Building Your Management Team - The Skill Set Matrix(TM)

Agenda below.

The concept of job scope and how it is stage dependent for most. The most common hiring mistake in my opinion is hiring people who got all their experience in vastly different size organizations. Tens of millions are lost on this experience every year, maybe even hundreds of millions in investments.

Putting a VP of Marketing from IBM in a startup is a formula for disaster. This may be obvious but the many subtle gradients between these two extremes are only exposed by having The Five Stages of Development model as a reference tool. We must rank people in this model to increase hiring success.

This tool is designed to help take the emotion out of hiring and reviewing employees and also do organizational development planning.

This session frames The Skills Set Matrix™ Tool with the 4 Levels of career experience X 5 Stages of a company X 5 Categories = 100 Cells. This sets up a way to rank people objectively, and also verify their resumes, as total time in each area must add up to total years’ experience. Hence, they cannot claim 10 years in marketing when 5 was in customer service. Like a balance sheet, it must balance.

Hire without the "I'll hire them because I like them" problem. Rank candidates and look at your entire team to understand where it is weak and strong.

This session explores the nature of learning and experience and how it can be understood and ranked better. Long before Malcolm Gladwell published the book Blink in 2004 at the first CEO Boot Camp, I published The Wisdom Pyramid. It is essentially the same concept though his was so much more articulate and deeper. After all he did a whole book and I only did one slide.

We all used to know it took five years full-time work to become a “Master”. That is why back in the 1800s they have 5-year apprenticeships. But somewhere along the way we forgot and lost this concept. Time to refresh your memory as not knowing this can kill your company. Would you hire a just graduated surgeon to operate on you or your mother, or someone with 20 years’ experience operating? Yea, I thought so.

Digging deeper into this common failure of entrepreneurs and hiring managers we exam The Pilot Story. Hiring someone with expertise you do not have. Where does wisdom come from? Objectively ranking your entire team and creating a map to fill it out that will crush the competition and attract investors like flies to you know what.

This is a powerful tool and use well it will build your organization with far fewer hiring errors, which can save hundreds of thousands of dollars and generate extra revenue too. WTPOA!

This session goes through a complete example of the SSM. Your exercise is to do one for your own company now. Odds are you do not even have enough data to complete this as you will need everyone’s resumes and to know the size of each company on their resume that is relevant to their job title today.

So, put it on your $1 Million Business plan now. I would bet this process will reveal holes in your organization that you were not aware of, or in very small ones be the first step in creating a organizational and hiring plan. Experiential learning is powerful. Do not miss it.

A model for hiring outsiders is presented and mapped into the same concepts of The Skill Set Matrix™.

Contractors and Consultants are easy to try before you buy and not a long-term commitment. However, many Consultants will take any job outside their expertise and the variance in performance can be massive. So, best to dip a toe in the water and try them out with a smaller project and only then commit to something significant or strategic.

This session discusses how certain people like the CEO are exceptions, as they are generalists more than specialists and do not “fit” into the Skill Set Matrix™ as a result.

We will also recap certain take-aways that can help enhance your recruiting success and retention because building a win-win and investing in talent will go a long way to making your company successful. See the Personality Testing course for lots more on this area.

Recruiting and keeping the best people and coaching them up is the #1 job of any real CEO. It may take up to 50% of a CEO's time. People are your competitive advantage and will help build SCA. Especially in a startup or smaller company where each person can be critical.