All too often, entry level jobs are filled by people who don’t seem to understand the basic rules for success on the job: be on time, show up for every scheduled work period, take some initiative to work hard on the job, be trustworthy and honest, and try to please the customer.  Wouldn’t it be easier and more efficient to know what your new employees’ attitudes in these critical areas are, from day one on the job, so that you can include training in basic work attitudes that will help them succeed?

The JOB APPLICANT SURVEY is a scientifically-designed and validated employment test that explores the work-relevant attitudes that entry level employees bring to the job.  It’s easy to use:  the Survey is administered over the internet and takes only 10-12 minutes to complete.  You get immediate results in your email inbox that you can use to help make hiring, training, and placement decisions.

There’s more! Included with the JOB APPLICANT SURVEY is an online, self-administered “ten step” training program.  Use it with all new employees to create an understanding of how to be a reliable and dependable employee.  Create motivation for success in your new entry-level employees by showing them how easy it is to succeed!

Best of all, the JOB APPLICANT SURVEY PROGRAM is affordably-priced.  For less than $10, you can learn about applicant’s attitudes in the following important work attitude areas:

• Work Ethic – being on time, showing up as scheduled, willingness to do what needs to be done, attitude toward supervisors and supervision
• Risk Areas – employee theft of company property, drug use that would affect work performance, temper control on the job
• Service Orientation – willingness to help customers, willingness to stay calm with rude customers, willingness to sell

The results of the JOB APPLICANT SURVEY PROGRAM are verified by our unique Reality√Technology which analyzes and corrects the degree to which a test-taker tries too hard to “look good.”  You can be sure that the Results Report detects and corrects the test-taker’s attempts to answer questions only in a positive way!  The result?-you learn about the real person who will be walking in the door on the first day of work!

For less than $10 per person, you can begin immediately to include objective, job-relevant, and valid information about applicants’ attitudes toward workplace behavior in your selection and hiring process!  LOOK AT AN ORDER FORM, or complete the form below and click on SUBMIT.  We’ll call you right back!

The TELLER TEST is much more than simply an arithmetic test. It measures a person’s ability to use information to solve problems quickly and accurately — and it does so in terms of typical teller transactions!

The TELLER TEST takes only 20 minutes, and you receive immediate results that help you make hiring, placement, and training decisions!

To learn more about how easily and quickly you can begin to include the TELLER TEST in your selection process, send us your name and contact information in the form below. We’ll get back in touch with you whenever you indicate it is convenient!

The first step in the hiring process is the job description. Without a thoughtfully-prepared job description, you won’t actually be sure of what you will expect from people you hire and, if you don’t know what you expect, you won’t be able to measure whether or not your employees succeed on the job. Be sure that you have defined what the job is — as precisely as possible — and from that description you will know what knowledge, skills and abilities are required for successful performance.

Have all of your applicants complete a standard application that conforms to current “best practices” and EEOC Uniform Guidelines. Most applicants have a resume, but remember that it just gives you their side of the story. A standardized application form that each applicant completes allows you to more easily compare job experience, and it usually includes confidentiality assurances.

Conduct screening interviews to confirm experience or specialized knowledge claimed on the resume and application form. The purpose of the screening interviews is to identify applicants who meet your basic requirements, which you have identified in the job description, for the job.

Conduct required background checks or other testing before you invest expensive interview time. If you are required to conduct a credit history, for example, this is the point at which you should do it.

Gather information about the applicant’s or candidate’s skills, attitudes, or job-relevant work style preferences by using employment test(s). The test or tests that you use should be determined by what job-relevant information you need. For example, for managers who direct the work of others, it is most important to learn as much as you can about how the candidate will work with others. On the other hand, if the essential job requirement is the ability to handle money accurately, an employment test that measures that ability is more appropriate.

You are ready now with a range of information about each candidate on which to base an in-depth interview. It takes time to prepare for and conduct in-depth interviews, so it makes sense to save this step for the candidates whom you have identified as most likely to meet all of your requirements.

Finally, it’s time to put together all of the information that you have gathered about candidates who have successfully completed each of the earlier steps in the process so that you can make the hiring decision. At this point, get the job description back out and review it first; this helps you avoid the trap of trying to make the job fit the candidate rather than the other way around. Make the hiring decision based on everything you know about each candidate and about what the job will require.

By following these steps, and making sure that each and every candidate goes through the same process — up to the point he or she is eliminated from further consideration if reason is found to do so — you reduce the likelihood of unfair discrimination in the selection process. You have given every applicant the same opportunity at each step of the process.

Even more importantly, by making sure that every applicant goes through the same selection process, you will achieve much more consistency and success at hiring new employees who will become assets to your company.

Sustaining outstanding performance is just as difficult as achieving it in the first place, and more and more business and industrial executives recognize the need to get objective feedback about how to maintain topnotch performance in complex environments.

Executive coaching is professional, objective coaching for an individual that is based on careful analysis of a person’s strengths, performance, and developmental need areas.  It is private and confidential, and the goal is to provide key employees with information and a supportive, structured relationship in which to use that information to improve professional performance.

Are you satisfied that key executives in your company continue to strive to improve their performance, or do they seem to be coasting on past accomplishments?  Do you have a key manager who has not seemed to find the way to unlock his potential?

I have worked with companies across the United States for the past 30 years, helping identify barriers to outstanding performance and coach executives and key managers so that they can achieve, and maintain, outstanding performance records.

We don’t live in a one-size-fits-all world, and I customize my services to your company’s needs.  Fill out the information form below for a free consultation about how I can help your executives and key managers with customized executive coaching!

In a perfect world this would be easy.  Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply say, “Tell me what motivates you and what you find de-motivating?”  The unfortunate fact of the matter is that if you were to ask this question, the answer would probably be more reflective of the applicant’s creativity in giving you an answer that sounded good rather than a 100% accurate picture of what truly works to motivate him.

There are two reasons that a straightforward question is unlikely to give you a complete and accurate picture of a candidate’s motivation.  First, remember that the candidate’s main goal in the interview is to make a good enough impression on you, the interviewer, to get a job offer or a positive recommendation to move forward in the selection process.  This goal means that, naturally enough, the applicant is going to phrase his answers to your questions in a way that he thinks is going to sound good to you — but not necessarily in a way that is a true reflection of how he actually feels.  While this is a common human reaction to being evaluated, the positive spin it creates can hide what truly motivates and de-motivates the applicant.

The second reason that the answer to your straightforward question may be misleading is subtle but important.  “Motivated” has become a significant adjective in the job-seeker’s world; most candidates understand that employers want to hire motivated people.  Asking about what motivates him may trigger the candidate’s very natural effort to seem to be highly motivated and the response that you get will very likely be designed to convince you of his enthusiasm, willingness to do what it takes, and to get ahead.  At the end of the response, though, neither one of you really understands any better what actually will motivate the person to do those things.

It takes an unusually insightful and objective person to analyze himself and then talk about what are often unconscious factors; add the stress of a job interview and the inherent desire to look as good as possible during that interview, and you have a recipe for an exchange of platitudes but not much information.

It turns out that there is something you can do to learn more about what motivates a candidate without asking him directly, and all it requires is that you turn on your good listening skills!  What we need are interview questions that draw forth from the applicant information about what motivates him without asking him directly about it.  Avoid questions that can be answered “Yes” or “No”.  Instead, ask open-ended questions that allow the applicant to paint you a picture of the circumstances and factors that worked to motivate him.  Here are three suggested interview questions that fit that bill.  Use any one or any combination of them and, of course, modify them as needed to fit your situation:

1. “On your last job, tell me about a project you worked on that was successful, or a situation that had a positive outcome.  What was your role?  What got you involved, and kept you involved?”

2. “Tell me about a project that you worked on, or a situation in which you were involved, that was not as successful as you would have liked for it to be.  What got in the way of your being as successful as you wanted to be?”

3. “What keeps you fired up?  What hasn’t worked and why do you think it didn’t work?”

The most important point to remember about asking open-ended questions is to stop talking and listen to the answers!  Give the candidate time to think about what he wants to say, and let him talk long enough so that you understand what he is telling you.  You are, in effect, listening for the meaning behind the words because that is where you will hear what motivates this person.  By the way, don’t be reluctant to follow up with more questions – open-ended, of course! – to be sure that you understand what the person is saying to you.  Your goal is to create a conversation in which you learn what drives this person to excel.

Your interview impressions of the applicant’s motivation should be backed up by doing the following:

1. Check references.  Ask references about the applicant’s general motivation level, what helps him exceed that level and what causes him to lose motivation.

2. Check your interview impressions with the impressions of other interviewers.  Pool your interview impressions of the applicant’s motivation with other interviewers’ impressions.

3. Compare your interview impressions to objective measures such as the Performance Profile.  In particular, look for strong ratings (“6” and above) on the “Energy Level” and “Take Charge Tendencies” characteristics.

4. Compare your interview impressions with a sample of the candidate’s work if obtaining a work sample is an option.  Look for circumstances and situations that seem to get the candidate fired up, and also for anything that slows him down.

It’s useful to you to know what motivates the person because, when it comes to motivation, one size definitely does not fit all.   The interview questions suggested here, and others like them, can help you figure out, for each candidate, what you can do (for example, be sure to provide adequate pay, give them autonomy, recognize their efforts, help them to master new skills, or provide meaningful purpose for their efforts) to help keep their level of motivation high.

It’s not unusual for applicants to express some degree or other of discomfort with the idea of pre-employment testing, whether the tests involved measure skills or attitudes.  That said, it’s a good idea to look at results carefully, so I went over the Performance Profile Results report with my client.  As it turned out, this applicant was rated a “4” (Marginal) on seven out of 15 personality characteristics.  To understand what was likely going on in this person’s case, let’s take a look at the most likely explanations for marginal or poor ratings on the Performance Profile.

One possible explanation for marginal and/or poor ratings on Performance Profile characteristics is “test anxiety.”  Test anxiety can probably best be defined as elevated anxiety about one’s ability to perform adequately in situations in which the outcomes will be scrutinized or judged (for example, a test with right and wrong answers.)  It’s important to understand, however, that everyone is subject to “test anxiety” to some degree; it’s what impels us to do our best on tests, in job interviews, and under all sorts of other circumstances.  (What feels like a “test” to one person might simply feel like a routine pre-employment questionnaire to another.)

Actual, debilitating test anxiety does occur, but it is far rarer than is sometimes assumed.  There are, additionally, some people who have some level of test anxiety, and previous experiences with poor test results have elevated their worry about taking tests so that it interferes with performance on written tests and questionnaires.  When test anxiety, or worry about test anxiety, does occur with respect to the Performance Profile, it is more common to see marginal and/poor ratings on most characteristics, rather than on just a few.

A second, and frankly the most likely, explanation for marginal and/or poor ratings on the Performance Profile is that they accurately represent the person’s personal work-style preferences that are driven by innate personality characteristics.  Keep in mind that the ratings on each Performance Profile characteristic are compared to the responses of thousands of individuals and have been subjected to rigorous empirical validation.

The applicant’s statement (“I don’t do well on written tests”) may refer to experiences in school that are not particularly relevant to this situation, or it may refer to test results from a very different setting that are not comparable to the Performance Profile.  The applicant may also be trying to diminish the amount of attention you pay to the test results, preferring that you rely on the interview impression (which has gone well so far.)

What should you do?  First, review the Results Report carefully, noting where the ratings of “4” or lower (that is, marginal or poor) indicate possible areas of concern with respect to the person’s ability to perform successfully on the job.  How significant, in terms of the job in which this person will be placed, will his weakness in these areas be?  If it is a concern to you, then formulate two or three probing, open-ended questions around the areas of concern that you can use in a follow-up interview.  (For suggestions about how to do this, take a look at the Performance Profile REFERENCE MANUAL; if you don’t have a copy, give me a call and we will send you one.)

The goal of a follow-up interview is to gain better insight into the applicant’s work-related work style preferences, especially ones that raise concern on your part.  You want to feel completely reassured that the areas of concern indicated on the Performance Profile Results Report will not lead to performance problems if the applicant is hired.  If the follow-up interview goes well, but you are still concerned, call me!  I am always available to go over specific results and help put them in the context of the interview and everything else you know about the applicant.

There is a final possibility:  an applicant warns you that “I don’t do well on written tests,” but the Performance Profile Report results don’t bear that statement out.  For example, there may be one or two ratings of “4” (marginal), but no strong concerns that are relevant to the job.  This may be a case of a person who worries about test anxiety, but does not actually suffer from its debilitating effects, or this person may be concerned that you are looking for a superman (that is, all high ratings) and is attempting to bring your expectations back in line with his likely performance.  In either case, there is likely no cause for concern that the Results Report doesn’t accurately reflect the person’s work style preferences; remember, all of us experience some elevation of anxiety to do well when we know other people are “watching.”  That’s a normal reaction that a testing situation creates.

The old view of intelligence was that it was fixed and unchangeable.  You inherited a certain amount from your parents and what you got was all you were ever going to get.  End of the story.

Then, along came a more enlightened view that said that what your parents gifted you with through their genes formed sort of a base amount of intelligence, but you could build on that base through education.  Parents everywhere heaved a big sigh of relief, reassured that shelling out thousands of dollars for their kids’ educations wasn’t going to be for naught.

The guest blog at the Scientific American site, written by Andrea Kuszerski on March 7, 2011, reported on her most recent brain research and here’s what I learned:

The blog article, titled “You Can Increase Your Intelligence:  5 Ways to Maximize Your Cognitive Potential,” focused on the aspect of intelligence involved in learning new information, which brain researchers call “fluid intelligence.” 

When we are faced with a new problem, fluid intelligence is what we use to evaluate the problem, come up with possible solutions, pick the solution that has the greatest likelihood of solving the problem, apply that solution and solve the problem.  Then we store that solution away in memory so that we can pull it back up when a similar problem occurs in the future.

The really cool finding in the research Ms. Kuszerski reported is that fluid intelligence is trainable and that it cumulates – that is, the more you train your fluid intelligence, the more fluid intelligence you gain.  Further, the research indicates that it is never too late to train your fluid intelligence.

So, you may be thinking, what’s the catch?  With all this good news, what’s the bad news?  The bad news is that training your fluid intelligence is not easy and it is not a one-shot deal.  But that’s all the bad news there is.  If you are willing to make a consistent effort, you can train your brain to think better.  How?  There are five strategies.  Using any one of them will produce results.  Of course, the more of the five that you use, the greater the results.  Let’s look at these five strategies.

Strategy #1:  Seek novelty – Look for new ways to get your mental gears going.  Learn a new skill or a new language.  Take a continuing education or college class in a new (to you) area.  Learn more about things outside your area of knowledge.  An easy way to do this is by learning acronyms.  For example, the acronym for the names of the great lakes is HOMES ( Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior.)  And now you have learned something new!

Strategy #2:  Challenge yourself – Contrary to popular opinion, “brain training games” like Sudoku and crossword puzzles don’t make you smarter.  They make you better at doing those games.  The key to using such mentally challenging games to make you smarter is this:  once you achieve a level of mastery at one of these games, move up to the next level or on to a new kind of game.  Doing so keeps your brain learning and growing.

Strategy #3:  Think creatively (and practically) – Practice thinking out of the box, but not too far outside the box.  Look at unusual situations and problems and think about novel ways to deal effectively with them.  The key word here is “effectively.”  Make your novel solutions do-able.  No magical or deus ex machina solutions allowed.

Strategy #4:  Do things the hard way – Your brain needs regular exercise just like your body.  Doing mental tasks the easy way lets your brain get flabby.  For example, calculators are almost always available but always using them (to calculate the tip at lunch or to verify your change after a purchase) instead of using your brain lets your brain power get weaker.  Don’t rely on calculators for everything; practice estimating instead and then check yourself.  Don’t use your phone’s memory to remember and “dial” all your calls; store the numbers in phone memory, but dial them yourself from time to time.

Strategy #5:  Network – Getting to know people and groups outside your area of expertise/knowledge exposes you to new ideas and fresh perspectives that can help you see your work in a new light.  It will also help you practice the other four strategies and,  at the same time, it is fun and interesting.

I had a physical education coach in high school whose favorite mantra, referring to physical fitness, was “use it or lose it.”  What he was trying to tell us was that if we didn’t continue to work at maintaining our physical condition, it would deteriorate.  And he was right.  There is now evidence that if we don’t continue to work at staying fit, we will put on about a pound of body weight a year without being aware of it.  That is, until we wake up one morning and discover that – surprise, surprise – we are now carrying around an extra ten or twenty pounds.

We are discovering now that the same sort of thing applies to our brain power.  Have you ever had the experience of talking with a well-educated professional who seems less on the ball than you would expect from a person with a couple of college degrees?  This might be someone who simply stopped working his brain.  He let his brain develop a bit of a pot-belly, let it go all flabby and out of shape.  Consequently, his brain no longer performed as well as it did when he was younger and expended more mental effort that kept it in trim.

Unfortunately, whether your brain is in good shape is something that you can’t accurately diagnose by yourself.  Most of us feel that we are just as mentally sharp now as we were five years ago, just as we feel we are in just as good physical condition.  Until we stop and see how many push-ups or sit-ups we can do.

I think the most effective way to approach the issue of keeping one’s brain in shape is to simply assume that it isn’t in as good a shape as you want it to be and look for ways to begin to use the five strategies I’ve listed above.

Physical Movement Feeds Your Brain

For years now we have heard that physical movement is good for you.  It should come as no surprise, then, that recent research has shown that it is also good for your brain.  The increase in blood flow to your brain that comes with movement also promotes the growth of your brain.  In particular, moving your body stimulates the parts of your brain that deal with decision-making, memory and multi-tasking.

According to Dr James A. Levine in his book, “Move a Little, Lose a Lot,” sitting is a major problem for us these days.  A hundred years ago most people spent up to 80% of their day on their feet, walking or standing.  Fewer people spent the majority of their time at desks or sitting; in fact, we may get sayings such as, “sit down and take a load off your feet” from that earlier period.  Now, thanks initially to the automobile, the growth of suburbs, and the lure of television, we no longer walk nearly as much.  In addition, our work and workplaces are increasingly denominated by computers and handheld communication tools that hold our attention and tend to keep us stationary. 

Sedentary Is Your Adversary

The average American now spends as much as 80% of his or her time sitting and only 20% in movement and activity.  While it’s obviously possible to work this way for long periods of time, we are actually handicapping our ability to perform effectively by not finding ways to keep moving. 

Your brain is part of your body.  When you move your body, your brain benefits just like the rest of your body.  Conversely, when you sit, your body begins to shut down.  Your heart rate slows and, with it, the circulation of blood to your brain slows as well.  This is why, after an hour or two sitting in front of your computer, you begin to feel sluggish and have to get up and move around a bit to stimulate your brain and “get the vital juices flowing again.”

The Motion Is the Notion

Dr. Levine’s solution to the detrimental effects of inactivity is to build more movement back into your day, but to do so gently.  He calls his system “NEAT,” which stands for “NonExercise Activity Thermogenic” ( “thermogenic” simply means burning calories.)  Notice especially that the first word in the NEAT acroym is NonExercise.  Dr. Levine is not suggesting yet another exercise routine; instead, he recommends simple physical movement – more standing and walking, doing more of the normal activities of daily life on your feet, not on your seat.

The beauty of this approach is that finding NEAT ways to do what you are already doing is readily attainable.  Take the stairs rather than the elevator, park farther away rather than as close as you can to the door, have “walking and talking” meetings rather than sit-down meetings, take a break from the computer every hour or so and get up and walk around for a bit.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Adopting a NEAT lifestyle is not a quick fix, so don’t expect results you can see right away.  But the more movement you can incorporate into your daily life, the smarter (and leaner) you can expect to become over time.  So, get off your seat and back on your feet!

In June, we talked about “Eight Rules to Becoming a Better Boss,” based on Google’s research project that was designed to engineer better managers.  I think it will be useful if we look at some of rules in the next few newsletters and talk about them in more detail.  In this newsletter, let’s look specifically at that first injunction, “Be a Good Coach.”  We may all know how important it is to be a good coach, but when it comes to translating that goal into everyday actions, it becomes less clear what to do.

The first specific recommendation with respect to being a good coach that came out of the Google research is to “provide specific, constructive feedback, balancing the positive with the negative.”  I think that this is such an important recommendation, and so easily glossed over, that it will be worth our while to look carefully at what positive feedback is, and to look at how it is different from praise.  In the next newsletter, we’ll look at negative feedback and how it differs from criticism.

Positive Feedback Is Specific; Praise Is General

Positive feedback focuses on what the person did to create a positive result.  It takes note of the steps the person took, the positive attitude necessary to deal with setbacks and missteps (which are a normal part of the accomplishment of any task,) and the resilience and persistence to see the task or project through to completion.  Here’s an example:  “Bob, I really appreciate your preparation for the ABC presentation, which was superb.  You involved every member of your team in coming up with the objections and questionable issues that were likely to be raised in the presentation.  As a result, you had not just one good response to each but, in most cases, a number of possible responses to choose from, depending on how things were going.  It worked flawlessly in the actual presentation and it resulted not only in our winning the business but in two very attractive referrals that we are now following up on.”  Positive feedback shows appreciation for a person’s specific actions and abilities.

Praise is non-specific:  “Good job, Bob.  Full steam ahead.  Way to go.”  While praise is better than not hearing anything at all about a successful effort, it can leave a person feeling somewhat empty or dismissed, as if his or her talents were not fully appreciated.   As a result, simple praise does not motivate people nearly as well as positive feedback.

Positive Feedback Is Personal; Praise Is Impersonal

Positive feedback describes the specific steps the recipient took to accomplish the task or project.  Positive feedback applies only to the person to whom it is addressed and to no one else.  It fits only one person.  Praise is impersonal and therefore vague.  “Good work” is a term that can be addressed to anyone in the company, from the CEO to the janitor, and it does not give the person who is praised a clear sense that his actions and decisions are specifically appreciated.  As such, it loses a lot of its intended power.

Positive Feedback Takes Time; Praise Is over with Quickly

It takes time to give positive feedback because you must do two things.  First, you must be aware of what the person receiving the positive feedback did to achieve his goal.  What attitudes were necessary to overcome obstacles, to deal with setbacks, and to persist in the face of difficulty?  What problems had to be solved?  In other words, how exactly did he do what he did?  Second, you must take the time to acknowledge your understanding of what the person did when you give him positive feedback.  Remember that the time you devote to giving positive feedback reinforces the value of the effort – of each small step – that was made to achieve the successful outcome.

Praise, on the other hand, because it relies on generalities, requires very little forethought or presentation time.  The problem with it is that, the more general and “automatic” it seems, the more it actually undermines motivation.  People who have solved problems and learned to do better than they thought they could like to know that someone sees what they did and acknowledges it.

Positive Feedback Requires Involvement and Observation; Praise Doesn’t

One of the most important parts of being a good manager is getting to know the people who report to you – their strengths, their weak areas that need development, their potential.  The ability to assign tasks that are meaningful, to create ad hoc teams for short term projects, and to set realistic goals is based on knowing the strengths and potential of your subordinates.  A good manager observes and evaluates subordinates constantly in order to help them perform and improve, and the feedback that the manager is able to give is therefore detailed and specific.

Choose the Difficult Right over the Easy Wrong

I found this adage in a brief list of “things your teenager should know” back in the days when I had teenagers of my own.  I don’t know how my children saw it at the time, but I liked it a lot because it applies to so many situations in life, and it certainly applies to choosing to provide positive feedback rather than general praise.

Giving a person positive feedback is choosing the difficult right thing to do.  It takes more time to prepare and more time to present; it takes more thought and consideration in order to be as effective as it has the power to be.  The goal of positive feedback is to strengthen the good habits and attitudes that lead to positive outcomes, and to recognize and reward a specific person for having achieved a positive outcome, learned a valuable lesson, and grown a bit.  Praise may be easier and faster, but it’s not nearly as effective at motivating and rewarding the behavior that you want to see more of.

I recently read about a project conducted by Google, using themselves as the “guinea pig,” that was designed to figure out, empirically rather than “by guess and by golly,” what makes a good manager.  Since that’s a subject we so often discuss, I want to bring their conclusions to your attention.

In an article that appeared in the New York Times on March 12, 2011, reporter Adam Bryant reported on the results of a research project at Google:  “Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss.”  Google is not only one of the most well-known companies in the United States right now, but also it is one of the most data-oriented.  As the company has grown, and the number of managers has increased, they have become increasingly concerned about good management practices and, according to Bryant, they decided to see if they could identify good management practices that were based on empirical data rather than on the latest academic fad.

Google took a rigorous approach.  They set up a team of 25 researchers and scientists who focus on HR-related research.  Their charge was to identify the practices and procedures that separated “good” managers from those who were least effective managers.  Their efforts were called, “Project Oxygen.”

Project Oxygen differed from similarly-intended efforts at other organizations in the scope and quantity of data that the team gathered on which to base their conclusions.  There’s a good reason, by the way, that many organizations do not undertake such a comprehensive approach:  it is extremely time-consuming (and time-consuming means expensive) to gather this much information, and it is often difficult to standardize and quantify the information.  Google brought its considerable data-mining resources to bear on the project, however, and produced a strong database of factual information from which they drew their conclusions.  The rigor with which they conducted the project strongly supports the legitimacy of those conclusions.

The Project Oxygen team gathered more than 10,000 observations of managers’ behavior on more than 100 variables from the company’s annual employee surveys, performance review scores, and other sources.  Examination of these data allowed the team to assign participating managers to one of four categories, ranging from Category One: “Most Effective Managers” to Category Four: “Least Effective Managers.”  The managers in Category One and the managers in Category Four went through carefully structured interviews that were designed to illuminate and expand on the study’s empirical findings. The interview procedure used the gold standard of research, the double-blind format in which neither the interviewers nor the interviewed managers were told which group the interviewees fell into.  The study’s empirical findings provided the skeleton of the study and information gained from the interviews put meat on those bones.

As a result of this thorough and exacting study, eight behaviors practiced by good managers were identified.  Google then used this information to develop a training program based on the eight behaviors and had all of their managers go through it.  The results were impressive; most managers bought in to the spirit of the training, and the overall ratings by employees of manager effectiveness rose.  Especially interesting was the fact that there was a 75% improvement in manager effectiveness for the managers who were in the lowest performing category by previous reviews and ratings.  Another significant aspect of Google findings is that these eight behaviors are rank ordered from most important to least important.

The eight behaviors that Google identified will seem obvious in retrospect, but Google’s project demonstrates that knowing about these eight behaviors is only half the battle.  The real payoff comes from training all managers in how to practice these behaviors, and encouraging them to look for opportunities to practice them every day.  Here they are, in order of importance:

1.  Be a good coach

• Provide specific, constructive feedback, balancing the positives and negatives
• Have regular one-on-ones, presenting solutions tailored to your employee’s specific strengths

2.  Empower your team and don’t micromanage

• Balance latitude for your employees with availability for consultation and advice
• Make “stretch” assignments to help your team or employee tackle big problems and grow as a result

3.  Express interest in team members’ success and personal well-being

•  Get to know your employees as people, with lives outside of work
• Make new members of your team feel welcome and help ease their transition to new positions

4. Don’t be a sissy:  be productive and results-oriented

• Help team members establish priorities for their work and use seniority to remove roadblocks
• Focus on goals and work with employees on how to achieve them

5.  Be a good communicator and listen to your team

• Communication is two-way; both listen and share information
• Hold all-hands meetings and be straightforward about the messages and goals of both the team and of individual team members.  Help team members connect the dots.
• Encourage open dialogue and listen to the issues and concerns of your employees.

6.  Help your employees with career development

7.  Have a clear vision and strategy for your team

•  Even in the midst of turmoil, keep team members focused on goals and strategy
•  Involve team members in setting and evolving the team’s vision and in evaluating progress toward it

8. Have key technical skills so you can help advise the team and individual team members

• Roll up your sleeves and conduct work side by side with the team when needed
• Understand the specific challenges of the work your employees do.

None of the eight behaviors are new, and many managers use some or all of them now.  Google’s Project Oxygen has done three things worthy of note.  First, it has lent legitimacy to these eight behaviors because they are based on actual observations and ratings of good managers rather than on the management “theory of the month.”  Second, by empirically establishing a rank order of the eight behaviors, they have shown that all eight are not equal in effectiveness.  This finding turned Google’s promotion policy on its head.  Instead of relying on technical competence as the primary factor in promotion decisions as they had done in the past, Project Oxygen showed that it was dead last in terms of what is important in a good manager.  Third, they have shown the powerful effect of training all managers, particularly their least effective managers, to use these behaviors.

Since we so often discuss how to find and develop good managers, I was particularly impressed by Google’s findings.  First, I found the relative importance of management skills to be instructive with respect to evaluating an applicant’s management potential; second, I was encouraged by the project’s finding about the effectiveness of good training at improving management performance.  I hope that this article is useful to you as well, and I look forward to any comments you have about it.