Strategic Hiring

Episode 105: Strategic Hiring, with Sue MacArthur

Strategic hiring will help free up your time for biz dev. In this episode, Sue MacArthur will share valuable insights into strategic hiring.

In this episode of Sell With Authority, we tackle a question that’s fundamental to our success: Can we all be better at allocating our time so that we have the space, capacity, and focus to more effectively lean into business development?

The short answer? Yes. Of course, we can with the help of strategic hiring. There’s always room for improvement in how we manage our time and efforts.

Here’s the twist — there’s another crucial variable in the equation of biz dev and time allocation — and that’s putting yourself first. When it comes to filling the seats within your organization, putting yourself last doesn’t serve you well.

We often hear the needs of others within our teams, and we rush to fill those roles. But — does that truly free up our capacity to sell more effectively?

More often than not, the answer is no. In fact — it may even increase the pressure to sell more just to keep up with the added capacity.

I recently read Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell, which completely shifted my perspective.

Rather than hiring for specific roles based on perceived needs, Dan advocates for hiring individuals who can take specific tasks off your plate, thus freeing up your time for biz dev.

Today, I’m joined by a special guest expert, Sue MacArthur, President of Strategic Talent Management, who manages the firm’s business development, operations, and client services.

Sue shares invaluable insights into strategic hiring — how to prioritize roles, hire effectively, and ensure that you have the right people in the right seats to propel your business forward.

I’m thrilled to have Sue on board to guide us through this crucial aspect of building a successful business.

Get ready to take notes because the golden nuggets Sue shares will revolutionize how you approach hiring and time allocation.

By applying these strategies, you’ll free up your capacity, sell more effectively, and position yourself for success as we charge through 2024.

What you will learn in this episode about strategic hiring:

• Why agency owners don’t often use strategic hiring to free up their time for biz dev
• Why the “seat-filler” mentality can undermine growth potential
• Why agency owners should put themselves first when hiring for seats that need to be filled
• The tell-tale signs of mediocrity and the best tactics to eliminate it
• Dedicating 50% of an owner’s time to biz dev can be the key to your agency’s future success
• How strategic reevaluation of roles and responsibilities can turbocharge your agency’s efficiency and growth

Resources:

• Website: www.strategictalentmgmt.com
• LinkedIn Personal: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suemacarthur/
• LinkedIn Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/strategic-talent-management/
• Stay Interview Questions: https://strategictalentmgmt.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/stm-stay-interview-questions-sheet.pdf
• Make your strategic hiring process go from ordinary to extraordinary

Additional Resources:

• Website: www.predictiveroi.com
• Visit our newly expanded Resource Library
• Join us in our free How to Fill Your Sales Pipeline Facebook Group
• Want to streamline your strategic hiring process? Then listen to this podcast with our guest, Michael Redbord

 

 

Strategic Hiring: Full Episode Transcript

 

Welcome to the Sell With Authority podcast. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI, and my team and I created this podcast specifically for you. So if you’re an agency owner looking to sell more of what you do so you can grow a thriving, profitable shop that can weather the constant change that seems to be our world’s reality.

 

Well, you’re in the right place. Do you want proven strategies for attracting a steady stream of well prepared, right fit prospects into your sales pipeline? Yep, we’re going to cover that. You want to learn how to step away from the sea of competitors. So you actually stand out on the ground you’re standing on. Yep. We’re going to cover that too.

 

Do you want to futureproof your business so you can navigate the next challenge that you know is going to come your way? Well, absolutely. We will help you there as well. I promise you, each episode of this podcast will contain valuable insights and tangible examples of best practices. Never theory from thought leaders, experts, owners who have done exactly what you’re working hard to do.

 

So I want you to think practical and tactical. Never any fluff. Each of our guests who built a position of authority and then monetized that position by growing their audience, by nurturing leads, and, yes, by converting sales. But all the while, they did it by being helpful. So every time someone from their audience turned around, there they were with a helpful answer to an important question.

 

I also promise you every strategy that we discuss, every tool we recommend, will be shared in full transparency so you can fill your sales pipeline with that steady stream of right fit clients who are never, ever made to feel like one of your prospects. 

 

Learn how to adapt an extraordinary strategic hiring process for your company

 

Strategic Hiring: Categories of Work and Percentages of Time

 

Okay. Before I introduce you to our special guest expert today, I’m going to tee up the topic by sharing one of the golden nuggets that I bring home with me every time I attend the Money Matters workshop.

 

Taught by Drew and Danielle from Agency Management Institute. If you’ve not yet attended Money Matters. Holy bananas. It orbits a distant moon of blossom. It’s amazing and Drew has this slide that he shares the morning of. I think it’s the morning of day two of the workshop, and it includes several categories as well as the percentages of time.

 

So categories of work, as well as the corresponding percentages of time that an agency owner wanted to structure that day in a way that would move their agency forward. This slide would be the roadmap. I will tell you, the first entry on the slide reads, quote unquote, business development and the percentage of an agency owner’s day that Drew and Danielle recommends that gets allocated into the biz dev bucket is 50%.

 

So a minimum of 20 hours a week. And candidly, I don’t think I know an owner who invests 40 hours a week into building their shop. So then the 20 hours per week toward biz dev, most of the time it’s the other way around. The owners I know are busier than a one legged person in a but kicking contest, and as a result, they don’t have the time they need in their week for biz stuff for them, biz dev has to wait until the evening or the weekends, and candidly, they’re probably too exhausted to do it the way that they would prefer to do it, if only they had the time.

 

And that seems to be a never ending dilemma, which I get. So can we all be better in allocating our time? Sure. So we can have the space and the time or the capacity to lean into business to have more effectively? Yeah, of course we can. No doubt there are incremental or there’s room for incremental improvements. But I think there’s also another variable in the biz dev time allocation formula.

 

And that’s you putting yourself first when it comes to hiring for the seats that need to be filled inside your shop, because putting yourself last doesn’t help you sell. So here’s what I mean by that. We hear from our teams, right? That they have needs for everyone else in the shop. This role, that role that needs to be filled.

 

And let’s say you fill those roles. Does that free up your capacity to sell more? Likely it doesn’t. In fact, the reverse might be true. You added to the team’s capacity, but now you need to sell even more and need to keep that capacity fully utilized. So I recently studied the book Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martel, and a first.

 

Candidly, I was skeptical because I assumed it was just another time management book, but I gave it a chance and I’m glad I did. One of the central tenets of Dan’s recipe is to hire people who can take specific work that is currently on your plate, the owner’s plate, and take it off of your plate, which tends to be the reverse of how we typically do it right.

 

We need an SEO person, so we hire for that. We need a programmer, so we hire for that. We need a media person. So we hire for that. We hire for all of these other roles. But unless you’re currently doing those roles and maybe you might be, but unless you’re doing those roles and nothing comes off your plate and you’re no closer to Drew’s goal, you know, for you, which is the 50%, right, 50% of your time going toward big stuff.

 

But if you identify all of the areas you’re currently spending your time and then you hire for that work, then you might be able to run toward that goal of 50%. Okay, so in full transparency, if you listen to the podcast for a while now, you know that my area of expertise is not hiring. It revolves around biz dev.

 

Learn how to adapt an extraordinary strategic hiring process for your company

 

Strategic Hiring: Sue MacArthur’s Introduction

 

So I invited Sue MacArthur, president of Strategic Talent Management, to join me today as our special guest expert so she can share her insights on how to hire strategically, meaning how to hire for the right priorities, how to hire correctly so you get the right people seated in the right seats, with the goal of freeing up your time so you can build your authority position so you can create the content that you know you want to create and then sell 50% of your time, right?

 

Will not sell 50% of your time, but be selling 50% of your time. That’s the goal. I promise you. If you take and apply the golden nuggets that Sue shares during this episode, you will without a doubt, free up your capacity, sell more, and be in the right position to roar through 2024. So without further ado, welcome to the Sell With Authority podcast, Sue.

 

Learn how to adapt an extraordinary strategic hiring process for your company

 

Strategic Hiring: Sue’s Path and Journey

 

Thank you Stephen, it’s so nice to be with you. Well, it’s nice to have you here, and thank you for bracing yourself for that very long winded introduction. But I just it’s a lot to live up to. I, you know, Sue and I were joking in the, we’re laughing with one another in the green room before I hit record about how.

 

And this is in episode 100, after the long introduction and I said to Drew, I’m like, brace yourself, brother, because it’s going to be a long introduction. And then he gave me a hard time, at the beginning of the episode, which was funny. So I thank you for coming back to the show when you and I had a chance to record like this before our bully, from STM joined us too.

 

And so now we get to you know, do this, sort of quasi encore. That first episode was with Onward Nation for that earlier podcast. And now we get to do this for the Sell With Authority podcast. So in the show notes, we will put a link to the previous episode so our audience can go back in and become more familiar with you, and so forth.

 

But just take, maybe a couple of minutes and share a little bit more about your path and journey now, as the president of STM and then we’ll dive in with the litany of questions that I want to ask you. Yes. Well, STM has been in business for over 30 years, and my business partner, Kurt founded that with a now retired partner.

 

And they started out as executive coaches, really over the years, found their way into really, what we are now is a more holistic solver of people’s challenges. And people are weird. So there’s always something new and exciting going on. But I joined Art oh, about eight years now. He and I have known each other for most of the 30 years he had the business and had talked off and on of working together.

 

And then a few years back he said, come talk to me at my office. It’s about time we get serious about this. And when I walked in, he handed me a box of business cards with my name on it. That sounds like Art. So we’ve been together ever since I started out as the vice president.

 

And then, I think about two years ago, we jumped into having more of a strategic leadership role and really being a partner in this. But as I said, people are weird. So we just never know what the new challenge is going to be. And trying to think long term when you’re talking about people is very difficult because there are so many factors that can change the landscape and change how people feel and respond.

 

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Strategic Hiring: Helping The Owner

 

So that’s an interesting challenge for us in the work that we do. Indeed it is. This is going to be such a fun conversation and I think not just fun, but helpful and insightful in a number of different ways. So there are a couple of really big nuggets that I want to make sure that you and I chat about.

 

And maybe there’s a different way to kind of slice apart, but let me go high level first. And as I was mentioning in the introduction, owners put themselves first to actually hire for the things that are currently on their plate so they can free up their capacity. And I get it. Like conceptually, that might sound like a utopia, and I know that there’s a myriad of things that can go wrong with that.

 

I understand that it’s not super simplistic, but so if we think at a 30,000ft view, how often from your perspective, because you and Art and team walk alongside agency owners every day. So how often do you see agency owners actually put themselves first in the hiring process, or is it more common if we need to hire this role, that role, and so forth, and it doesn’t really impact the owner?

 

It’s definitely more of the latter where you know, they identify a need and they say we need to hire somebody and then they go out and do it. They don’t often step back and think about what they are doing, that they may need to hire someone else to free up their time, to be more strategic, to think about the bigger picture, to do the business development?

 

Learn how to adapt an extraordinary strategic hiring process for your company

 

Strategic Hiring: Planning How to Let Things Go and Let Someone Do It

 

So I see a lot of agency owners who do a good job at trying. I have a friend who is famous for doing this backhanded compliment. Oh, you’re so good at trying. And they do, and they get clear of that for a while. And they let go of some things and they delegate to people on their team or maybe hire someone to take some big things off of their plates, but then they always seem to get sucked right back in.

 

Yeah, I know their heads are above water for a while and then they’re down under the waves again. And there are a lot of reasons for that and all legitimate reasons. But it is very difficult to really get yourself fully clear of that. And it takes a lot of planning. It takes a lot of effort and really being honest with yourself of what you need to let go of and being able to do it.

 

Yeah. So I’m going to ask you in just a second to walk us through the exercise that I know that you’ve done before actually, that you did alongside my business partner, Erik. At one point, for the benefit of STM, but before we get that, I just want to say, to everyone listening to our audience, I get that this is not simplistic.

 

This is not a wave, a magic wand, and then tomorrow it’s fixed. I’m not suggesting that. So I certainly do not want to give that impression. And also that this takes six points, time planning, thoughtful consideration. And I recognize sort of the chicken, the egg, the which came first that there’s this sort of circular dilemma of like, well, but if I don’t fill those other positions and if I put myself first and then those other positions are glaring and that kind of stuff and they need to be filled or whatever. Then, you know, if I fill those, but I don’t, you know, take stuff off of my plate that I can’t. It’s like, how are we going to ever move this thing forward? 

 

Learn how to adapt an extraordinary strategic hiring process for your company

 

Strategic Hiring: Shifting Roles in The Company

 

So one of the things that Sue and I were talking about in the green room was, okay, every time that maybe somebody leaves or a different position or you create a new position or whatever, that’s an opportunity to be super thoughtful about strategically what the agency needs.

 

And we will talk about that a little bit too, so before we get to those things. So take us through the exercise that you worked alongside Erik to do, and because that seems like that created some aha’s and that might be really, really helpful for our audience too. Well, it is something that I think about often . It comes to mind quite often, and I’ve used it with my team and the exercise was this. Erik asked me to do some homework before our next meeting the following week, and that was to make a list of all of the things that I was doing that I was too expensive to do. 

 

And when he asked that question in front of our whole team, there were crickets. And everybody looked around the table like, who’s going to admit that she’s doing anything? It’s just too expensive to do. And the reality was that when I really sat down that week and thought about it, yeah, it was almost everything that I was doing.

 

Wow. Because I wasn’t able to, I was so wrapped up in the minutiae of the day to day, the things of our business that I had no time or energy to think strategically, to think long term, to think big picture. What task needs to be done right now? Yep. And in recognizing that and shifting my role, it completely changed my relationship with the company and the way that I thought about my work.

 

Learn how to adapt an extraordinary strategic hiring process for your company

 

Strategic Hiring: Take The Time to Develop People in Taking Over Some Tasks

 

Okay, so tell us a little bit more about what changed. And then I’m going to go as I’m going to ask you to go back after what changed? I’m going to ask you to go back and take us inside your head, about how you thought about all of those things. Like what was your process in identifying those things?

 

But so first, what changed? One thing that changed is I realized that there were things that I had been holding onto that I needed to let go of. Things that I thought, well, you know, it’s easier to just do it myself than to train somebody else. Or maybe, you know, with a few things. It was.

 

I don’t think we have anybody else on the team who’s capable of doing this, so. Yeah, it’ll be done better if I just keep doing it. And that was tough for me to let go of some of that and to take the time to develop people around me, to be able to take some of that off my plate and to trust them to be able to do it.

 

Well, they may not be doing it in the same way that I would, and I had to let go of that. But they are accomplishing great results and it has freed me up to do things that are more important to the long term. Help them for business. Okay, so let me give it back to you in a slightly different way.

 

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Strategic Hiring: List Down How You Want Things to Be Done 

 

So when you said easier to do it myself, there’s no one else on the team or anyone else on the team that can do it in the way that I would do it. So you work through it. So maybe myths isn’t the right word, but it sounds like that work is getting done and you’re freed up to do other things.

 

So I don’t know, maybe myth is the right word. Like sometimes we tell ourselves things that sometimes are true, but sometimes not once we go down that path. So where was that for you? Well, I think having Erik just ask me that question was there was this I, that I almost felt like a light bulb went on in my head as I’ve never thought of it that way.

 

And I continue to think about it that way. If I, you know, I have conversations with myself as I’m working on a project and think, oh, this is one of those things that I’m too expensive to be doing. And that’s kind of a weird way to to describe it, but it made sense in my head. And so now, even though we may not have the capacity to add another team member to take that off my plate, it is in my mind that when we do add a new team member, here are some of the things that we are going to need them to do.

 

I love that it maybe was really simple, like sending down for ten minutes and just sort of like brainstorming on a sheet of paper of all the things that you’re too expensive to be doing. Or was there a different process, like how did you think through all of that? Because here again, I think that that’s going to be a helpful ingredient in the recipe for our audience.

 

Well, in the initial thought, without over that week of, you know, the span of my homework assignment from Erik, it was a daily, you know, writing down of what did I do today? And then going down through that list and picking out the things that were big picture and strategic and, you know, perfectly in line with what a president of a business consulting firm should be doing.

 

Yeah. And then what were the things that I was spending a lot of time on and energy and effort that could very well be done by someone at a different level? Emily just had a situation come up, on the team where we lost our administrative assistant. Yep. And what we did, rather than just saying, okay, we’re going to dust off the job description and put out an ad as a team.

 

We really looked at it. We ended up not making a whole lot of changes, but the conversation was, what are any of us doing that could be shifted to this admin to make it a richer experience for the person we hire, and free us up to do more important things. So it has become kind of a part of our culture now to think about that.

 

Yeah, but it is an ongoing process. As I said, there’s still a lot of things I’m doing that could be shifted to someone else to allow me to concentrate more on business development and things of that nature. But at least we know with the next hire we make what our goals are going to be. 

 

Learn how to adapt an extraordinary strategic hiring process for your company

 

Strategic Hiring: Auditing Your Time 

 

That’s an important first step, it sounds like when you took the time to audit your time, to see where all of this, your most precious, your precious, excuse me, precious resource.

 

Your time is being applied to making a list of all of those things. And my guess is there. And I think that this would be true for anyone in our audience, that if they actually audited their time, they’d say, only bananas. Why in the world am I doing all of those different things? And then being able to hire for this position?

 

So it sounds like the audit itself was pretty revealing that when you do fill this position that is now open, some of those things from that audit are going to be tasks that this new person on your team is going to be doing. Am I tracking with you? Right, right. And that’s a great opportunity when someone leaves your team. I think that a mistake that most businesses make is, they just say, okay, this is what the role has been, this is what the role is going to be.

 

And they run the same ad they ran the last time they hired for that role. And there’s no intention or real thought put into this the way this position is structured? Is this serving us? Well? Has the business changed as the role changed? Have we changed in a way that we need to to make some decisions about what we might take out of this position or what we may add to it that will allow the leaders of this business to to truly lead and not get mired in the day to day doing.

 

Yeah, I think that’s fantastic. And it’s so easy to make that mistake, right, to essentially be hiring for the status quo. But you just gave us three, three really good questions there. I’m going to give these back to you, make sure I got them correctly, my notes as the business changed or has our business changed, and if so, in what way has the role changed?

 

And if so, in what way? And have we changed in an organization and if so, in what way? Right, right. For example, perhaps you’ve been in the interim between the last time you were hired for a role and maybe that involves copywriting. Come to agencies. You’ve hired an admin assistant who has a degree in journalism and would love an opportunity to take on some of that work.

 

Yeah. You as a people, as a group of people have changed. Do you have different resources? So now is there an opportunity with this new hire to shift some things to somebody you have on the team that has a certain talent and a certain desire, and role other duties into this position as you look for the replacement, as you look for a new hire.

 

And that has shifted in a way that’s healthy for your business. And it’s making the best use of your existing resources. Okay. I am all right that I literally like when you’re going through that I’m like, oh I totally got to ask you this question that’s generated anyway. No, it’s okay. Lay it on me. Okay. So could we connect that back into the auditing time that you’re suggesting.

 

So owners ought to audit their time. They make a list of the things that they’re too expensive to be doing. Thinking, okay, I need to get these roles, these tasks, these things off of my plate so that I can hit Drew’s goal of 50% of my time toward big stuff. Then maybe once they have that list, should they then also be auditing the skills of their team to see who on their existing team would might want to do that work and then to your point, it’s like then maybe filling, either backfilling or redesigning those roles in a different way if they’re bringing new people into the team.

 

Learn how to adapt an extraordinary strategic hiring process for your company

 

Strategic Hiring: Making Conversations with Your Existing Teammates

 

So what do you think about that exactly? And something that we have been recommending, it’s something we’ve really been pushing a lot lately is the concept of the stay interview. We should be having regular stay interviews with our existing people. It’s kind of like an exit interview, but designed to prevent an exit. Luckily, I’ve never heard of this before a stay interview.

 

Yes, you can get a template for the question to ask on our website. Okay. This is phenomenal. We’re totally going to put that link in the show notes. But that stay interview okay I know okay. So there are a lot of questions that we recommend asking, but one that particularly goes to this point, I’ll it a couple that go to this point.

 

One is, you know, we always ask in an initial interview with any potential new hire, what are your career goals and aspirations? Where do you want to go? What do you want to do? When was the last time we asked the person who’s been with us for 5 or 6 years. So that’s part of the equation. But also asking the question, do you have any talents that you feel are not being utilized?

 

Is there something that you aspire to be a part of that you’ve not been given the opportunity to be a part of? And you may find that your receptionist always wanted to be in sales, and isn’t that a fantastic find? But we’re not asking our people those kinds of questions in a way that really benefits the business and the individuals in the business.

 

Wow. I was once in a session where Art was the guest expert, like in a live session in person many, many years before Covid and all that kind of stuff. Anyway, and the topic of having conversations with your existing teammates. At the time, you didn’t call it a stay interview, but it was sort of like weekly, or mentorship.

 

Right. And I remember there being some objections in the audience where somebody is like, seriously, Art? Really? I have to sit down with my direct reports on a weekly basis, right? And not talk about the project status. Right? Like talk to them about them as people in Art and say it this way. So I’m essentially thinking you’ll drift.

 

But you know, Arkin’s Art in sort of, his polite but snarky way, which I thought was just really awesome the way he said it, he’s like, you know, when you want to be a great parent, the key to being a great parent is to what? Spend your time or spend time with your kids, right? Well, guess what?

 

If you want to be a great leader, employer and you want to develop your team, you need to spend time with them. And I’m like, oh, okay, I love that answer. So then we started doing weekly mentorships and I do weekly mentorships to this day with my direct reports and I love that time. We call it Mentorship Tuesday.

 

Learn how to adapt an extraordinary strategic hiring process for your company

 

Strategic Hiring: Delegating Task/s To the Right Person

 

I love that time. What you just shared here with the state interviews is a way to take that, even like raising the bar of excellence that is so good. And it doesn’t have to be a weekly conversation. It doesn’t have to be a monthly conversation. But once or twice a year, sit down for half an hour or an hour and ask those kinds of questions.

 

Ask, is there anyone here that’s been particularly helpful to you? Yeah. That gives you an opportunity to recognize someone for being helpful. Do you feel like you have all the tools and resources that you need? But the questions that go directly to this conversation and freeing up the owners time to really focus on growing the business are really about what their aspirations are and what their talents are that you are not taking advantage of and could be. Wow, that’s so great.

 

I mean, you have a track record with them, they’re already indoctrinated into your culture and all of that. Wow. Okay. Really, really good. So when we’re thinking about again, freeing up and bonus time to run toward the 50% of time allocation toward bestow, you’ve given us some really big golden nuggets so far. Auditing their time.

 

And then specifically, to your point, are they doing things if they’re too expensive to be doing, that’s going to probably be one of the biggest outcomes of the audit. If there’s probably going to be some things on there like, why am I even doing that? No one needs to be doing that. Let’s just get rid of that altogether. It is probably going to be some of those things so maybe nobody needs to do it right.

 

Maybe it’s not that they’re too expensive to do it, but it just sucks the life out of them. Right. And wouldn’t they have a whole new outlook on their work and their role with some renewed energy? If they could find someone on the team that they could trust, offload that to the person on their team who may absolutely love doing that, and it could absolutely energize them because they love doing that type of thing, whatever that project might be.

 

Right. And then the second thing that you just walked us through, the stay interviews are really, really good. So when we think about hiring strategically, if our goal is to 50%, what else might come to mind, for you, of things you might want owners to be thinking about is ways to actually free up more of their time.

 

Learn how to adapt an extraordinary strategic hiring process for your company

 

Strategic Hiring: Mediocrity Can Cost You So Much

 

I would love for more owners to think about the cost of mediocrity on their team. Oh, okay. And you can really break this down in a dollars and cents way. Okay. And this idea came out of a conversation I was having with one of our clients who was thinking they needed to let somebody go, but they did okay.

 

And they kept them on board. And, you know, they’d make little improvements and then they’d slip back a bit. But having someone in that role was better than having no one in the seat. Okay. And the question to him was, how many hours a day or a week do you think you’re spending on either covering for the work that’s not being done, or holding the hand of this employee who is not performing to the level that you need?

 

And the answer was, I’m spending at least two hours a day. Holy bananas. Either picking up the slack or reassigning work to other people, which was overburdening her strong performers, or counseling or redirecting or you name it. There was a whole laundry list of things that they were having to do to prop up this mediocre performer. So we ran through the cost analysis on that.

 

Okay, what is your salary? Let’s break that down into an hourly amount. This is what your time is worth okay. And then it turned out to be about $10,000 a year. Wow. This owner’s time was being wasted on propping up a mediocre employee. Okay, just just a second. So, the $10,000 was based on the hourly cost, if you will, of the owner.

 

Or did it also factor in? I don’t know how it would be. I just want to be sure that I understand correctly. Did it also factor in like missed opportunities or was it truly not a factor in ours? Did not factor in missed opportunities. So we had to add that to the equation. So how many deals were lost because they were spending, you know, five hours that week with this person as opposed to on the business development, on growing the business, on solving the big challenges for the business.

 

So, you know, just breaking down the dollars and cents was enough to make the point. So mediocrity is costing you in so many ways. It’s costing you in your time, it’s costing you in money, it’s costing you in the engagement and the energy and drive of the people who are performing well because they see that someone is not stepping up to the plate, but they’re still being paid and they’re still being supported.

 

And then all the things that they’re not doing are shifting on to the ones that do it. Well. So there are just so many costs to mediocrity. And by really taking a look at your team and saying, do I have people who are really contributing at a high level, or do I have 1 or 2 or have been helping you?

 

If you have 3 or 4 who are not performing at the level I need them to in order for me to spend the time I’m doing the things that grow this business. Wow. Okay, so forgive the kind of neophyte question. This is obviously not my area of expertise, but it is truly yours. The cost of mediocrity. Like how do you assess your team for someone who’s mediocre like I, which I totally get the whole like it’s taken me two hours of every day to, you know, work with this person.

 

So for that owner to be able to answer that question, that might have been really easy, black and white or whatever, because the owner was investing two hours a day, you know, to be helpful to that teammate, the mediocre teammate that you’re talking about. But outside of that sort of direct example, like how does an owner in their leadership team maybe assess a team for mediocrity, like, does it show up in the timesheet?

 

If so, what’s the data point? Well, I, in fact, just yesterday I wrote a blog that will be coming out soon on warning signs that you may have a bad hire. Okay. And some of those are in the early days. If they’re if it’s difficult for them to adapt, you know, they just seem to be struggling.

 

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Strategic Hiring: Red Flags to Look Out for When Hiring the Wrong Person

 

But look at how many mistakes, how much time are you or other members of your team spending on correcting someone else’s mistake? Okay. And if that feedback has been given that, hey, you need to be more careful, you need to be more attentive to the details. But is that being absorbed and implemented and if it is, is it staying at the level you need to be or are they continuing to slide back and then you have another conversation.

 

They get better for a little while and then they slide back. That recurrence is really a demonstration of a lack of energy and drive to really succeed, consistently meeting missing deadlines and, you know, making excuses about it and not communicating that they’re going to miss a deadline. So suddenly the deadline has come and gone, and you go to them and say, hey, where’s the stuff?

 

And they’re like, oh yeah, I wasn’t able to get the stuff done on time. These are all signs, where communication, whether they fail to convey information that you need, they misunderstand your instructions. They don’t set clear expectations for you or the people around them. Another red flag, lack of accountability. When they are corrected, there’s oh it’s always I wasn’t trained on that or it’s somebody else’s fault at just a general unwillingness to learn and improve.

 

But this all takes a lot of communication and effort on the part of the employer to set clear expectations. If they’re not meeting up redirect, make sure they have the resources that they need. But if you’ve removed all the obstacles, if you’ve had all of the conversations and you are still not getting what you need, and other people are having to pick up the slack, and sometimes that’s you as the owner, then you have a problem.

 

Well, my guess is our audience, or at least some of our audience here in you go through sort of the warning signs of mediocrity. Some of them probably thought of a person and maybe quickly. 

 

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Strategic Hiring: Know How to Address Problems

 

So let’s just assume that that might be the case. If that is the case, if they’re thinking, yep, great. Thanks a lot, because now I’m thinking of a person.

 

So candidly, what would you suggest that they do as the next step? Well, the first thing is to evaluate what the problem is. Okay. How has the person been provided all the tools and the training that they need, or is there something missing that we can solve? Are there obstacles in their way that we can help remove for them to step up and perform at a higher level?

 

Do they have the right support? Do they need a mentor? You ask all of those questions. What are the root issues? What are the things that need to change? And is there anything in our organization that is standing in their way? That’s the first step. And you really have to be objective about that and be willing to accept that perhaps there are internal issues that are contributing to the situation, but then you need to have a private conversation with the employee and tell them what the issues are, what you need to specifically, what you need to see from them.

 

What does success look like and how are we going to get there? What is the plan? What is the timeline and what is the plan? Celebrate the small wins. But also don’t let anything slide. We do this in personal relationships. We do this with employees like, well, it’s just a little thing and I’ll overlook it.

 

But those little things can really pile up and become a really big problem. And those problems can trickle through your whole business. And in the context of this conversation, a lot of times what that means is the owner is overburdened with the stuff and can’t concentrate on the business. Yep. So that’s kind of the steps that I would take.

 

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Strategic Hiring: Aim For the Success of The Team When Hiring Someone

 

But I understand and particularly it’s not quite so critical right now. You know, the hiring market has eased up a bit, but there was a time not too long ago where we were all in a panic that we might lose somebody because God knows we weren’t going to be able to fill it. I mean, it was crazy out there.

 

Yes, it was absolute insanity. That is not so much the case anymore, but it’s hard to let go of the mentality of it’s better to have someone in the seat than no one in the seat, but you need to really think about what impact that is having on your business. And is that a fair statement? It’s been such a great conversation because I feel like we’ve knitted together, through your expertise and insights, this, a recipe for getting to the 50%, the, audit your time, the conducting stay interviews, and then, you know, calculating the cost of mediocrity and then doing something about it.

 

And it’s been my experience that maybe that’s the right way to say it. That I think we, as agency owners, are particularly vulnerable to this because, you know, agency owners are the it. I get it that I’m biased, the kindest, most generous, thoughtful, amazingly creative, fun people that I’ve had the privilege of being around over the last 30 years.

 

And they’re all in on their teams and they want to serve their teams. And so, you know, when they hear you put yourself first in the hiring process that feels so foreign, it may be even completely inappropriate to put yourself first, because they’re all about the team and the success of their team and aiming for that, right? That’s awesome.

 

But then there’s the trade off of if we don’t audit our time and we don’t do see interviews and we don’t read, or a team of mediocrity in fixing that, then we’re never, ever going to be able to move toward the goal of 50%, you know, of our time to our best stuff. And that’s how we move the shop forward.

 

Right? And so we’re going to always be sort of in that, chill or chill. I try to put a tail and chase together a panel chasing a dilemma or circular thing and we can never break out of it. So I know we covered a lot and I know we need to come in for a landing. But before we go, before we close out and say goodbye and any final advice, any final insights, recommendations, Sue that you would like to share and then please share with our audience the best way to connect with you.

 

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Strategic Hiring: Final Advice and How to Connect with Sue

 

Yes. Well, I think that this whole idea of putting yourself first goes beyond just freeing up your time, but it also is an issue around how engaged you are with what you’re doing, how excited you are about what you’re doing. We use assessment tools in our business, and we very often see with agency owners their role, engagement has taken a hit.

 

They’re beaten up, they’re worried, they’re stressed, and the joy isn’t in the work anymore. And by putting yourself first and finding ways to surround your people, to take the burdens off of you and allow you to recapture the joy in your work, what will that do to your business? Right. So there’s a lot of reasons why this is an important thing to take on and to really focus on is, you know, thinking about how do you recapture the joy and and how do you focus on the right things in your business. Amen. Well said. 

 

And in terms of how to reach us, generally speaking, you can reach my team at [email protected]. Does he have any questions? We can make sure that that gets shuffled to the right person to give you the most appropriate and fastest help? There are also a lot of free resources on our website.

 

The stay interview template, for example, is on the resources page of our website. People are welcome to go out and grab that. And I encourage you to use it. It’s something we’re using in our business now. So because we often don’t take our own advice, we are, you know, we’re in the middle of doing stuff too. And we turn around like, when’s the last time we had a conversation with our employees?

 

So, I encourage people to go out and help themselves to any of those resources that they think we’ll find helpful. And, but I’ve, this is a subject that is near and dear to my heart as my role has transformed over the last couple of years. And it was through thinking about it in a different way.

 

And certainly my engagement has gone up and I’m contributing at a higher level to the business. This has been a very personal journey for me as well. Lovely conversation and incredibly helpful. So, thank you for that. And okay, everyone, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and revisit the recipe that you just shared with you about how to get to the 50%.

 

The key is you have to take it and apply it, and because when you do, you will absolutely accelerate your results. And so we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day. And I am grateful that you said yes and came on the show to be our mentor, to be our guide, to help us move our businesses onward to that next level.

 

Thank you so much. So thank you for having me. It’s always so much fun to spend time with you.

 

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