{Podcast} How to Hire Top Performers So You Can Ignite Growth

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Mark Moses: If I can’t define it, I can’t measure it. If I can’t measure it, I can’t manage it.

Guest: Mark Moses

Bio in a Tweet: Founding Partner of CEO Coaching International, highly successful entrepreneur, coaches 25 of the world’s top Entrepreneurs and CEO’s.

Key Insights:

1. Hard as it is to say, “People that got you to where you are today typically won’t take you to where you want to go tomorrow.” This means as your company grows, you may need to replace long-time employees and hire top-caliber performers who enable your company to jump to a new level.
2. Hire ahead of the curve. To avoid your company growing faster than your employees’ skills, over hire today so when your company is 3x its current size, your team will still be effective.
3. Mark identified three ways to separate good candidates from great ones.
   1. Ask probing questions to ensure the candidate “actually did the work that led to great performance rather than simply benefiting from the work of others.” Mark shared key interview questions that address this point.
   2. Perform an exhaustive background check. Mark shared exactly how to do this and how to get background check gatekeepers to open up.
   3. Use an assessment like DISC to identify strengths, weaknesses, and how your candidate performs under pressure. Use the output to focus the interviewing process.
4. A hard-earned lesson from Mark: “If I were to do it all over again, I would pay up, go find the best people in the country who fit my culture, put them on my team,  get out of the way, and let them execute the company’s plan.”
5. Mark referenced a list of 21 steps in building a high-performance culture. Here it is.
6. Plan. Plan. Plan. “Companies need to have an annual plan, a quarterly plan, with accountability, scorecards and goals. And the scorecards have to measure leading indicators, not lagging indicators.”
7. What should you measure? “Sales is a lagging indicator, but number of quality prospects talked to or number of calls made or number of quality meetings or demos held, those are leading indicators, and those are examples of the activities you should measure.”
8. “If you can’t define it, you can’t measure it. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Mark said if you measure the leading indicators and scorecard those activities, you’ll have a much higher probability of achieving your desired results and ensuring your employees are focusing on the right activities.
9. You only have to focus on a small number of key decisions. “CEOs get sidetracked doing all kinds of things in their life, but if we can clear out all that clutter and have them focus on the two, three, or four decisions that they need to make each year that really matter, they’ll be able to dramatically move the ball in their business.”

Coaching Takeaways:

1. Over hire today so your employees are still effective even when your company is much larger.
2. Pay up for the very best people because one great employee can get the results of two average people.
3. Be relentless is defining your goals, measuring your activities toward those goals, and managing the results by making appropriate adjustments along the way.

Transcript: Download the full transcript here.