I’ve lined myself up in front of fish tank on purpose for this particular video because the fish are going to be part of the story. I know many of you read the transcript and enjoy following the blog that way and I think that’s great. But I also know many people watch the video, and I’ve heard that you like to see the fish. So, go ahead and watch the fish while I talk if you like. But the other reason is because we talk about putting people into environments that really suit them well. And that we have the right type of person in a job and in an environment that really does match up well with them.

So, I was talking to a candidate about this and how it all kind of ties together and I said, you know, you can be a beautiful fish but if you are a fresh water fish and you are put in a salt water tank, you’re not going to do really well. And if you are a cold-water fish and you are put in a warm water tank you’re not going to do really well. So, it has nothing to do with the beauty and the quality of the fish. You need to put the right fish in the right kind of tank. And you need to put the right type of people in an environment that suits their behavioral nature, and provide them with the kind of coaching and the mentoring that suits their needs.

Yes, there are many different ways to get jobs done and different behavioral styles can definitely be successful in the same environment. But you the manager make the difference because you know how to create the environment that just like putting a fresh water fish in a fresh water tank and a salt water fish in a salt water tank. Hope this makes sense. Thanks for your time, thanks for listening.

I want to talk to you today about when you’re thinking about how much effort you put into what you do, and whether or not anybody actually notices. The reason for this story is because I had an opportunity to talk with the candidate just recently and they said to me, “hey Bob, you really like what you do, I can tell you really enjoy it. And this was a very interesting time for me to learn about myself. I went through this one other time and it was so obvious that the person who was reviewing my profile with me was bored. They just mailed it in and there was nothing that I really got out of that experience.” And it made me realize that people really do see the difference. People can recognize when you’re putting forth an effort to make it special and to make it good.

There are repetitive aspects of everybody’s job. Think about the Broadway actor who is playing Hamlet and needs to read “To be or not to be” six nights a week and for two matinees. But just as every single audience is different, every single candidate is different, every single client is different and you need to look what you do in the eyes of the people that you’re delivering your work for — embrace how they will feel about it, look at how they will view it and you’ll be able to move beyond any aspect of repetitive boredom.

Really enjoy and embrace what you do. There is so much pleasure in what we get to do and how we’re able to work with people. You need to take advantage of that, just like the sign says at my pet store that we visit, Bark Less, Wag More. Thanks for your time.

I saw this mask when I was out shopping with my wife for the holidays and, of course, like anything, whenever I see something like this my thoughts always go to business. I thought about a kid holding this up like this and thinking that the person whom you get to see is the mask, not the real person. And I got to thinking about this as it relates to the hiring process because, let’s face it; whenever a candidate comes in to see us, no matter what they may say about wanting to be sure that it’s a good fit for them, too, people put on a mask, and that mask is what they think you want to see. It’s just human nature and it can be very difficult for us to decipher whether we’re looking at the real person or if we’re looking at the mask.

One of the tools that we provide to help you with this is the Behavioral Profiling tool that breaks out for you the basic, natural self, as in who the real person is, and then how we get to see that person. Think about how relevant that is for you when you’re trying to make a hiring decision, because is it the person with the mask who is going to show up or is it, in fact, the real person? And we know that in terms of providing motivation, guidance, leadership, coaching and everything else, it needs to be the real person whom you’re motivating not the mask. Thanks for your attention, I look forward to being with you again.

Even in these difficult economic times, our clients still find it very difficult to find quality candidates that they are prepared to hire. We would like to think that people are just sticking out there, you know, hanging around the telephone booth waiting for the phone call but the fact of the matter is most of us have very, very specific needs and it’s hard to find candidates that really do fit the bill. But every once in a while, you find two.

The question becomes:

What steps can you take when you really have two quality candidates?

That was a dilemma that one of our clients was facing. It was a position for sales and they had two candidates, each had very different personality profiles, both of them could certainly be very effective in sales. But their situations were very different. One person had been out of work for a while, had taken a bit of a sabbatical to deal with some family-related issues which is not at all unusual. The other person was gainfully employed, working for a competitor, and was being recruited by them, so to speak.

Well the first candidate was going full speed all out to get the job. Anything that needed to be done as part of the interview process, they really went overboard and did everything perfectly. The other candidate who was gainfully employed didn’t put nearly as much time into the effort. As a result when it came to presentations and follow-up, they really didn’t measure up at the same level. But the client understood why.

So we talked about it. I made a recommendation to let both of them know that there is competition for the position, and to let them know what your concern is in each case. Give them a chance to see how they would respond and how they would deal with that situation because after all, for sales people, this is going to be a natural evolution and this is an opportunity for you to have evidence of their behavior.

You might likely say, well the person who’s gainfully employed, well they’re not going to put in the same effort and the person who is unemployed is really going to knock themselves out. But the true nature of a competitor will come through when they realize a position that they say they want is on the line.

So the morale of the story is, give your candidates a chance to compete and pay close attention to how they deal with it because the way they deal with that competition will be very much the way they deal with…working for you.

We’re going to review an email that I received over the weekend. These are the kind of emails that can really make a weekend special let me tell you. I’m going to leave off the details because they’re irrelevant to the story but it reads like this:

It says, “Hi Bob. I have recently joined a company. My current employer doesn’t
know this yet, so please keep that quiet. Please find copied here with, the name of the Human Resources Manager. She is our Senior Human Resource Manager and we have discussed using your services as part of our recruitment process. I would also be interested in you conducting an analysis on the existing sales team as a way to understand more deeply the team we already have in the field.” And it’s signed by this individual who is the new Senior Vice President of Sales.

So this had great meaning to me for a lot of reasons. Obviously it’s a new prospect. It looks like the sales cycle is going to be relatively short. The SVP of Sales has worked with us. He gets it. He understands what the value is. How great is that?

What’s really interesting as a business person and as a sales person is to really
grandfather where this came from because this obviously didn’t start with this company and it didn’t even start with the company that this person worked for. It started with a company one before that. Because the individual that brought our product to the company where this person was started with us about 10 years ago and we worked with that person for a number of years with that company. He then moved over into this new organization and brought our services with him.

The writer of this email was one of the managers that when our services were initially presented, kind of rolled his eyes and said, “What do we need that for?” Well that was about five years ago. We had an opportunity to work together obviously over those years and now we’re going to continue to have an opportunity to work on that.

All of this started with a cold call. All of this started because somebody who was on my team had the guts to pick up the phone and call a senior level executive and talk to them about what we did and engaged them in conversation. So for all of you cold callers out there, banging your head against the wall wondering what they’re really worth, when you strike the gold line, you can write it for a long way. This client will be the seventh client that we will do business with over the last decade that all came from that one sales person picking up the phone to talk to one prospect.

So keep at it even though it’s hard. Even though you may get disappointed based on the percentages, remember we’re not playing baseball. Nobody cares about your batting average. All we care about are hits. Keep swinging for the fences.

You maybe aware of a quote from Henry David Thoreau – probably
something he came up with on a rainy day, when he was sitting at Waldon Pond,
which said, “most of us live lives of quiet desperation”. I’ve always found that quote
disquieting and I really feel that it doesn’t necessarily apply to everybody equally. And
I’ve never really felt that it’s applied to me. But there are times of quiet when I think
about the service that Opus provides to our clients. And I really try to understand the
value that we can bring to you, by utilizing our services.

I think its important that we all feel that we do something of value. And so I give this
probably more thought than other people do. And I really think the value is around
helping you understand motivation, what motivates you as an individual, what’s
important to you to help somebody confirm and affirm your own motivators, and then to
help you understand what motivates the people around you. Because if we understand
what people are motivated by, then we can understand what we can do to help them
accomplish what’s important to them.

And it’s not the things as much as it is the intangibles. We all have them, the desire to
win, the desire to be part of the team, the desire for security, the desire for harmony.
Whatever it is, we all have motivations that go beyond what we normally see. And
our job, and what hopefully we do well for you, is to help you understand your own
motivation and what motivates others. And for doing that then maybe, maybe Thoreau
didn’t get it right as it relates to OPUS.

I want to share some thoughts with you about a video that I saw probably two years ago when I attended a presentation that was done by a friend and client, Rob Johnson, of Sage Software. He kicked off the session by showing a video clip that’s called, “Stuck on an Escalator.” And we’re going to include the url so you can go and watch this video as well because it should haunt you the way it’s haunted me for the past couple of years.

The concept is very simple. There are two people. They are riding up an escalator in either an office building or wherever. You can’t really tell. And all of a sudden, the escalator stops. And they kind of panic. They’re standing there and they start talking
to each other. They start calling for help. Somebody does show up to theoretically fix the escalator, although that person doesn’t fix the escalator. And the people that are on the escalator stayed there. And you want to scream at them. “Just look. Just get off the escalator. It’s up to you to step up the escalator. What is your problem?”

But obviously it’s a metaphor. And the metaphor is that we get stuck on our own escalator of life where we don’t move. We get stuck with something and we don’t fix it and we don’t really understand why.

I looked at that tape and I thought about it. I said, “No. That’s not me. I would never do that.” If I had anything in life and I got stuck, I know I would just step right up and get off that escalator.

But you know what? The reason it’s haunted me is because I also know that’s not true. There are situations in all of our lives that cause us to get stuck on the escalator. And it’s our job as grown ups to figure out when we are stuck because help is not on the way. And more often than not, its tied to our behavioral style. It’s tied to doing something that is opposite from what our strengths are. And we avoid it.

Well this video helped me recognize those times in my life when I needed to kind of give myself a boot in the butt to get myself going. And I think that the video could do the same thing for you.

By the way, kudos to my friend Rob Johnson because since that time, he’s written a book about salesmanship and I’m going to give him a plug right now. It’s called “Kick your Own Ass: The Will, Skill, and Drill to Sell More than You Ever Thought Possible.” You go Rob. Watch the video. Tell me what you think.

Bob Kreisberg: For those of you that have a family cat, you’re going to understand
exactly what I’m talking about right from the get-go. But for those of you that maybe
dog people or for those of you that don’t have any animals at all, this may be a little bit
different for you, and I appreciate that.

My wife and I and children were dog people for many, many years. And we found that
having dogs was a great pleasure. They came when you call them. They sat when you
ask them to sit. And they pretty much did whatever you wanted them to do.

Then came the kittens. My daughter introduced us to kittens and we brought them in the
house. And lo and behold, the kittens ended up in the sewing room, and I remember the
first time I try to get the kittens out of the sewing room, and it was impossible. I mean
I was pulling my hair our trying to figure out how to get these kittens out of the sewing
room.

My daughter, who is a veterinary technician and a master psychologist as it comes to
animals especially cats, said to me, “Dad, what you need to figure out is what motivates
them, not what motivates you. Because if you can figure out what motivates them they
will respond to that.” And she said, “The good news is, you can find some thing they
will be motivated by. It could be a food snack. It could be an empty box. It could be a
tinkling sound. Or maybe be a moving feather. Figure it out and you’ll get the cats out
of the sewing room.” And she was right.

It was an important lesson to be learned because although with dogs, you may be able to
tell them what to do. With cats, with customers, and employees, finding out what really
motivates them and figuring out a way to bring that to them will get you far better results.

And we’re all motivated by something. It may not be a shiny light. It may not be a
tinkling sound. But it has to do with who we are and what our personality is and what
makes us tick. And just think about this. We maybe very motivated to do things that we
like but we’re even more strongly motivated to avoid things that we don’t like.

Understand the nature of the person that you’re working with so you can figure out
whether or not it is the empty box or the tinkling sound. And when you can deliver that,
then you can motivate people just the way we motivated the kittens to do what we wanted
them to do.

Thanks for your attention.

I want to talk with you today about whether or not a bad personality can be fixed. It’s an interesting concept and it’s something that we’re probably all familiar with at some level. I was in an Executive Suite for a number of years, and we had a receptionist who was a very sharp person, but also highly critical. If she liked you as a tenant, you got very good service. But if she decided, in her infinite wisdom, that you weren’t very capable in what you did, you got lousy service, and I watched this happen.

Of course I was on the side of getting very good service, so I was okay. But it clearly was not an okay situation. And really, the nature of this person was that she had a critical nature and you could say that she couldn’t help herself. Or of course she could. But it raises the point when you have someone that has a personality style that’s not fit for a particular role; can you as a leader fix that personality?

Well, to an extent you can, but you need to realize that there’s only so much elastic that you’re able to get out of somebody. So asking somebody to be so different from what their natural style is, is a very uncomfortable place to put people. In fact, our role as a leader is to be able to find the right fit for people.

Now maybe in this case, there wasn’t a right fit for this particular person in this organization and you need to look at that as reality as well. We only have a certain amount of flexibility and we all need it, because there isn’t any such thing as the perfect personality for a job. We all need to recognize there is a time and a place where we need to modify what our own nature is to accommodate the requirements of that position. In some ways, we all have bad personalities for what we do. Hopefully, it’s more good than bad and we can take advantage of the good and when we need to, adjust, so we could be effective in our role.

Thanks for your time.

Probably the most typical vernacular that I hear when discussing the personality profile of a salesperson is using the phrase hunter versus farmer. And more often than not, a vice president of sales or even a CEO will say, “What we really need around here are some hunters. We’ve got farmers but we really need hunters.” Help us find some hunters and in fact, it’s one of the critical reasons why people work with us and utilize our candidate assessment and personality profiling services is to be able to determine whether or not the candidate is a hunter or if that person is a farmer.

Now we can talk about whether or not a company really does need hunters versus farmers because we’ve definitely found situations when companies are looking for hunters yet, in fact, their top performers are farmers. But that’s a topic for a different video blog. We’re talking today about understanding the personality profile difference between a hunter and a farmer. And it’s very simple and it’s very clear. There are four behavioral traits that get measured in a personality profiling tool. Dominance, which is the level of aggressiveness, extroversion, which is for sociability, haste, which is rate of motion, be it fast pace, go – go or slower moving, slower going, and then structuring detail. Detail oriented or not detail oriented. What’s very clear to define a hunter versus a farmer. Hunters are aggressive personalities – so their dominance will be high. Hunters are impatient personalities, so they will be fast-paced and they will be action oriented. And hunters are traditionally big picture oriented people, so their conformity will be low.

Farmers on the other hand, are consensus oriented people. They are collaborative and consensus oriented, therefore their dominance is low. They are typically good listeners and they pay attention to what is important to the client’s needs and they take their time to understand. Therefore, their patience is high. More often than not, they are process oriented and procedural and they will follow the steps necessary to do what needs to be done. Therefore, their conformity is high. We didn’t talk about the extroversion trait because in both cases hunters and farmers, more often than, not the extroversion trait is high. That’s not the measurement that makes the difference between a hunter and a farmer. What we look at in candidate assessment, personality profiling is the positioning of the dominance trait, high is hunter, low is farmer. The pace trait – high is farmer, low is hunter and the conformity trait – high is farmer, low is hunter. It’s very easy to define and it’s also very easy to be able to see the grey areas as to when somebody combines certain traits of both hunters and farmers.

Thanks for listening.