Dan Crompton Of ActionCOACH On How To Hire The Right Person
An Interview With Ken Babcock
Speak to referees. Traditionally, companies may ask past employers for validation. Most corporates will send a one-line letter stating the dates of employment and nothing else. You get no sense of what the candidate might be like in the real-life working situation. And that’s the point of your whole recruitment process.
When a company is looking to grow, the choice of who to hire can sometimes be an almost existential question. The right hire can dramatically grow a company, while the wrong hire can be very harmful to morale and growth. How can you know you are hiring the right person? What are the red flags that should warn you away from hiring someone? In this interview series, we are talking to business leaders who can share insights and stories from their experience about “How To Hire The Right Person”. As a part of this series I had the distinct pleasure of interviewing Dan Crompton.
He is a sought-after leadership coach based in London, specializing in turning managers into leaders. He and the team at ActionCOACH have been awarded the best group coaching program in the world for the last two years running, out of over 1,000 coaching practices. He is the author of the upcoming no-nonsense book, How To Manage A Team.
Thank you for joining us in this interview series. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’?
I’ve managed teams in lots of different settings. Everything from London pubs, to nightclubs, to retail and FTSE 100 companies. More recently, I managed a team at broadcaster ITV, overlooking £130m of revenue. And in that time, I’ve had some excellent bosses and some terrible ones — and I’ve probably learnt just as much from the awful ones as I have from the great ones.
I’ve also been an excellent boss and a terrible one! I’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way with hiring and managing my teams. I always find failure to be the best teacher.
After some years, I realized that what I loved about my corporate roles was obsessing over the team. How to hire the best people, how to keep the shining stars, how to design a great culture… Your one role as a leader is not to get the stuff done, but to build the team up to be able to get the stuff done even better than you could. So, if that’s your focus, even learning how to get rid of the people who aren’t right becomes an oddly enjoyable skill to master.
That’s why I made the move into coaching other business leaders a number of years ago. I know how damaging it can be to have a terrible boss, and so now I get to help make sure it doesn’t happen to other people, by coaching business leaders and their teams to step up and skill up.
You’ve had a remarkable career journey. Can you highlight a key decision in your career that helped you get to where you are today?
I would look to a habit rather that one single decision. Soon after I first started managing teams, I got into the habit of reading — and I guess learning in general. No matter how many years of experience you have or what scale of projects and teams you’ve run before, there is always more to learn.
I found audiobooks really easy to fit into my day, when I’m travelling to see clients, and as part of my morning routine. If you can take one learning — one action — from each book you read, you can make huge changes in your life and your career.
I run a virtual book club for business owners every month, and originally I thought it would just be a nice way to get a bunch of entrepreneurs together over a cocktail. But even I’ve been surprised! There are some seriously big wins going on in the group from certain books. People are winning clients, charging higher fees, taking whole months out of their business, hiring staff and more from the wisdom that is out there.
I would not be able to be the coach I am without some of those mind-popping realizations you get from an excellent business or psychology book.
What’s the most impactful initiative you’ve led that you’re particularly proud of?
When I was working at ITV, it was a big corporate machine and had all the things you’d expect from that: a five-year plan, company values, a systemized appraisals process and all the rest.
Sometimes within that environment, it can be easy to get a little lost in terms of the impact you can have. But I’m particularly proud of the team I ran. We created a very clear culture in our team, and even within a company of 4,000 people, my team had a clear personality, and a distinct reputation.
Part of that was down to the recruitment. I am always ready to go into any recruitment process willing to hire no-one. It’s not about asking yourself: ‘Which of these candidates will I hire?’ Instead, you’ve got to ask: ‘Which of these candidates — if any — will meet the standards that I need?’
Saying no to all candidates is a hard decision, especially when you’re busy and need the headcount. But that’s when leaders tend to make the worst hiring decisions. You’ve got to stick to the standards you need in the team, otherwise it all starts to unravel very quickly.
On top of that, I designed the specific culture I wanted in the team. We worked together to create specific actions that everyone could take on a daily or weekly basis that brought our team culture to life. It’s all very well having swirly writing on the office walls with words like Integrity, Innovation and Customer Service. But in itself, that does nothing to change people’s day-to-day actions and decisions when they’re at their desk.
I’ve always been passionate about turning those cliché statements into meaningful actions and regular habits for the team to adopt. That’s the missing piece of the puzzle for most company values, and I’m proud of the distinct reputation my team had as a result of addressing it directly.
How about a mistake you’ve made and the lesson you took away?
One of the biggest mistakes I made, that I keep coming back to, is not acting faster when I thought there was a problem with a new hire. I wasn’t strong enough on using the probation period, and I was too lenient with the mindset of: ‘They’re a lovely person! They’ll get better soon enough.’
It was solely my decision, and one that I and the team had to endure for a long time afterwards.
The first error was the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that I’d set for the probation period. These are supposed to be the clear-cut, unambiguous ‘go/no-go’ gateway for a new starter. If they hit those specific metrics, they’re in, and if they don’t, they’re out.
The mistake I made — and I see most other businesses making — is having KPIs that only relate to the tasks of the role. That means there are people that will pass that gateway, who can do the job well enough, but who are still not right for the team. Their values and attitudes don’t match what you need. That’s why you’ve got to include KPIs around company values and the characteristics you need in that role, not just the tasks and responsibilities. If you’re not assessing for that stuff at the probation phase, there’s no point in having your values set out in the first place.
The second error was in my leniency. I knew this person wasn’t right, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt. How I am now — and how I coach my clients to be — is quick and decisive during the probation period. That’s what it’s for!
By letting someone go, you’re sending a really strong message back to the team: this is the level of standards we expect in this team, and we only want brilliant people to have the honor of joining this team.
How has mentorship played a role in your career, whether receiving mentorship or offering it to others?
I have received mentoring and coaching during my career, both formally and informally. It’s not about having someone with all the answers, telling you what to do next, but someone who is willing to spend the time to help you figure stuff out for yourself. We don’t learn from listening, we learn from thinking, processing and doing it ourselves.
The mentoring that has been most impactful for my career has been informally through excellent managers who have been excellent coaches. Not in the literal sense, as I’m in the coaching industry, but in how they communicated with me as I was learning.
It’s far easier as a manager to give people the answers or show them how to do it. Usually how to do it your way! What is harder is to never answer a single question that your team has. To spend more time curating their thought process to figure it out, so that they will never have that question for you again.
I’ve been really lucky to have a couple of managers like that, who really have helped me become the coach I am today, even if that wasn’t their aim.
Developing your leadership style takes time and practice. Who do you model your leadership style after? What are some key character traits you try to emulate?
I said earlier that I’ve learnt as much from my best bosses as I have from the terrible ones. An exercise I do with my clients is to delve into the characteristics of your best manager and your worst manager, to identify the personal leadership values that are important to you. I also ask them to think about the leader that they have been — what would your team members say about you and your leadership style?
Through the discussion, you end up with a list of twenty or so traits, behaviors and values. You can whittle that down to the top three that are above all else the most important leadership traits for you. I call it your Leadership Prism, because it’s a three-point lens through which you can make decisions, set your standards and create a consistency in how you deal with people.
For me personally, the leaders I’ve had in my career and the type of leader I have been — both good and bad — have given me the three values of my Leadership Prism.
Autonomy is the first one. Autonomy and ownership have to be given by a leader before a team can take them. I truly believe that people should be given autonomy of where they work, when they work and how they work. This won’t work in all industries, and you’ve got to have solid recruitment systems in place to make sure you’re hiring self-starters who don’t need tight management. You also need systems for the probation period and any poor performance to make sure you’ve got bright, responsible people on the team.
The second is to expect excellence. This has got to go hand-in-hand with giving autonomy, because if you’re not careful, giving autonomy can quickly slide into ‘hands-off leadership’. You’ve still got to demand and expect excellence — and act quickly if it’s not forthcoming.
My third leadership value is to bring both personal and career goals to the top of the agenda. I’m really frank with people I manage. I will ask them: ‘What job do you want after this one? Where will you be in 5 years? If you were to leave this job in the next 12 months, what would likely be the reason?’
I don’t buy into the weird pretense that everyone will be in the same job for the rest of their lives. Why do we have that as a general assumption in the workplace?! It’s far better to get to know your team, and to help them get the most from their experience with you, so that they can give you the most back. You’ll keep people longer, and doing better work, if their personal goals are being met.
Thank you for sharing that with us. Let’s change paths a little bit. In my work, I focus on helping companies to simplify the process of creating documentation of their workflow, so I am particularly passionate about this question. Many times, a key aspect of scaling your business is scaling your team’s knowledge and internal procedures. What tools or techniques have helped your teams be successful at scaling internally?
The one system we’ve introduced that has transformed how our business functions is OKRs: Objectives and Key Results. It’s a system introduced to Intel by then-CEO Andy Grove, and there’s an excellent book on it by John Doerr, the coach attributed with Google’s early success. The book is called Measure What Matters, and lays out how to set goals across a business, turn those goals into actions, and help everyone to keep themselves accountable to what they’re responsible for.
Our COO has really driven this. We have all our OKRs on an online platform called Plai. That guides our weekly team meetings, and means that everyone knows what they’re up to on a quarterly basis, and what everyone else is up to.
It’s quite seamless once you have the process up and running, and it really has turned our team around 360 degrees in terms of our collaboration and movement forwards. That’s particularly important for the fully remote team that we are. Without systems and processes to keep us all accountable, it wouldn’t be possible.
The pandemic forced many companies to adapt. Implementing remote onboarding and professional development — in addition to maintaining culture — challenged organizations. Can you share with us the challenges you have faced, with remote onboarding and hiring? How have your internal processes evolved as a result?
We’ve been a remote team even before the pandemic, but there were certain things we used to always do face-to-face. Seeing clients, recruitment, team meetings. Now, all of that has moved to virtual, but I think recruitment was the last one to do so.
When Covid kicked off in 2020, we did hold off our recruitment for quite a while. I guess we didn’t think it could be done without meeting someone. But it was about 3–6 months into the pandemic that we decided that we had to find new ways of doing everything.
As much as possible, we’ve kept our recruitment system the same as before. We’ve always run group interviews, and asked candidates to present a very quick four-minute presentation to the group. We’re coaches, and we need people to be able to convey ideas in an engaging way in that environment, so it makes sense for us. All of that can be done virtually — and, in fact, being able to do it via Zoom is a skill we now need new hires to master.
We had a few business owners that we were working with who buried their heads in the sand about the pandemic. They either assumed it would be all over sooner that it was, or decided they didn’t need to make any changes to how they operate and how their team processes and communication work.
We now know that was a big mistake. The quicker you’re able to react to situations like that, the easier it is for business to continue.
With the Great Resignation/Reconsideration in full swing, many job seekers are reevaluating their priorities in selecting a role and an employer. How do you think this will influence companies’ approaches to hiring, talent management, and continuous learning?
It certainly does seem to be the Great Reshuffle, rather than Resignation. There are a few milestones in human history that change how things work forever. The Plague in the 1300s, World War II, and now our very own plague.
That might sound dramatic, but for the first time in the history of human society, employees are truly holding some of the power, if not all of it. I’m hearing people in interviews asking questions like: ‘What’s the culture like?’ — and then making a decision based on the answer to that question. The question isn’t new, but the fact that employees — even at junior levels — are the ones therefore deciding whether to take a job or not is new.
And the basis for that decision is anchored in lifestyle factors. How flexible are the hours? Where can I work? What is the company doing for mental health? How do my personal goals fit in with this company?
So, if your hiring practices haven’t changed already to match candidates’ new priorities, you’re already losing great potential team members.
You need to consider that your recruitment process is usually the first experience someone has of your company. Your company’s brand isn’t made up of the color of the logo or what your website looks like; it’s made up of every interaction people have with you. That’s where the impression is made. So, what you do well and what you do badly in your recruitment process is a huge part of your branding, marketing and reputation.
Super, thank you for sharing all of that. Next, let’s turn to the main focus of our discussion about hiring the right person. As you know, hiring can be very time consuming and difficult. Can you share 5 techniques that you use to identify the talent that would be best suited for the job you want to fill? Please share an example for each idea.
From making some bad hiring decisions, as well as plenty of great ones, I recommend five techniques to getting the right person on board.
Firstly, put up barriers to entry. It sounds counterintuitive, but you actually want to make it more difficult for people to apply for your roles. Even at the height of the pandemic, one client of mine received 300 resumés for one junior role. How on earth are you supposed to read all of those — let alone assess them all fairly against one another?
That’s why I recommend putting up barriers. Get people to deselect themselves from your hiring process. So, instead of asking for a resumé and covering letter, ask candidates to send in a two-minute video answering a very simply question. Or to leave a voice message, again answering a very simple question.
The mad thing is that up to 90% of candidates won’t bother. So, it takes a little longer to hire, but the 90% who are just scatter gunning resumés to any role don’t even reach your inbox. And the ones who do make that extra effort are the candidates who care about the job and about your company. They’re also more likely to be people who take ownership over their own work and progress.
My second tip is to put more effort into assessing for attitude than you asses for skills in your hiring process. The old saying that skills can be taught, but attitude cannot is so true. And yet, what are most recruitment processes about? Your experience, what you studied, what projects you’ve worked on.
In most industries, you can get a pretty good sense of someone’s experience level by casting your eye diagonally across the first page of their resumé. So, spend more time getting the rigor in how you asses someone’s attitude. How will you assess whether they’re a self-starter? How will you assess whether they are coachable? How will you assess whether they’re going to take true ownership over their projects?
The third tip is to be upfront about the salary. I hear time and time again about candidates getting through to the late stages of a recruitment process, only to find the salary isn’t even in the ballpark of what they’re looking for. What a waste of everyone’s time, and what a terrible introduction to your company!
Some companies don’t want to divulge exactly what other colleagues might be earning, but they’ve all got Google. They can work this stuff out. (And your team do talk about their salaries over a drink!) A good compromise can be to publish a salary range instead of a specific figure, and to lay out what factors will decide where someone falls within that range.
My fourth tip for hiring the right person is not to be afraid to follow up. What I mean is that you will have your recruitment steps, but don’t worry about going outside of this if you need to. If you’re down to the last two or three candidates, and there’s one factor you’re not quite decided on, arrange another call. It’s fine to have a quick 15 minutes with one candidate if you have a particular topic you want to delve into a bit deeper. This is an important decision for you both, and don’t let process stop you from finding out everything you need.
My fifth tip for getting the right person onboard is to speak to referees. Traditionally, companies may ask past employers for validation. Most corporates will send a one-line letter stating the dates of employment and nothing else. You get no sense of what the candidate might be like in the real-life working situation. And that’s the point of your whole recruitment process.
The key here is to think outside the box a little. Who says that only a previous employer can be a good referee? Why not ask the candidate if you can speak to one of their ex-clients? Or someone they’ve managed in the past. Or one of their suppliers? Obviously you’ve got to do this with full permission from the candidate, but the powerful testimonials you’ll get from those conversations will give you a huge insight into how they’re likely to behave in real working situations.
Some of my methods might seem unusual, but they need to be. It’s a fact that most hiring managers aren’t thinking about the process in this depth, and the impact on their teams, their time, their business performance is absolutely huge.
In contrast, what are a few red flags that should warn you away from hiring someone?
I don’t subscribe to some of the traditional red flags in hiring. Like gaps on the resumé, or even if they have something bad to say about their current or previous employer. They’re leaving for a reason, after all!
I think the red flags should be unique to each role. If you’re being rigorous about what attitudes and characteristics you need for a particular role, those should be what you assess for, and the red flags should emerge from your interview discussion.
The bigger red flags almost seem too obvious to mention… Turning up late to an interview — without valid and advance warning — is an absolute deal-breaker for me, talking inappropriately to the tone of the room, dressing inappropriately. Usually it’s overdressing that has turned me off. If you come suited and booted to an interview of creatives, you’ll instantly identify yourself as not getting it.
The only other thing that turns me off a candidate is if they have a series of short-term jobs. I love people who have changed careers and bring a diverse set of experience with them, but if they’ve had a series of roles for just 12–18 months, it makes me doubtful that they’ll hang around for long.
What software or tools do you recommend to help onboard new hires?
I never recommend specific software, because it changes so quickly. It’s more important to consider what functions you want any software to serve. The onboarding process needs to reaffirm their decision to join your company. It’s like spending a lot of money on a new purchase and getting buyer’s remorse when you get home!
Your new starters have made a huge life decision that affects themselves, their partners and families, their old colleagues… So, you need to reaffirm their decision and build their excitement to start the new role.
You should get the team to meet them socially ahead of starting. They need to not only read your company values, but they need to understand the company culture. You need to set clear KPIs for the probation period. Whatever software, training or plain old face-to-face talking you use to achieve those aims is up to you.
Because of your role, you are a person of significant influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your ideas can trigger.
It’s a little off topic, but I am constantly staggered by how our education system fails not just our kids, but all of us. School hasn’t changed that much since the Ancient Greeks and beyond. We teach kids algebra and geography and selected history. But, how come no-one knows how to do their taxes, or set up a cashflow forecast, or plan for retirement?
It was many years before I realized that wealth is a skill. Not just a birthright that you either get or don’t, but a skill that can be taught. In fact, it has to be taught! And right now, that’s not happening anywhere until it’s usually too late.
So, if I could inspire a movement, it would be to educate the world’s new generations on the specific skills and principles of money management and wealth creation.
This was truly meaningful! Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your expertise!
Thank you so much.
About the interviewer. Ken Babcock is the CEO and Co-Founder of Tango. Prior to his mission of celebrating how work is executed, Ken spent over 4 years at Uber riding the rollercoaster of a generational company. After gaining hands-on experience with entrepreneurship at Atomic VC, Ken went on to HBS. It was at HBS that Ken met his Co-Founders, Dan Giovacchini and Brian Shultz and they founded Tango.
