How To Create A High-Performance Culture
Kobi Simmat (lead image) is a self-taught expert in business management, advisory services, and the founder of Best Practice Biz. He achieved a $20 million valuation and then a successful sale of his business and now helps others unlock the full potential of their businesses. He’s also author of How to Build a Business Others Want to Buy. In this guest post, Simmat offers tips to installing a high performance culture at your agency…
Building a high performance starts with hiring the right people. I’ve been a business improvement coach for over twenty years, built a team of seventy staff and achieved a $20 million valuation and then a successful sale of my business, so I have seen what works and what doesn’t. If you want to unlock the potential of your people and build a high-performance culture, I have some tips to help you succeed, and it all starts with who you hire.
Hiring is always a hit and miss affair but over the years I’ve got better at it, mainly because I ask three outstanding questions. These questions help me achieve three things: they filter out who is most suitable for the task at hand, who will get the job done best and who is most likely to contribute to the culture I have created.
The questions revolve around three topics: 1) Do you get it? 2) Do you want it? and 3) Do you have capacity? These questions have proven remarkably efficient in helping me hire A-grade players, spot B-grade players who can be coached to become A-grade players, and actively avoid C-grade players.
You can’t build a high-performance culture with people who can’t honestly answer ‘yes’ to these three questions. If they do, however, you’re on the road to building the team you need to take your business to the next level.
The average cost of a mis-hire is 200 per cent of an annual salary, so it pays to get hiring right. I don’t leave it to chance.
Why are these three questions so powerful?
I ask these questions because I’ve been burnt in the past by people who say one thing at an interview, and do another. They tell me how good they are, how much they want the job, how hard they’ll work. They get the role but their hype doesn’t live up to their reality; they’re not half as good as they say and they can’t do the job at hand. That’s a costly own goal. I need to prevent that from happening.
Hiring well starts with asking these three key questions at the early stage of the interview process. Each question leads to more questions and each will uncover the truth about how appropriate this candidate will be for the job at hand.
Follow this script and you’ll be on your way to not only hiring the best people, but they’ll be people who remain loyal and contribute to your culture as well.
- Do you get it?
- Do you understand the job on offer?
- Do you understand the KPI metric you are being asked to reach?
- Does that metric or number motivate you?
- Have you read the job description in detail?
- Do you have the skills and experience to deliver on the job at hand?
Assuming they say ‘yes’ to those questions, I then ask:
- Do you want it?
- Now you know exactly what the role entails, do you honestly, genuinely, with no reservations want this job?
- Is there another job that you had your eye on (that you didn’t get elsewhere) which makes this role the booby prize?
- Are you interested in this role because you’ve got your eye on the prize of a bigger job a few rungs above this one?
- Do you see yourself staying in this same role for at least three years?
Assuming they know what the job entails, (they ‘get it’), and they wholeheartedly desire the job at hand (they ‘want it’), my final and perhaps most important question is…
- Do you have the capacity to take it on?
- Do you have the time, mental preparedness, skills, experience, desire and space to fully commit to this role?
- Do you have the emotional resilience to take on feedback, embrace change, express empathy and self-regulate your emotions?
- Is there anything going on in your life that will prevent you from completing this job to the standards I have just outlined in the earlier questions?
- Is there anything that could prevent you from completing these tasks in the allocated time?
Why do I ask these three questions?
We hire for will and train for skill so we take a lot of time in our hiring process to ensure we get the right people, in the right job, for the right reason.
Hiring is easy. Firing is hard. It’s costly, draining on everyone and leaves a bad taste in the mouth for all concerned. It’s also impossible to build a high-performance culture with people who don’t get it, don’t want it and don’t have capacity so it’s best not to employ them in the first place. It’s much harder to get someone out of an organisation than it is to get them in, so we spend a lot of time ensuring we get the right people in so that we don’t have to worry about moving them out.
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