Here are 10 questions to take your employee reference calls from ineffective to informative and revealing. You are spending a significant amount of money to recruit, hire and retain every person in your company along with the future replacement cost.
You can hire significantly better candidates and see “red flags” much quicker if you ask better questions during the hiring process and during reference checks.
Considering using this questions for your candidates. I put them in the order I’d use them.
Questions:
What is your relationship to the candidate? How long have you worked with the candidate?
This establishes a baseline for you.
What were the candidate’s responsibilities, outcomes, and impact?
This lets you know how well the person knew the candidate and you can understand their role versus the role you need them for.
(If the person managed the candidate): Could you please share with me your leadership and management style/philosophy and company culture.
This gives you a guide on comparing your company environment from where the candidate is coming. It also gives you a lens to understand the feedback you will be receiving.
On a scale of 1-10 (one being poor, ten being extraordinary), how would you rate this candidates communication, teamwork, problem-solving capabilities? Please share a specific example that explains your rating.
Where did this candidate fit in well with your company culture? Where didn’t they? (and why for both)
When you worked with this candidate, when did they appear to be highly motivated (and why do think that was? when were they least motivated? What do you believe drives this candidate?
What blind spots do you see with this candidate?
How could have this candidate excelled more in their position? Why?
How did this candidate react to feedback? What developmental feedback did you provide them? How did they react, process and implement that feedback?
On a scale of 1 to 10 (one being poor, ten being extraordinary), how enthusiastically would you endorse this candidate?
“Working with Jason really helped me to work through my blind spots and become a better leader. I can’t say enough great things about how impactful working with Jason was for me personally and professionally.” Joel Clum, COO, Worldwide Express $1B Revenue (Shipping & Logistics)
4. Self-Awareness Is The Number One Predictor Of Your Career Success – Jason Treu, Jason Treu Executive Coaching
95% of people think they are self-aware but only 5-15% really are! It is these blind spots that can cripple your success.
5. Build Psychological Safety Within Your Team – Jason Treu, Jason Treu Executive Coaching
If you don’t have psychological safety you are not going to have a high performing team.
How Do You Build Psychological Safety?
Be open and honest with your team when you mess up!
Use your mistakes to show the team how to be open, honest and vulnerable.
6. Get Accurate Information By Truth Telling – Jason Treu, Jason Treu Executive Coaching
Ask your employees how they would rate your relationship on a scale from 1-10 and then how you can move it to closer to a 10.
Through this exercise you know how the other person is feeling and, if needed, you can do something to improve your relationship.
7. How To Give Negative Feedback – Jason Treu, Jason Treu Executive Coaching
It has been found that feedback is 40% more effective by prefacing it with the statement: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them.”
8. Support That Works – Jason Treu, Jason Treu Executive Coaching
“How can I best support you?” Instead of…
“If there is something I can do for you, let me know?” or “Is there anything I can do for you?”
Here’s how to create a great feedback process for events, product launches, and major milestones. It will help you and your team/organization make continuous improvements that will show up in your products, services, and other outcomes.
Navy Seals use the below process. It’s why they are the best in the world.
Pixar uses a similar process called the Brain Trust. Their president has said all their movies suck in the beginning. So they get the team working on the movies together at certain points to provide feedback. This feedback is what shapes the movies improvement. I was fortunate to work there and see this in action.
You need to also create rules of engagement such as:
The feedback needs to be about the outcomes and process, not the person.
Everyone needs a chance to speak (and I suggest the most junior people go first. If not, you can get confirmation bias.)
etc.
Feedback Process for Major Events, Product Launches, Milestones, etc.
Many leaders live in the “ILLUSION that things ARE working” because they aren’t getting any other feedback.
Silence is dangerous because it’s often one-way. The leader just isn’t getting the information (but it’s out there).
Why?
Employees just aren’t sharing feedback bc you aren’t asking the right questions and creating a psychologically safe space for them to voice their opinions.
Great talent often produces poor results. Social cohesion and connection are far more important.
Google found that all-star teams rarely ever produced all-star results. It’s how the team engages and interacts with each other.
Why?
Egos get in the way (I.e. the need to be right)
People don’t want to listen
“What interested the researchers most, however, was that teams that did well on one assignment usually did well on all the others. Conversely, teams that failed at one thing seemed to fail at everything. The researchers eventually concluded that what distinguished the ‘good’ teams from the dysfunctional groups was how teammates treated one another. The right norms, in other words, could raise a group’s collective intelligence, whereas the wrong norms could hobble a team, even if, individually, all the members were exceptionally bright.”
‘“As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’“
“Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues.”
Don’t believe the myth that if you hired great people, you’d get great results.
Collective intelligence almost always trumps brilliant individuals.
Check out the study I quoted above: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.amp.html
