How to Assess, Select, Coach, and Retain Talented People
Dr. Maynard Brusman
Are you struggling to hire and retain top-performing employees? The following article by Dr. Maynard Brusman, Consulting Psychologist and Leadership Coach provides practical strategies that will help you improve your ability to select and keep exceptional employees. Drs. John Stevens, Susan Battley, Dana Ackley, Ben Dattner, John Fennig and Jim Kastenbaum, six highly respected workplace experts share their state-of-the art talent management tips and insights.

This month features the first installment of a 2-part series on how to assess, select, coach and retain. This segment will deal with assessment, selection and coaching.

The ability to select, motivate, engage, develop, and retain top people is critical to a company's success. If you want to build a company where people love to work you have to know how to hire and keep great people. Unfortunately, a poor hire can cost a company a great deal of money and cause undue distress and wasted time for everyone involved.

Great companies and managers start with optimistic, change-resilient, and committed people whose values fit the workplace culture. Keeping great people involves creating a healthy work environment where people can use all their knowledge, creativity, and skills. Self-managed organizations create work environments where people can continuously learn and make decisions.

Tracy is Vice President of Human Resources at a fast growing company in a very competitive market. However, most of the company's managers are extremely busy and find the hiring process very boring. Many resent time taken away from "important work" that needs to be done. Resumes are glanced at. Interviews consist of questions made up as the interview goes along. Interviewers talk most of the time, largely selling the virtues of the company. Hiring decisions are frequently based on impulse. Interviewers rarely find the time to get together as part of a team and discuss the candidate's work-related competencies. Tracy found herself exhausted with the process and knew there had to be a better way.

Sound familiar?

Assess and Select Top Talent

Believe it or not, hiring the right people can be enjoyable and fun. Managers can easily learn an innovative method of interviewing, hiring and retaining people based on a candidate's past performance. Research in the area of emotional intelligence supports the idea that the ability to communicate effectively with others is a critical workplace core competency. The selection and assessment process is a great place to practice these skills.

The first place to start when hiring someone is to do a job analysis. Identify the critical success factors or job-specific competencies by interviewing top performers in that position. The next step is to create a job description based on a candidate's past performance. If you want to hire great people, first define exceptional performance. Effective job descriptions define what needs to be accomplished, not the skills and experience the candidate needs to have. Research demonstrates that the ability to accomplish desired goals is a better predictor of future performance than the candidate's level of skills and experience. Comparable past performance is a good predictor of future accomplishment.

What is a competency?

Competencies are behaviors that distinguish effective performers from ineffective ones. Certain motives, traits, skills, and abilities are attributed to people who consistently behave in specific ways. A competency model depicts a set of desired behaviors for a particular job position or level. A competency model also implies that such behaviors are predictive of who is likely to be successful in a position or role.

Two distinct groups of competencies are assessed during any job interview.

Key Points for Conducting an Effective Interview:

If you want to be a great company, you need to hire great employees who are learning agile. The employment interview is the most important thing that you do. The 60 minutes you spend in an interview will determine whether you get a top-notch employee or a loser and a potential lawsuit. If you handle it right you get an A player who will bring value to your company. Handle it wrong and you end up with a problem employee, or even worse: a discrimination lawsuit.
Preparation is the key to a successful, effective interview:

1. Do a Job Analysis. Identify critical success factors or job-specific competencies.
2. Create a job description based on what work needs to be accomplished.
3. Read candidate's resume and reference letters.
4. Decide how long the interview should take, generally 30-60 minutes.
5. Write job-specific competency questions. Example: Tell me how you have used your computer skills to accomplish a specific business objective?
6. Write Interpersonal or Emotional Intelligence competency questions. Example: Conflict in the workplace is inevitable. Can you tell me about a time when you were able to handle a difficult situation with a coworker? How did you know that the situation was making you upset? (Self-Awareness).
7. Indicate problem behaviors (would cause a competent person to fail) on Job Rating Sheet.

8. Decide if a work sample is necessary and how the skills should be demonstrated.
9. Incorporate valid, reliable and job-related pre-employment tests.

During the interview procedure:

1. Ask specific job skills and education competency questions that you have prepared.
2. Ask interpersonal skills competency questions. Interpersonal competency questions represent approximately 70 % of any interview, supplemented by other types of questions.
3. Take notes, including any potential problem behaviors.
4. Note areas for personal and career development.
5. Call references.
6. Complete a Hiring Rating Sheet including ratings on general impression, interpersonal skills and job-specific competencies, work simulation observations, test results, references and recommendations for hire.

Hiring decision:

1. Each member of interviewing team shares analysis of candidate's work-related competencies and other job-related data with the hiring manager and a final decision is made.

What strategies do you use to help companies assess and select top talent?

John Stevens, Ph.D.

Another useful approach to building "top talent" in a company is to build and strengthen the "wheel". The Talent Wheel, that is. The Talent Wheel is an interconnected series of critical human resource activities, each leading to and supporting the next in a cycle that eventually returns to the start-point, only to begin again…much like "points" on a rolling wheel. And like a rolling wheel, each revolution of the Talent Wheel can carry the organization further toward building it's cadre of top talent. However, again just like any wheel, weakness or 'damage' in any component part of the wheel can derail or hamper forward movement.

The Talent Wheel begins with Selection, which implies making a choice from among several candidates for hire. As noted elsewhere in this article, there are a number of important considerations and practical steps to selecting the 'right' candidate for hire.

The next critical activity is to Hire the selected candidate. This involves getting the candidate to want to work for your company and to accept your offer of employment. More than a few good candidates have been lost because of poor handing of the hiring process. A well-grounded and respectful approach to negotiating the hire offer will increase a company's chances of "signing" the people-talent it most desires.

Assuming the selected candidate is hired, the next critical activity is Orientation or on-boarding. The first 2-6 weeks of a person's employment is the time that first impressions are made of the new hire as well as by the new hire. Long enduring work attitudes and behaviors are shaped during this period as the new hire experiences 'how things are done around here'. Company land-mines and sacred cows can derail or disrupt the new hire's performance potential. A sound, well thought-out orientation experience will enable a new hire to not only avoid early missteps but also help him or her adopt those work attitudes and behaviors most valued by the company.

At some point, the new hire will be absorbed into the company and be subject to both the informal and formal systems for judging, evaluating, and appraising his or her performance and contribution. Some type of ongoing assessment is made of the employee's performance (i.e., what he/she did or didn't do), talent and skill (i.e., what he/she can or can't do), capability (i.e., what he/she will or won't do), and potential (i.e., what he/she could or couldn't do). An employee's perception of how fair and accurate such assessments are and how constructively feedback is shared significantly influences the degree to which he or she remains willing to give a 'best effort' to the company's agenda.

Both formal and informal ways of assessing an employee during his or her tenure with a company combine to produce one of four outcomes, or Dispositions. Depending on how the employee is viewed, a decision is made deliberately or otherwise to: 1) train and development him or her; 2) tolerate and accept his or her behavior and level of contribution; 3) transfer or promote him or her; or, 4), demote or fire him or her.

The first two dispositions cycle back to the ongoing assessment of the employee, creating a kind of mini-loop within the larger Talent wheel. The latter two dispositions result in the employee vacating his or her original position, thus bringing us full circle back to Selection.

By deliberately and systematically strengthening the elements and processes within each of the human resource components that comprise the Talent Wheel, companies can keep their organization 'rolling' forward toward building top talent within its ranks.

Susan Battley, Ph.D.

I typically approach assessment and selection from a "goodness-of-fit" perspective. My clientele consists primarily of senior executives and board directors in both the for-profit and public sectors. Early in the search/selection process, I want the search committee to answer these three questions:

  1. What is the most important attribute you are looking for in your new executive that is not experience or education-related?"
  2. Describe the ideal relationship between the board and the chief executive."
  3. "In the last two years, what has the board (or senior executive team) spent the most time on?
    Looking ahead, is this likely to stay the same or to change?"

Helping the search committee identify - and agree upon - critical job success criteria greatly improves the probability of a "whole-person fit" between the new executive hire and the organization, its strategic goals, culture, and key stakeholders.

Dana Ackley, Ph.D.

Many executives avoid, perhaps even dread, hiring activities because they don't feel they know how to do it successfully. This is understandable. Research suggests that there is only a 50% hit rate using a standard interview process. Those executives who rely primarily on interviews are punished over and over again by mis-hires. Since most people avoid punishment as much as they can, such experience leads many executives to spend as little time as possible on hiring activities.

The hiring process does not have to be so punishing. Putting the right kind of effort into the process can allow executives to reap rewards of success.

Dr. Brusman is right. The first step to a successful hire is to figure out what the job really is. This may not be as easy as it sounds. I am continually surprised by how little colleagues know about each other's duties. Therefore, don't assume that you really know what the job in question entails. Since this is normal, don't be embarrassed by not knowing.

Dr. Brusman is also correct that all jobs require both technical and what are now called emotional intelligence (EQ) skills. EQ skills can be thought of as those additional skills that some people have that empowers success. In 1980, a research psychologist, Dr. Reuven Bar-On, asked: "What skills, beyond intellect, do people need to succeed?" His seventeen year research project identified fifteen skills that differentiate successful from unsuccessful individuals. Examples include empathy, self regard, stress tolerance, optimism and problem solving. Individuals with the right mix of EQ skills for their particular job can add more than double to the bottom line than do individuals who may be equally smart and technically skilled but don't have the right EQ skills.

So, when you are learning about the job you want to fill, ask about both the technical knowledge/skills that are necessary and about what personal/interpersonal skills are needed in order to execute the duties at a high level.

Example: A company wanted to significantly upgrade its sales force, adding several positions as well as replacing some low performers. At first, an executive might think he knows what sales entails. In reality, different sales people do different things depending on many factors, such as the nature of the product or service, who the customer is, kind of competition, pricing etc. A car salesperson needs different skills that someone involved in business to business sales of million dollar contracts. Similarly, while there is overlap among the duties of most CEO's, their jobs are likely to have considerable variance as well. Message? You will increase your hiring hit rate if you don't trust your preconceived notions.

To learn about the needs of this sales force, the client company held a meeting of its leaders and their key sales professionals. First we had sales people describe their jobs, i.e., what they really do every day. Second, because the company already knew that they wanted to add EQ assessment to their hiring process, we put an EQ lens on it. We split into small working groups to determine their opinions about which five EQ skills matter most of the fifteen possibilities.

Finally, I interviewed several key sales professionals regarding significant success and failure sales experiences. I studied their stories to see which EQ skills were most prominent in success experiences and seemed to be absent in those that did not go well.

Combining all the data, we determined that the EQ skills that best facilitate success for this particular sales staff are Interpersonal Relationship, Problem Solving, Empathy, Optimism, Assertiveness and Reality Testing.

The company added a two step EQ assessment to their hiring process. Step one is to ask top candidates to take an assessment tool that measures the fifteen EQ skills (Emotional Quotient Inventory or EQ-i). Step two is a behavioral interview that probes for these EQ skills. For example, in assessing Interpersonal Relationship, we ask "Tell me about a customer with whom you have developed a good relationship. How did that relationship evolve?"

Ben Dattner, Ph.D.

First of all, I work with clients to define the job, specify the criteria that will be used to predict whether or not a candidate is likely to succeed in the job, and then design a consistent, defensible strategy for assessing candidates against those criteria. Part of hiring right is about avoiding hiring mistakes, and so I endeavor to educate my clients about common hiring errors. For example, I describe why employment interviews are so often inaccurate predictors (see: http://www.dattnerconsulting.com/presentations/interviews.pdf ).

I always encourage clients to use multiple, valid measures to assess candidate attributes and potential, and advocate using a combination of well-validated analytic ability and personality assessment instruments
(see: http://www.dattnerconsulting.com/presentations/selecthandbook.pdf )

John Fennig, Ph.D.

Since I began consulting in 1989, I've seen an increasing openness of the business community to using better approaches for assessing, coaching and retaining talent. But in the last two years, there has been a significant interest in culture change and development. I believe business leaders are coming to see that the "people side" of the business success equation has validity for increasing sales, profitability, quality and output while decreasing many forms of waste (including, unnecessary and unplanned attrition). As corporate and consulting psychologists, we have a unique skill set that enables organizations to get their people to work more effectively, while also having a higher standard quality of worklife.

Jim Kastenbaum, Ph.D.

At present, the hallmark of my method for assessing/selecting top talent is pre-employment assessments. These include nine tests, and a 60-90 minute interview. The testing is benchmarked against specifics for the position (competencies and characteristics) as well as fit with the hiring company's culture. I have found two elements that differentiate my process. First, I create a readable and thorough report of the findings, splitting the findings into strengths and weaknesses (my clients find this very easy to read and understand). Second, I have an in depth meeting with my clients to review the report. That meeting often surfaces questions and issues which lead my clients to an even better hire/no hire decision.

Coaching Star Performers

The most important thing managers can do is to guide individuals to develop in ways that will prepare them for changes in their work, increase their job effectiveness and improve their value to the organization. Mangers can help people take personal responsibility for growth and continuous learning aligning personal development goals with the organization's business goals.

Research indicates that if leaders complete these basic steps in the behavioral coaching process, they probably will improve.

1. Allow leaders to be involved in determining desired behaviors. Leaders cannot be expected to change their behavior if they lack a clear understanding of the company's goals.

2. Let leaders assist in identifying key stakeholders. There are two major reasons why leaders deny the validity of feedback: wrong items or wrong raters. When leaders and their managers agree in advance on desired behaviors and key stakeholders, they buy into the coaching process.

3. Collect feedback. The coach can accomplish this by interviewing key stakeholders and using 360-degree rating systems.

4. Determine key behaviors for change. Select only one or two key behaviors that will have the most positive impact on effective leadership.

5. Have the leader respond to key stakeholders. The leader being coached should talk with each key stakeholder to collect additional suggestions on how to improve in the targeted areas. The leader should keep the conversation positive, simple and focused.

6. Review what has been learned, and help the leader develop an action plan. After listening to suggestions, the leader must return with a plan describing what he or she wants to accomplish. The coach then provides encouragement that helps the leader live up to each commitment.

7. Develop an ongoing follow-up process. Follow-up should be very efficient and focused on the future, incorporating questions like, "Based upon my behavior last month, what ideas do you have for me for next month?" Within six months, conduct a two-to six-item mini-survey with key stakeholders, asking whether the leader has become more or less effective in each targeted area for improvement.

8. Review results and start again. If the leader has taken the process seriously, stakeholders invariably report improvement. Build on this success by repeating the process for the next 12 to 18 months. This type of follow-up will assure continued progress on initial goals and uncover additional areas for improvement.

The coach must keep the focus on the specific behaviors selected with the leader, facilitate information collection from key stakeholders, and emphasize positive, measurable progress as noticed by team members and stakeholders.

People want to know how they are doing in their jobs and how the company is doing in its business. Multi-source assessment creates accountability and service to all stakeholders: supervisor, external and internal customers, including coworkers and direct reports

Multi-rater 360-degree feedback has many well-documented benefits:

What strategies do you implement when coaching a star performer?

John Stevens, Ph.D.

Related to the ideas and suggestions presented elsewhere in this article for coaching employees toward 'star' performance is the notion that 'what got you here is not going to get you there'. A book with this title was recently authored by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter and underscores the importance of continuous learning and development for those seeking advancement and success as business professionals.

With this notion in mind, efforts to coach star performers need to include tactics and strategies that will help prepare today's star performers for the challenges and demands that come with changes in the business or organizational context that they are currently 'starring' in and/or that come with their advancement to a higher, more responsible position.

For example, exhibiting stellar performance as a mid-level department manager in a mid-size company experiencing slow growth and consolidation requires a very different skill-set and a very different mind-set than would be required for stellar performance in a mid-size company experiencing rapid growth and tumultuous organization change. Likewise, the skills and capabilities to perform like a 'star' as a mid-level manager are very different than the skills and capabilities necessary to perform like a 'star' at a senior manager level. Yet many managers continue to believe that they simply need to continue doing what they have done to be a star in a previous context or at a previous organization level but with more intensity after they have been promoted or after the organizational context has changed.

Coaching from a peer, a boss, or an external consultant can be a critical ingredient in helping a person incorporate and use new learning, insights, and behavioral skills to continue exhibiting stellar performance in a new or different set of circumstances.

Therefore, it is often helpful to coach people toward stellar performance in their current circumstance while at the same time helping them to acquire the learning, insights and behavioral skills necessary for stellar performance at the next level of responsibility and/or in a new organizational context.

Susan Battley, Ph.D.

I employ an evidence-based Five-Step Coaching Model:
1) Define; 2) Assess; 3) Plan; 4) Act; and 5) Review. Star performers are results-oriented people. This model enables the coaching client, the coach, and any sponsors to make before-and-after performance comparisons, and also to determine the return on investment (ROI) of the coaching program.

Star performers may overuse their strengths, or otherwise possess blind spots in their attitudes and behavior that create hidden job or career risk. When possible, I put them through an assessment that maps how their particular styles and preferences can create performance risks, especially when they are tired or under stress.

Dana Ackley, Ph.D.

A key strategy I use is to link the desired behavioral change to something that matters to the star performer. In my initial assessment of a coaching client, I ask such questions as:

Once I assemble all the assessment data, I link problems that the client wants to solve to the assessment results. I demonstrate how developing one or more specific EQ skills will be instrumental in getting the desired results.

For example, one CEO wanted to increase the frequency with which his senior team kept commitments they made to him. Assessment showed that he was not as assertive as he needed to be. His staff did not really know what mattered to him and what didn't. It was easy to make the link of building his assertiveness skills with getting the results that he wanted. This direct line of sight from the change I wanted him to make (build assertiveness) to the problem he worried about (better commitment from his team), he invested himself in the process with high motivation.

Ben Dattner, Ph.D.

I help him or her gain a better understanding of his or her strengths and development needs, using a standard coaching process.
(see: http://www.dattnerconsulting.com/presentations/execcoaching.pdf )

However, when working as a coach, I am always careful not to play the problematic roles of evaluator, messenger or advocate, as these can hinder the efficacy of coaching. (see: http://www.dattnerconsulting.com/threeroles )

John Fennig, Ph.D.

There are a couple of key strategies that we use. First, because we are a training shop in the field and because often "two minds are better than one", we staff our coaching projects with two consultants and try to balance gender and other factors on the coaching team relative to the client. We find that clients are willing to pay the extra money for the advisory team, so this is not a financial disincentive to us, rather the contrary.

A second key strategy is to have the person we are coaching produce a list of current real-world leadership challenges that they are facing and ensure that our coaching work, while often skills based, is informed by and applicable to the clients real world daily job challenges, opportunities and/or stresses.

Jim Kastenbaum, Ph.D.

Coaching begins with two elements: determine what the company sees as the professional development needs of the star and separately assess the star's capability to attain those development goals. I assess the company's view by interviewing key stakeholders, as well as doing a 360-degree assessment (I have used the Denison Leadership Development Survey with very good success). The other assessment process is a full day assessment which examines the star's capabilities in the areas of: Problem Solving Skills/Style; Motivation and Personality Characteristics; Interpersonal and Team Skills/Style; and, Leadership and Management Skills/Style. In that assessment, I benchmark the test/interview findings against the aforementioned company views. The result is a document which shows where the person is, where they need to be and a development plan of how they can get there. This is reviewed with the company (the star's mentor/coach needs to be in that meeting, as well as in all phases of this process), and then in a follow-on meeting with the star, mentor and myself.


© Copyright 2007 Dr. Maynard Brusman, Working Resources