E3: Hiring Friendly People

What if instead of thinking outside the box, you want to find a better box? Welcome to Invisible Solutions. I'm your host, Steven Shapiro. Each week we tackle your most complex problems using the lenses from my book, Invisible Solutions. If you don't have the lenses, you can get them at get or with that. Let's get started with today's episode. Today we're going to start off with a tip that I think is incredibly important. Because in the world of innovation, we always tend to use this expression, think outside the box, like that's some kind of magical tool for coming up with better solutions. But if you remember, in episode two, we talked about the Goldilocks principle and why asking abstract questions often leads to a lot of irrelevant and low value solutions. So when we say think outside the box, we're actually saying to increase the level of abstraction. But really what we want to do is not get broader with our questions, but actually get more accurate with our questions. Instead of speeding up the bags, we might want to slow down the passengers. That was from episode one. We want to be able to change the question, not necessarily the abstraction of the question, but we want to ask a question that's going to help us zero in on what's going to create the greatest value. So it's always about the question. Better questions lead to better solutions. So don't think outside the box. Find a better box. And with that, we move to today's challenge. This is one that was submitted to me via email and it's a real world problem. Unlike the first two, which were more generic problems, this one is one that a real company's struggling with. And, and so as a little background, this is a company that sells direct to consumers through a individual sales force. So they have a bunch of people out there selling their product. Let's just say for the sake of argument, they're selling toasters. So what they want to do is attract more people to sell their toasters. And so the question they submitted to me is, how can we get friendly people to work with us? How can we get friendly people to work with us? That is, how can we hire more friendly people to work with us? Now, the first thing I want to point out is that I'm pleased that they use the word with, not for. So how can we get friendly people to work with us rather than for us? It's a one word difference, but it's actually a huge impact on the way we're going to think about the problem. The first lens I think I'd like to use here, though. Is a combination of the substitute lens, which is lens number 15, and the result lens, which is lens number 7. Because when I look at a question like this, how can we acquire, how can we get more friendly people to work with us? My first question is, what's the result? What's the result? Why do we want more people to sell? Well, the answer is pretty obvious. We want to sell more. So maybe the question isn't about how do we get more people. It may be how do we sell more? Which is a different question. It also then opens up to me the substitute lens, which is changing words. They were asking the question, how can we get friendly people to work with us? But maybe the question could be, how can we keep the friendly people working with us who are already working with us, and how can we make them more productive? How can we make them more valuable so that they want to stay with us? Therefore, it is instead of a hiring question, it is a keeping question. So let's go to another lens, lens number one. I always like to start off with lens number one early in the process, especially when it's a broad question and the leverage lens is all around asking, what is the leverage point? What would give us the greatest value? So we might want to ask which people? So let's stick with the original question of how do we get people to work with us? Well, the first question I have is who. Who are these people? Who are the most friendly people, or who are the people that are going to be best at selling? Because if your goal is actually sales, not people, I mean, you could probably get a lot of people. But if those people aren't going to sell, is that going to do you any good? So how do we get the most people who are going to be the most valuable? Now we have to do some research, figure out who those people are, what kind of demographic, psychographic, economic situation, age. There's a whole bunch of different things you might want to look at to determine who would you want to target? The next thing that you might want to look at under the leverage lens is where do these people gather? So if we're going to try to get these friendly people, where's the leverage point for getting the people? So where do these people get together? Maybe it's at schools, maybe it's at some type of social gatherings. Maybe they have some kind of shared interest. Maybe there's something about them that will be most interesting if they have a particular shared background. Maybe selling isn't an individual sport, maybe it's a team sport. So if we have a team sport, maybe we want people to join as groups because that will give us some of the greatest results. So what's going to give us the greatest impact? If you could only spend a small amount of money and a small amount of time to get to the people that you wanted to get to, who would you get to? And where do they gather? Which then leads us to the reassign lens. The reassign lens is the who question. It's the who dimension. Now, we talked about who we are targeting as potential employees or as potential salespeople. But the other who that we might want to think about is who has access to these people. And I always find that to be a really powerful question to ask. Is, instead of you trying to attract people, who can you attract? That can attract people. And this might come back to our previous question on the leverage lenses. If you know where these people gather and you know what their shared interests are, maybe you can find the influencers in those shared interests. Now, the biggest challenge that we have in, I would guess, with this type of problem statement is that we tend to use a very broad brush. I want to attract a lot of people, but if we can get more specific, we will get greater results. So maybe we don't want to attract everyone. We only want to attract certain people who have certain qualities, and we get to the people who have access to those people. Another lens to think about at this point is the emotion lens. I love the emotion lens. Lens number 14 is all around. How do we add a little emotion to the question? Now, this is sort of an emotional question in some respects, and that is we want friendly people, but that's more of an attribute of the individuals. How do we want them to feel? How do we want them to feel? Or maybe how are they already feeling about the company? So maybe what you want to do is start thinking about who are the people you want to start attracting based on the way they feel about the product that you're selling and who those individuals might be. So if we were to do that, we then start looking at, like, how do we get people to smile when they think about our product? Or who are the people who already smile when they think about our product and how do we target them? Or who are the people be most passionate about what we are selling? Because they see that what we sell is going to have an impact not just on themselves, but on the people that they're selling to. A lot of people. One of the things we know is when it comes to sales, the impact the emotional impact you make on others after you make the sale has a huge impact on your ability to sell. So let's start talking about the emotion behind it. Which might lead us to lens number 19, which is the pain versus gain lens. Now, this is an interesting one. The pain versus gain lens says that people typically will make faster decisions to eliminate a pain or reduce a loss or the threat of a loss than they will to get something. Most of the time, we tend to use the gain aspect of this lens. Give you money, we'll give you money if you sell. But when you understand the pain side of the equation, sometimes that motivates people to participate. Now, it's not always the best motivator. Eliminating pain isn't always the best motivator for someone to take action. Sometimes it can be something completely different. One of the things that we know is when it comes to innovation, for example, what motivates people is at the lowest level. At the lowest level is an extrinsic motivation, some kind of reward or payment. At the next level, though, it's about community. So that lowest level is compensation. The second level is community. And people want to feel part of something larger. So this is something which might be considered here, is how do we attract people who want to feel like they're part of something bigger, something larger, something bigger than they are, something, you know. So if people, especially right now in this current situation, people feel isolated, well, how do you have people feel connected? That would be. Wow, that's a really interesting question. And just, you know, the third level when it comes to innovation in terms of motivation. So we talked about compensation, community. The last one is contribution. A lot of people are motivated by their intrinsic desire to make an impact. And this is going to lead us to another lens, which is the analogy lens. The analogy lens is lens number six. And I love this lens. And I try to use this whenever possible. The analogy lens is all around who else, who else, who else has solved a similar problem? And the thing that we know that sometimes the best solutions to our problems don't come from people from, from our industry or area of expertise, but they come from somewhere completely different. So in this case, who else is able to attract friendly people to work with them? And where my mind goes is social causes and movements. If you look at those, they're not being motivated by compensation. They might be motivated by community to some level because they feel like they're part of a larger group, but it's also they're motivated by contribution. They're making an impact and so that's what I want you to start thinking about here, is maybe that analogy lens is going to be very powerful to be able to find different solutions, different aspects, different ways of looking at the problem that might help you find different solutions. So instead of looking to other sales organizations, look to what causes and movements are doing in order to drive change. So we've talked about a whole bunch of different lenses here. We started off with the result lens and the substitute lens, where we looked at, well, is it really just about getting more people, or is it about getting more sales, or is it really keeping the salespeople we already have? We looked at the leverage lens, which is saying, who should we target? Where we get the greatest impact? Where do those people gather? Which then led us to the reassigned lens, which is about, well, who can we target that will have access to the people we want to have access to? And that's a great way to start looking at how do you create sort of this larger picture of connectivity? We also looked at the analogy lens, which is asking, who else has solved a similar problem. We looked at the emotion lens, which is all around the emotional feel behind it. And when you put all this together, you end up with a very interesting range of possible solutions. Now, if this individual were here with me, we would be having a dialogue and I would ask a whole bunch of questions around these questions. And by the time we were done with this, in a matter of minutes, we would have zeroed in on a really good solution. But hopefully you're able to see the process we go through in order to identify these reframes, these different questions that can lead us to completely different answers. And with that, we are at the end of this episode of Invisible Solutions. I am your host, Steven Shapiro. I look forward to being with you next week. I'm be sure to submit your challenges that you have to us so we can solve them on the air. And if you don't have the lenses, go to getthelenses. Com until next time, Happy problem solving.