✅ ALL ABOUT MAKING YOUR TALENT THE BEST . . .

✅  ALL ABOUT MAKING YOUR TALENT THE BEST . . .

The competitive edge of any company is unquestionably its Talent. No technology, no strategy will be successful without a corp of Talent who know how to use it and execute it to the company's advantage.

So, equally unquestionable, the goal of any company is to hire the best of the best in all fields. But suppose you are a start-up with very limited resources, or you've been placed in a position where your support staff has been deemed wanting - with the hope it will make your path to success very difficult if not impossible?

Let's start with the start-up scenario...

To attract the best Talent, a start-up with limited resources can find it difficult to compete against the big guys in terms of salaries and benefits. And if it is not perceived to be next Google or Facebook, even giving potential new hires equity vs a big salary, may be difficult.

Sooo, you're left with hiring the next best thing: people with a positive, pro-active attitude, hungry to improve themselves, and who just need a chance to make good.

When I first started my law firm, it was boutique law firm destined to compete with the best law firms in a niche market they had yet to discover. I had an excellent secretary who came with me from my previous job as General Counsel to a large commercial and residential real estate development company. But that was it. Our resources allowed us to hire back office staff who in some cases had never even seen a computer!

To make a long story short, the law firm literally became a school, where my secretary and I taught the others how to strive for excellence in every aspect of their jobs, how to produce, organize and archive documents, how to answer the phone with a smile in their voice, how to get a sense of urgency for important matters, and how to operate all the machinery, including the computers - we were one of the first law firms to provide everyone with their own computer vs. the "word-processing pool." 

The upshot? Not only were we profiled as a hot, up-and-coming legal boutique in the front pages of a leading journal, and had a number of big law firms pursuing us to incorporate us into their practices, but by the time I moved abroad, they all had incredible skills the market picked up in a flash.

Now, for the corporate scenario. . . .

Flash forward to being abroad in an emerging economy. When I first arrived, I was pretty much met like a Martian who had just landed from outer space. As a result, had to unlearn almost everything I had learned in the United States - and my first experiences were truly Kafkaesque in nature!

In this culture, effort meant everything. Results not so much. Thus, if you were someone who actually got results, you were an immediate threat to the status quo - and any future efforts to obtain results were subtly and not-so-subtly undermined and sabotaged.

One of the favorite ploys was to assign you secretaries which were either very young and very green to support you in your senior position, or who had made the rounds in other departments and were found wanting, but were tough to fire.

Let's start with the one tough to fire. 

When she arrived at her new station as my secretary, she was a bit gothic, dark and brooding, introverted to an extreme, and clearly had a low self-esteem. She lurked in the shadows, refusing to turn on the light in her corner, was very difficult to draw out, and did her work on the fly without much attention to detail. She had been a secretary in every department of the organization and had been found wanting. But, for various reasons, legal and financial, it was preferable not to fire her. 

In this case, it's quite possible she may have been assigned to me simply because there was no other place to put her, and I was the new head of a department which had not really done much before I got there. Indeed, it had been on autopilot as the previous head rarely showed up for work.

Being the over-achiever I am, I had other plans, and needed her to work with me as a team. Tried every which way to draw her out, to connect with her at any level. Nothing. 

Then a strange thing happened.  

There was a program on T.V. about a group of adolescents competing to be the next singing idol of the country. One of the contestants sang like a nightingale: he had a truly privileged voice. BUT he had a problem with his eyes, along with a clear low self-esteem. A problem with which the "teachers" and judges were not helping at all. I was furious and made comments to that effect to the secretaries surrounding my secretary. 

Somewhere along the line, something I said hit the right button with her. For the first time ever, she came into my office and asked if I was serious about teaching her how to do her job well - and if I was, could we start immediately . . .? OF COURSE.

Sooo, we embarked on her schooling, beginning with her attitude, then how to strive to find how to do things better and more efficiently. Among other things, I taught her what I knew about graphic design to make our documents more visually appealing, how to pay attention to every small detail though the prism of excellence, and how to handle documents so that they always looked super professional. She was actually quite a beautiful girl who at one time had even been a model, so we also worked on getting her to project an inner beauty through an enhanced self-confidence.

By the time I left, she was so good at her job, she was once again scooped up by the very same Executive Director of the organization who had once considered her unfit for the job!

The young, green secretary . . . 

Another experience was being hired for a position practically adjunct to the C-suite. Our offices were a self-contained rectangle. Top management had the windowed offices, while all our secretaries had open desks right outside each office. The most junior secretary had been at the company some 20-25 years, and their positions as executive secretaries to the top brass were very coveted.

Consequently, it was very evident that something was a miss, when a very young - practically a teenager - recently hired secretary to the secretarial pool a couple floors below, showed up as my assigned secretary... 

As it turned out, the status quo was not keen on my being hired, as they perceived me as having being hired by the opposing team who usurped their positions (long story there, not worth repeating for the sake of this post). So the sooner they could get rid of me, the better. Thus the green secretary who didn't know her away around the company yet, and consequently would find it tough to be of any great help with the high-level work I had been commissioned.

And indeed, when she first started, she was often late, a bit flippant, had a very casual attitude towards her work, and was more interested in chatting with her boyfriend on the telephone at all hours, than in anything else.

Finally one day I sat her down for a serious conversation. I asked her to look around her and appreciate who the other executive secretaries were and how long they had been at the company to achieve those positions. "You are a very, very lucky girl. You hit the jackpot. Instead of waiting 20 to 30 years to make it to this suite, you are here now. So, you have a choice: you can either go back to the secretarial pool and work your way up all those years, or you can settle down and let me teach you how to be the executive secretary you need to be at this level... go home, think about and let me know on Monday."

As it happened, her Mother had been with the company her entire career, and when her daughter shared our conversation with her, she got her ears pulled. She arrived on Monday with a far more contrite attitude and said she was willing to learn. And learn she did. She turned out to be a quick and enthusiastic learner, and it wasn't long before she took the lead and started to suggest better ways to do things. She mastered graphic design and started producing great looking documents and presentations. She dived into learning all about document management (documents keep coming up because us lawyers tend to produce a lot of them and their management is very, very important).

Soon, all the other executive secretaries started asking her for documents and information...

In this case, the end of the story is bitter-sweet. The not so good news, is that the very director who had assigned her to me to sabotage my efforts, transferred his pregnant secretary to the secretarial pool. The good news - if you want to call it that - is that he had my secretary assigned to him!

The bottom line and the moral of all these stories is that you can turn Talent into the best - and it's a win-win-win for all involved: for the Talent whose new skills and self-confidence make her/him very marketable and pursued; the company who has a new competitive edge in a great Talent, and the person she or he supports who will have a great new team member in their quest to perform excellent work and get results.

You may think that sometimes you just don't have the time to make these kinds of transformations happen. Then again, you just may not have any other option - and in the end, the investment of time and know-how will benefit all.

Cheers!

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