Episodios
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We’re all familiar with CEOs and CFOs, but we’re well overdue for a Chief Officer in the HR department. That’s why Amanda Young is here as Chief Human Resources Officer at Bankers Trust — to talk about what that role means and how the expectations have changed over the past two decades.
Amanda started her career in HR, working through internships and learning from mentors along the way. She found herself as an HR manager at 27, and today she is one of Fortune’s 40 under 40 as the CHRO at Bankers Trust. She manages a team of 525 employees and, although banks are known for being stuffy and structured, Amanda brings new life to the industry by focusing on creating the meaningful work experiences employees want.
Just over the past two years, the talent landscape has changed. People are leaving behind traditional roles for a variety of experiences that bring new depth to their careers. It’s less about climbing the corporate ladder and more about enriching the work experience. For Amanda, it’s about creating the flexibility for her team to do just that.
Like many businesses, Bankers Trust transitioned to a more flexible workplace over the pandemic. But more than going online, the bank relaxed the dress code and maintained its focus on leadership and managerial training. Amanda is still facing a few obstacles in the coming year, but learning to respond to changes instead of just reacting to them isn’t one. Her intentional responses and the deliberate and collaborative programs she’s implemented for her team continue to provide them with the meaningful experiences they need.
Of course, not every program can be a success story. Amanda shares her pitfalls and what happens when the programs you plan don’t have any follow-through. It really takes a team to manage a company, and she takes care to enrich and empower her team just as much as she empowers herself. Tune in now to hear more about the role of a Chief Human Resources Officer and the resources Amanda uses for herself.
If you would like more information on the resources Amanda discusses in this episode, check out:
Fear Is Not The Boss Of You by Jennifer Allwood -
Jeff Russell started as a journalist — he never could have guessed it would lead him to become the President and CEO of Delta Dental, the largest dental insurance carrier in Iowa with over one million members. The wide array of experiences Jeff encountered on his career journey prepared him to run a company, just not in the way you would think.
How exactly does journalism prepare you to run a company? Jeff breaks down what it’s like to get an assignment and write a story. Developing quick-thinking life skills made him more adaptable at work. Jeff is used to seizing opportunities when they strike, and he had the chance to step into multiple different roles as he worked his way up the corporate ladder.
However, when it comes to hiring his own employees, he doesn’t like to use the term “ladder.” He explains how that vertical-type thinking can narrow your perspective of the workforce. He prefers hiring people who have real-life experiences to rely on because it builds better teams and stronger leaders.
The pandemic really put a damper on those real-life experiences in the office setting, and we discuss how we’re all using technology to stay connected with our teams. Jeff is a tech guy at heart, and he shares what he’s doing to pivot and connect with his team in new ways.
Employee engagement is integral to the success of your business, but what does your company culture look like when you go remote? The best things happen organically when the whole team is together, and the most important questions we need to be asking ourselves as leaders are: How can I stay flexible? How can we reinvent collaboration for the online world?
Jeff is focused on fostering collaboration and inspiring spontaneous connections in the next year. He shares some of the new talent initiatives he’s planning and what it looks like to move his company culture forward in a digital office space. It takes a team to reinvent a company, and Jeff wants to keep planning ahead with his to see what the company can become for the next generation of customers and employees.
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When we talk about talent in the workforce, we aren’t just referring to the development of our current teams and employee culture. We are talking about the future workforce and our role in inspiring and preparing the next generation. We have to prepare now for the future of work, and Tony Timm is doing just that in his current role as the CEO of the Boys & Girls Club of Central Iowa.
The Boys & Girls Club creates opportunities for kindergarteners to high school seniors to succeed in school and secure the skills they need to start college, find jobs, and lead successful adult lives. Right now the club, which can accommodate 1,000 children, serves about 350 kids and teenagers, with over 100 more on the waiting list. The issue? Staffing.
Tony has spent his whole career in nonprofits, so he’s familiar with the strain of staff shortages, but nothing like what the pandemic has brought. He walks us through a typical day of a kid in Boys & Girls Club, the kind of activities offered, and the type of mentors needed in both a working and volunteer capacity, and he shares the reality of the grind the team has endured to meet the needs of their community.
When schools closed their doors and went digital, the Boys & Girls Club remained open, extending their hours to help students accommodate to remote learning. The team is short about 50 part-time employees, and Tony discusses the challenges of filling part-time roles with a workforce today that requires full-time hours and pay. His clever way of affording people the right opportunity to have an impact and still support themselves financially benefits both his team and the community, which is a balance many employers strive for.
The investment in human capital is key here. Not just in the dedicated employees and volunteers at Boys & Girls Clubs across the country, but in the children who use these programs to learn and develop their own skills. We are a community that needs a workforce, and failure to invest in this future generation is a failure to invest in ourselves. Improving the labor force is more than increasing wages, and Tony Timm has more than a few ideas on how we can help build tomorrow’s future.
Links Discussed:
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck -
Darin Brush is laser-focused on education, but he isn’t an educator by trade. That’s why we’re talking with the President of Davis Technical College because you never quite know where you’re going to end up in your career. A professional path can carry you in so many different directions, and Darin never figured he would end up on a college campus.
Davis Technical College offers training in 35 different programs, ranging from nursing assistants to welders to cosmetology and plumbing and electrician apprenticeships. Nearly 500 part-time and full-time employees make up a staff of trainers, teachers, and industry experts who have solid experience in their fields, even if they aren’t necessarily educators by trade.
Not coming from an educational background gives Darin an edge when it comes to finding the right talent for his students. His recruitment process focuses on finding altruistic people who share a passion for success in others even if they don’t have the teaching experience. Hard skills like that can be taught, but a passion for learning and helping others isn’t trainable.
More importantly, Darin involves each and every employee in the college’s strategic planning. Darin’s team is one of the only business structures we know of that involves every employee in every step of the process. Darin believes that employees are more engaged when you take the time to ask their opinion and respect them enough to listen. You don’t have to implement everyone’s ideas, but simply listening to them creates a culture where every member of the team feels appreciated.
Most companies have one person in charge of culture, sometimes called a Chief Culture Operator, but not at Davis Technical College. To Darin, he thinks it unfair that one person should be responsible for everyone’s workplace satisfaction. That responsibility falls on every employee on campus — it’s our culture and it’s our time to own it, he says.
Inspiring 450 employees to own their workplace culture involves a lot of steps and a lot of listening. Darin shares the plans he’s initiated as President and how his employees have responded to them. We discuss what’s worked (and what hasn’t), and how his own team inspired the five-year plan that’s in place for the students. Listen now to learn how involving every employee at every level can change the way you run your business.
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Traci Galligan is a mentor in a lot of ways. As Senior VP of Human Resources at a large insurance firm, she has years of experience learning and growing into her role. You wear a lot of hats when you work in HR, and Traci is breaking down all the roles she’s played and how she got there to help all of us find the right talent we need in the HR department.
Many of our listeners have questions about HR: When should I hire a full-time HR position? Which certifications are valuable and relevant? What roles should the HR department play in my business?
For Traci, she sees HR as a business partner. And not just a business partner for the executives and top-tier management, but a partner for every employee, from the bottom to the top. While certifications can set someone apart on a resume, it will be the interpersonal skills and compassion that make for a truly talented HR leader.
It is up to HR professionals to build relationships and earn trust among the employees ahead of running the day-to-day operations. The goal is to create and/or improve workplace culture, and this perspective has changed the way Traci recruits and trains new hires. She discusses the biggest changes she’s seen in the recruitment process over the past couple of years and shares how she looks for talent.
Traci seeks out those with the hard skills, experience, and certification, but she’s also looking for influencers with leadership skills and the emotional intelligence to tap into an employee’s needs and goals within the company. The top three things Traci looks for is someone who can:
Coach Learn and Listen to their coworkers.There are so many new ways to manage and inspire your employees, and the pandemic has created some interesting opportunities for leaders to get clever with how they create and maintain their culture while working from home. You can’t force people to do what you want them to do, so tune in now to hear how Traci meets employees on their level to create a talented workplace environment that builds on everyone’s success.
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On this episode of Talent Matters, we’re veering off of our regularly scheduled programming to chat with one of our own consultants, Alex Aanderud from Legacy of Results. We’ve worked with Alex over the years, and we love the unique perspective he takes on when he’s helping businesses find talent.
Alex started as an engineer with Boeing, but he’s a people person at heart, and he took his love of systems and figuring out how they worked and applied that concept to people. Instead of working with something tangible like a jet engine, he wanted to apply his skills and knowledge to something more intrinsic and intangible.
The systems he works with now focuses on what makes people different and how these unique individuals can fit into a team or business model. He created the asset management tools that we use to look at how people, communication, culture, and trust all work together to create successful teams of employees that not only do their job well but also find pride in their work.
One of the biggest changes we have all seen in the talent pool is that employees are not feeling fulfilled in their work. Jobs are becoming more of a means to an end, rather than a space where a person can be their authentic self and fulfill their potential.
For Alex, this lack of fulfillment calls for a change in leadership. Leaders need to adapt to the current hiring pool and better communicate with their teams in such a way that makes them feel valued.
Value is more than just a paycheck to some employees, and there are four key points that Alex discusses with every organization he works with to make sure there is a process in place that inspires work fulfillment. These four points are:
Your business’ purpose Your business’ mission Your business’ vision Your business’ valuesAlex explains how these four points create authenticity in an organization and how this authenticity can be used to motivate your team and establish a sense of pride within the company. The team is always right, Alex explains, and it’s up to those in leadership positions to recognize where the team is coming from and motivate them appropriately.
Listen now to learn if you have the right process in place to make your employees feel valued and how you can inspire them from a place of authenticity.
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Matt Barbara lives his life in the fast lane. He was born in Australia and came to the U.S. as a race car mechanic. He decided to stay in Iowa because it is home to one of the best race tracks in the world, but his business isn’t in racing. Matt is the founder and CEO of Kustom Concrete Pump, a concrete pumping business that is about to pass its tenth anniversary.
How did he go from race cars to concrete? Well, his father worked in concrete and construction, so you could say concrete is in his blood. However, it isn’t the construction side of things that gets Matt’s heart pumping. It’s building a company around a team of employees, some of whom have been with him for 5+ years, that inspires him to go to work every day.
Working in concrete and construction isn’t for everyone. These are long days in hot weather carrying heavy equipment and shouting to one another across sites, which makes hiring and keeping employees a very tricky business. Matt discusses some of the changes he’s seen in the job market over the past decade and how he has evolved to keep up with them.
The biggest changes he’s made are in employee engagement. Employee engagement includes fishing trips and year-end parties, but it also extends to offering work opportunities in the off-season and creating a safety department that is headed by two of his best operators. Being able to anticipate the needs of his employees not only keeps Matt one step ahead of the game, but it also shows his team that he listens to them.
Ten years into the game, Matt now has the time to sit back and take a closer look at the things that work and those that don’t. Listen now to hear about some of the new initiatives Matt is planning to implement and how they can be applied across blue-collar and white-collar organizations.
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Who says success has to stay stationary? Our guest today worked his way up the corporate ladder through different clients and seized different opportunities to learn, grow, and climb to the top. Today, Tom Dastrup is the CEO of Honeyville, a family-owned company that hired Tom a little over two years ago to develop their team and expand their business.
Tom found success through the intersection of sales, marketing, and engineering. When he started in this industry, it seemed like there were 10 people for every job. But today it’s as if there are 10 jobs for every one person, and really good talent is that much harder to find. He’s had to dramatically change the way he looks at hiring, and he’s evolved his hiring structure to meet the changing talent market.
We discuss the transition from temp agencies to hiring full-time employees and what it looks like to work with local colleges and programs to train your own people, but Tom has the unique perspective of working with a family-owned business staff. When your talent pool is centered around a family business, many of these employees have never worked anywhere else. Training and hiring become less about skills on a resume and more about developing programs to hone talent that honors the family’s vision as well as the current market.
Tom’s developed some significant training programs over the past two years and created an executive leadership team that helps the rest of the team recognize their own strengths, weaknesses, and preferences in the workplace. While some programs failed, others made glaringly obvious that Tom didn’t have as many people in key positions as he needed. This created new opportunities to find new employees to fill the voids, and new team members have ranged from salespeople to engineers to maintenance staff.
Turnover isn’t high at Honeyville, and Tom doesn’t mourn the few employees he’s lost over the past few years. No one left with hard feelings, but one of the most important lessons to learn as the leader of a company is how to let good people go. When employees don’t see themselves in the future of a company or have yet to seize an opportunity to grow themselves, you often have to give them that space to stretch and grow.
For Tom, someone who has grown with many companies over the years, he understands how important it can be to change your path. Listen now to learn how change and growth can change the way you create your own business plan as well as the plan for others.
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We are starting our sixteenth year in business helping business leaders and owners navigate today’s changing talent landscape. This pandemic has changed the way we work and the way we hire our employees, and we’re back with our guest Brian Kellen to talk about some of the things he’s done right - and wrong - when it comes to talent acquisition.
Brian Kellen is the president and founder of FlexPack. The Results Group has been working with Brian for many years helping him develop the metrics to hire his dream team. Too often companies become too systematized when it comes to hiring and promotions, but Brian has never lost that spontaneity. It helps him meld the unique skill sets of his employees with his business plan.
But what happens to this spontaneity when you acquire existing companies and employees?
As Brian works to expand FlexPack with two new acquisitions later this year, he’s changing up more than just his hiring process. Brian is updating his business model and creating equity programs for his executive team, something that is new territory for him. He shares how he reached this stage of business ownership and what it means to hire someone to help you out.
Knowing when to ask for help is key to bringing FlexPack to where it needs to be. As Brian explains it, he is a natural salesman at heart and a business owner in training. He is trying to figure out how to grow his business as well as how to use his hiring metrics with the new team members he’ll acquire practically overnight.
Hiring is a top concern for Brian right now, not just amid COVID-19 but also amid his own evolving business landscape. You can acquire stock options and warehouses, but acquiring a team with the right mindset is not as simple. When you come from a business with a strong culture as we see at FlexPack, it’s not always easy to carry that vibe over to established employees within another company.
Establishing a healthy work culture is one thing to do internally within your own organization, but when you’re going out and bringing in new companies, the trajectory of your original plan is going to change. Listen now to hear how Brian is changing gears and using business development managers to teach newly acquired sales teams the FlexPack secret sauce.
Links Discussed:
Fight Camp -
Steve Smith joins us from his remote office in San Diego to talk about company culture. More importantly, we’re discussing how to change your company culture. We all have an idea, an intention of what we want our businesses to represent, but having the talent to manifest this intention as we grow our business is a completely different can of worms.
Steve learned early on that scaling a business around your best intentions relies heavily on the team of people you hire and the company culture you create.
Steve is the founder and CEO of G-commerce. G-commerce creates cloud-based supply chain solutions for some of the largest auto parts manufacturers and vendors in North America, and he is blessed with having the talent to run an organization of 10,000+ customers with only 50 people. Technology definitely makes it easy for his small team to work remotely, but fiber internet and Zoom calls don’t create company culture - people do.
We dive into how Steve defines company culture and what inspired him to create a culture around integrity, accountability, and innovation. “It’s the purpose that holds us together,” Steve explains, and he sees his purpose as one of service to others and to industry. He shares his strategies for empowering people and how he builds productive relationships between not only his staff but his customers as well.
Creating a company culture like Steve’s starts with your recruitment process. People are at the core of Steve’s business strategy, so hiring from the right talent pool is key. You have to reimagine what it means to work for someone and look for candidates that are working for more than just a paycheck.
To attract the right employees for your culture, you need to create a work environment that is energizing and inspiring. Steve has worked in many different parts of the country and dipped into a wide variety of talent pools. We discuss the changes we’ve seen over the past decade and steps to take to create a recruitment process that better speaks to your company’s culture and values.
The market is getting tighter, but it’s never too late to reinvigorate your organization with a fresh perspective on company culture. Listen now for the top two things you can do today to create a new company culture.
Links Discussed:
Scaling Up by Verne Harnish
Play to Win by Alan G. Lafley and Roger Martin
The Code Breakers by Walter Isaacson
Good to Great by James C. Collins
BE 2.0 by Jim Collins and Bill LazierThe Five Temptations of a CEO by Patrick Lencion
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We are getting pretty specific when it comes to attracting the right kind of talent to your organization. Recruitment ads are something that most people overlook, but we have a unique trick to writing recruitment ads that work. Jennifer herself helped us pioneer this technique with The Results Group, and she’s sharing her insight into this sometimes very competitive hiring market.
Before we get started, realize that you are going to need a standardized hiring process in place in order for these ads to work. You need to be very clear on the ideal candidate you want to hire and what skills and behavior they need to make their position successful.
To get there, we have to ask you some tough questions. Many leaders learn a lot about themselves as they try to figure out the position they’re hiring for. It’s all so you can look at the recruitment process in a brand new way and write new recruitment ads that actually work at attracting talented and motivated employees to your business.
Get started with these easy tips for writing recruitment ads:
Describe the things currently going wrong with their current employer and how you’re ready to pay them what they deserve for the quality of work that they do.
Include key knock-out factors that dissuade people who aren’t the right fit from even applying for the position in the first place.
Forget requesting a resume or asking candidates to fill out an online form. Use a call to action at the end of the ad to encourage candidates to call so you can speak together.
You get one paragraph to talk about who you are as a company, so make it count!We are going in-depth with these steps and more, so tune in now for invaluable insight into how to write recruitment ads that work.
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Since opening up about our employee assessments and hiring techniques in our last episode, we are getting even more excellent questions from all of you! So this time we’re dropping nuggets about recruitment systems. We’re talking about what a successful hiring process looks like so you can start taking the first steps toward creating a recruitment process for your own business.
What is a recruitment system and why do you need one?
For starters, it’s the only way you’re going to hire the most talented top performers for your business. We discuss the kinds of systems you can put in place and a few “Manager Musts” you must look for in a managerial team (and yourself!) in order to guarantee that you hire and keep high-performing employees.
Your recruitment system will also give you what we call “The Four M’s of the Recruitment Process”. These are ways to measure, manage, and monitor your team’s and your business’s growth by setting specific expectations and roles for your hiring positions. You can also take steps to modify these systems to evolve and better meet your organization’s needs as you grow.
To create a successful hiring process you need to have insight into the talent pool you’re pulling from. We have a unique perspective of the hiring process, and we’re sharing a bit of our experience recruiting across industries. We really want to help you identify the type of person you’re looking for so you don’t waste time interviewing the wrong people.
Listen now for tips on how to attract top performers and new ways to approach the interview process that might surprise you.
This will be a high-level conversation about recruiting and hiring, so stay tuned for future episodes where we get into the nitty-gritty of how to create a customized recruitment process.
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Expect a change of pace in this episode. We heard your voicemails and read your texts, and we decided to tear back the curtain and reveal the secrets behind the employee assessments we’ve been talking about in our previous episodes.
We are The Results Group, and we are a master distributor of Innermetrix, an employee assessment program. We use both individual and organizational assessments, but we’re only talking about individual assessments in this episode. Mainly we discuss the three assessment indices we use, why businesses and coaches use them, and how these assessments can be implemented within any kind of business or corporate structure.
To start, we use a combination of DISC Index, Values Index, and Attribute Index to create the Advanced Insights Profile that addresses the three most important aspects of finding and honing talent — the how, why, and what behind people’s motivations and behaviors:
The DISC Index measures the how by pinpointing a person’s observable and natural behavior preferences.
The Values Index measures the why by pinpointing the motivation behind someone’s behavior.
The Attribute Index measures the what by pinpointing an individual’s organizational skill and competencyAnswering these three questions gives you deep insight into these layers of an individual’s personality. These assessments can be used when you’re looking to hire, promote, or train an employee by showcasing which talents they bring to the table, where they can fit in with your company, and what can be developed through further training or coaching.
We go into great detail about each index in later episodes, but for now, we want to focus on how these assessments pinpoint all of the little things you need to know about someone in order to understand their personal work style and ethic.
No matter where you are in your business or what role you play, you will always run into talent that is either struggling now or will struggle later. The data you garner from these assessments can prepare for these hurdles, and we discuss how you can use this data to equip yourself and your employees with the tools necessary to grow the company and evolve with it.
We work to help talent be the most successful it can be, and we share with you the different ways we look at businesses and coaches, and how you can utilize these assessments in different environments. Our philosophy isn’t to come in and rewrite the way you’ve been doing things, but if there’s parts of our system that you aren’t implementing, these assessments will help fill in those gaps.
Listen now to find out how to access employee assessments online and how we teach, certify, and train our consultants to help others use these assessments to grow their business.
Links Discussed
Innermetrix
The Results Group
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Beth Shelton, CEO of Greater Iowa Girl Scouts, wears many hats, more than you would think one would wear while running a non-profit. But when it comes to managing 70 counties of local girl scouts and 50+ employees (make it double in the summertime), Beth is responsible for everything from property management, animal care, water sports, insurance coverage, and more.
Beth’s experience in higher education changed her perspective, but when she found the Girl Scouts, she couldn’t have prepared herself for the rollercoaster ride of fun and business management she was going to run into or how much she was going to learn about herself.
Of course, we say “fun”, because that’s what it is — cookies and craft beers, leadership skills and campfires. But the reality of running a non-profit organization as large as this one means she has to make a lot of difficult yet financially stable decisions that keep the mission running from behind the scenes.
That means hiring and creating a team that is dedicated to the servant leadership skills she values in herself. Beth takes leadership from the bottom-up approach and sees her role as one that supports the team above her. She expects the same from the leaders on her team and makes hiring decisions that fit in with the culture of her team as a whole.
Looking for servant leadership like this doesn’t come without snags. Beth discusses how her own mistakes in recruiting ultimately helped the Girl Scouts grow. When she realized that she was getting too hung up on trying to figure out people’s motives, she started looking for new ways - and new people - to approach the hiring process.
What she learned that letting go and allowing someone else to take over actually empowered the members of her team, she knew she was on to something. A good leader knows they can’t do it all, and one of the best ways to empower a new leader is to step out of their way and let them get the job done. Odds are they can do it better than you anyway, and Beth discusses ways to recognize your own strengths and weaknesses so you can build a well-rounded team that complements your own leadership style.
When you see yourself at the bottom of the stack, looking up at the team you work with, you’ll definitely garner a new workplace perspective. Servant leadership can present you with new opportunities you may have missed before by opening you up to the ideas and perspectives of others. For Beth, it makes work fun, which creates an excellent work environment for her team and the girl scouts in her troops.
Listen now for tips on incorporating servant leadership into your management style and ways to get involved with Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa.
Links Discussed
Girl Scouts of Greater Iowa
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Bruce Logan is the President and CEO of Logan Contractor Supply, a company that really knows how to succeed in a niche. That’s due in large part to the way Bruce trains and engages the employees on his team. Talent plays a critical role in how Bruce does business because he believes you can’t start thinking about getting customers until you have a talented team structure in place.
Today’s labor force is tight and inexperienced, but rather than see this lack of vocational training as a loss, Bruce saw it as an opportunity. He explored new ways to find the talent needed for his niche industry of highway construction materials and equipment, and he ended up creating some of the innovative hiring processes that we discuss in this episode.
Finding the right employees means investing upfront in the payroll for training and onboarding education, says Bruce. He is intimately aware of the culture of his employees and how they work well together, and he’s become practically obsessed with finding the perfect fit for his crew.
Experience isn’t always necessary if the candidate has the right personality, and Bruce will hire someone based on their work ethic and their personality if they have a desire to learn. Because teaching a skill is easy, but creating an environment that makes people excited to come to work is different.
You can create training processes to teach your staff hard skills, and Bruce shares some of those processes with us, but it’s the investment in the employees themselves that really pays off. When employees see how much their leader invests in and empowers them, they’re going to give you the best possible job performance that they can.
That’s where the Bruce Logan Leadership Academy comes in. It started out with smaller groups from the management teams, but today any employee who wants managerial experience can attend any of the Logan Leadership Training programs. What’s more, these programs are designed not to take longer than 90 minutes so they can be done during work hours and no one has to sacrifice their work-life balance to be a better employee and leader.
Bruce truly loves watching people grow and succeed, and figuring out the best way to get there with them is his favorite part of the job. Listen now for new ways to approach your hiring process that will develop a culture of people who genuinely like coming to work.
Links Discussed:
The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C. Maxwell
New Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan
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Katy Martin got her taste for leadership in the contracting industry. She was inspired by these types of organizations and more that are driven by their sales team and has ultimately uncovered the secret to hiring the perfect people. Her experiences led her to found The Smash Company, a recruiting agency that helps clients hire the right people.
She sort of fell into recruiting by accident, and she shares how that story ended up turning into the full-scale recruiting agency she leads today. Katy helps clients get super clear on what kind of business culture they want to build and how to hire the people that will make it happen.
The biggest hurdle she sees clients face is undervaluing the positions they are hiring for. No position in your business is more important than the other, and dedicating some time to vetting and hiring the right salesperson is worth the investment.
It’s more than just having a standardized recruiting process. It goes beyond group interviews and assessment tests. It’s being able to put your ego aside and focus on what a business needs, and it’s amazing what you can learn when you just listen to people.
Katy learned a lot from her own team, and she discusses some of the hurdles she’s facing as she builds a business from the ground up. The Smash Company is about to double in size, and she’s taken on the leadership role of preparing her current team of 28 to recruit, onboard, and train the new hires. Her systems work because everyone is actively engaged and personally contributes to some part of the process.
Katy trusts her core team to train the newcomers and build the relationships necessary to continue building the business, but she has a few tricks up her sleeve. She shares some strategies she’s using to not only motivate her team but making the recruitment process easier and more automated. Automated systems can set a standard for your business and streamline your processes so you can guarantee you’re hiring the right person for the job every time.
When is the right time to start hiring people? Katy answers that question and more. Listen now if you’re ready to start hiring salespeople and building your team.
Links Discussed
Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman
Loving What Is by Byron Katie
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Fred Paul is bringing a new perspective to leadership. As Manager and unofficial Dean of Wacker Neuson University, he is in charge of educating the North American sector when it comes to how to fix or sell Wacker Neuson products and services. His leadership skills were put to the test last year when we had to figure out how to connect with his team remotely.
For those of you who don’t know, Wacker Neuson is an organization that creates concrete and worksite technology and equipment. It’s a niche market with unique products that require specialized knowledge and training. Paul does all this training and more by teaching soft skills, like leadership and management, to the thousands of employees who interact with Wacker Neuson products every day.
Wacker Neuson makes a huge investment in their training, and Fred is a salesman. Training is his opportunity to be more competitive. He can penetrate the market with awareness programs that pique interest and help people understand the products while still being interactive and informative.
We have both worked with Paul over the years and seen him at work, and he’s breaking down how his processes had to evolve with the pandemic year. The key to his success? Besides being able to think on his toes, Paul knows how to connect with people.
The success of his team is due to the fact that he listens to their needs and builds the programs and materials that fix their challenges. He calls it a “hand-shake business,” which requires people to get back to the basics of interpersonal interaction. For him, that means trusting your team, listening to their insight, and making decisions that benefit the organization as a whole.
Listen now to learn how Paul put all these pieces together and translated in-person training for remote learning without sacrificing that interpersonal element we all need as successful leaders.
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Randy Keys just hired his 91st employee the morning we recorded this podcast. This is epically serendipitous because this is our first-ever Talent Matters Podcast episode, and Randy is someone we have watched grow from technician, to sales, to owner of Schaal Heating Cooling & Plumbing.
Last year, Schaal was nominated again for Top Workplace for a Small Business in Iowa and has been listed as one of the top five workplaces in the state for the past four years. Creating a work environment like this one doesn’t come without a few bumps and bruises along the way, and Randy has seen his fair share while growing this business over the past decade.
When Randy bought Schaal, there were just 18 employees. At first, he acted as general manager, hiring manager, human resources, and whatever else he needed to be, but around the 75th hire, he realized he was going to need some help. But he was very careful about what kind of help it was and where that help was coming from.
At the core of his business is people, and Randy’s main focus is growing his people. Rather than going out and hiring as many people as possible, he asks himself two questions:
How are we going to help our employees?
How do we grow our employees and help them help themselves?The answers to these questions lie in knowing where people’s strengths are and helping people learn to recognize their personal strengths.
Randy learned early on that if you put people in the wrong place, they lose their joy and you lose their commitment to their position and their career. You can’t just assume your employees are having a good time, Randy says. Rather, he takes time to ask each employee how they feel about their position and what they expect from him. That’s the best way to guarantee he’s answering those two questions correctly.
But employee engagement involves so much more than a questionnaire at the end of the year, so Randy makes sure every leader at Schaal is doing something every month to engage employees. He shares which coaching and leadership courses prepare his team to engage with employees on an individual level, and we discuss the youth initiative programs that offer the skills training kids need to start a career with Schaal.
Showing this kind of investment upfront, proving that a company is willing to invest in the growth of its employees, can send engagement skyrocketing. When employees see that their leaders are excited about their success, they will follow your lead. Listen now to hear how Randy Keys is leading by example.
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Leadership is about investing in yourself, but you have to seize the opportunities you have. Not all of these opportunities are obvious, others will hit us over the head, as Matt Moeckl found out. But for Matt, a chance opportunity and his own sense of leadership inspired him to create these kinds of opportunities for others.
With all of his success, he finally had a purpose for it.
Matt was always a natural-born leader, he just didn’t realize it right away. He’s a self-starter, buying up real estate two months out of college, creating a zeitgeist of wealth and opportunity for himself. But it was a volunteer opportunity at a youth summer program (don’t call it a camp!) that changed Matt’s perspective forever.
Matt’s first experience at Wildwood Hills Ranch, a conference and retreat center focused on leadership and life skills development for at-risk youth, opened his eyes to the fact that not everyone has the same opportunities that he did growing up. He focused on equipping these kids with the life skills they need to seize their opportunities, and he focused on a few of his own, too.
Matt learned early on that healthy, trusting relationships have the highest rate of success, and today he encourages his staff and his students to learn, experience, and prepare for lifelong success by being both a source of strength and investing in the personal strengths of his team and his students.
He discusses the growth initiatives he uses to train his current team of full-time and volunteer employees and all the ways he keeps learning from them and his students. He compares being a good leader to playing chess and explains how he prepares for the long game by investing in his team’s skills and their intuition, something good leaders learn to trust.
Listen now to hear all the ways Matt is building the next generation of leaders and how to connect with him for leadership training, volunteer opportunities, and more.
Links mentioned
Wildwood Hills Ranch
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It’s your unique talents that will prepare you for the future workplace, and our guest is someone who’s honed his own talents enough to help others.
Dr. Trent Grundmeyer, an Associate Professor of Education at Drake University, moonlights as a leadership guru. He owns Grundmeyer Leadership Services which specializes in training educators and connecting them with school districts in need of their expertise and skills.
He brings a multiplicity of perspectives to the educational world. He’s disrupting the status quo by helping uniquely talented educators find the perfect job. But what can you expect from one of the youngest principals in Iowa?
That’s right - at 25, Trent became the youngest principal in the Iowa school district at the time. Today he’s training future principals and superintendents with much of the same insight and excitement he had on his first day as principal.
Trent’s talents come from his perspective. He looks at the younger generation of educators as the ones with the fresh ideas that public school systems need to give the incoming generation of students a relevant education.
Many of the things we discuss in terms of leadership talent come from Trent’s ability to recognize that he isn’t pretending to be an expert, and he expects himself and everyone learning from him to treat all-new experiences as an opportunity to learn.
Education deserves new ideas, fresh perspectives, and objectivity that listens to the opinions of the student council as well as the school board. But hiring these leaders can be difficult. Trent shares some of the biggest obstacles he’s faced in training and hiring, and we discuss the ways he’s prepared himself to face these challenges.
Too often in education, many processes are seen as “the norm”. If it’s not broken, why fix it? But it’s that limited perspective that has kept a lot of public school systems behind the curve. We can’t expect to educate the future if we aren’t updating our systems to meet the future head-on.
Trent’s biggest advice for leaders in education and other professions is to keep yourself from getting too deep in the weeds. It takes talent to balance the minutiae of your job with the broader picture regarding the work you do. If you can remember to remove yourself every once in a while to look down at the bigger picture, the opportunities for learning more and just being all-around better at what you do will present themselves. It’s up to you to take them.
Listen now to hear all of the ways Trent’s skills and talents prepare future leaders and check out these resources that can help you improve your leadership skillset, in education and across other professions:
Links mentioned
The Grundmeyer Leader Search
Superintendent PJ Caposey(Add CTA depending on client’s preference).
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