Hire Teamwork-Oriented Employees

You can use pre-employment tests, specific interview questions, realistic job previews, and role-modeling to hire employees who crave to use teamwork and collaboration.

Warning: Many jobs do not need teamwork-oriented employees. Our society greatly values “teamwork.” Also, many leaders are teamwork-oriented, so they erroneously assume they should hire employees who love teamwork.

So, find out which jobs in your company really require collaborative employees. Some jobs do not.

For example, in our pre-employment testing research at many banks, great Tellers usually score high on a test’s Teamwork scale. But, the banks’ successful Bookkeepers score low on the pre-hire test’s Teamwork scale.

Lesson to help you: Use employment tests to objectively discover which jobs truly require teamwork-oriented employees.

Now, let’s delve into some terrific ways to help you hire teamwork-oriented employees.

PRE-EMPLOYMENT TESTS HELP YOU HIRE TEAMWORK-ORIENTED EMPLOYEES

Your fastest and lowest cost method to assess teamwork in a job applicant is pre-employment testing. Start by conducting a “Benchmarking Study” in which you test current employees. Pay special attention to typical test scores of successful employees in each job. Then, you may give pre-hire tests to job applicants, and prefer applicants who get test scores similar to your successful employees – plus also do well on other prediction methods.

Here are employment test scales that help you assess an applicant’s teamwork-orientation:

+ Teamwork test scale
+ Friendliness test scale
+ Helping People Motivation test scale

JOB INTERVIEW QUESTIONS TO EVALUATE APPLICANT ON TEAMWORK

The next method you can use is the job interview. If teamwork proves crucial for success in a job, then make sure you ask questions to uncover how teamwork-oriented the applicant is.

Here are examples of such open-ended questions:

* “What were three gratifying projects or tasks you worked on?”
* “Tell me about three projects or tasks you disliked doing?”

After you ask each question, listen to how much the job applicant mentions teamwork. Applicants who are
- teamwork-oriented will describe gratifying tasks involving working with people
- not teamwork-oriented will say gratifying tasks entail working alone

RJP = REALISTIC JOB PREVIEW TO ASSESS TEAMWORK

If a job candidate does well on your pre-employment tests and job interviews, then you can do a realistic job preview (RJP). This shows what it actually is like to work in the job. An RJP involves the applicant spending a half-day or full-day accompanying an employee to watch the job actually being done.

The RJP serves three purposes. First, a job applicant shows interest in the job by agreeing to spend four to eight hours observing. Second, your employee can unearth valuable insights about the candidate. Third, research shows applicants getting an RJP are (a) less likely to accept a job offer but (b) if they do accept, less likely to turnover.

Make sure the applicant sees the teamwork required to perform the job. Keenly observe the applicant’s reaction to required teamwork.

LEADERS MUST ROLE-MODEL TEAMWORK

If teamwork is required to perform a particular job, then the manager must be a teamwork role model. Then, employees learn how to act on-the-job.

So, if a job requires teamwork, but the manager does poorly at teamwork, then you either need to:

A. help the manager develop teamwork skills
B. replace the manager with someone whose strong suit is teamwork

4 METHODS TO HIRE TEAMWORK-ORIENTED EMPLOYEES

If you use pre-employment test benchmarking or another way to see if a job truly requires teamwork, then you can hire collaborative people by doing the following:

1. Pre-Employment Tests – see if applicant’s test scores are like your best employees’ scores
2. Job Interview – listen to comments about working with people
3. Realistic Job Preview – find out applicant’s reactions to teamwork needed to on-the-job
4. Role Model – exhibit collaboration so your employees to learn by watching you

Why would you bet your career or your company’s success? If a specific job requires teamwork-oriented employees, then you readily can use these four methods to hire job applicants who excel at working with people.

© Copyright 2007 Michael Mercer, Ph.D.

Converting Ideas Into Success Stories

OK, so you have a great idea and you can’t wait to sell it. This baby sells itself, doesn’t it? You may be wrong there and if you are, it will cost you dearly. Converting concepts to successful money making businesses is not easy and requires the following steps.

Viability:–

To put an idea into execution, you need to check on its viability. It may sound really good in theory but not work when put into action. There have been great ideas that have not planned out, simply due to a lack of utility or the lack of a market for the product or service. Make sure that you ask your mentor, or other industry experts for advice. This can be a bit tricky if you don’t want to give your idea away. Alternatively, try to find some small way of testing it out. Another separate and equally important aspect is to decide whether your product or service has an online market. Ask yourself whether people go online looking for your offering and whether these people would buy this offering online. This will help to establish the online viability of your concept.

USP:–

Remember that people are looking for value in your product or service and if you can differentiate yourself by coming up with a unique selling proposition for your business, you will be more successful. Your idea must have merit, essentially and offer something unique that sets it apart in making it attractive to customers. Keep in mind that you are up against a lot of competition on the internet before deciding to go ahead with your plan. Remember also that if your idea is not unique, some other aspect of your approach should be.

Marketing:–

This may be one of the pillars of your online business if you can get it right. Your great concept will only get you so far – to get people to find and buy your product you need the help of a great marketing effort. If you can hire a good search engine optimization team, do that. If not, try to research and read up on the subject to the best of your abilities. Definitely get a good web developer who will follow World Wide Web Consortium standards and will also optimize the structure of your site to make the job of search engines that much easier. Further, get good content that is informative and intelligent to attract customers. Most importantly, look for affiliate programs, email marketing opportunities, start newsletters, blog marketing, banner ads, pay per click and so on. These are the various techniques that help a site get attention from its customers. It is important to get relevant visitors who are looking for your offering or something similar.

Planning/ strategy:–

Have a plan. Create a business model, do projections, make a marketing plan, be ready for difficulties, identify problems and work on problem solving. Educate yourself about your business, the internet and about the product or service you are selling. Once you master this, you will know more about how to plan and structure your start up phase and be ready for future growth. As in any business, an online business needs to have a strategy in place to make money and convert ideas to money making businesses.

Getting Ideas Is The Easy Part: Here's What You Need For Innovation

Ideas, including good ones, come naturally to human beings. As Robert Tucker said: "Anyone who has ever taken a shower has had a good idea." But good ideas are only the starting point for innovation.

No less an authority than Joseph Schumpeter put it this way: "to carry any improvement into effect is a task entirely different from the inventing of it, and a task, moreover, requiring entirely different kinds of aptitudes." In other words, it takes work to turn good ideas into something helpful and profitable.

Get Ideas from Everywhere

Human beings naturally have good ideas. They'll share them with you if you let them. But if you shoot down or ridicule every new idea you hear, people will stop sharing ideas with you.

Companies that produce lots of innovation start with ideas. They encourage idea sharing. As Jack Welch recommends, they get every brain in the game.

They also know that most great ideas don't sound so great at first. Great ideas become great as people work at molding them and shaping them and stretching them into useful form.

To get as many ideas as possible, create a climate where people can share ideas. They won't all be great ones. But some will and that's all you need. The other advantage of getting ideas from everyone is that you'll benefit from ideas you didn't have to develop yourself.

Learning from Others

Not only do other people get lots and lots of ideas. Some of them take the time to work out the details that you wouldn't spend time on. My experience with yogurt is an example.

I love yogurt and my favorite is fruit-on-the-bottom. For years I figured I had two options. I could eat through the yogurt down to the fruit. Or I could stand there in the kitchen and mix the fruit and yogurt together by stirring with my spoon.

Then, one day, I was at a friend's house and I watched his daughter take a container of yogurt out of the refrigerator and shake it vigorously. "What are you doing?" I asked her.

The girl gave me a look that only a teenager can give to a slightly-subnormal adult. "Mixing up my yogurt." She was polite enough not to add the word, "stupid."

What a neat trick! Now I shake my yogurt to mix it. Why didn't I think of that? I probably could have analyzed the problem and come up with the shaking solution, but what I did was working OK, so I didn’t look for anything better.

Look around for innovations that others have created. Ideas that are almost sure to work are the best practices of other companies in your industry. But the breakthrough ideas often come from outside, from an industry that routinely solves a problem that's new to you. But, sometimes, innovations grow out of accidents or things that some curious soul happens to notice.

Hmmm, that's Interesting

Interesting things happen all the time. And they can become the source of innovation. But someone has to notice and take the next step.

At the National Institutes of Health, just like in laboratories around the world, researchers used frogs for experiments and often that involves surgery on the frogs. Researchers put the frogs away for the night in water that was filled with organisms that should have made the frogs sick.

But the frogs didn't get sick. Thousands of researchers for dozens of years thought nothing about that.

Then, in 1987, Dr. Michael Zasloff noticed and wondered why the frogs, with open wounds and in a septic environment weren't getting sick. I don't know what he said then, but I bet it was some variant of "Hmmm, that's interesting." That curiosity led Dr. Zasloff to the discovery of a new class of antibiotics, which he, being Jewish, named with the Hebrew word "Magainins."

The fact is that while everybody gets good ideas, not everyone is good at spotting a fortuitous coincidence and then doing the work necessary to turn it into something worthwhile. Japanese researchers Teruyasu Murakami and Takashi Nishiwaki found that only 5 percent of the people in most organizations are "idea creators." They suggest that a further 10 percent are idea supporters and promoters, but that 85 percent are "idea killers."

It's easy to spot the idea creators in your shop. They're the people who always want to find out why something works the way it does or try out an idea about improving a process. Put them together with supervisors who are idea supporters and promoters and they'll be an unending source of innovation. But they probably won't get it right the first time.

Inventors Don't Know Everything

You would think that the person who came up with a product idea or invention would be the best person to predict the uses for it. You'd be wrong. Thomas Edison is a good example.

When Thomas Edison introduced his phonograph in 1877 he could think of several uses for it. Why, you could record the last words of people who were about to die. You could teach spelling. You could make a talking clock. You could have a dictating machine for your office.

What wasn't important to Edison was using the phonograph to play music. Maybe it was because he had hearing problems, but Edison thought that the reproduction of music was a frivolous use of his wonderful invention and cheapened its image.

Other people didn't think the same way. They liked the idea of using the phonograph to play music. When they wanted to create an early jukebox that would play music at the drop of a coin, Edison objected. It took him almost twenty years to accept the fact that playing music was the use that mattered most to people, that mattered most to the market.

Don't fall in love with your technology. Don't think people will love what you love. Remember Edison and the phonograph. Remember Sony.

Sony was sure that their Beta format videocassette recorder would conquer the market and the world. It didn't, in part because the higher quality video that Beta offered was less important to customers and video rental stores than longer running time per cassette. In the end, the customer knows.

Get the Customers Involved.

Customers may not be able to tell you what spiffy new products and services they will like, but that's OK. They can tell you what their problems are. They can react knowledgably and helpfully to an idea you've got for a product or service. And they'll find ways to use your product that you never thought of.

This afternoon I was in the supermarket. A man near me was using his camera phone to beam a picture of a can back to his wife at home. After he sent the picture, he put the handset to his ear, "Is that the right one?" he asked. He listened, then picked the can off the shelf and put it in his basket.

The people who invented the camera feature for cell phones never imagined all the uses people put them to. My contractor uses his to check on a job across town without driving to see if an installation is done correctly. People take surreptitious photos in locker rooms. They take pictures of auto accidents to use later in court. And, my favorite, my daughter sends me a picture of my grandson, at his birthday party two time zones away, while the party is in progress.

Customers know best what works for them. That makes one of the best innovation strategies the simple one of getting the customers involved early.

Give it a Try, and Quick!

The company with perhaps the most amazing record of innovation over the last century is the 3M Company. William McKnight was hired as an assistant bookkeeper at 3M in 1907 for the princely sum of $11.55 per week. He rose to become president in 1929 and was chairman of the board from 1949 to 1966. In that time he created the innovation culture that made 3M famous.

As I was working on a way to close this piece, I discovered a collection of his sayings that seemed better than anything I could say. Here they are.

"Listen to anyone with an original idea, no matter how absurd it might seem at first."

"Encourage, don't nitpick. Let people run with an idea."

"If you put fences around people you get sheep. Give people the room they need."

"Give it a try, and quick!"