A DEEPER QUESTION: How to Measure Passion in an Interview...

You want candidates who are passionate about what they do for a living, don't you?

Of course you do. But passion for a profession is tough to get a grip on.  Find out whether the people you are interviewing have passion for what they do (or are simply paying the bills) through some of the following interview strategies:

1. Ask candidates how they stay up to date in their field.  If you see a glut of reliance on professional training and formal activities that happen in company time, you're probably not dealing with passion.

2. Ask a candidate to give you a big question in their field they'd like to solve and why. Ask them what they've done related to starting to figure out the answer.  Probe hard on the answers they give.  See any creativity?  You might have passion.  See lots of glittering generalities?  That's fake passion. 

3. Ask a candidate how they find others in their profession to connect with, and how often they connect with others in their field outside their company.

What do they talk about?  What type of information is exchanged? How have those connections helped them?

4. Ask Motivational Fit questions - When have your been most satisfied in your work at Company X?  Least Satisfied? If the answers show a consistent theme of talking about BS factors rather than a clear line towards being able to do interesting work related to their field, it's hard to project them as passionate in their field.

And no Skippy - passion for something that's not work related doesn't count for you as an interviewer - it's nice to know you run marathons, but it has no impact on things that emulate from passion for the profession - continuous improvement, innovation, etc.  It does tell me you're not going to cost a lot for healthcare, though.  Thanks!

Start asking questions that give you line of sight for professional passion on your candidates. No fake passion or passion that doesn't produce results.

Or just keep looking for people that want to make the donuts and go home.  

Stuff the Capitalist (aka KD) Likes: White Guys Giving Bad High-Fives Inside Your Company

Who am I?  Who cares?  Good questions.  It's my site, so I'm going to tap into Fridays once in awhile by telling you more about who I am - via a "Stuff I Like" series.  Nothing too serious, just exploring the micro-niche that resides at the base of all of our lives.  Potshots encouraged in the comments.

There's nothing better than white guys giving bad High-Fives inside your company.  

Note: My name is Kristian Patrick Dunn. I'm a white guy. Irish-American, even. It's OK for me to have this opinion. 

For the rest of my thoughts I why I love this so much - click over to my post on topic at Fistful of Talent, where you'll find the following featured:

1. Bro activity - bad posturing as you give the high five outside the conference room.

2. Puddy from Seinfeld - as an example of asking for the high-five, a sure sign that you shouldn't be giving it.

3. Height and gender challenges with high-fives - now derailing this simple team-building activity at a company near you.

If you're a white guy or love a white guy who's reaching with his use of the high-five, click over at take a look at this post now.

Still, when a white guy gives a bad high-five, I can't....look....away....

Ambition: Value The Folks In Your Organization Who Are Dissatisfied (In a Good Way)...

"You go out to eat, can't pay, y'all can't leave
There's dishes in the back, he gotta roll up his sleeves
But while y'all washin', watch him
He gon' make it to a Benz out of that Datsun
He got that ambition, baby look in his eyes
This week he's moppin' floors, next week it's the fries.."

--Golddigger, Kanye West

Ambition.  As much as many of us are uncomfortable saying it's a value/feeling/potential factor we want in our organization, ambition is needed in your company in order to get good stuff done.

Here's the golden nuggett last year from Paul Hebert over at Fistful of Talent:

"Mad Men Season 5 started this past week.

Full disclosure, before this past week’s episode, I’ve watched a total of 6 minutes of Mad Men.  But the hype was too much for me to bear, so I DVR’d it and sat and watched it the other night.  It’s awright.

But… I liked it a lot more when I heard this line…

“Dissatisfaction is a symptom of ambition. It’s the coal that fuels the fire.”

The more I thought about it, the more I liked it and the more I figured there was a lesson in it.

And here’s the lesson IMHO:

If you work too hard to make every employee happy and satisfied, you create a group of people who never want anything to change."

Interesting and true in my eyes.  If everyone's satisfied with how things are going, who pushes the envelope and tries to change things for the good at your company?

Backstory: A few years back, I was doing a classic "section 2" in performance management for the company I was with.  As part of that exercise, we were trying to change the traditional company values we were rating people on (hard to do and pretty ineffective) to "potential factors", which are more like "DNA" strands you want to evaluate all your people on.  The things you value most across all employees, regardless of role.  

As part of that exercise, we did broad brainstorming as a leadership team - coming up with 37 potential factors to whittle down to the 5 or 6 we would eventually go live with.  The ones you would expect were there - innovative, driven, etc.

2 members of the leadership team came up with - and were adamant about including - ambition in that list.

You would have thought that they did something unmentionable to the American flag.

As it turns out, the rest of the team couldn't get past the fact that ambition comes with some negative baggage - sometimes people act in self-serving ways, a zero-sum game mentality can be rewarded, etc. No matter how the 2 leadership team members came back to the positives associated with ambition, the others couldn't get over the negative attributes associated with its use as a potential factor.

But ambition is real and gets results, just like Mad Men and Paul outline above.  

It takes a gutsy company to include ambition in a performance system.  But, whether you put it on paper or not, you're likely rewarding ambition behind the scences in your company.

5 Things You Need to Make Everyone Hate Your Success (The Duke Haterade Primer)...

Capitaist Note: Duke is in the Sweet 16 and angling for another Championship.  How's that working for you?  I'm running this post from a few years back, because the teams I really wanted to follow this spring - Gonzaga and Ole Miss - are out. That leaves me with the boys from Durham.  I watched them last night in the second round and was... like.... meh....

I kid.  But I'm guessing that if you polled all the serious college basketball fans in America, you would find that around 80% hate Duke.  Just flat out hate them.  At one time, I didn't like Duke either, mainly because I thought they won because they usually had 8 high school All Americans, spread the floor and let the natural advantages they had dominate. It wasn't a complex thing for them to win.  I changed my mind and became a Duke fan awhile back, because I thought they were actually over-achieving based on the talent they had.  For those of you scoring at home, that makes me a "flip-flopper", or as the Duke haters like to say, a "scum-sucker".

Why do the masses hate Duke so much?  Here's one of the million primers from Cory Smith at the Samford Crimson:

"Let's start with one of the most obvious reasons that no one can explain, and that is the players and the coach. The coach with the last name spelled like a first generation Icelander that you have to wear an oversized retainer to pronounce. You know the players, too. JJ Redick, Bobby Hurley, Greg Paulus.

I have heard people say they do not like Duke's players because they are pasty white. I have a hard time with this one since I am of the Caucasian persuasion myself. I don't like Duke's players or Coach K because they come off as just plain smug. Much like most of the students accepted there, the players seem as though they think they are better than the opponents simply because they are at Duke. From Coach K's American Express commercial where he all but declares himself the Gandhi of college basketball to the look of disbelief on his and his players' faces when they are called for a foul while the victim crawls out of the third row of cameras, it is very clear that Duke loves Duke, and they cannot understand why everyone else doesn't as much as they do. That is with the exception of the media, namely Dick Vitale."

The Duke hate started me thinking about other teams and corporations that, over time, the masses love to hate.  You know the targets of this hate - it's sports teams like the Yankees, Duke and the Lakers, and corporations like Microsoft, Apple and yes Dorothy - even Google these days. 

These teams and companies are good at what they do and provide value, so why do people hate them?  Here's my the Capitalist list of the top five things you need to have in place to make people hate you as much as Duke or Microsoft:

1.  Lots of Sustained Success - Let's face it, it's not enough to win one title or launch one killer product.  No, you need to be successful for a long time - a decade seems to be a nice round number for starters.  Think about Microsoft, the Yankees and Duke - they all have success that's measured in decades, not single digit years.  You hate them because you're tired of seeing it.

2. A Leader That Gets So Much Press You Can't Help But Hate Them- Coach K and the American Express commercials.  Bill Gates back in the day.  Steve Jobs in the mock turtleneck - again. George Steinbriener in the luxury box with the Magnum P.I. shades.  These images, combined with the other factors, make us pray for an alternative to rise out of the ashes - and eject the golden franchise back to the pack - not for one year, but for eternity. 

3. Aggressive and Demonstrative Behavior Designed To Snuff Out the Competition and Keep Them On Top - Here's where it gets interesting.  You think all that success is easy to maintain?  Nope, in order to stay on top, you've got to be alert and ready to try and dismantle all comers - and everyone else is ALWAYS going to give you their best shot.  So, you do what champions do - you dig in, get aggressive and try aggressively to maintain your position.  For Microsoft, that meant embedding the browser in the operating system and killing Netscape.  For Duke, it means their guards are trying to get themselves ready to play by slapping the floor on defense (like nails on a chalkboard for all the Duke haters) or holding the follow-through on their shot for an extra two seconds.  You're on top, you compete to stay there.  Sometimes it looks really cocky.  Enter more hate...

4. Media Coverage of the Success and Culture - Apart from the press coverage of the Coach K and Bill Gates leader types, sustained success also brings one thing for sure - 24 hour coverage of the culture of the winning company/program.  That means at one point, we heard so much about the Redmond campus we could scream.  We hear so much about how the Duke program is different due to the academic mission of the University, we're rooting for the diploma mill instead.  America loves an underdog, and in the 24/7 media world, Microsoft, Apple and Duke are overexposed from a media perspective.  As a result, we hate.

5. The "They Only Win Because They're Rich" Objection - What follows sustained success?  Money.  Lots of Money.  So when Microsoft, Apple, the Yankees and Duke win, they've got resources to throw at problems and competitors.  If you're a Royals, Netscape or a NC State fan, what do you point to as the reason you can't get a win against the established power?  Money, dude.  We hate the winners because they're rich.  We're not. We're unlikely to be rich anytime soon.  HATE!

It's human nature to hate the winners - the BIG winners.  May your hate keep you warm in the winter of your career and help you raise your game.

Or you can just hate without regard to your own performance.  Either way is fine with me...

Are Motivational Posters in the Workplace Dead? If So, What's Next?

I'll admit it.  I never liked the fluffy motivational posters that people like Successories put out. You know the ones - big title like "Potential" with a picture of an iceberg with a subtitle that says, "the greatest things you're capable of are unseen by others."  Or some %$#$ like that.  I'm probably not the best one to write those things.

Because I'm jaded.  

As I travel around, I see fewer and fewer of the "up with people" motivational posters.  I think they've run their course for the most part, where even the optimists get limited pump from seeing the iceberg.

Which begs a question - if Successories are dead, what's next?  What's next is you writing you own catchy slogan. Something with your personality, decidedly un-"successories" like and hopefully with a little humor mixed in.

You know - write a slogan like regular people talk.  Something that could hit a t-shirt at your company that real people can related to and maybe rally around a little bit. Need examples?  I've one for you from the world of sports that should get your corporate creativity flowing...

Let's look at Ray Lewis (controversial linebacker for the Super Bowl Champion Ravens).  He's "Pissed Off for Greatness":

Why is he pissed off for greatness?  Because he's tired of you being OK with being mediocre.  You're better than that, my friend, you just need to get a little pissed off.  Here's video of Ray explaining his performance philosophy (email subscribers click through for video), watch the whole thing (2 minutes):

Oh my.  It's a call for discretionary effort, but rather than saying those words or talking about boring words like engagement, he's wrapping it up in the mantra "pissed off for greatness". Which is pure play t-shirt and coffee mug fodder that the cynics can rally around.  

We all need the same things from our people.  Think differently about how you market that need to cut through the clutter, and you win big.

MATH: How Much Would Banning "Reply All" Save Your Company?

Reply all?  It sucks, right?  But does it really cost your company anything?  Do the math on some numbers that I spotted recently in BusinessWeek:

"At least 15 percent of a typical office worker’s day is spent on e-mail, and 5 percent of e-mails received are replies to all, according to data from VoloMetrix, a Seattle startup that tracks, minute by minute, how its clients’ employees use technology at work. While that might sound like a small number, spread those stats over a 10,000-employee company and “you rapidly get to a pretty big number in terms of dollar cost—in the tens of millions of dollars [per year],” says VoloMetrix founder Rya n Fuller. For worker productivity, he says, “It’s death by a thousand cuts.”

So let's roll with that math.  Let's say you have a 1,000 person white collar company and the average salary is 50K.  If 15% of a worker's day is spent on email, and 5% of that email glut is reply all, then you could make an arguement that about 15.6 hours a year are spent on reply all types of emails.  Do the math - $24.03 per hour on average X 15.6 hours X 1,000 FTEs, and you've got an intereresting total - $375,000.

But the math is really only part of the equation, right?  It really comes down to how productive - or unproductive - you feel the reply all button is.  

Answer that question and you're ready to answer the big question - Do you believe that reply all is so unproductive that you would remove the functionality from Outlook to prevent it's misuse?

Well?  Do you feel lucky, punk?  Would you do it?  Geek posts like this one say it can be done.

What would you do if you ruled the world?  Or at least your division?

Stuff the Capitalist (aka KD) Likes: The Goldfinger Channel on Pandora...

Who am I?  Who cares?  Good questions.  It's my site, so I'm going to tap into a Friday once in a awhile by telling you more about who I am - via a "Stuff I Like" series.  Nothing too serious, just exploring the micro-niche that resides at the base of all of our lives.  Potshots encouraged in the comments.

I like Pandora. Big deal.  So do all of you with an iPhone.

More specifically, I like the GoldFinger channel on Pandora.  Not specifically because of Goldfinger, although I like them a lot.  Who can forget their classic cover of 99 Red Ballons?  See the video below (email subscribers, click through):

Nice.  But the real power of Pandora is that it doesn't let you just listen to what you want.  It's stretches your horizons a bit by making recommendations on what you might like if you like Goldfinger.

I added Goldfinger to my Pandora stream after eating dinner with some smart HR folks in the South/South-Midwest this week.  One of them told me to add the Neon Trees.  Good advice.  (shout out - hi team!)

So I start listening to the Goldfinger channel, and I get introduced to about 5 bands like them, including a classic cover band called "Me First and the Gimme Gimmes".

You don't get that from a service that sucks.  Pandora gives me what I want, then diversifies me.  

BTW, the CD cover that I saw from the Gimme Gimmes was "Ruin Jonny's Bar Mitzvah".  Sold.  And yes, that's one of the Foo Fighter's guitarists that contributes to the Gimme Gimmes.

I'm KD, and I like the Goldfinger channel on Pandora.

Tell me what I should add on Pandora in the comments...

Your CEO Is Dedicated to Building a Great Culture? Here's a Simple Test to Prove It...

Ask him to give you (the HR/Talent pro) veto power on any hire you think isn't a cultural fit.

That's veto power even if the business leader wants to hire the person.  It used to be called the "nuclear option" during the cold war.  Of course, you'd exercise that power with care.  You'd push and prod just like Reagan did back in the day, but you'd stop short of using it - most of the time.  

It's called leverage.  You.  With veto power over anyone who would be a net negative to the culture.

That's the test to see if your CEO is serious, or if he just read that culture is important in last month's issue of the Harvard Business Review.  Not that there's anything wrong with that...

GOING GLOBAL: How to Be Global in Today's Workplace Even If You Only Speak English...

I know.  You're expecting something brilliant here, maybe a flow chart or a strategic Malcolm Gladwell video.

Wrong post.  I'm simply going to tell you how to start looking like a global manager or employee even if you're locked in to Peoria as your home base 100% of the time.  The basics to get started - check it:

Rule #1 to looking global:  ALWAYS DO THE MATH FOR THE PEOPLE YOU TALK TO RELATED TO THE TIME ZONE THEY ARE IN.  That's actually rule 1-5.  Being global, or even being bi-coastal in the states means that the people you talk to should be comfortable that you're dependable, accessible and in many ways, just like the people they're talking to across the hallway.

That means you don't tell them, "let's meet at 1pm" - and you're referring to 1pm your time.  Or even say, "let's meet at 1pm my time".  You want to be on their team even though you're not there - DO THE MATH FOR THEM.  Especially if you're requesting the meeting or are the leader.

Time zones mean friction.  You job with remote folks is to take friction out of the system.  Make them want to work with you by at least taking the time zone friction off the table.

Rule #2 to looking global, even when you're not:  Don't do all the meetings with people in time zones other than yours at times that are simply convenient for you.  I can't say it any better than my friend, Gerry Crispin, who laid out the following comment on this post of mine over at Fistful of Talent:

"Don’t make weekly calls of your team (matrixed or not) at times convenient for you simply because you are the team leader. Spread them around and get your tail out of bed at 3am on occasion."

Gerry actually has some deeper comments about working with a global team, so check them out on that post.

But, this post is about the basics.  You can't possible do all the cultural things you'll need to do in a global spot before you have the moxie and selflessness to do the math for the people you're trying to schedule.  

Walk before you run.  Then maybe your company will talk to you about that spot in London.  Or, maybe Lithuania might be a better fit for you.

The Poor Man's Guide to Employee Engagement...

My definition of employee engagement: Discretionary effort that you don't have to threaten someone to get.  

Threatening or even asking means the resulting effort is not discretionary - funny how that works...

Lots of things go into creating an environment that draws discretionary effort.  Hiring the right people is a start.  Having managers that can have a two-way conversation is a good follow up to that.

Or, you could just tell them what to do...