If You’re Like Most Entrepreneurs, You May Be Hiring For The Wrong Thing

Lauren: You’re a high octane business owner. You’ve got a team on paper. It looks like you’re rolling in success, but there’s a voice inside of you. Whisper screaming. This isn’t sustainable, something feels off and I’m gonna lose it off.

Sound familiar. That’s where I come in.

My name is Lauren Goldstein and I’m the CEO at golden key partnership. I help top level executives like you avoid burning out and burning down as you’re scaling up. How. By harnessing your superpowers, finding and hiring your ideal team and then simplifying the heck out of your business operations. That was easy.

It’s my mission. And the mission of this podcast to help you see operations in a whole new light to help you diagnose the real root cause of your company challenges and to bring your business back to a healthy flow. And profit. They call me the business doctor. And this is the biz doctor podcast.

Welcome back to the show. In today’s episode, I’m gonna talk about a mistake. I see most entrepreneurs make when they’re adding to their team that is so easily avoidable they’re hiring for the wrong. You see, most people hire because they need something taken off their plate, which is not wrong, but where things go Amis is when you make it about the checklist, the tech or the task, instead of who that person has to be at their core to succeed in the role, you can always teach someone how to use tools or software, but you can’t make somebody something they’re.

It’s about who they are at their core. They’re innate talents. Now I can hear the wheels turning in your mind and the mild skepticism. So let me give you an example picture in your mind, a lovely human who’s more comfortable with spreadsheets than small talk being put on outbound sales or business development.

It is not going to matter how many. Or red hot leads. You give them eventually they’re going to fall flat on their face in a firestorm, a failure in burnout. Why? Because this particular person was not made for selling. It’s not who she is. It’s not who she is at her core. And in that same vein, one of my favorite examples is when I hear a business owner lamenting about how their sales team won’t fill out a CRM or spreadsheets.

No kidding. Sherlock. Who they are is about people making relationships, closing deals, not spending quality time with a computer. See what I’m getting at. Let me give you another real life example that I think will further paint this picture. I declined a few years ago who owned a financial practice and had hired a team based on things that she did not enjoy doing in her day to day.

Again, not wrong. This is how most entrepreneurs. So she was looking for somebody that could transfer money for her clients, between accounts, do new client onboarding stuff, uh, send thank you birthday cards, you know, administrative stuff, again, not wrong, but where she was wrong is the particular person that she hired lacked attention to.

Now, I know this might seem like a rookie mistake, but honestly, when I talked to her about it, she’s like, it didn’t even occur to me that I needed to take a step deeper. She just said she could do the tasks. Most of the time she did them and it was fine. But where the kicker happened is in one situation where this team member transferred $500,000 to the wrong account.

And then suddenly she realized her. Because when you hire somebody just to cross things off your list, chances are you’re hiring a worker bee, which I’ve talked about in many other episodes. So go ahead and go back and listen to those. But in addition to a worker bee, you’re hiring somebody that may or may not be able to actually do what is necessary to be successful in the.

This is also where our scorecard comes in to play. Because if you’re very clear around the mission of the role and what success is, the accountabilities, then you can work backwards into the innate talents that the person needed to have. So in this case, once we went back to square one, because trust me transferring $500,000 to the wrong account, not something that a business in financial planning and management is gonna take light.

So we went back to the drawing board to figure out, was it a miscommunication? Was it something else? Was she not invested? And we really clarified the role re clarified the role shall I say? And so when we looked at the accountabilities and what they were accountable to, then we realized the common thread came down to a few key things, attention to detail, follow through an autonomy.

Those are the things that this person really needed at their core. And when we compared that to the person that was sitting in this position, her attention to detail wasn’t there, she didn’t act unless she had permission, which was sucking the business owner’s time causing delays. And when you’re in financial planning, CPA time is money, especially with how markets fluctuate and.

She just was not a critical thinker, which was another innate talent that she was missing. When you really get clear on who that person needs to be, then you can ask questions and test them during interviews to make sure that they are who you are looking for. In this example, something that, you know, I really wanna drive.

Is, you can hire somebody to do tasks. That’s not what I’m saying. There are definitely people where that is perfect for them and perfect for the team. But if you have a lean team and you’re trying to hire key people and hiring for the CRM that you use, which I’ve seen entrepreneurs do, or the POS that you’re using, or the social media platform that you’re using.

It’s not always gonna work because you need people who innately have the specific talents and ways of being that will be successful in that role. Another example you guys have probably heard me use is my accountant. She’s got the attention to detail closing loops. She’s also got the strategic mind. a lot of those things I can’t teach.

I can’t teach you to be incessant with your detail and making sure loops are closed. I can teach you how to be a little more strategic, but again, that’s a little bit worker B versus player. So now I’m sure you’re asking yourself, how do I actually hire for their innate ways of being instead of just going through the task list.

Here’s how you take a step back and ask this very simple question. For someone to be successful in this role, who do they need to be at their core being again, get really, really specific about things that you can’t teach, things that they need to be born with. Just like with my client, the little tweak you make in how you view the role will make all the difference.

I know that I’ve seen a trend recently of people looking for sales, people, or business development people now. There are certain things that sales people have that is very unique. One of them is they’re very good at building rapport. They love building relationships. They love small talk and they’re all about people, but there are people out there that are not people, people

And so if you have somebody who has, let’s say three outta four of those, but isn’t a people person they’re probably not gonna succeed in that role. So again, when you think about. That person has to have that you can’t teach, get clear on what the priorities are, because it could be that they just need one of those things to be successful, or they might need all four.

Get curious about who’s on your team. What success in that role looks like and get really curious on my favorite thing, which is the one thing. Of that role because chances are, if you can figure out the one thing that you would love them to do more than anything else, it’s gonna make, building it backwards and figuring out those innate talents even easier.

And here’s a little tip for you, this question and others to help you find your high performing players and get really clear on the innate ways of being that your team needs to be successful is in our golden key scorecard, which you can download free at goldenkeypartnership.com/scorecard. It’s also gonna be in the show notes.

And if you’re curious about how to avoid a few other common mistakes, I see when hiring go have a listen to season one, episode 12, I dive into a few other things that could be preventing you from having a high performing team and a team that’s autonomous, and really gives you your time back and helps you build your.

So that’s it for this speaks episode. Love to hear from you your biggest takeaways. So make sure you’re following along. Tag me on Instagram at it’s Lauren Goldstein or LinkedIn, wherever you hang out on the interweb. Don’t forget to subscribe and thanks so much for listening. We’ll see you next week.

So, which part of your business needs, love and attention? You might be wondering that, Hmm, here are your next steps.

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