We all know jobs can’t talk, but we can talk to superior performers. If only we knew what questions to ask. They would give us all the information needed to identify someone who could achieve superior performance in every job.

It seems like it should be easy to identify superior performance but its not. One of the problems is in definitions of superior performance. The “best performer” in one organization would be classified as average at another.

We try to benchmark superior performance using current “team members.” But, even on a sports team not every number one draft pick makes it in the pros, let alone becomes one of the superior performers. You can’t benchmark superior performance if your top performers are average compared to the top team in your industry.

Another common mistake is that guidelines for selecting and ranking the top performers have not been well-defined. For example, sales statistics have been erroneously used to rank performance.

Many organizations hire for skills and fire for attitude.

Our own biases about skills and knowledge keep us from understanding what the job would say about what is required for superior performance. If skills and knowledge always lead to superior performance, every nurse, medical doctor, lawyer, engineer, CPA, or any person who has passed a certification exam would produce superior performance.

Perhaps the reason so much emphasis is placed on skills and knowledge is because they are the easiest components of performance to define. Many organizations hire for skills and fire for attitude. In these organizations, it is ironic that their recruitment, selection, training, and performance management processes focus primarily on skills and knowledge but rarely address “attitude,” even though there are valid assessments available.

Our biases inevitably keep us from listening objectively to the voice of the job. There are three voices we hear when analyzing performance in jobs. One voice tells us how the job should be performed. The second voice tells us how we would like to do the job, and the third voice is how the job has always been done. Most people are not aware of which voice they are listening to relative to performance requirements. The most unbiased voice is the job telling us how it should be performed.

Behavioral event interviews and focus groups are simply too labor intensive, cumbersome and expensive to use for every job in the organization.

Behavioral event interviews and focus groups have been some of the practices used to define performance in jobs. However, behavioral event interviews and focus groups need to be facilitated by individuals who have been trained in the process. The process requires countless hours of data collection and analysis. This is why many organizations only use these methodologies to develop performance requirements for general roles such as leader or team member.

In the end, the value of the results of behavioral event interviews and focus groups is contingent on having the right process, facilitation and input from the right people. The right people are people who are currently performing at superior levels in the job and others who have a thorough understanding of the job. When organizations select people to be involved in the process of determining the performance requirements of jobs they need to ask:

1) Who is currently performing the job at a superior level?
2) Who formerly performed the job at a superior level?
3) What, if any, changes are impacting the job that have implications for performance?
4) Does the manager/supervisor/leader understand what constitutes superior performance in the job?
5) What are the measures for superior performance in the job?

Many organizations have almost given up hope of finding short cuts to defining the requirements for superior performance. Behavioral event interviews and focus groups are simply too labor intensive, cumbersome and expensive to use for every job in an organization. Even more daunting is the time they take to implement. The changes in market conditions, industries or technology are impacting jobs so rapidly that performance requirements can very quickly become obsolete.

..how do you determine just how much consulting a consultant needs to provide to achieve superior performance?

Defining superior performance in jobs is increasingly contingent on “soft skills.” With information services driving the economy, performance will increasingly depend on our thinking and relationship abilities. Daniel Golemen addressed the emerging imperative for soft skill competencies in his best selling book, “Emotional Intelligence.” Golemen’s studies revealed that some emotional intelligence competencies are at least twice as important as technical skills.

However, the standards for measuring soft skill requirements are more difficult to develop than hard skills. Bricklaying knowledge and skill are obvious requirements for bricklaying. It is a fairly straightforward process to determine how many bricks a bricklayer must lay each day for superior performance. But, how do you determine just how much consulting a consultant needs to provide to achieve superior performance?

..if you hire “ding bats” and train them, you get “trained ding bats.”

Skills-training works best when it relates specifically to the performance requirements of jobs. Soft skill competency training must also be related to the most important performance requirements of jobs.

But, if you don’t know the soft skill competency requirements of the job, how can you design the training so it relates? So, if you don’t know the soft skill competency requirements of the job, how do you know what to look for in applicants?

1) Team building efforts often attempt to turn “work groups” into teams without any understanding of the differences between “work groups” and a team.
2) Team building training often teaches people about teams but not how to behave as a successful team member. Trust is a key issue in team building.
3) Some team building is nothing more than entertainment.

• Hard Skills
• Soft Skills
• Behavior
• Attitudes
• Intelligence