Work Is A Team Sport – No, Really It Is!  

Both the last few and the next few weeks are conference season for me, both presenting and attending as a delegate – I get to travel to lovely Warwickshire, Mid Wales, Madrid, and around my home county of Somerset.

At the presenting ones I am discussing people management and what it means. In my view, people management is the only form of management and it is mission-critical for any business, organisation, or group success.

Question – can people be managed? The answer – yes – if they want to be and most people in the workforce want and are happy to be.

Starting the journey

So where does that journey start - it’s with the recruitment and selection process. We have known this for some time, yet it still needs work.

The process starts with knowing what your organisation needs to be done, this, therefore, means knowing your organisation, what it is doing, where it is going and how it is planning to get there. These are your mission, vision, values, strategies, objectives, and your plans.

From here it is writing a tailored job description (JD) and person specification (PS) – these two documents are vital to attract the right people to apply to come and work with you. They are not ‘tick box’ exercises to get out as much information across as you can or show off the organisation or set out what you want as a rule book, they are the basis of a new relationship with your next employee so make them engaging and enlightening.

Reviewing applications

The next step is requesting and receiving of the applications, this might be more important than the JD and PS – how do your potential new colleagues get in touch with you, how do they present the information about themselves, what is the process explicitly including timescales, format, quantity, and quality. Job seeking should not be a test – it should be a process of engagement from both sides and transparent for both if you want a good working relationship going forward.

We move forward to the ‘sift’ for the interviews. The sift needs to be fair, open, and understood by all involved. I am an advocate of telling the potential applicants how they will be assessed, who is involved in the process and what they can expect next. Even down to giving the applicants a biog of the assessors.

The interviews...

Then comes the interview (groan – I hate them!) it is such a false and forced way of assessing a person's potential and ability. I agree an interview needs to be done but again it is not a test! Most interviews I have attended are set up so ‘them and us’ that I have often been put off at that point or wanted the role so much but ‘froze/got over nervous/panicked’ at the interview and been upset as I have not been given the best version of my self at all and not give the organisation to see what I truly have to offer.

Interviews are also often so short and overprescribed that it is not possible to adequately assess a person from such an intervention. I want all interviews to be a minimum of 4 hours for any role, interviews to be interactive, and well-planned, questions to be sent to the interviewee for preparation and that whole selection process being laid out for both sides. The interviewee being asked to set out what they want from the process too and how they want it to go!