So if you want to get the treasure in the dungeon, you got to make sure you have the right team. Hello architect nation, and welcome back Enoch Sears here, Business of Architecture. Founding principle, if you've ever made a hire that looked perfect on paper but turned out to be a disaster in practice, if you've ever waste time, money and morale on team members who just didn't click, or if you're unsure about if you should hire and worried about bringing on the wrong person, well, you're not alone, and today's podcast episode will show you some strategies for solving these issues. On today's episode, I sit down with Ryan Willard, Director of consulting services at Business of Architecture, and we discuss the number one hiring mistake that's silently costing firms 1000s the secret strategy for spotting a true team player before they even sit down at your desk, and the real difference between communication and conversation and why most firms fail miserably at this Today's episode is sponsored by World teams. One of the top headaches of running an architectural practice is matching work needs with staffing. What if there was a way to flexibly scale your workforce according to your needs? A while ago, we began to hear reports of a company that was helping some of our clients build remote teams. World teams helps small firms build qualified remote teams quickly and easily, saving you the hassle of sorting resumes and interviewing unfit candidates. They work in your time zone, prioritize near native English speakers and offer flexible contracts so you can scale as needed, plus you work directly with your remote team building trust and cutting costs without sacrificing quality. To download a free guide for the building a remote team for a small architectural practice, go to business of architecture.com. Forward slash world teams. That's one word. Business of architecture.com forward slash world teams. And as a reminder, a sponsorship is not an endorsement, and you must do your own due diligence before entering into any business relationship. Get the free remote teams guide by going to business of architecture.com, forward slash world teams. Hey, architects, remember when you had time to actually architect? I know it may be a distant memory, but here's the thing, the free smart practice method master class is calling your name. Can you hear it? Ditch the administrative avalanche. Reclaim your creative genius. Fall back in love with your profession. Seriously, what are you waiting for? Head over to smart practice method.com. To watch this free video for podcast listeners now, whether you're hiring your first employee or building a powerhouse team, this episode is full of golden nuggets for you. Let's dive right in. Ryan
Enoch, hello, good day. So
today we're talking about how to spot a rock star before you hire them. First of all, what do we mean by rock star? Let's set the intention for what do we mean here? Are we talking about someone who is treated like a prima donna? They shut down other people's opinions. They feel entitled to what they have in the business, and they create silos around themselves to make sure that no one steps on their toes or gets in the way of the work. That's what we mean by rock star, right?
We're not gonna we're not gonna use the highly pruned lead singer of a band who needs to have a big rider as the example here rock star is in the sense as a high performer, somebody who's on the stage because they're a total badass. Love
this, love this that they are, what are. Let's talk about some of the problems that we have seen when we're helping firms implement the smart practice operating system. What are some of the problems that you're seeing come up that directly go back to the people pillar?
Now, some of these might land kind of bit counter intuitive, or they might, you know, a lot of a lot of hiring practices that we see in architecture might be treated as gospel. So this first problem, particularly that we see, is hiring based on resume and portfolio alone. Now, on the surface of it, that sounds like it makes a lot of sense, but we often see that it misses a massive component which can really make your business be so much more efficient, which is you end up with a team of technically capable people who can't communicate, they can't communicate, they can't collaborate, and they can't problem solve under pressure. And it's interesting that we've seen so many people who have got brilliant technical minds, high levels of technical competency, but the business still runs into a. Enormous inefficiencies and problems that could have been resolved very easily with somebody who was either a kind of quasi gifted conversationalist or just had that sense of communication, hospitality, consideration and you know, I think just finding people who can communicate and who are powerful communicators is a under it's underestimated how effective that can be in your team. Like it can, it can a good communicator can actually bring out the best in the rest of the team. They can improve the communication standards across the whole organization. They can bring seemingly isolated or desperate parts of your business back together again. And they can do this as well without instruction, and it's just in there. It's second nature. When
we talk about communication, what do we mean? Are we talking about just the words? Because that's the way I would have heard this 15 years ago, before I knew anything about the Business of Architecture. So
we can it's useful to make a little bit of a distinction here between the idea of communication and conversation. And we were doing a live presentation a couple of weeks ago, and I was recounting the work of Gordon Pask, who was a cybernetician in the kind of 40s, 50s, and Gregory basin, who was also a kind of an academic whose work largely revolved around communication, and both of them made this distinction of like, well, actually, communication is an insufficient word to describe what happens between two people. And I think Pasc particularly kind of described communication as being a linear process where information is going from one point to another, whereas conversation is that there is the expression of an idea, the interpretation of that idea, the RE interpreting of that idea back to where the original source was of that idea had come from, and now, in that circular process, the idea has evolved and grown, and there is some kind of agreement between the two points, A and B that has brought an extra level of richness. And it also communicate conversation implies that there are two autonomous, independent, intelligent organ, organisms that are kind of having this recursive, circular process of of expressing ideas, whereas communication in the context that we're talking about here is a kind of one way command, or here's some data. There you go. And I think a lot of us in our businesses, think we're communicating, or think we're having conversations and we're actually just communicating, or we're transmitting, as a nice way to look at it, we're just transmitting information. Does it get picked up? Who knows? Who knows? We're just transmitting stuff. We've got no cogni cognitive ability to recognize whether it's landed with somebody else. We've got no further inquiry of how it's landed to what they've understood with it. There's no ability to create a space for that other person to feel comfortable with asking questions or reiterating things and so a great communicator or conversationalist, shall we say? Now, now we made the distinction, is somebody who can really create that space in your business, and it can really elevate performance everywhere
and in the mechanistics of language, we would refer to things such as emotional intelligence, body language, tone, tempo, tenor, these different things that go into the conversation so far beyond just communication. Problem number two, Ryan, when we talk about hiring or building a team, would be misaligned values or misaligned culture fit. The impact of this would be low morale, office drama, turnover that quietly drains profit and productivity, or people just having unvoiced complaints. Or unvoiced complaints is probably the best word that never gets surfaced, that impacts productivity, yeah, alignment,
yeah, absolutely. That's a that's a major one. If we're not marketing as business owners, there's a big question mark to like, what are your values? What. The message that you're, what is it that you're standing for that's not out in the public domain? So who and what you attract now becomes much broader. So you're, you're leaving yourself open to being more vulnerable, to attracting people who, who are from, who have a different value set, or a different culture set. I was, you know, years ago, we had a client who they were about to do some work. They'd run a project on a building where a large part of the brief was for the packaging of meat, and they were vegetarians. Half the team was vegan, yeah,
okay. I was like, if I where is this going?
Ouch, and that's, that's, that's kind of like a quite, you know, okay. I mean, that needs to be, needs to be resolved. And, like, how did something like that come to be? Of course, you're going to upset. You really upset people with that kind of, that kind of way of being about it. So I think a lack of conversation in your organization often leads to, you know, not a clearly, pronounced or articulated value or culture set. It gets left chance and there's way more kind of space for friction. We had it recently with a client of ours. This was kind of higher up in their in their leadership, and there was some quite fundamental value differences and approaches to architecture. And, you know, there was, you know, this company was doing a lot of very high end residential work, serving, serving ultra high net worth individuals. That's what they've already been doing. The person on the team didn't want to be, didn't felt that it was bad to be serving that kind of client, and wanted to go and do affordable housing. Okay, not, I don't want to make a comment on whether that's right or wrong. That's not the point. Not the point. It's just that there's a, there's like a a misalignment here, of of what the values are so us as as sometimes this stuff can, can arise, and we don't know that it's there. It's not, it can be not a problem until it is. And certainly, if somebody's kind of elevating through the runs of practice, and they've kind of, you know, it wasn't fully aligned where the values were. And certainly when people kind of come up into into leadership and the values that set is not aligned, then it's probably going to mean that the company parts ways. And so it's, it's a it is an important one to you know that we have a responsibility, as with our marketing, is to start being clear, or at least pra getting into the discipline of practicing, what is it we're standing for? What? What are our values? What is the culture that we want to incubate here? And it goes way deeper than just a kind of, you know, a weekend seminar that you might do with a external consultant where they make you pick integrity, excellence, performance, collaboration, as your as your five core values, or whatever it is that you just stick up on the wall printed out in Comic Sans for everyone to ignore. It's the culture of the business. Is the quality, is the kind of conversations that you want to have happening in the business all the time.
Problem number three in architectural hiring practices. Is no clear role definition before hiring, and the impacts of this can be just as devastating. The new hire might feel lost. They're underperforming and don't even realize it. Maybe they're trying to reinvent the wheel, or other people are doing that, creating, ultimately, confusion and inefficiency, people stepping on each other's toes, the person just being unclear about what it is that I'm supposed to do. So there's no culture of accountability. Because how can we be accountable if we're not even sure what our responsibility is, other than get the drawings done or move these things along and move them ahead, which lacks a lot of clarity that's very common in team organizations,
and it gets more confused as well the smaller the business. So we'll see a firm that's hiring for a project architect, and yet that project architect will come on and they'll have 15 different expectations placed upon them, doing other roles or other responsibilities that would be outside of the traditional understanding of what a product architect is. And rarely does this project role, you know, one the project role was the company role is not defined. So it makes it. Difficult to attract person with the right experience, because you don't quite know what it is that you're looking for. You don't quite know what the business is that you need. And then once they're inside of the firm, there again, the individual is not certain of what or how this particular organization is defining that role. And so we see a lot people hiring somebody thinks that they're a senior project manager, the leadership at the firm says, when we wouldn't even classify you as a project manager, yet you haven't got enough experience, and bang, already you've got a kind of point of contention, conflict, and then there's nothing to there's nothing to kind of say, here's what it is, here's here's how we're defining what a project architect or project manager is. It
reminds me of when I have my kids do chores around the house. I may have something that I want them to do, and yet they do it. And then when I come and I come and I look and it hasn't been done the way that I want it done, or the way that I expect it to be done. Now I'm in a difficult position, because now I have to tell them, give them the unwanted feedback that, Hey, you didn't do that the way I wanted it. And they're like, Well, how come you didn't tell me that? How come you didn't tell me what I wanted? The same thing applies to clearly defining job roles for potential new hires, that that if we're not clear about exactly what it is we need, the outcomes that we need, then when those people come on board and they're not measuring up to that, and we're realizing it, but we've never clearly stated that, now it puts us as leaders in a very difficult position, because now we have a problem on our hands, and this is where we see leaders needing to reassign people to Other roles, maybe readjusting the role and then having to bring in another person. And although that can be worked through, it's definitely not the ideal situation. Yeah,
absolutely. And we see a lot where the roles are not person agnostic. So you hire somebody, you're not quite sure a what the business needs right now, and all you know that there's a pain and everyone's busy and overwhelmed. That's normally what it is. It's very reactive. And then you bring somebody on. You like this person. You're not quite sure why you like them. They seem talented. They seem like they could be really, a really great fit. And then they come on and they don't properly fit the role that was being defined for them, and they'll either start under underperforming themselves, or get frustrated, or you'll be surprised at like, Okay, well, I thought they I thought they were going to be good, and then you start giving them things that they don't want to be doing because you were selling it as this other role, which was, you know, maybe that will happen in the future, but right now, the business didn't need that particular role. So now they're doing a lot of menial tasks. And worst case scenarios, you can actually end up hiring someone who's very expensive, and then you're giving them dogs body work to do, because you just didn't define what the A what the business needed, and then how those needs might manifest into specific person agnostic roles. And that person agnostic role means it's a role which is developed independent of an individual. I, you know, I don't have a role for Enoch, but there's a role for a CEO, and Enoch might fit that role
Absolutely. And I remember the other part of this Ryan, is that as employees, we can then begin to lose confidence or be unsure about our own performance in the company. Now, the leader of the company may not tell us you're not you're not matching up to this role, but we're going to sense that if we're not, even if there's not clear communication, that we're not meeting the outcomes. So what this can actually agree with the employee is also this employee feeling like they're spinning their wheels. I remember this happened to me one time when I was in a in a job position, and I just knew I wasn't quite meeting the expectations the owner. And it made me feel incomplete. It made me feel like I was underperforming. It made me feel anxious and unhappy, because I wanted to excel. I wanted to excel in the role, but the outcomes were not clearly defined, and so I really had no feedback on how it was actually performing in that role. And so all of these things can compound. So when we look at, why aren't deadlines being made. Why aren't collections happening in the office? Why is our cash flow in a feast or famine cycle? These are the kind of systematic things when it boils down to people that can actually have the impact and cause these problems to happen. And you were talking with someone recently, Ryan, where you were explaining the four pillars of smart practice, profit process, the power, power, OS and people. And this particular firm owner said something very interesting to you when he was asking you, I think what you thought was the most important pillar of those four pillars.
Yes, that's right. And, and my. My response was, Well, all of them are important, and they all actually overlap onto one another, and it's kind of like a table. Why it's why we call them the pillars. But this person was very insistent that that people was the was the one pillar that was out and out, the most important one, and was kind of categorically, sometimes I was wrong,
you're wrong. They're not all equal. It's the people.
But I thought that was that was interesting, because we didn't dive into it any any deeper in that particular call. But it was interesting that actually, you know, having the right rock star people in place is dependent on having parts of the other pillars working like, Hey, you gotta, you gotta have good money in your business to attract talent. Sorry, you just do, yeah.
How is that gonna work? Right? You have no money, but you're gonna hire the best people. How does that work. Everybody
moaning and whinging about attracting talent. See what happens when you put a when you raise the salary up for somebody. See what happens when you've got $150,000 for an architect, the kind of caliber that you start getting, or 200k for an architect, okay, see what kinds of attention you'll get a lot of love crap as well, no doubt. But you're you're going to get some highly interested, highly talented people looking at your looking at your firm. I know architects love to say it's not all about the money, but you, if you're running your business well, and you can afford to pay people well above the kind of the the mean, average, you're going to attract talent. We've seen it so many times. Of our clients, the ones who are bringing in the big bucks, and they put out an advert, and it's a decent six figure salary for an architect, where somewhere else in the country might be getting paid literally, in some cases, half, you know, we had a, we had a client who, they put their advert up on the website, and the next day they had, like, a number of responses. And one of these responses had been from a, like, a fanboy who was waiting for this firm to hire. And, you know, again, it's a good, amazing. It's a good sort of indicator of this firm has been doing well of being visible. And there's, there's word out on the street, if you like that, this firm pays people really well. So people are looking, people are people are interested. You know,
it's a great example, Ryan, about how all these pillars, all four pillars, they overlap. They're combined. They're not they're not separate. We can't separate them out. We can't say, you know, all we need is the process. We can't say all we need is the right people. We can't say all we need is just to be fully energized and motivated, which would be the power. You can't just say all we need is tons of money, just the profit, because it's like driving a cart down the road with square wheel that's not going to flow. Everything needs to flow properly. It's all interconnected. It's a whole systems approach,
yeah, and that idea of getting the best out of people, like, if you've got rock star performers, we've seen talented people go into poor businesses and then their performance drops. And now you've got the leaders saying, Oh, I've got a poor team. And we're like, let's have a look at you first
problem number four, and let me know if you've ever heard any this happen to anyone which is falling for the interview act. Probably never heard of that before, right? You hire someone who talks a great game, but ultimately, when the pedal comes to the metal, they don't execute, at least not at the level that you wanted them to. I remember Jeff frame, who used to be in design counsel here at Business of Architecture, used to have this saying where he would say to employees, he'd hold the resume, and he would look at them, and he'd say, I want to meet this person, show me this person, meaning he wants the person that's represented on the resume. And that's the thing. They'll come into interviews. They're, they're on their best behavior, right? It's like the first date. They're, they've, hopefully, they brush their teeth, they've combed their hair, not only that, but they're there with the right answers. They have drawings that they may or may not have worked on in their portfolio. And if that's the extent of your hiring process, it's going to be very difficult to suss out the best team members.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think as well, it's worth, you know, kind of having a little bit of suspicion around people who make you feel good in the interview. And this is coming from somebody who I know that I have an ability to make people feel good in like interview scenarios and talk myself into many, many good jobs that perhaps weren't the best fit for myself or for the other person. And. Yeah, and I think like on the DISC profile. So we talk about using the DISC profile a lot, or personality profiling tools, is that there are certain disc profiles that can come across very well, who can talk the talk, but if you've got no ability to test what they're talking about. Then you run a risk. You run a risk of picking the wrong person, or somebody who is a good communicator, but that doesn't have the technical competency that you're, you're you're wanting. Here is in the kind of the flip side to the good communicator that they can talk themselves into a, into a, into a job, which which they are not fit for. So
Ryan, when we look at the problems, we look at number one, hiring based on resume and portfolio alone, misaligned values or culture fit. Three, no clear role definition before hiring. And four, falling for the interview act. Possibilities, on the other hand, would be one, hiring for the character coachability and real world performance. Possibility two, aligning values and culture from day one. Possibility three, hiring into well defined roles with clear key performance indicators. Outcomes. Number four, seeing the real person before you commit. And I know there was a conversation that came up. You were telling me about one of your smart practice implementation calls that we hold with smart practice member firms, and you had shared with them a video of a hiring experience that we have as part of our hiring process with our team, and using that as an example. So the possibility here was seeing the real person before you commit.
Yeah. So when we were hiring for Jackie, who is our Chief of Staff here at Business of Architecture, and her role would be akin to, you know, studio manager or an office manager, she's involved in a lot of the admin administration and kind of internal communication between team members. And she's really at the powerhouse to make sure that we all behave and that stuff gets done. And
she's, she's the reason why we're recording this podcast.
No, she is. She really is, without Jackie, we would be a squabbling mess of of excitable children, but she's, she's such a powerhouse in Business of Architecture. And I think all of us, you know, the business would not be here where it is without her and and I'm glad that we knew that it was such a crucial role from the outset, and that it wasn't just you know, we didn't, weren't treating it like a secretary position or just a receptionist or we downgraded it, but it was actually like a core organizational piece that we really took our time about getting it right. And you can never, you know, there's no fail safe way of getting the right person, but you can certainly increase the likelihood of making the right choice. And again, you know you can hire slow fire fast, as the kind of common dictum that you'll hear in business circles. And one of the things we wanted to do with this office manager position was actually test them in a real life as close to a real life scenario as possible, to see how they actually behaved under duress, and put them in a slightly stressful situation, nothing horrendous like blindfolding them and pushing them out into the street and tell them to get back home. But it, you know, in the context of a zoom call, one of the roles that our office manager, or Jackie, was going to need to fulfill was dealing with late payments. Okay? Now, this is something that happens very rarely, VOA, but on occasion, there's someone who's gone delinquent, and this position was going to be the first port of call to, you know, extract or get a commitment from a particular client of ours to ensure that we get a payment. And there's a kind of art here of being persistent, being professional, using a kind of sales strategy with the other person to get a clear, resolvable, workable way forward not to panic under test because, because we were going to mock this situation, live there in the interview and and examine how the candidates would perform. So my wife, who is a trained actor, she came onto the call, and for each of the candidates, Yvonne pretended to be a client who was delinquent on their payments, and we wanted to see how they would respond. And it was really interesting, because we had somebody else who was probably the firm favorite for a while of the candidates. And. They came across really well in the interview. They spoke really fantastic. But then when it came to this kind of more real life scenario, they crumbled, and Jackie just absolutely aced it and and it was, and we use that. We use the interview now as a training tool for our clients, just to demonstrate the power of a good communicator, someone who's instinctively a great communicator. How they can, you know, hold a client accountable, but do it in a professional, persistent, gentle, safe manner. There's no unnecessary usage of, you know, of escalating it into conflict. I mean, that was the real what Jackie did very well was she, she dealt with the with Yvonne, who had been briefed to make it, make it difficult and be slippery. Can
you, can you give me some details? Give us the what, lowdown dirty? Can you give us so,
so Yvonne was, briefed to make it kind of difficult and slippery, and some of the things Yvonne did was she'd put a big pause in, like, I'm busy. I'm doing something right now. You've caught me at a bad time. I can't really talk about it. Kind of throw that out. See how Jackie did. And Jackie would respond with, like, I'm terribly sorry. And Jackie came at it with the she took she made it out like it was our mistake. Okay? So she made it really safe, and there was nothing for Yvonne to kind of fight with. She was like, I understand. I'm so sorry. We've interrupted you, and we wanted to get onto this really quickly, just in case it's a clerical error and it might be, it looks like it could be a clerical error on our side. I just want to make sure that everything's okay with you, and there's really nowhere to you know, it wasn't accusational, it wasn't confrontational, but it was persistent. And, you know, it's kind of like those you know, if you're if you're angry at the bank, and you phone up to the bank and you're like, I'm gonna really have a go at them, and they're like, yes, we understand. So sorry. And then all of your energy has just been dissipated, and you're like, I'm sorry. I don't mean to talk to you like that.
So, but you know, Jackie, she assumed the responsibility of the you know, of why the payment hadn't gone hadn't gone through, and it was kind of very much coming at it from the attitude of, like, is everything alright? How can we support you? Yeah, we're surprised that this has happened. And then she was able to put together a series of steps and a commitment from the from the client, and, you know, it was just very beautifully done. And afterwards we, you know, both Nicole and I, when we watched that, we were like, yeah, that's, that's, that's, I feel really confident, if somebody could do that under stress, you know, we've surprised them of that kind of test, and they can pull that out. Yeah, they've really, you know, they're showing who they are. The other test was a, wasn't a communication test, but it was dealing with a spreadsheet and trying to, trying to find a problem of the spreadsheet, and again, doing it under kind of timed conditions. And Nicole and myself are watching on the Zoom call. And again, this had a few candidates not perform very well. And we understand, like these tests, you know, you understand that not every candidate is going to rise to the test, and that their performance might dip as a result of the stress. That's okay, we can and again, a part of the role of the interviewer is to kind of create a safety, of a safer space, because you want them to perform to the best their ability, so that you can make a an established decision. But it's also good about seeing how, how well people can deal with their own emotions under stress. Now, we're interested in that. We want to see that okay, because you can deal with your emotions, you know, in the comfort of a nice, calm interview, and you're just telling us how great you are, but want to see how you react when you're put under a little bit of pressure, and whether you spin out. What kind of control do you have with your own emotion, emotional ability? And again, this was one of those tests that Jackie kind of excelled in and she was happy, like she just looked like she was enjoying it. That was the main thing. She jumped into the spreadsheet. She said, I'm going to do this, this and this, she was communicating to us everything that she was doing, where, where, and how and why. She was looking for the problem in the spreadsheet or what was broken. Jim, solve it. But that wasn't the point. She was in communication. With us the whole way through. And so, like she was having fun, and there was a logic and a strategy to her, her approach. And again, on on a on another occasion, with that same test, we had a candidate, who, who you. Kind of crumbled afterwards, you know, kind of just in it. And was just like, actually, I really can't do that. This is and we were like, Okay, that's I
love these tests, Ryan, I love them. I've had such interesting experiences hiring people, hiring for sales positions. I've had people cuss me out on the phone when they got under pressure. Oh, tell us that stuff. I've had people cry. I've had people do all sorts of things. That story
about the guy who cussed me out, yeah, yeah. The sounds, the sounds, yeah, yeah. So
we're hiring for, we're hiring for an intake role, basically someone who can vet clients who want to implement, you get our help implementing the smart practice operating system. So obviously, you know, not every firm's fit to work with us, and so we need to vet them very carefully, and we need to have someone who's great at emotional empathy, diagnosis and understanding where someone's coming from, and basically having a good conversationalist like you talked about earlier. And so there's a lot of people who are sales people who applied for this role. And a part of the the testing process was I would basically tell them that I'm sorry it doesn't look like a fit. After I let them go on for about 90 seconds talking about how great they were, I would kind of interrupt them, and I would say, I'm just, you know, I'm just, I'm just not hearing it here. And, yeah, I mean, there was, there was at least one guy. He just, he just gave me strip the F bomb. He's all F you, and he like hung up the phone. So the beautiful thing about these tests is that people will disqualify themselves.
I saw a it was on on YouTube. I think it was a Gary Vaynerchuk, and he was recounting a story from a fortune 500 CEO, where they were looking for, you know, a COO or a kind of second in command kind of position. And they'd put their, you know, the candidates through, you know, a series of interviews, and they were quite grueling, and they'd gotten down to the last three and the final kind of test, if you like, was they told all of them that they didn't get the job, and the test here was like only one of them absolutely refused to accept that it wasn't that they that they weren't the right fit and and that was what the CEO was looking for. Was looking for somebody who would, in this case, refuse that they weren't the right fit. And they and the guy picked up the phone, got in touch, and was like, hey. Like, I understand, but you've made a mistake. You've made a mistake. I am the absolute, the right person for this, for this role, and, you know, I let me know who is it that you've chosen for it, and then they were like that. The fact that you've done that was what we were looking for.
That ties in beautifully to the mindsets or principles that are needed when a business owner, an architectural practice owner, is hiring a rock star. Principle number one, hire for who they are, not just what they've done. Great example of that CFO position or that coo position, the person being the kind of person who's not willing to take no for an answer. Past experience is helpful, but behavior under pressure is what matters most. Principle two is hiring as marketing. We've talked about that a lot. Number three test, before you trust put them through these kind of tests, and principle number four is have an investment mindset. So many times we believe that we have an investment mindset, and yet we're looking to hire the cheapest people possible, or spend the littlest amount of money possible hiring a person for the role an investment mindset is looking at I'm investing into this person. This is an investment in my business, and I expect to recoup that and more by making a wise decision on how I hire this person and specifically how much I pay them. So let's move into the path now. Ryan steps to spot a rock star before you hire them, we're going to give you everyone four key tactics here. Number one, define the role in terms of outcomes, not just tasks. So clarify specifically, what does success look like in terms of outcomes? What are the tangible results that you want this person to deliver to the business? And what do those look like at the 30 day mark, at the 60 day mark, and that the 90 day mark, this would include any sort of key performance indicators, deliverables and a cultural fit, and have a process for determining if that person's not a fit, which sometimes it happens, have clear measurable so you know, at the 30 day mark, you didn't Meet this measurable
I'm sure it's not a fit. Yeah, absolutely. It's something that is, again, set down with the person at the beginning, outline what these things are. The more that this success can be kind of clear and objectively measurable. Either it's something that's gone. A numeric measure to it, or it's something that's objectively it happened or it didn't happen. Okay, great. And those are, those are easy to agree upon, as opposed to something which is more broad, like, you know, we want to see an improvement in, you know, in drawing turnaround, or something that's that's very difficult to quantify and very nebulous. And again, you can do this on a case by case basis with somebody, and work with them towards those particular goals. And it's not necessarily even like, you know, you can have somebody with a clear marker at 30 days, and let's say they didn't get it. They didn't hit the marker, but they did everything around that. It's just the result didn't show up yet. Okay, great. It's still at your discretion to continue on, and it gives you something to talk about with that other person on what's missing and what can be and how to readjust for the next 30 days before the 60 day milestone.
This is such an important framework for finding the right fit, and this is part of the people playbook that's part of smart practice operating system, which is that 3060, 90 day, they don't actually win that role until they have shown the proof is in the pudding, until they have shown that they have the skills, the characters, the mindsets and the characteristics and who they are is a fit for the role, not just that they're a nice person, not just that they're a good person, not just that they're a fun person, but specifically their qualities, their attributes, the things that they do actually are going to deliver the results that you need in the business. Again, as you mentioned at the beginning of this episode, Ryan, making sure that the role serves the business, because ultimately, that serves the team. It serves you as the leader. It serves the entire organization. It serves the clients. Every little piece of this ism is so essentially important,
yeah, and this is, again, we're kind of coming here from a culture of like we're hiring on based on meritocracy, right? We want to find, we want to find the best people for the for the positions. We're not, it's it's not another agenda. Make sure that the business is being the best served it can be.
Step number two is to write a magnetic job post that filters for mindset and motivation. Step number three, build a working interview or paid trial. When we talk about paid trial, we're basically talking about a test. So sometimes you can actually pay someone as an outsource, as a contractor, to actually do something that would be part of the role, that's something that could be a great way to test their skills. And then step number four, use the right tools. Use things like the DISC profile, work style, structured interviews, supplement your gut instinct with these proven behavioral assessments and structured scorecards to avoid what might otherwise be the innate bias that we have. Like you mentioned, Ryan, someone who makes us feel good in the interview, the need that we have to hire someone immediately. Because, wow, I have this mountain of work behind me, and we really need to get someone in the seat. I mean, we had $1 for every client who came on board and said, Yeah, you know what? I built my team because we needed to hire people, and we just had a lot of work, and now they're stuck with sort of like a garden that hasn't been thoughtfully planned out. There's all these different plants that aren't harmonious sitting there together, and now the firm owners thinking, you know, I want to let these people go. And it just makes things more complex in the long term.
It's interesting as well. Like, you know, the DISC profile. We love the DISC profile. Colby is another great one. These are very powerful tools. If you take the time to kind of learn how they work, have to have them integrated into your own culture. They're used as a way of improving your leadership and how you might communicate with other people. They become used as a tool for people to be able to self diagnose, if you like, become more self aware of their own communication patterns and behaviors that might become a constraint, and we can now supplement a lot of these tools with the use of AI. So if you're doing a zoom interview, or even if you're interviewing somebody face to face, and you just record the record the interview on your on your iPhone. You can run the you can turn that very easily into a transcript, or have aI look at it. But you can, you can have another level of analysis using AI, kind of paired with one of these personality profiles as as well, and we've seen a number of our clients doing that to a lot of success, and just gives you a kind of deeper ability of being able to assess where somebody is at and what might be their deeper motivators. Again, nothing wrong with getting somebody, particularly if they're. If you know you're getting very close to saying yes to somebody to have them do a DISC profile, you take on that cost, it's not very much, and then making sure that you know their algorithm the right fit for a lot of roles, when we actually define what the role is, when we will always have our clients make an assessment over which personality, which DISC profile, do they think would be a great fit for the role? And that's quite I think that can work really, really nicely. Not to say that you know you being in one particular quadrant confines you to only certain types of roles, but there needs to be the the will and the self awareness. If you've got a high i Who's going to be doing some really high level, detailed procedural work, you know, I would, if you kind of start to see that kind of conflict, you've got somebody who's doing some sort of compliance work, detailed compliance work is a high I that's somebody who's more into the vision and inspiration and fun and communication. Are they going to be the best fit for that kind of highly technical, detailed, miserable they might be. They just want to enjoy it. Yeah.
Yeah. Brian, I remember one of my early jobs that I applied for. It was a company that they operated very efficiently. They used a lot of the best practices in terms of business. So as part of their hiring process, they did have some behavioral assessments that I had to go through. And there's also a pitfall with these behavioral assessments, because what can happen from the candidates perspective is they think it's a test they need to score highly on. So this is what happened to me as I was going through this test. I was trying to second guess and trying to think about, what do they really want, what's the answer that they want? And so I completely missed the point of the particular test. So the other part of this is, yes, these things are important, these behavioral assessments, but you need to know how to use them. You need you need to know and understand how to frame them and how you present them to your candidates, is of the utmost. Otherwise they can completely backfire. Ultimately, I like thinking about, look, I grew up in the 80s, Dungeon and Dragons was a thing. Final Fantasy was my one of my games of choice during the 90s. And the thing I love about these role playing games is you would go into these dungeons, and then you would have these parties, and you realized that you needed every hero had to have different attributes. You didn't want to have four barbarians in there, because the barbarians are very strong, but they can't run very fast, right? And you have a thief. The thief can pick the locks, but the thief is very, very fast and can run away. The wizard has these massive magic spells, but they're very weak if they get attacked, and they have no defensive strength, and so you kind of need to keep them near the back. And of course, the Archer is great, because the Archer has the good old ranged attack. You can have the archer behind you, and they can shoot the arrows forward. But again, they're fast, they can move, but ultimately, if you get them pinned in a corner, they have little defensive skill, right? So the key here that I learned in these role playing games was that it's the party together that helps you win the dungeon. You can't just have a hero that's one that's really strong, Bob Baron and that guy's gonna win the whole thing. So the same thing applies to these behavioral assessments. We're not looking for someone that is the winner in all these areas. When we're looking at rock stars, we're looking at a team of rock stars. We're looking at rock stars that excel in their own individual areas, and that's the key. We're not looking at one person who's going to come in and drive the results of the firm forward. We're looking for the person that comes in as the perfect puzzle piece to the existing culture, the existing mindset, the existing outcomes that are needed, and for this, things like behavioral assessments can be super important to understand. What are the attributes that these people need? Because, like you pointed out, Ryan, not every attribute is needed in every role, and just because you have an attribute does not mean you're a loser. You're bad. There's something wrong with you. It just means that this particular role isn't a fit for you.
I, you know, the DISC profile for me personally, was such a revelation, and kind of coming out as a sort of high I with, like I was ID on the on the thing, which is a much more extroverted type of personality. And I just remember when I worked through it was like, ah, that would explain, like, literally, why I really struggle with all of this kind of high level compliance detail work that I'm constantly doing. And, you know, for me, I was the kind of person who sent me down in front of an architectural drawing, particularly on CAD I can work at it for like, you know, 30 minutes, and then I need to go and get up and have a chat with somebody and and walk around. And then there's that kind of like a frustration of, like, why can't I concentrate? Why can't I do this? Why can't I. Like, you know, how come I can't, I'm not getting totally absorbed into into this kind of work. And, you know, there were other sort of things, like big picture drawing or whatever ideas that were much more appealing. But it was kind of like, okay, that's only that work is reserved for only those, for that level of of the of the business. So I think it's, it is. It's very useful. It's very useful as a kind of self awareness tool, and just having people recognize, you know, kind of identify where their strengths are, and be okay with their strengths. It's interesting. A lot of our our school system is very much in the C quadrant of the DISC profile. So like a lot of us, we all get trained in being highly analytical, particularly in the professions. There's a lot of high level detail compliance procedures that need to be that need to be learned, and it's just very good for us as individuals to come as well as we're designing our careers to be like, Well, is this really a fit for where my underlying motivations are? And it's not to say that you're not competent at being able to do it. It's just, is it the best use of your resource? I
Yeah, so if you want to get the treasure in the dungeon, you got to make sure you have the right team rock star hiring. Now, for those of you listeners who understand and you get the importance of the people pillar that having the right people in your practice is so essential, is not just essential, but is critical to you building a well functioning team, and critical to you delegating, taking off some of those hats that you don't want to be wearing and you shouldn't be wearing. As a firm owner, we've prepared a special rock star hiring guide that you can get by going to business of architecture.com, forward slash rock star. It's yours courtesy of Ryan and myself for being an amazing podcast listener. And that's it for today. Ryan, incredible conversation. Appreciate you bringing in the examples of how these things actually relate to these small firm owners that are implementing smart practice operating system. And here is today's Smart practice tool tip. Do you remember when you became an architect to actually, you know architect things, but instead you found that you've joined the 1000s of firm owners trapped in what we might call admin hell, chasing spreadsheets, reviewing payments, preparing invoices, while your design passion slowly fades and turns into one of those squiggly little things from Ursula in The Little Mermaid. The delegation roadmap is the smart practice tool that gives you a proven system to identify which tasks are stealing $150,000 or more of your time annually, and how you can get them all off your plate for good. Your family misses you, your creativity is gathering dust, and your firm is awaiting for you to lead it properly. Get this tool 100% free by going to business of architecture.com. Forward slash delegate, and I will see you on the other side. Today's episode is sponsored by World teams. One of the top headaches of running an architectural practice is matching your work needs with staffing. What if there was a way to flexibly scale your workforce according to your needs? A while ago, we began to hear of a company that was helping some of our clients, some of our smart practice firms, build remote teams. Piqued my interest, and so we discovered that world teams help small firms build qualified remote teams quickly and easily, saving you the hassle of sorting resumes and interviewing unfit candidates. They work in your time zone, prioritize near native English speakers and offer flexible contracts so you can scale as needed, plus you work directly with your remote team, building trust and cutting costs without sacrificing quality, while a remote team member is no replacement for an in house team member. Remote teams are a viable option to download a free guide for building a remote team for a small practice, go to business of architecture.com. Forward slash world teams. That's one word. Business of architecture.com. Forward slash world teams. As a reminder, this sponsorship is not an endorsement, and you must do your own due diligence before entering into any business relationship. Get the free remote teams guide by going to business of architecture.com, forward slash world teams a special thank you to our recent listeners who left reviews for the podcast on iTunes. Your reviews help others find this podcast so that the rising tide raises all boats to be acknowledged right here on the show. Open up the podcast app on your iPhone, search for Business of Architecture, and after clicking on the show, scroll all the way to the bottom to leave a review. Today's episode is sponsored by Smart practice, the world's leading step by step solution for small firm owners. That want to structure their existing practice so the complexity of business doesn't get in the way of the architecture. Because you see, it might not be your architecture skills that hold you back. It may be the business aspects of running a practice, managing people and projects, dealing with clients, contractors and money. So if you're ready to stop being a glorified administrator and get back to architecture again, go to smart practice method.com and discover the proven simple and easy to implement smart practice method that is revolutionizing firm management for owners and teams. And as always, I want to thank you for joining me here today and remind you that the views expressed on this show by our guests do not represent those of the host and we make no representation. Promise, guarantee, pledge, warranty, contract, bond or commitment, except to help you conquer the world, with the exception of the of the podcast episodes, where Ryan and I are actually also the host and the guests. And with that, carpe diem, you.
