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The best way to source candidates for open positions is by tapping into an existing network.  Sending emails to connections and leveraging LinkedIn network will turn-up the prime candidates. When sending these emails or postings it's best to focus more on the "soft skills" sought and less on the "hard skills."  Remember most leaders hire for hard skills but fire for soft skills.  By describing the personal characteristics needed, contacts will better recall someone they know who is the ideal fit. Consider these two approaches and which one is more likely to conjure up a person you'd recommend: Wanted: A receptionist capable of typing 100 words per minute; able to answer multiple incoming phone lines; greets and directs visitors; 10+ years experience with a fortune 500 company. Seeking: A receptionist who loves word processing; who's smile you can sense over the phone; immediately makes visitors feel comfortable when they visit us; thrives in a fast paced multi-tasking environment. Empowered hiring managers describe the soft sills they need when looking to fill a position for more successful hires.

Davidson, NC – Cynthia Gave, The Metiss Group, Davidson, NC was recently named to the National Small Business Association (NSBA) Leadership Council. NSBA is the nation’s oldest small-business advocacy organization, and operates on a staunchly nonpartisan basis. Cyndi Gave, a recognized leader in the small-business community, joins the NSBA Leadership Council alongside other small-business advocates from across the country as they work to promote the interests of small business to policymakers in Washington, D.C. “As a small-business owner, we are reminded daily about the importance of being involved and active when it comes to laws and regulation,” stated Gave. “Joining NSBA’s Leadership Council will enable me to take our collective small-business message to the people that need to hear it most: Congress.” Ms. Gave was born and raised just outside New York City, graduated from Michigan State University, and founded The Metiss Group in Metro Detroit in 1996 before expanding it to the Charlotte, NC area 10 years later.  The Metiss Group works with small to mid-size businesses throughout the US aligning talent processes to overall business strategies; right people in the right seats, performance acceleration, and organizational health.  Cyndi has been a member, speaker, and sponsor to Entrepreneur’s Organization, Vistage, Renaissance Executive Forum and other CEO peer-to-peer groups. Gave joined the NSBA Leadership Council as part of her efforts to tackle the many critical issues facing small business, including tax reform, regulatory restraint, health care costs and how access to capital will impact small business. The NSBA Leadership Council is focused on providing valuable networking between small-business advocates from across the country while ensuring small business a seat at the table as Congress and regulators take up key small-business proposals. “I am proud to have Cynthia Gave as part of our Leadership Council,” stated NSBA President and CEO Todd McCracken. “She came to us highly recommended and I look forward our coordinated efforts for years to come.” Please click here to learn more about www.themetissgroup.com For more on the NSBA Leadership Council, please visit www.nsba.biz For More Information, Contact: Cynthia Gave 704-837-0696 cyndi@themetissgroup.com

According to usa.gov the top five New Year’s Resolutions are: 1.    Lose weight 2.    Volunteer to help others 3.    Quit smoking 4.    Learn more 5.    Get a better job For hiring managers looking to make a hire, the best time to start recruiting efforts can be the beginning of the year.  January is the best month to reach passive candidates capitalizing on their New Year’s resolutions. Often, these newly resigned job seekers will begin searching for new positions that first week in January even before they have their resumes prepared. Whether or not there is an immediate need, identifying superstars when they are emotionally committed to change jobs and courting them until there is spot for them is a strategy that will give a long-term competitive edge.  Many have learned the hard way that waiting until there is an opening is too late to begin searching for just the right person.  Granted, there is some effort required to keep the candidate engaged as the year progresses, but that’s nothing like the effort required to find someone out of thin air once an opening occurs. The holidays provide lots of gatherings with people looking for safe topics of conversation.  Hiring manager can use the time wisely by preparing a little pitch that can be used to describe the culture of the organization and the pros of working there.  When people begin to search for positions, they’ll start by thinking about the type of place they’d like to work — let one of those places that come to mind be the leaders. Empowered hiring managers plant seeds of candidate sourcing early so they can reap the benefits when they need to make a successful hire.

Past performance is always the best indication of how well a candidate will likely perform in a new role. Interviewing and assessing candidates provides useful insight, but If you have ever applied for an advanced area of study (or know someone who has), you know submitting references is a major step in the application process. References play a significant role in the school's admittance decision. The prepared applicants have been cultivating their references well before the time of application. Much thought is given to choosing those references that will be both respected by the school and can best attest to the candidate's abilities. The quality of references submitted by job candidates says a lot about them too. Having bosses or senior associates as references indicates a candidate who has left jobs on favorable conditions. Having quality references might indicate how well a candidate maintains their network. The best references are those who have had frequent and significant interactions with the candidate. They have had the opportunity to see the candidate's many facets and worked with them through the rough patches. Candidates with poor quality references may be a future headache. Empowered hiring managers evaluate the quality of their candidates’ references and make successful hires.

When leaders are asked how things are going, many will answer with something about how busy they are – just not enough hours in the day, can’t get anything done, running around like crazy, etc., etc. So why not create a strategic talent plan to align and support the overall strategic plan? Perhaps the simplest way for a leader to motivate, empower, and free up time is for them to ask their direct report: “What three things could I be delegating to you?” After agreeing what can be delegated, the leader should lay out a development plan to prepare for that delegation. The development objectives should roll right into the quarterly expectations and performance measures. This may not feel comfortable for the leader who believes "no one can do this better than I" but the leaders must remember that to get to where they are today, someone sometime gave them a break and trusted their abilities. Leaders who empower direct reports with increased delegation have more success.

As we approach the end of one year and prepare for next year, most organizations undertake some version of strategic planning. This can often be exciting as we optimistically look to the future and lay out steps to accomplish those growth goals; sometimes it’s overwhelming as we battle to get the leadership team to agree on a realistic, if not short, list of goals to be accomplished. When it’s all said and done, we’re relieved, and energized to achieve that expected growth. So why not create a strategic talent plan to align and support the overall strategic plan? As a recovering HR person, I distinctly remember one international organization to which I belonged and the December we had 3 openings our singular recruiter was trying to fill. She was busy, but it was a reasonable workload. Then, January 2nd hit. We suddenly had 92 openings for the new year to fill with one in-house recruiter, no heads up, and every one of those was needed NOW! That example may appear obvious, but think about some not so obvious strategic talent planning that needed to be considered. Of course, it would have been useful for me to know this was going to hit January 1 so I could have prepared to staff-up for this effort - either by using outsourced resources, or hiring in-house team members based on even more future growth. If we were hiring an additional 92 people, of which 70ish were going to be in one area, what were the plans for the individuals to whom they’re going to report? Do we need to promote additional people to leadership roles? Do those people need some leadership development? Do we need to hire additional people from outside for those leadership roles? When do they need to be brought on? Will they be expected to contribute to the selection process of people who will be on their team therefore needing to be hired first? Now think about your strategic plan. Are you planning to expand and grow, or contract? Are you planning some acquisitions? Are you planning to implement or streamline extensive processes? What are the primary focuses for next year and how might having the right strategic talent plan allow you to achieve those goals more efficiently, more quickly, more smoothly? #TheMetissGroup #TalentAlignment

The brain is like any other muscle: it strengthens or atrophies with exercise or neglect. Given the complexities and challenges all teams face, effective problem solving or critical thinking skills are essential. Critical thinking skills can be learned and developed. This important skill enhancement should be a part of each direct report's personal development. Leaders should make it a natural part of conversations by asking for solutions, strategies, and what the direct report would anticipate to be the short and long term ramifications of those choices. There are many sources for learning critical thinking – Googling "critical thinking training" returned about 29,200,000 results (as of this writing). A well-written, great resource for developing critical thinking skills is: "The Thinker's Toolkit: 14 Powerful Techniques for Problem Solving" by Morgan D. Jones. Leaders who encourage direct reports to work on their critical thinking skills and empower them to find the resources that work best for them have increased success.

It's a fact that humans are more likely to extend themselves for another human if there is a relationship between them. Strong relationships inspire people to go out of their way for others. An effective relationship between a leader and their direct report contributes to everyone's success. The best way to work on this relationship is during regular one-on-one meetings. Leaders should sincerely ask about their direct report's family by name, inquire about their hobbies and interests, and even know about their pets. Leaders who care about their direct report's lives outside of work will get them to move mountains for them at work. Leaders who get to know their direct reports and empower them experience more success.

In the 70's at Stanford University, Walter Mischel studied a group of four-year old children and conducted the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment. Each of the children was given one marshmallow, but were promised two if they waited twenty minutes before eating the first marshmallow. Some children were able to wait the twenty minutes, and some were not. Mischel then studied the children into adolescence and found that those children able to delay gratification were psychologically better-adjusted, more dependable, and better students. Bottom line: delaying gratification resulted in more success. Good impulse control is considered a positive leadership characteristic and as psychologist Daniel Goleman indicates, an important component trait of emotional intelligence. Leaders are under much pressure to deliver results faster and often forsake greater future success because they choose today's immediate gratification. We see this in leaders who hire a poor culture fit just because the person is strong in hard skills, rather than a good culture fit with the opportunity to develop the hard skills. We see this in leaders who choose to complete a task themselves today instead of delegating it to a developing direct report because it gets done faster. We see this in leaders who fail to prepare a succession plan for their direct reports because it takes up too much time today and figure they'll just deal with it later. Empowered leaders control the impulse of today's short cut and experience greater success tomorrow.

The best time to assess candidates is after the phone screen, core values assignment, and first interview. As assessments become easier to administer, more-and-more organizations are assessing candidates at various points in their selection process. In some cases, where they are being inserted, and how they are being used might create a legal or moral dilemma. Legally, no assessment should count for more than 1/3 of the selection process and no assessment should be a go/no-go decision on its own. There are two other business reasons not to assess too early in the process: 1) hiring managers might be investing in an assessment for a candidate they don’t like and could have screened out without the investment; and 2) the assessment might bias the view of the candidate before the meeting. Meeting with a candidate before assessing allows for an open mind about their styles. A bigger mistake hiring managers make is administering assessments too late in the process. It is common for managers to assess candidates as the final step “just in case something pops up.” By the time a candidate gets to this stage of the process, hiring managers have emotionally committed to the candidate and cannot objectively interpret the results. If hiring managers are deep into the process and committed to a candidate, they shouldn’t bother assessing. Assessing candidates after the first interview allows the hiring manager to confirm their observations and objectively focus on concerns in follow-up behavior-based interviews and behavior-based reference checks. Empowered hiring managers assess their candidates at the right time in the process for successful results.

Leaders are responsible for challenging their direct reports to personally grow and providing resources for their development. Leaders are not responsible for teaching, just the inspiration. On-going personal development can be of the mind (intellectual), body (physical), heart (relationships), or spirit (values). Too often development is just focused on the intellectual (mind). There is nothing wrong with encouraging direct reports to grow in all parts of life. Taking an aerobics class (physical); spending more time with the family (relationships); or attending a spiritual retreat (values) are all effective personal development activities that can make direct reports more productive. The leader's job is to empower their direct reports to develop. Their continued growth and development - in all aspects of their life - will lead to everyone's success.

Empowerment is built on trust and a healthy relationship cultivated between leaders and their direct reports. With empowerment comes an obligation to call out troubling situations that have gone ignored. This is most difficult for leaders who greatly care about the person, but that's when it is most critical. How much trust can there really be if something obvious is being avoided? When providing feedback, these steps should help the leader: • Take accountability for actions; • Describe the situation and behaviors; • Assign accountability to the direct report for identifying and implementing a solution. For example: "I have to tell you, I feel guilty for not having brought up this issue sooner, but I have so much respect for you, I need to share with you something I should have said a long time ago. I'm concerned you are losing credibility when you are unprepared for client sessions and not meeting deadlines. I'm confident you would never do anything to intentionally harm your credibility or ours. What do you think you can do to turn the situation around?" Empowered direct reports know when and how they have fallen short of expectations so they can feel the success of implementing a solution.