the right people in the right seats. 

What exactly were some of the biggest hiring mistakes of 2022? 

Not Hiring the Right People

The estimated cost of a mishire can be 5 to 27 times the amount of the employee’s salary according to Topgrading.com. Which means a mishire can be extremely costly to a business. 

A major mistake we saw during 2022 was businesses hiring the wrong people-especially in sales leadership positions. Having the right people doing the right job is a sure fire way to keep your business on track, even during difficult times. When you hire, you need to hire the best person for the position, constrained only by your budget. 

To reduce the possibility of a mishire, we recommend following a rigorous process like the 12-step that Topgrading offers, which will help ensure the right fit and benefit not only you but your potential hires as well.

Holding On to the Wrong People Too Long

Keeping the wrong people on your payroll too long was another common mistake during 2022. 

If you find yourself questioning whether or not a person is the right fit for your business, then you need to listen to that inner voice and start asking yourself some hard questions.

There are at least two ways employees can be “wrong” for your business. Either they are a wrong fit for the role they are currently serving in, or they are a wrong fit for your corporate culture. 

In a previous article, The Ethics of Hiring Well, we detailed the importance of hiring people to match your organization's Core Values. If the employee is fulfilling a role that doesn’t fit their skill set, is there a possibility of shifting them to a different role? On the other hand, if the employee doesn’t exemplify your core values, the cost of keeping them will far outweigh any cost of letting them go.

Not Using 2022 to Set the Foundation for Growth

In a very short time frame, customers have shifted their purchase habits, possibly more dramatically than at any other time in history. Do you have an employee or a team tracking those shifting sentiments? Are you using their learnings from the last year to adapt? 

Read more: Who Should Attend Your Annual Strategic Planning Meeting? — PFD Group

Every business should plan for experimentation but in a way that mitigates risk. Otherwise, you might get caught in cuts.

Look at how changes in the market have impacted your core customers. What new needs do they have? How can you better serve them in a way that drives more growth for your business? 

Despite the challenges, today’s business landscape offers so many new opportunities for agile companies.

Need help planning ahead to mitigate risks for 2023? The PFD Group can help. We’d love to support you and your senior team. Contact us and we’d be happy to schedule a call to discuss your strategic vision.

The Ethics of Hiring Well

A teammate (right) and me (left) at Ethics Bowl at the Regional High School Championships, 2016

In college, my friends used to tease me for being an ethics nerd. My love for ethics began back in high school, where I was a part of my school’s inaugural ethics bowl team – even placing at our regional competition in Utah. After high school, I reached out to the staff advisor to join my collegiate ethics bowl team before I even arrived on campus. In ethics bowl, we discussed a multitude of topics, from the ethicality of using beta testing when developing software in self-driving cars, to the treatment of children born with anencephaly, even to the ethics of colonizing Mars. Being a part of these teams and these conversations profoundly shaped my outlook on my life and career and has jumpstarted my curiosity of how to live out as an ethical business leader.

In fact, the ethics of business decisions have been a hot topic on everyone’s mind lately – from discussions on stakeholder theory, to the triple bottom line, to the conscious capitalism movement. Within these broader movements towards business ethics, there are countless topics within day-to-day business activities that need to be explored from an ethical standpoint. One such topic is hiring.

What does it mean to hire well? What are the impacts of hiring well?

Hiring well doesn’t necessarily mean you hire the top graduates from Ivy League schools, nor does it mean requiring experience for entry level positions. What hiring well means is that you answer “yes” to this one question: Knowing what you know now (after a person has been working at your company) would you enthusiastically rehire them? These applicants can come from diverse backgrounds, but they must be a core value fit and do their job well. If someone isn’t a good fit for their job, you can create stress for yourself and other employees who will need to pick up the slack, as well as lost revenue. If someone is not a good core value fit, you run the risk of devaluing your culture, creating frustration, and even driving away some of your employees who are good fits.

 With so much on the line, hiring well is extraordinarily important, both for your business success and to better the quality of life for your employees. At PFD, we recommend the Topgrading Methodology for hiring. The idea behind Topgrading is simple. Most companies hire fast and fire slow, and by doing this, they are hiring and keeping people in their organizations who they wouldn’t “rehire” if given the opportunity. Topgrading adds rigor – it allows those who are making the hiring decisions to truly take their time and consider their candidates. By adding this rigor, we are ensuring that we truly are hiring the right people in the right roles – vastly increasing the success rate hiring from 50% to 90%.  We recommend reading the book Topgrading by Brad and Geoff Smart for more information on this process. 

We’ve talked about the impacts of hiring well, and the process we recommend using for hiring. Now, for those of you who are ethics nerds like me, let’s discuss some ethical theories as applied to hiring.  

Utilitarianism

Quite simply, Utilitarianism asks: what creates the greatest good for the most people, while minimizing suffering? It is also called Consequentialism, because it looks at the consequences of an action to determine its morality.

Under a utilitarian lens, it is a moral imperative to hire well. Taking time to hire well – to have the right people who fit the culture and excel at their jobs – will result in the greatest good for the most amount of people, both in the company and out. As we have described above, hiring poorly can result in stress and frustration to the employees, thus causing harm. Further, assuming the company has some involvement in the community, a mishire can result in lost revenue, thus reducing the number of resources the business has to give back to causes. Conversely, a good hire who fits the culture can add to the quality of life of fellow employees, and can increase our resources to give back to our communities.

Kantianism

According to Kantianism, determining morality means asking ourselves, “if we were to imagine a world where everyone was to do this action, would it still be viable?”  If the action is not viable if everyone were to do it, we have a duty to behave differently. For example, if a manufacturing company were heavily polluting a local river, their actions would be unethical, because everyone polluting a river would make the environment surrounding uninhabitable. Additionally, under this ethical theory, we have a moral duty to treat people with respect, because they are rational thinkers, and never as a means to an end. So, in this theory, it would be unethical for an employer to hire somebody and intentionally grossly underpay their starting salary to save money. That would not be treating them with respect to themselves as rational actors, and they would be using that employee as a means to an end (saving cash).

Under a Kantian lens, it is also an ethical duty of ours to take the time to hire well. We might know a great salesperson who could bring some deals to the company, but doesn’t fit the core values, and according to this theory, we shouldn’t hire them. This is because making exceptions to our hiring process would undermine the duty we had to our other employees, who both fit the culture and do well in their roles. Further, to hire someone into a position or culture that they cannot do well in, is not respectful to them or their time that they spent with you at your company.

 Ethics of Care

Contrasted with the first two theories, this third theory holds that morality is centered on interpersonal relationships, as well as benevolence (or care) is a virtue. Under this theory, the interpersonal relationships that you have with people matter. For example, if you have a long-standing relationship with a supplier (assuming this supplier also acts ethically), this theory contends that you should not switch suppliers just to save a couple of bucks on the cost of goods sold.

Under an ethics of care lens, it is especially important to take the time and effort to hire candidates who fit the culture, and who excel in their jobs. When we hire people, we are making a commitment to their longer-term success. When we hire someone, we can build relationships with them over time, and to create a culture where our employees’ relationships with one another can thrive. To mishire someone can dissolve culture and trust quickly, thereby eroding these relationships.

Of course, we can’t always get the right hires in the right roles 100% of the time, but it is important that we take the time to create hiring strategies and processes in place to maximize our chances of success. If you would like to talk about your hiring process and strategy, we would be happy to talk with you.