how to build your team’s cheat sheet for excellence
Job descriptions and onboarding materials can be propulsive and culture-building. They can also be crummy boilerplate.
The best, most useful stuff in these documents is usually a list of competencies. This list is the blueprint, the recipe for success, the “How One Gets a Reputation for Being a Badass Around Here” cheat sheet.
The key to making that list really good is putting down the pen and picking up the microphone. Don’t invent a single thing. Get the items on the list inductively by getting them from your best people.
Gather your top performers, the all-stars whose opinions and standards you trust. They understand the mission and understand how far you still have to go to achieve it. You also want people with a good 360-degree view of the org. Typically, this means they need to be folks who have line of sight to more than one division.
Once you’ve assembled this squad, interview them with the following prompts:
Tell me about the mission we’re trying to achieve.
Who have you seen who is most likely to achieve that mission? That is, if we cloned this person, we’d be guaranteed to hit the mission.
What do we see each of those people do on a regular basis that makes them stand out from others? If a documentary film crew followed for a week & you made a highlight reel, what would you include? Split blended or combined behaviors out into individual items (e.g., hungry but humble → 1. Hungry, 2 Humble)
Set your floor behaviors: Who are 2-3 people who didn’t make your list from above? If a year from now they did make the cut, what did they literally start doing to get there?
Now take that list and look for patterns. Form hypotheses.
Share that with the group. Let them reflect. THen turn that into 3-5 competencies / core values.
Note: You can just look at old evals of your top people if you have authentic, detailed performance reviews. That may be even better than the focus group.
-Ben
