2 Valuable Tools That All Leaders Can Use To Evaluate People

29 May 2 Valuable Tools That All Leaders Can Use To Evaluate People

What are the tools?

Hey everybody welcome to our Lead Strong leadership series where today’s title post is the Two Valuable Tools That All Leaders Can Use To Evaluate People.  So for those that don’t know me my name is Christopher Hart with Transforming Lives Coaching and Consulting and I’m a coach and consultant in the areas of organizational and leadership development as well as the psychology of success and peak performance.  And so the content that we share on these videos, if you’re new and you’re joining us for the first time or watching one of our videos for the first time, we do a daily leadership video where we can share content with individuals who aspire to be leaders or who are leaders…and I believe everyone’s a leader at some level whether you’re leading yourself or you’re leading others…this content is valuable to parallel between our personal lives and our professional lives whether you’re leading yourself to specific goals or you’re leading others in an organization or you’re leading others in your family, all the fundamental aspects of our leadership videos apply in the parallels of both lives.  So I encourage you to listen to our content in the manner in which how it serves you and how you show up as the leader in that specific environment.   

So let’s jump into it, the two valuable tools, these are tools, these are elements that you can take and put in your leadership tool bag to increase your impact and influence in yourself and in other people’s lives.  And so these two tools that we can use to evaluate people are very valuable.  There’s a number of things that in essence we can use to evaluate people but these are two tools that I like to use that I think are extremely valuable that we can use whether we’re hiring people, whether we’re trying to decide whether or not we should keep someone or fire them.  If you’re leading people and your responsible for them in your life, or excuse me, in your organization …you can’t just fire people in your life, that’s a little weird, but I will talk to that…these are these are two tools that we can use to do a logical process of determining whether or not someone’s the right match to continue to stay in the role within our organization as opposed to getting emotional.  Why?  Because we are emotional beings, there’s going to be things as a leader in your leadership journey that you’re going to wake up, you’re going to be upset about, you’re going to be pissed off, you’re going to be whatever, and we have a tendency to fire people on emotions and not logic, and quite frankly that’s a leadership fail.

So these two tools are what I call the two Rs.  

The first one is results, that’s pretty easy to understand, we’ll dig into it here in a minute but the first one is results; and the second one is response.  What are the results that people are getting and how do they respond to the different situations that happen within the world,  within life, et cetera; and how do each affect one another?  So let’s break this down.

The first one is quite frankly results right.  We need to understand that if we’re going to evaluate goals …Good morning Dean, you’re a beautiful person as well my friend.  Thank you for your videos that you post every day, they motivate me in my fitness edge, or in the fitness area of my life. I will tell you some of those workouts are difficult to keep up with, so keep posting them.  Thank you.

So when we look at results like what’s the result we’re looking to achieve or what’s the result that we’re going to hold someone accountable to, like the expectation, the outcome?  And so how do they show up, what are their activities in conjunction with the results?  See there’s more to results and how we assess and evaluate individuals than the actual results itself.  As leaders I believe we have to be part of people’s growth journey and sometimes growth happens through failure, and as long as someone fails and they grow through it which talks about the response element, it’s not really failure, it’s part of growth and growth is important on anybody’s journey to success, to include your own.  But what we understand about results is what are people doing to achieve the results?  Do we have a very defined plan that we understand the activities that we can also hold them accountable?  Meaning if you didn’t get the results are you at least doing the activities that we know should generate the result, because if you are that’s a different evaluation of an individual compared to a person who doesn’t have an understanding, doesn’t have a plan or does have a plan and is not executing the plan because they want freedom of action.  When we talk about a commitment, a commitment is defined by an action or obligation that restricts freedom of action.  So if we’re evaluating results are they committed to the activities that should define the results or are they choosing freedom of action, because they’re choosing freedom of action they’re not committed which means if they’re not getting the results and they’re not committed then that could set the stage for removal from the role,  the organization, whatever.  So that’s how we look at the results element.  

The result element has subordinate understandings meaning what are the activities, are they committed to those activities?  Are they choosing the commitment over freedom of action because if you choose commitment that tells me that there’s no freedom of action, it’s an obligation that restricts freedom of action meaning you must do this and put aside everything that’s lesser of importance, or you don’t do the other stuff until you’ve done your commitments.  And if they’ve done their commitments and they’re not hitting the results then what we look at is how do we respond as leaders, we focus on is it a skill set, is it a mindset, is it a will set?  Well a will set should be there because they made the commitment, then it must be skill set or mindset, what’s holding them back; and then that’s how we lead them to the next level.

So all of that is contained under the evaluation of results.  See there’s more to results than the one-dimensional …hey if I was supposed to take two listings this week and I only took one or I didn’t take any, and “Oh you’re not getting results, you suck.”  No, maybe not, maybe as a leader you suck; maybe your people don’t suck, maybe your leadership sucks. So these are things that we have to evaluate based off a results, it’s the first key indicator that helps us assess and evaluate those within our organization, and quite frankly yourself.  Because what we say in our six levels of leadership, Level Two is lead thy self, are you getting the results in your own life?  Are you holding yourself accountable before you’re holding your people accountable or you that quote/unquote “positional leader” that’s holding people accountable to their results and you not yourself?  Told you, this stuff parallels in your life and in your own leadership, it’s for you in your own goals and it’s for your people and how to take them to where they want to go because if you’re not helping people get to where they want to go, your leadership lid is low, you’re leveraging them to get to where you want to go and that’s quite low-level leadership, so be careful with that.

The second valuable tool is response.  Here’s why response is important:  My mentor, Tony Robbins, says that the business leader who possesses the most flexibility will win in business.  So what is he saying there?  What he’s saying there is the business leader who has the ability to respond appropriately to change in shifts is the one that’s going to be able to win.  The individual, the leader who is so fixated on one way of doing it because they were programmed into only doing it this model … you see this in real estate like only this model works.  Well guess what, models of success worked long before very specific models, that model is just a tool, don’t get so fixated on it, don’t believe that’s the only way to grow a successful business.  Your ability to respond, why?  Because there’s shifts that happen.   I believe there’s three shifts that every business leader must keep an eye on and be able to respond appropriately to, it’s market shifts, business shifts, and personal shifts.

Market shifts are something happened in the economy, the marketplace that shifted it’s going to force you to respond appropriately.  Business shift, if something happen in your business, you woke up one day your key person left and took half of your team organization with them or took the most valuable players with them to start their own team, start their own organization, that’s a major shift in your business.  And then personal shift is you wake up one day with a serious debilitating illness or disease or something that you’re the main player in the organization, you’re the one that is responsible for the most amount of production in the organization and something happened to you, how do you respond to that?  So these are all the factors that we look at response, but what we look at for people in evaluating them is how do they respond.

Look, in my organization I don’t care if you don’t hit the goal…well I do but how I’m going to evaluate you is One, on the results that you get; and Two, how do you respond, because here I know, success is not a perfect science, it’s not formulaic where do A, do B, get C; or you can be doing A and B and get something completely different like it’s just not working out for you.  My question is how do you respond to that?  If you epically fail on your goals, if you fall short, how do you respond to that?  You know and if you had a tough psychology week, a mindset week where you didn’t do what you were supposed to do and you chose freedom of action because something was just beating you up in the head, okay how do you respond to that?  You didn’t get the result,  how are you going to respond?

And quite frankly how about this, maybe you didn’t get the result this week, how are you going to respond?  Are you going to continue to get the result?   You’re going to continue to get the result or are you know now going to choose comfort like “Oh alright I hit the result, I’m going to kind of cruise and take it easy this week.”  Or “You know what, it’s getting towards the end of the year, I’m close to my goal, I’m going to kind of scale it down a little bit because you know it’s the holidays and I want to enjoy the holidays.”  Well you haven’t hit your goal yet.  See your response to your goals is just as important as your response to the failure of your goals.  Are you hitting your goals and are you just comfortable with continuing to hit that goal or are you going to respond by saying “Look I’ve hit the goal once, I hit it twice, hit it three times, I validate I can do this, like here’s a model now.”  Now boom and take it to the next level.  How do you respond?

How do you respond when things don’t go your way?  Real estate agents out there when you’ve got four, five, six, 10, 15 units scheduled to close this month and half of them fall out because of  financing or your client did something stupid or your inspections didn’t go your way, how are you going to respond?  Are you the agent that’s going to choose boo-hoo and tell your coach “Boo hoo coach, woe is me!”  Or are you going to say “You know what, screw that, I can’t control that; all I can do is control myself.  I’m going to wake up tomorrow and I’m going to go out and replace those four units that just fell out. “

When the proverbial crap is hitting the fan how do you respond leaders?  

How do you influence and impact your people to respond when the crap’s hitting the fan in their life?  See guys I believe how you achieve your results and how your results show up and how you respond to the results or lack thereof, or the shifts, or the things you can’t control, how do you respond?  It’s as equally important to evaluate people as the results that they get in their life.  And clearly we can see how these tools help us in evaluating people when they’re within our organization, when they’re within our sphere of influence as leaders, but I also think it’s a valuable tool to evaluate people in the hiring process.  Like as a leader I want to know what are the challenges that showed up in your life?  Where are the experiences in your life where you expected this result and it didn’t show up?  What’s your major challenge in your life, like I’m going to look to define those things, those experiences, why?  Because I want to know how did they respond.

How did you respond to hardship?  How did I respond to recognizing that PTSD was controlling me in my life?  You see all I did was create a different response when things didn’t go my way, that was more of a psychological challenge.  How are you responding to the things that aren’t going your way in your life?  How are you responding to you’re trying to correct your weight by 25 pounds but you can’t seem to break through?  How are you responding in your business when the market is starting to slow down?  Quite frankly maybe the market’s speeding up.  What’s your greatest challenge in your life?  How are you responding to that?  Are you choosing “Woe is me?”  or “Victor to be?”  Which one?  Because both will determine who you become, and as leaders that’s what we want to know in our people, who are they?  That’s what we evaluate.  And how do you evaluate who they are is the results that show up, and if it’s a lack of result, how do they respond?  And when the results do show up who do they become along the way?  Do they become someone …”I’m this person, I sold a hundred million last year in real estate,” or do you become the person that decides like “Hey you know what I achieved the result, other people need this result, I’m going to go pay it forward.  I’m going to go sow some seeds in my industry that has given me so much.”

Guys I’m telling you, how people show up in the world of results and their response mechanism will tell you a lot about who they are.  You can use all the assessments in the world, someone can be a perfect match of whatever assessment, DISK, personality, behavioral, “This one measures everything in the world,” but does it measure their response?  Probably not.  See those assessments can tell you a general understanding of who the person is but how they show up in results and how they respond to life’s challenges and the results that do show up is going to tell you more, and that’s why I call them the two valuable tools to evaluate people within your organization and your life, and quite frankly yourself.

So hopefully this information has brought value to your business as well as your life, and again we encourage you to use this information in a parallel manner for your life, your business, yourself and those that you lead.  And if you like this video please hit some likes, hearts, smiley faces, whatever you want to hit. If you’re watching it live, I’d love to hear your ahas; and even if you’re watching it on replay whether on Facebook replay or our YouTube channel, let me know what you’re taking away from this, let me know what your challenges are, we’d be glad to do some videos that speak directly to your leadership journey and your leadership challenges because that’s what we’re here for.  So thank you for joining me today, we hope we brought value, massive value to your leadership journey whether you’re leaving yourself or others, and remember one thing, God loves you, so do I.  Lead strong.  Have an amazing rest of your day.  Take care.

About the author:

Over the course of 8 years, Christopher Hart went from an enlisted Private First Class to a Commissioned Officer-Captain. In 2005, Christopher chose to move on from his military career to focus on starting a family and embarking in the world of entrepreneurship. Christopher’s passion is now working to help others be the BEST version of themselves and helping them Lead others to the same!

To learn more about Christopher Hart or to get in touch with him regarding a coaching program you can email him at Chris@TransformingLivesCoaching.com