Here Are The Three Questions You Need To Assess Everyone In Your Company

When it comes to building a great team in your company, cliches abound about getting the right people on the bus, putting people in the right seats, etc. While those admonitions are catchy, they don't really explain how to go about accomplishing the feat of selecting and evaluating your company's talent.

But Kelly Knight, President of EOS (aka the Entrepreneurial Operating System), recently shared with me her firm's elegantly simple approach for assessing whether you've actually got the right people. It's called "Get It, Want It, Capacity," and it stems from thousands of hours of Gino Wickman, EOS founder and creator, working with entrepreneurial clients. Knight describes it like this: "'Get it' is whether you have the natural talent and God-given ability to do that job well and understand it well; you're born to do it, and it's part of your DNA. 'Want it' means that you genuinely like your role and want the seat, and I, as your manager, want you to have that seat. And then capacity is whether you've got the time, mental, physical and emotional capacity to actually do the job really well."

It's notable that their approach isn't focused exclusively on whether someone has the technical skills to successfully perform the job; the right people will have the desire, emotional capability, fit, and more. That tracks with what my team and I found in the Hiring For Attitude research; while 46% of new hires will fail within 18 months, 89% of those hiring failures will stem from attitudinal issues rather than from a lack of technical skills.

EOS's framework also identifies another widespread problem when it comes to assessing talent; inconsistent and unclear evaluations. As Knight told me, "Everyone has to have a 'yes' in get it, want it, and capacity. Maybe is not an option here; it has to be yes or no. A leader will meet with their team to assess the needs of the organization and, with an eye towards the greater good, whether each person meets what's required."

While it might strike some as a bit harsh to limit the evaluation to a series of binary choices, the reality is that more rating options often lead to more inconsistency. And inconsistency is one of the biggest problems in any evaluation of talent, whether those evaluations occur early on during hiring or later on during performance appraisals. As a recent Leadership IQ study on hiring practices found, 62% of HR executives believe that their company's hiring managers are inconsistent in how they interview candidates. And as a study on performance appraisals discovered, only 22% of people always think that their leader actually distinguishes between high and low performers.

Notably, Knight and EOS insist that these evaluations take place quarterly during a candid and fully-transparent conversation. As Knight puts it, "We call them quarterly conversations, and it's really an informal one-on-one conversation that's had between a manager and an employee. They talk about how they're doing, how things are going, what's working, what's not working, do they share and reflect the organization's core values and do they have the get it, want it, and capacity for that role."

In an ideal world, these conversations result in a series of yesses. "But if the answer to one of the three questions is a no," says Knight, "and it's been a couple of quarters in a row, then it means that we're having a different conversation because the get it, want it, and capacity aren't lining up."

Only 43% of leaders rate themselves as advanced or expert at delivering constructive feedback that changes behavior, according to a Leadership IQ study. By simplifying the conversation, the approach that Knight describes may provide a way to make a challenging conversation open, honest, and even vulnerable. While the EOS conversations are not performance reviews or constructive feedback conversations in the classic sense, you do want, as Knight says, "to be fully aligned walking out of that conversation with what the expectations are, and then, 90 days later, you do it again."

These conversations don't have to be perfect. For Knight, a big goal of these conversations is that "everybody knows where we're at, and we're all just rowing together to try to do the right thing. This is as much art as it is a science."