I mentioned my friend Alex Mandossian in my story page.
Alex came to our first Altitude program in January.
I was talking to him about this upcoming Altitude program we’re going to be
doing, and he told me that it’s important to communicate that we have our
own internal language that we use to describe things. Our
“vocabulary” had an effect on him, and it really made a difference
in his business.
So let me tell you about it, and give you some of the terms… along with
what they mean.
Use them if you want. They work for us. Hopefully, you’ll come to the
training we’re doing so we can show you what they really mean in
action:
Stars
A Star is someone who has a high degree of the different qualities that
we’re looking for in a professional. Some of the qualities we look for
include:
- High Driver (I’ll tell you about that one in
a minute)
- Highly Networked (I’ll tell you about that
one, too)
- High Personal Aspirations
- Experience In Our Industry
You’ll notice that these things are qualities that most companies do
NOT talk about when they discuss what they look for in a person.
Driver
A Driver is someone who picks up a project, understands the result that
we’re trying to achieve, and then DRIVES that project with intense
resolve… until it is DONE
I’ve just described about .01% of the people working in business today,
you realize.
The opposite of a Driver personality is what I call a
“Passive-Aggressive Reactive” personality. This is any person that
you meet working at any Department Of Motor Vehicles in any city in the United
States. You know what I’m talking about.
We want Drivers.
So we have a name for this quality, we have a description of it, and we value
it highly in our company.
Creatives & Organizers
We use the terms “Creatives” and “Organizers” to
describe personality types.
A Creative is someone who is conceptual, right-brained, and comfortable with
chaos and procrastination.
An Organizer is someone who is structured, left-brained, and comfortable with
getting everything done early.
You need both, or your teams are going to suck, by the way.
Highly Networked
This term relates to a person who is both a strong networker and a good judge
of business talent. Rare and valuable.
Virtual Bench
I mentioned this one earlier. It’s the way we’ve been finding
people almost since the very beginning, but I got the actual term from Brad
Smart.
We’re a little more sophisticated now, so we have a big spreadsheet with
the different people we’re talking to in rough priority order, with some
different ways of valuing them across the top. We meet on a regular basis on a
teleconference bridge line, add and remove people, talk about people that we
might need to find in the future.
Vital Stats
This is a term that has lived in our business for several years now. We
don’t actually have a “Vital Stats” anymore (or at least it
doesn’t go by that name anymore).
In short, I need a “dashboard” so I can see how our business is
doing. We have a few of them at this point, but you get the idea.
All of your vital information, displayed on charts, with trends obvious to
anyone with a 1st grade education.
HR
We have no Human Resources department.
And we have the lowest “drama” level that I’ve seen in a
business.
Here’s why: HR is everyone’s job. If you’ve got a problem in
your business, and the person who oversees that area doesn’t have a good
enough relationship with their team to handle it, then you probably have the
wrong person running your team.
Of course, there are exceptions. But rarely.
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