Saturday, March 6, 2010

Building Congruency Into Your Hiring

A number of years ago I had the opportunity to become certified in several sales and customer service training programs offered by the Integrity Systems organization, www.integritysystems.com . One of the most impactful things that I learned from these programs and their founder, Dr. Ron Willingham, was the concept of congruency.

Dr. Willingham describes congruency as being made up of five elements:
  • Our view of the activity
  • Our view of our ability to do the activity
  • The relationship between the activity and our personal values
  • Our willingness to do the "work"
  • Our belief in the product, service, or organization

As I listened to this model what struck me is its applicability not only to sales or customer service to any role or job. Think about how difficult it would be to perform at a high level if your work was in conflict with one or more of these elements? Yet how often are we testing for congruence with these elements in our hiring process or in addressing deficiencies in performance between our expectations and their actual performance?

In another way you could look at this as cultural hiring. Companies that have developed high levels of engagement in their organization have explicitly or implicitly built this congruence into their culture. They have created an opportunity for people to "join up" with their organization rather than merely comply. Given that we are seeing "failure" rates of better than 40% in outside executive hires and new managers we might want to examine this, especially given that most failures are not occurring because of "technical" competence. I also believe that this is why technological interventions like Six Sigma or lean manufacturing do not sustain long term results. They don't address the "people" issue and organizations are made up of people.

So I would submit to you that hiring for congruency and recognizing that you are hiring a "whole person" should be a critical part of your hiring process. I would go further and recommend that you not rely exclusively on the interview process to validate that congruency.

As my colleague Joseph Skursky of Market Leader Solutions, www.marketleadersolutions.com, says "Hire Hard-Manage Easy". You will find that the payoff is there in the long term....

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