How to Assess, Select, Coach, and Retain Emotionally Intelligent People

The ability to select, motivate, 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?

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:

• Successful work behavior requires a mixture of job and people skills.
• "The single best predictor of future behavior is a candidate's past behavior."
• Stay focused and conscious. Overcome emotional reactions and remain in control. Listen 80% of the time.

Preparation is key to a successful, effective interview:

During the interview procedure:

Hiring decision:

• 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.

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.

People want to know how they are doing in their jobs and how the company is doing in its business. An increasingly popular and powerful means for managers and employees to get information on their performance is multi-rater 360-degree feedback. Used independently or as part of a management development program, multi-rater 360-degree feedback can enhance self-awareness by highlighting what supervisors, peers, subordinates, and customers see as an individual's strengths and development needs. It is an exceptionally effective tool for change. No other organizational action strategy has more power for motivating employee behavior change than candid feedback from work associates. Multi-source assessment creates accountability and service to all stakeholders: supervisor, external and internal customers, including coworkers and direct reports. In recognition of the importance of human capital, organizations are spending billions of dollars to enhance human performance using multi-rater 360-degree feedback tools.

The objective of a multi-rater 360-degree feedback process is to improve the competencies, skills, and behaviors of a single person or group of individuals. Competencies have been called the DNA of organizations because they are the essence of a company's competitive advantage. Organizational core competencies are those qualities that distinguish an organization's products or services from those of its' competitors and establish value in the minds of its customers. A customized set of competencies for a specific position is developed and individuals are assessed on how well they demonstrate the desired competencies. Individuals are evaluated both on how they do the job and the results or outcomes achieved. Using 360-degree feedback instruments, employees can compare their own perceptions of their skills, abilities, and styles with the perceptions of others.

Multi-rater 360-degree feedback is a powerful process for developing people, renewing organizations, supporting a cultural change, team building, promotion and succession planning, management development, building learning cultures, and implementing strategic initiatives.

Organizations are flattening hierarchies by eliminating unnecessary layers of management and putting increased emphasis on empowerment, teamwork, continuous learning, individual development, and self-management. The Multi-Rater Model aligns with the organizations strategic vision to create opportunities for personal and career development and for aligning individual performance expectations with corporate values. As organizations change their culture to align with their vision and values, multi-rater feedback becomes a powerful method to communicate the new competencies required by the new values.

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

While creating a high-involvement culture, multi-rater 360-degree feedback provides a proactive system that aligns employees' behavior with organizational expectations. It promotes the corporate vision, improves employee interpersonal communication, and provides the constructive feedback most employees strongly desire.

How to keep workers:

The ability to retain top people is critical to a company's success. Commitment, the bond between people and the organization, has become the vitamin C of business.

Retaining key people is corporate America 's number 1 problem. A solution means more profitable companies, happier, more productive employees, and more satisfied customers.

In most organizations, the CEO sets the tone for how people are treated. Are people valued for what they do on a frequent, individual basis or are they grouped together as a line item in the budget?

Managers need to be held accountable for building a retention culture in their teams and in their departments. Research from the Saratoga Institute shows that 50 percent of work-life satisfaction is determined by the relationship a worker has with his or her boss.

Self-managed, agile organizations create work environments where people can continuously learn and make decisions.

Employers face an unexpected predicament. The economy is robust, technology is expanding our capacity, and global markets provide new customers, but companies don't have enough competent people to get the work done.

Retaining the right people is a strategic imperative. Managers and employing organizations need to understand what good people want and meet those expectations Our country's diverse workers want to control their own destiny, and make significant contributions to society through their work.

Research demonstrates that most people shift their loyalties to a new employer because of non-monetary reasons. Good people leave their jobs for the following typical reasons: 1.The company mission, vision, and values seem incongruent with their experience, 2. Leaders don't communicate how the employee is valued, 3. Inadequate resources and information, 4. No opportunity for advancement, and 5. Compensation issues.

There are a number of important strategies that companies can implement that will provide a solution to keeping valuable people. Which strategies are needed depends on the particular corporate culture. A comprehensive corporate culture survey designed and administered to all employees can help determine which strategies to employ.

Selected Strategies for Retaining Good People:

Working Resources is a Leadership Consulting, Training and Executive Coaching Firm Helping Companies Assess, Select, Coach and Retain Emotionally Intelligent People; Emotional Intelligence-Based Interviewing and Selection; Multi-Rater 360-Degree Feedback; Career Coaching; Change Management; Corporate Culture Surveys and Executive Coaching.

Dr. Maynard Brusman
Consulting Psychologist and Executive Coach
Trusted Advisor to Senior Leadership Teams
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