Wayne Dyer once said: When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. What is the most challenging element of your social business? We feel one of the most difficult, yet most important elements of any business are the hiring process. This is particularly true for a social business. Here the employee traits take center stage, don’t they?
These days more and more companies are turning their attention to social commerce business. Meaning? The simple meaning is they believe that they need more attention to building customer relationships.
Related post: Who Will Be Your Next Employee?
From customer relationships comes trust, the most important factor in a customer selecting a company with whom to do business. The secret to building customer relationships is customer engagement and there are many ways you’ll need to engage customers.
During the hiring process steps, you really must take into consideration personality. Even the person who is talented, sometimes they don’t have the right personality because they are not really people oriented.
Bringing in exactly the right people is paramount for any business and being successful at social engagement is growing as most important for many businesses.
Put simply; people matter. The problem is that very few people actually possess the talent to identify talent. Identifying and recruiting talent requires much more than screening a resume and having a set of standard interviewing questions to guide you. There are issues of values, vision, culture, and most of all personality that need to be addressed in the hiring process.
In today’s post, we’ll share our philosophy on the best qualities to look for to ensure that you hire the correct personality traits for a social business.
We recommend the following 7 behaviors, attitudes and strengths to look to hire and develop in our client businesses:
Signs of a good employee.
Engaging employee traits
Some people have so much personality, presence, and magnetism that they brighten a room when they come in. Others have so little, that they brighten the room when they leave.
A person with a truly magnetic personality does not have to be the “life of the party” or the “class clown” in order to attract attention. Instead, he or she may say very little in the way of idle conversation or chit-chat.
What this person does best is make everyone he or she interacts with feel empowered or validated. The positive energy and the selfless interest in the other party make the person very popular indeed.
Employee traits … connects personally with professional
The fundamental truth is that your personal life is almost undoubtedly more interesting than your business life. Period. And, associating some sort of noteworthy character trait in your personal brand makes you more memorable in social media. The fact that you run a PR firm? Meh. The fact that run a PR firm, but also grow prize-winning roses? People will remember that.
In a socially connected world, where countless opinions and options are just a finger swipe on a mobile device away, differentiation is harder than ever. You have to build some hooks for yourself than transcend the office. That’s why I make it a point to emphasize my hobbies … love to work in my perennial garden, try new golf courses, and do a lot of reading.
Your personal life? Your professional life? One and the same. I know that’s often uncomfortable. But it’s the truth.
Signs of a good employee … great storyteller
The point that I like to make is that how you say something is just as important as what you are saying.
Storytelling is a great means for sharing and interpreting experiences, and great experiences have this innate ability to change the way in which we view our world.
Stories, when properly practiced, pull people into a dialogue. It’s about engagement and interaction. The audience is just as active a participant as the storyteller. And it has a great deal to do with how you tell the story.
Born a collaborator
It takes a great entrepreneur with a vision to start a business, but it requires strong leadership collaboration skills and a collaboration of many people to make it a success.
Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals. Note that collaboration is NOT cooperation … it is more than the intersection of common goals, but a collective determination to reach an identical objective by sharing knowledge, learning, and building consensus.
Here are three important traits of a great collaborator:
Don’t try to be the smartest person in the group – even if there’s a chance you are.
Offer your ideas as just that – an idea – not THE idea.
Never outwardly attack an idea or suggestion.
Listener
Some people are very good at speaking, telling their stories and being able to inspire others. But being a good listener is often more important than speaking. It gives a deeper level of understanding of someone’s situation and helps to know what words are best to use and what words should be avoided.
As simple as listening may seem, doing it well, particularly when disagreements arise, takes sincere effort and lots of practice.
Listening is the key to having good empathy. Tim Brown, the CEO and President of IDEO, the global innovation, and design firm, describes empathy as making an effort to “see the world through the eyes of others, understand the world through their experiences, and feel the world through their emotions.”
Customer-centric, in its simplest and most pure sense, means making the customer’s life easy; designing processes that are focused on delivering a positive experience to the customer; making it extremely easy for the customer to learn about you, buy from you, and get support from you when they need it.
There are always situations where the designed process doesn’t flow as smoothly as intended. And those situations are the ones where your customer-centered trait is really tested.
When a process goes off the tracks, customer-centric businesses don’t let the customer feel the bumps. They stay focused on delivering a positive customer experience, while they absorb the bumps through alternative or ad-hoc procedures.
Change has become a much bigger, more interwoven part of the overall business fabric – an embedded leadership requirement that plays into everything that we do, every day, and how we go about getting things done. In the end, every employee must be a change agent.
A change agent lives in the future, not the present. Regardless of what is going on today, a change agent has a vision of what could or should be and uses that as the governing sense of action. To a certain extent, a change agent is dissatisfied with what they see around them, in favor of a much better vision of the future.
The bottom line
The biggest mistake people make when it comes to listening is they’re so focused on what they’re going to say next or how what the other person is saying is going to affect them that they fail to hear what’s being said. The words come through loud and clear, but the meaning is lost.
A simple way to avoid this is to ask a lot of questions. People like to know you’re listening, and something as simple as a clarification question shows that not only are you listening, you also care about what they’re saying. You’ll be surprised how much respect and appreciation you gain just by asking questions.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your enablers for success for being a more social business?
Need some help in capturing more improvements for your staff’s leadership, teamwork, and collaboration? Creative ideas in running or facilitating a team or leadership workshop?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And this struggle gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
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Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he writes about topics that relate to improving the performance of the business. Go to Amazon to obtain a copy of his latest book, Exploring New Age Marketing. It focuses on using the best examples to teach new age marketing … lots to learn. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More hiring material from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Recruitment Process … Avoid These 5 Killer Hiring Mistakes
People Are Your Business, So Recruitment Is Lifes Blood
Employee Traits … 7 You Need to Be a Social Business
