Foolproof Hiring, Necessary Endings & How Great Coaches Ask, Listen, and Empathise
18 June 2023 Newsletter
The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic. Peter F. Drucker
Hope you’re Thriving!
It’s been an interesting week, with 3 full day leadership workshops.
Here’s a quote from a friend I thought you’d enjoy.
Life takes discipline.
Diligence.
Determination.Recognise that while sometimes you have to compromise, other times you don’t.
The temptation doesn’t come with a choice between right and wrong.
It comes with a choice between right and easy.
That’s why in my book Onboarded, I titled a chapter, ‘Short-term pain versus long-term gain’. Because life means making the right choices over and over. And they’re often not the easy ones.
And that’s what Dr Henry Cloud discusses in his book Necessary Endings.
Dr Cloud states that “while endings are a natural part of life, we often experience them with a sense of sadness, hesitation, resignation, or regret”. He goes on, “How would our personal and professional lives improve if we were to forget about the idea of failure and instead see endings as a necessary step to something better?”
In this week’s podcast, we talk about the book Necessary Endings, along with how and why we’re finishing the podcast. More on that below.
Foolproof Hiring
Most of us would have heard of Topgrading, the hiring method Brad Smart used with Jack Welch to increase the number of A players at General Electric.
The biggest criticism about Topgrading is that it’s too long and technical. Yes, it makes a robust case to use the method, but most busy managers won’t read it.
So it was great to see a new easier to read book from Brad Smart and Chris Mursau, the president of Topgrading, called Foolproof Hiring, which is currently available on the Kindle edition for $0.99.
I was fortunate enough to read it last year when it was in development and then again two months ago when it was complete, and they’ve done an excellent job of outlining the most important way to hire A players consistently.
I also spoke with Chris on the Topgrading podcast Talent Wins last month about Onboarding – check that podcast out on the link here.
Is Your Website Being Used To Train AI?
This week I came across an interesting article from The Washington Post looking at how AI chatbots gather content on the public web to provide answers to the questions we’re all asking on AI interfaces (large language models LLM) like ChatGPT.
The article explains how Google’s C4 data set (Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus) is being used to train Bard – Google’s conversational generative AI chatbot. These AI chatbots aren’t thinking about the answer to your question; they are repeating what they have found on the public web, on websites just like yours.
Business and industrial websites comprised the biggest content category in Google’s C4 data set, 16% of categorised tokens, with personal blogs being 3.8% of categorised tokens. It begs the question, are they stealing your content if you have the copyright symbol on your website, and it’s being scraped to be served up as content for AI chatbots?
A quick search shows that our online courses appear in the search – maybe because they’re hosted in the US. You can see if your website is in the tokens within the article.
How Great Coaches Ask, Listen, and Empathise
This week I came across an interesting article I thought you would enjoy.
When you coach as a leader, you don’t need to be the expert. You don’t need to be the smartest or most experienced person in the room. And you don’t need to have all the solutions. But you do need to be able to connect with people, to inspire them to do their best, and to help them search inside and discover their own answers.
Coaching is about connecting with people, inspiring them to do their best, and helping them to grow. It’s also about challenging people to come up with the answers they require on their own. Coaching is far from an exact science, and all leaders have to develop their own style, but we can break down the process into practices that any manager will need to explore and understand.
The article identifies the three most important practices that coaches must do to be effective;
• asking powerful questions
• actively listening
• demonstrating empathy
Effective coaches create an environment that encourages self-reflection, trust, and open dialogue by asking powerful questions, actively listening, and demonstrating empathy. Such coaching relationships have the potential to drive personal and professional growth, ultimately enabling individuals to reach their full potential.
Recruiters’ Turnaround Times
This Week on The Growth Whisperers Podcast
166 Necessary Endings
“Necessary Endings” is a self-help book written by Dr. Henry Cloud. It explores the concept of embracing and initiating endings in various aspects of life, such as relationships, careers, and personal growth, in order to create a positive and fulfilling future.
The book emphasises that endings are a natural part of life and are necessary for personal and professional growth.
While endings are a natural part of business and life, we often experience them with a sense of hesitation, sadness, resignation, or regret. But Dr. Henry Cloud sees endings differently. He argues that our personal and professional lives can only improve to the degree that we can see endings as a necessary and strategic step to something better. If we cannot see endings in a positive light and execute them well, he asserts, the “better” will never come either in business growth or our personal lives.
In this insightful and deeply empathetic book, Dr. Cloud demonstrates that, when executed well, “necessary endings” allow us to proactively correct the bad and the broken in our lives in order to make room for the professional and personal growth we seek. However, when endings are avoided or handled poorly—as is too often the case—good opportunities may be lost, and misery repeated.
Drawing on years of experience as an executive coach and a psychologist, Dr. Cloud offers a mixture of advice and case studies to help readers:
• Know when to have realistic hope and when to execute a necessary ending in a business, or with an individual.
• Identify which employees, projects, activities, and relationships are worth nurturing and which are not.
• Overcome people’s resistance to change and create change that works.
• Create urgency and an action plan for what’s important.
• Stop wasting resources needed for the things that really matter.
Knowing when and how to let go when something, or someone, isn’t working—a personal relationship, a job, or a business venture—is essential for happiness and success.
In this, the final episode of the Growth Whisperers podcast, we talk about the book necessary endings, our journey together, and why you should consider what endings are necessary in your life.
Thank you for listening, it’s been an honour to help you. From Kevin and Brad.
Episode 166 of The Growth Whisperers Podcast
Listen to The Growth Whisperers
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Keep Thriving!
Brad Giles
