Where Are All the Gold Star Employees?
In my first blog post of the leadership series, Is a Bad Apple Employee Ruining Your Team?, you met Francis, a problem employee. Of course, Francis was fictional (sorry to all the Francis fans out there), but her actions certainly were not. Francis’s problems weren’t so much her job performance, but rather her behavior and attitude, both of which are more subjective and difficult to manage. Of course, performance problems can be equally as frustrating; I am not ignoring those. Because performance issues are generally more concrete and measurable, however, making the decisions to correct or remove them is more straightforward. At the end of last month’s blog, I promised to offer tools to help prevent and protect you from being saddled with, or “held hostage” by, a bad-apple hire, so let’s get started.
Many of us have made a hiring mistake, or two, or three. Often, these hiring mistakes didn’t start as bad apple employees. Typically, new employees start excited, eager to learn, and wanting to please. So, what happens? Over time, weak leadership, disorganization, and unhealthy work cultures extinguish their enthusiasm, energy, and interest. Believe me, I know first-hand about creating problem employees. Like some of you, I learned all about it at the school of hard knocks and have seen it happen in many other practices. Untrained leaders frequently and unintentionally create their own employee nightmares. Do you want to prevent this from happening in your practice? If so, read on.
It begins the minute you start interviewing a potential employee. Yes, creating a top-quality employee begins before you even hire them! As you and others are interviewing them, high-quality employees are interviewing you and your practice looking for signs and signals to indicate whether you are an ethical, fair, inclusive, organized, and engaged dentist/leader. This is one way to pick out a quality employee. Of course, they will ask about wages, benefits, and bonuses, but high-performing workers will also wonder about your practice’s level of organization, team dynamics, doctor expectations, mission, and team meetings. In addition to having well-developed systems in place to answer these types of questions, you will perk up, take notice, and pursue those candidates – if you are smart.
Quality employees are as picky as quality leaders about where they want to work and with whom. I see it all the time when helping practices hire, train, and develop team players. To even have a chance of hiring talented employees, you need to reflect in your hiring processes a high level of organization, ethics, expectations, and integrity. A well-developed and properly executed Hiring System will accomplish this for you. Poor employees, embezzlers, benefit seekers and general bad apple employees love working for disorganized and unengaged employers and practices. In fact, they thrive in these environments. They shy away from organized, ethical, and engaged employers who might have accountability built into every operating system. You want to discourage these types of bad apple employees immediately.
Rushing through the hiring and training processes is the start of creating that nightmare employee who makes you want to pull every hair out of your head. Capturing the attention of high-performing candidates is easy when you are following an effective Hiring System that clearly demonstrates your level of ethics, organization, team commitments, and engagement. Let me stress the word I used in the last sentence, following. I didn’t say knowing. You may know how to hire, but that is not the same as following an effective Hiring System. Ask yourself these questions about your Hiring System:
Does your hiring process cover step-by-step procedures so that it can be followed time after time by anyone executing it?
Has your team been trained on its proper execution?
Is it being properly executed?
A perk of being the leader is that you don’t have to execute every part of your operating systems yourself. What you do have to do is provide best-practices and a patient-oriented system, stress their importance and build-in accountability. Your job is not only to provide your team with the proper tools, but to inspire your team to follow them. Taking short cuts, skipping steps, ignoring certain parts, or rushing through the process will negate the protection and results this system offers. If you do that, it won’t be long before you have a bad apple employee to look forward to working with every day.
To help you start designing an effective Hiring System, here are the 10 Golden Rules:
Interview at least three people for any position in your practice.
Require the candidate to complete a customized, employment application. Don’t just accept the resume at face value.
Conduct four interviews: (some can be combined)
One with a trained gatekeeper to screen resumes and save you time. This could be your office coordinator or a practice/hiring coach
One with you
One with the entire team
A working or shadowing interview
Use the same set of interview questions for all candidates. Of course, each interviewee will have different questions, but all the candidates will be asked the same basic set of questions for more accurate and fair comparisons.
Hire personalities over skills. Let the candidate do most of the talking so you can pick up on their personality traits. You can train skills, but you can do nothing to alter personality traits.
Call no less than two of their work references before offering the job.
ALWAYS do a background check.
Verify licenses, certificates, stated training, and prior employment they claim in their resume and application.
When interviewing, verbally review and stress your practice’s Purpose Statement and Team Commitments.
Establish clear, truthful expectations from the very beginning. Two essential human resource documents have been designed to communicate these expectations: for tasks, it is the Job Description; for behaviors, it is the Employee Handbook. Use them here.
Of course, for each of these Golden Rules, there is a right and wrong way to execute it. Unfortunately, space does not allow for all these important details here. Since my job is to make you and your practice more successful, I am always glad to provide help, assistance or advice. Contact me for a turn-key Concepts Hiring System with training videos and supporting documentation that will save you and your team work, headaches, and mistakes.
What I want you to remember is that the perfect employee will rarely walk through your door. Only you and your leadership skills and tools will shape a new hire into a high-performing, loyal, engaged, gold-star employee. That is why you can’t find gold-star employees. They rarely come pre-packaged. You shape them into your specific definition of a GOLD-STAR employee. If you don’t, they will gradually slide into the typical, frustrated, disengaged employee - one that happens to be on your team, but is playing a totally different game on an entirely different playing field.
In the next leadership blog post, I will discuss how to start developing this new employee - that you so carefully hired - into a Gold-Star team member.
