Scaling your Company by Investing in your People

As a leader, I can confidently say that there is nothing more rewarding than seeing your employees thrive and grow in their roles. Too often the business world pushes the narrative that creating a unique and valuable employee experience is a cursory concern that only large companies have the resources or time to attend to. However, here at PFD, we are big believers in the idea that the culture and environment you create for your employees should be a central part of your business strategy. 

After all, companies grow due to the actions and commitment of those who work there. If you are not taking the time to create an environment in which every employee can succeed, then you are actually hurting your business. To create a company in which every employee is set up for success, we recommend that you take time to invest in three areas of your employee’s life: 

1. Ensuring cultural fit: While it is important that your employees be diverse in talent and experience, it is also equally important that each of your employees share a set of workplace values. This means that there is an understanding of what behaviors are expected and that each employee lives by that. What is crucial as a leader is to ensure that you communicate clearly what those values are on a daily basis. This can minimize conflict and create comfort by increasing clarity of expectations. 

2. Providing opportunities for growth: Your employees want your workplace to be a space where they can grow and reach their full potential. To ensure they are able to do this, you should be providing them with timely coaching and resources for learning. For example, at PFD, I make sure to build mentoring relationships with my employees to ensure that they have the support they need to accomplish all their goals. 

3. Environment: Your physical environment is something that can either add to or detract from the mental wellness of your employees. If your physical environment is sterile and dull, it may be difficult for your employees to focus. On the other hand, if there is natural light and greenery in your workplace, your employees may feel more connected to one another and motivated. You don’t need to have a Google-esque office environment, but it should be clean, comfortable, and welcoming. 

If you’d like to learn more about each of these three steps and how to fully make mentoring and employee experience a part of your business strategy, I highly recommend that you look into ordering our book The Mentorship Engine when it is released this November. The Mentorship Engine will walk you through a repeatable framework with which you can craft a compelling vision for your company and then source and retain the talent you need to fulfill that vision. If you are at all interested in the idea of growing your people while also growing your company, this will be the book for you. Keep an eye out in the coming weeks for a pre-order link.

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.

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.

GET YOUR TALENT FLYWHEEL TOOL

Talent Flywheel Sign Up