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By Carl L. Harshman, Ph.D., and Tom Etzkorn, M.B.A.
The vast majority of you reading this article are knowledgeable, experienced,
and highly successful in the camp business. Hopefully, you enjoy that
well-deserved recognition because of your dedication, hard work, and
thoughtful decisions. In our many years of working with employees at
all levels of responsibility, we have found that those performing in
the top tier are often, like you, driven to strive for even better performance
and greater achievement.
The question then becomes . . . how can we help these great employees
become even greater?
Given the projected audience of high-performing camp owners, managers,
and staff we thought we would begin by attempting to offer some insight
and perspective from those already addressing and illuminating the path
to the greater.
The 212° Principle
We recently read a short book entitled, 212°: The Extra Degree by
S.L. Parker. The theme of this work is that when dealing with water,
the single degree between 211° and 212° is the difference between
simply having very hot water and . . . producing powerful steam that
can drive a locomotive engine.
We like the analogy because it is possible that the fundamental difference
between your camp being good and being great may be just a matter of
degrees, not major leaps in technical expertise or substantial professional
development within a discipline. So, we proceed under the assumption
that the knowledge and practices we describe in this article represent
that extra degree that will increase your potential to take your camp
from good to great or even, from great to greater!
Power of Your People: The Source of the Extra Degree
When asked to describe why your camp is the "best," you
often cite location, programs, facilities, and experiences . . . and
almost in passing, acknowledge that you have a great team of committed
and well-trained staff. While this is certainly easy enough to say, it
is most difficult to deliver consistently year after year. In your organization,
if you have the right product/service and strategy, the real secret to
your success is your people, and each one determines your camp's
results, reputation, and rewards . . . every day. The three types of
people who are key to your success are: (a) those who execute day-to-day;
(b) those who provide essential support to the people who execute; and
(c) the people who lead both groups. The efforts and attitudes of all
three groups are deeply interconnected and highly important to ensure
total success.
Even the best camp in terms of facilities, programs, and strategy
is not likely to survive very long with poor to mediocre staff and unmotivated,
ill-prepared leadership. Jim Collins, the author of the best-selling
book Good to Great argued that staffing . . . "getting the right
people on the bus" . . . was the essential
first step in the journey
from just being good to being great.
None of us sets out to hire mediocre or non-performing staff and
leadership. We're all looking for high performers with a large
proportion of superstars among them. In pursuing high performers, the
critical hurdles are: (a) how to attract the best candidates; (b) how
to select the best of those you attract; (c) how to manage and motivate
those you hire; and (d) how to develop staff and leaders—that is,
how to help the best get better.
The Purpose of This Article
We begin with the principle that "hiring entails a lot more than
just making a surface decision about whom to put on the payroll." Rather,
effective hiring is a multi-phased process—one that begins when
you announce the job opening, it gathers momentum in the screening and
selection of applicants, and continues well beyond the point that a job
or promotion offer is made and accepted.
Thus, the aims of this article are manifold. We seek: (1) to provide
an objective, criteria- based, reference model within which you can evaluate
candidates; (2) to describe the role of assessment in screening and selecting
candidates; and (3) to show how the information collected in the screening
and hiring process can be used in managing and coaching after the person
is on board and a functioning member of your team.
Begin With the End in Mind
Steven Covey in his classic Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
says that one of the seven habits of highly effective people is to "begin
with the end in mind." While Covey refers to the bigger picture—personal
mission and vision—in terms of hiring, we mean that you start with
the outcomes you want from a staff member or leader.
The best performing organizations have answers to the following questions
for each role in the organization:
- What are the standards for performance? What outcomes or impacts
is the person who occupies this role supposed to create or affect?
(Notice we are not talking about the job description or what they do—we
are talking about the impact of what they do on the people and world
around them!)
- Example: Camp Counselor
- Role: To organize, manage, coach, and counsel a team of campers.
- Impacts:
- Campers leave the experience with defined skills
they did not have upon arrival.
- Campers indicate that their counselor was kind, helpful, and supportive.
- Campers indicate a strong desire to return the following year.
- What behaviors and characteristics are most likely to produce the
impacts or outcomes you described in the answer to the prior
question?
- Behaviors:
- Counselors exhibit a strong interest in "people"
and in interacting with them.
- Counselors exhibit the ability to "listen" in the broadest
sense (e.g. to recognize nonverbal calls for help).
- Counselors are able to work effectively in a "team" model
and environment (with other staff and their campers).
- How do you assess the potential, capability, and/or existence of
various motivators, characteristics, or competencies?
- People: How would you know if someone has both
an orientation toward or motivation for dealing with and the skills
for good interpersonal relationships?
- Listening: How would you know if someone had good
listening skills? Would you know if they had the filters for observing
nonverbal behavior in others (as opposed to a filter for listening
only to the words communicated)?
- Teaming: How would you know if someone was motivated to work
in a team or social environment? Would they be expected to
operate under a shared responsibility premise? Should you know
if they had the interpersonal, communication, and emotional
skills to be an effective member of a team or to be the leader
of a team?
- Finally, how do you use the important information gathered during
the recruiting, hiring, and selection process to manage and
coach to greatness after employment?
The remainder of this article expands our focus by addressing four key
questions:
- Why would I care about anything other than an individual's
competencies? After all, isn't getting the job done the only
thing that matters?
- How would/could you know that someone had a certain attitude, motivation,
value, or skill that was either required or missing to perform well
in a role?
- How do we measure characteristics like attitude and motivation
that are not easily quantified?
- Once I learn or know some things about a person or group in the
hiring process, how can I use that information for: (a) future recruiting
and hiring; (b) managing the individual; and (c) coaching/training
for improved individual and team performance?
Is Anything More Important Than Competencies?
We're not sure that in a given situation there is anything more
important than competency. We are certain, however, that competency is
a necessary, but probably not a sufficient sole condition for top performance.
What does that mean?
It means that talent or competency is often not enough. How often have
you read about the athlete, with all the talent in the world, who "crashes
and burns" at the pro level? What about the talented individual who "chokes"
under pressure and fails to perform. Or, what about the candidate you
hired who looked great on paper, sounded terrific in interviews, but
turned out to be mediocre at best in the job?
We suspect that the people who come to mind when we ask these questions
were all quite talented, but something else
contributed to their inability to perform in the actual job. We have
to assume that none of them would have gotten as far as they did without
demonstrating adequate levels of knowledge and/or skill.
In his work with emotional intelligence and performance, Daniel Goleman
points out that merely having an ability does not guarantee that we will
be able to make effective use of it in the performance of our jobs.
So what else matters?
We answer that question with the performance formula in Figure
1.
As you can see in the formula, there is more than the Competency factor
that contributes to "Results," or what we called "impacts" or "effects"
earlier. The two other factors are Attitude and Motivation and Values.
Values include our criteria for what's important in life and a
given role or context as well as our personal goals and principles.
Attitude and Motivation, in this case, refers to a set of "filters" that
unconsciously help us interpret and manage the experience going on around
us. These filters have the following characteristics:
- Unlike factors like personality that tend to be stable over
time and situations, our Attitude and Motivation filters may shift
according to context and situations. An individual's filters may be
different at home than at work. On a personal note, think how your
attitude and motivation can vary depending on context (work or home,
work or social). Context (work or a specific role) can be the reason
that someone recommended by a good friend for a position turns out
not to be very good in the job.
- Our filters are the important first stage of the performance process
and impact the other factors downstream as well as our emotional state
(and conversely, our emotional state can also temporarily impact our
filters). How our filters process reality turns out to impact whether
and how we make use of our competencies.
- We may not even be aware of our filters! That is why two staff
members can listen to the same instructions from a supervisor and hear
different things and respond very differently.
- In a practical sense, if you want to change behavior, you may have
to address Attitude and Motivation issues as much as or more than raising the
level of Competency.
- In analysis of the relationship between Attitude and Motivation and
performance based on performance ratings, it is common to find that
these two filters account for up to 60 percent of the performance rating!
Once again, Attitude and Motivation can account for up to 60 percent
of job performance . . . a compelling reason for camp owners, directors,
and senior staff to consider something other than just Competency when
making hiring decisions.
How Do We Know What Attitudes and Motivation are Important in a Job
or Role?
First, it is important to have some basic understanding of how the Attitude
and Motivation filters differ from how we think of motivation based on
common language and practice. Second, it may be important to understand
how different Attitudinal and Motivational filters would impact thinking
and behavior.
When you have a framework for understanding the Attitude and Motivation
filters, there are basically three ways to gather information about what
is important in a role:
- You can do a logical analysis of important patterns based on your
knowledge and experience of high performers in your industry and in
certain roles. For example:
- You might want someone in a sales and marketing role
to be proactive and somewhat aggressive. You might want someone
in a counselor role to be more patient and responsive.
- You might want someone in a top management role to have
a preference for dealing with options and alternatives while someone
in an accounting or bookkeeping role might be more effective if
they had an orientation toward procedures.
- If you have a known group of what one camp called "Superstars" in
a role (in this case, counselors), you can do an analysis of the
Attitudinal and Motivational patterns to see what is common among
them.
- The third method is to create a "Model of Excellence." A Model
of Excellence is a thorough analysis of the top performers and lower
performers in a role to establish statistically the Attitudinal and Motivational
pattern differences between the two groups. For a description of a Model
of Excellence, see Building a Model of Excellence by The Institute for
Work Attitude & Motivation.
For a copy, write to info@iwaminstitute.com.
Any of these approaches can yield the definitions needed to understand
what Attitudinal and Motivational patterns are important to the performance
of a given role in your camp organization. Once you know these patterns,
you can combine that information with your knowledge of what competencies
are critical to design your recruiting, screening, and hiring practices
for various roles in the organization.
How Can We Measure Attitude and Motivation?
At present, there are two widely-used global tools for assessing the
kinds of patterns we describe here. One is called the "Language
and Behavior Profile" or LAB. It is a structured interview technique
developed by a psychologist in the U.S., the rights to which are now
owned by Success Strategies, a Canadian company. The LAB is described
in depth in a book entitled Words That Change Minds (Charvet 1997).
The second way to assess attitudes and motivation is with the Inventory
for Work Attitude and Motivation (iWAM). The same psychologist who created
the LAB Profile developed the basic iWAM. The rights to the iWAM now
belong to a global company called jobEQ, www.jobEQ.com. jobEQ expanded
the basic iWAM to its present level. It measures more Attitudinal and
Motivational patterns than the LAB, but is highly consistent with it.
For example, the iWAM Model of Excellence can include questions based
on the LAB Profile and other scales to check in interviews for the presence
or accuracy of a pattern.
The iWAM is available in several languages and is online for easy access.
In addition, there are a number of Standard Groups for different countries
as well as a body of research on the instrument and its application to
various aspects of individual and organizational effectiveness.
How Can We Use Attitudinal and Motivational Information in Our Camp?
While there seems to be more and more specialization in the field of
social and psychological assessment, the iWAM and LAB Profile information
have several applications. (See
Figure 2) Here is a brief
summary of each application in the world of camps.
Recruiting It turns out that the key to "activating" Attitudinal
and Motivational patterns is language. Certain words and phrases "push
the buttons" of people with certain patterns. So, if you know what
patterns you are seeking in high performers, you can use certain words
and phrases in your camp and recruiting literature to attract candidates
with those patterns. The result is that your candidate pool will be closer
to the definition of high performers than a randomly recruited pool would
be.
Selection The selection process is perhaps the most difficult and time-consuming
aspect of camp administration. Further, because of the nature of seasonal
staffing, we have to go through it year-after-year. One of the recommended
uses of a Model of Excellence is to pre-screen candidates for the selection
pool. Based on the analysis of high performers, you can identify and
quickly evaluate how candidates compare with your current definition
of high performers. By using the Model of Excellence as one of the up-front
filters in the process, you can decrease the amount of time and resources
you invest in the selection process and increase the quality of staff
that the process eventually yields. The Model of Excellence is not a
stand-alone selection tool. It is one of the tools that can be used in
the camp's overall recruiting, screening, and selection processes. Further,
the extent and manner of use depends upon how you defined the patterns
that are essential to top performance in a role.
Orientation There are two ways to make use of the Attitudinal and Motivational
information in the staff-orientation process. One camp reviewed the group
profile of the staff they hired to determine how they structured and
delivered the staff orientation and training based on the "receptor"
factors of the group. They used "Convincer Patterns" and "Convincer
Processes"
as one source of information for this effort. In addition to the group
strategy, the camp used a portion of the person-by-person information
in the individual sessions conducted with staff prior to the opening
of camp.
Managing When asked about the value of using assessments including the
iWAM in the selection and management of employees, one manager of a corporate
customer service group said:
“Since we put the selection and hiring process in place, it has
been interesting to compare the results we got from the assessment tools
to the on- the-job performance of the individuals we placed in the positions.
I have found the results to be very accurate. In addition, the findings
have helped me in the way that I can better relate to each person, communicate
ideas, and understand their methods of working.”
Her experience resulted in using different approaches with different
staff, based on what she learned about each of them through the assessment
process.
The application of the Attitude and Motivation information is important
in creating versatility among leadership. It is often a mystery to a
manager or supervisor why he or she can be so effective (often translates
to "relate so well to") with some staff and have so much
difficulty with others. In many cases, we attribute the cause of the
problem to the staff member's "flaw" or insufficient
characteristics. As it turns out, it may be a difference, not a flaw.
That is, the language of a manager may be a mismatch for the Attitudinal
and Motivational pattern of a staff member resulting in behavior that
is either below expectations or counter-productive to team and or organizational
goals.
Coaching There are two aspects to the application of the Attitudinal
and Motivational data to the performance coaching process (the process
of helping individual staff members improve their performance). First,
if there is a performance issue, one of the first places to look for
is "why" there is a difficulty (Is it a motivation issue?
A competency issue? A supervisor/relationship issue?). The second place
to use it is with the supervisor or manager doing the coaching. If your
leadership has been trained in the fundamentals of the strong connection
between Attitudinal and Motivational patterns and language, then the
leader as coach may be more effective in getting the desired improvement
from their staff.
Development Unlike trait-based factors such as personality and native
abilities, there are two ways to address performance mismatches between
Attitudinal and Motivational patterns and performance:
- It is possible to help individuals shift or change patterns.
- It is possible to develop some skills or competencies to compensate
for Attitudinal and Motivation patterns that are likely to be fairly
permanent.
The strategy or application to an individual is a function of the person,
the supervisor, the situation, and the resources available.
As you can see from the sections above, Attitudinal and Motivational
pattern data can be used in several aspects of the development process
from initial orientation to coaching to training. What's important
is for the camp industry to become aware of the possibilities and to
consider how the information and practices might be applied to a given
situation.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Let's go back to the beginning and look at the basic premises:
- Jim Collins says, "First who, then what." Who you
have on your camp bus is absolutely critical to long-term, high-level
performance.
- Daniel Goleman and the emotional intelligence community argue,
based on their research, that factors such as intelligence and competencies
are not sufficient in many cases to predict performance. There is something
more involved and that something seems to have a great deal to do with
our ability to use our abilities. Think, for example, about how effective
you are when you get really upset.
- We assume that there is a vast storehouse of knowledge and experience
among camp owners and managers in the recruiting, selection, and development
of staff and that this storehouse has great value in addressing future
challenges.
- We also used the 212° analogy to propose that going from good
(hot water) to great (steam) was often a difference of only one degree.
We are asking if there is a possibility that the one degree could be
in the application of Attitudinal and Motivational patterns to the
performance process.
Where you choose to go from here is entirely up to you. There is a long
history and tradition that underlies the camp industry in North America
and elsewhere. So, on one hand, it is important to know and respect what
it is about the industry and of each camp that makes it and them great.
At the same time, you might want to consider what will be involved in
reaching the next level of excellence for your camp for as one person
said: "In this world, if you are standing still, you're losing
ground." Perhaps there is a way to keep moving your camp toward
greatness or the next level of greatness in the work cited in this article.
Regardless of what you do, remember that the defining key to your camp's
success really is your staff . . . take advantage of all the tools to
ensure that you have the best team possible . . . at the very least,
it is what your campers and their families expect.
| References |
| Charvet, S.R. (1997). Words that change minds: Mastering the language
of influence. Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company, (2nd edition). |
Originally published in the 2007 May/June
issue of Camping Magazine. |
