Successful Companies Don't Have Mediocre Employees

There's a reason it's tough to get hired by the most successful companies. Can you name a top-rated company or organization with nothing but mediocre employees? Successful companies consistently hire, develop, and retain superior performers. The best advice successful leaders, CEOs, and business experts have ever given is: hire the right people for every job in your company, develop them to the fullest, and keep them on board as long as possible.

Author Jim Collins says in Good to Great, "People are not your most important asset, the RIGHT people are." I'd take that a step further; not only do you need the RIGHT people, you need them in the RIGHT positions -- jobs that fit their personal motivational needs, behavioral patterns, and core-skills as determined by a validated assessment.

Here are seven areas an organization may want to consider to consistently hire the right people for every position in the company, develop them to their fullest, and reduce turnover by retaining those employees. These steps can take employee engagement from an art to a science. 

Identify key job accountabilities

A Key Job Accountability is a task or activity the person on the job must do on a daily basis for the position to exist. You need to know the Key Accountabilities for each job and rank them according to their importance in getting the job right as part of the Job Benchmarking process.

What are the Key Accountabilities required *by the job?* What does the job itself require - not what the manager or the people doing the job think it requires or even what they prefer. Examine the “unspoken” part of the job description and address it, quantify it, and decide to include or exclude it from a position’s key accountabilities. 

Job behaviors

What specific behaviors are required for superior performance on the job? If the job could talk, what would it say? "I need [X] to be done this specific way to be done right." Not the way it's being done now or how the employee would like to do the job or how it’s always been done before or how someone else does it or even how certain people wish it were done - but how it should be done for maximum performance and success. 

Job motivators

What attitudes and motivators does a job require for superior performance? What values does the job reward? For example, if the job calls for someone with a strong social/humanitarian attitude - someone who puts other's needs above their own - then a person with that value will be happy on the job and naturally do it the way it should be done. If a job requires continual learning and study to be successful, then someone who values learning will be happy in that position and do it well.

Can you imagine putting people into positions that actually matched their natural behaviors and internal motivations? What would that look like long term at your organization? 

Employee behavioral styles

Next, identify the behavioral styles of those currently in the job to determine if each matches the behavior required by the job. Those who match the job's behavioral requirements will do the job as it should be done and have a higher level of job satisfaction and employee morale.

Some jobs require a supportive behavioral style, some require caution, some require an outgoing, persuasive style, some require a strong results orientation. All positions may require a bit of each of those but each position will have one or two styles that mesh best with what the job requires. 

Employee attitude and motivators

Do you know what motivates your employees ... really? When employers know, really know, an employee’s motivators, it’s easy to match them to the job primary motivators. When a job rewards certain values and motivations, the people who have those values will fit the job, be energized by their work, and perform at a much higher level than those who have to force themselves to be motivated to do what the job requires. Employers must know each employee’s motivators in order to increase employee satisfaction and reduce employee conflict and disengagement. 

Job applicant’s behaviors and motivators

What are your applicants' behavioral styles and attitudes? Have you matched them to what the job requires? There's no better way to know for sure that people will be superior performers in a particular position before hiring them than to hire only those whose behavioral styles and motivators match those of the job itself. This is the one of the most powerful resources you can employ if hiring top talent is important to you. Additionally, a well structured assessment will give your specific questions to ask a potential employee. 

Motivate your employees

How much easier would it be to retain great employees if your managers had a "people manual" composed of assessments that could tell them exactly how to motivate, manage, and communicate effectively with each individual person reporting to them? NewsFlash: not all employees are the same! Each individual is motivated a little differently, communicates a little differently, and has a different skill set. As a manager, you can learn how to best connect with each employee with the proper (validated) assessment.

A recently validated assessment can take most of the mystery out of hiring and developing top talent and make employee engagement a crucial part of your retention process.

Once you take these seven steps, establishing a performance review process that includes employee evaluations based on the job's Key Accountabilities, Behaviors, Attitudes, and Core Skills is relatively easy. You have an outline of what needs to be done and how.

How do you accomplish these steps? First benchmark the job itself, not the people in the job … even those who are doing it well. Benchmarking a job (rather than an individual) removes the bias, personality contests, and non job-related elements from the hiring and managing process. Once the job benchmark is complete, then assess your employees and future applicants comparing them to the requirements outlined by the job itself.

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Ron Haynes