Fail Your Way To The Top

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Fail Your Way To The Top

Have you had a challenging day or week? Feel a little tired or discouraged with a current situation? Ready to throw in towel and quit something?

Don’t worry. It’s very normal to go through times of feeling that something in life stinks and all there is to see and feel is current mess.

Here is something neat to ponder during those times, though. When doing battle with discouraged feelings, take a look at this report and reflect on this man's record of failure. It is a testament to how humans can learn and grow and win despite losses and defeats.

Failed in business-------------------------------------1831 Defeated for legislature------------------------------1832 Failed in business again----------------------------1833 Elected to legislature---------------------------------1834 Sweetheart died----------------------------------------1835 Nervous breakdown------------------------------------1836 Defeated for speaker----------------------------------1838 Defeated for land officer------------------------------1843 Defeated for congress--------------------------------1843 Elected to congress-----------------------------------1846 Defeated for re-election-------------------------------1848 Defeated for senate------------------------------------1855 Defeated for vice president--------------------------1856 Defeated for senate------------------------------------1858 Elected President--------------------------------------1860

"The Art of Hiring Smart: Find the Best Person for the Job"

Benchmarking is a process which establishes behavioral standards most appropriate for a given position - that is, what behaviors are most effective most of time in this job. A well-defined Behavioral Job Description acts as a standard in evaluating existing employees as well as a guide in hiring new employees. Today's benchmarking tools are powerful, but they can cause as much damage as good if they are carelessly applied. With help of objective tools and targeted guidance, process has productive results. No matter which quality tools are used in benchmarking process, more and more companies, because they have experienced misguided application, are turning to professional help. Traditionally, most benchmarking has involved profiling employees in a target position to determine which attributes are most common in your best performers. This imperfect method has several potential dangers. First, it actually assumes you already have best performers and that you can find none that can perform better. This assumption limits benchmark standards to your current employees only, and does not consider standards outside your current environment. Another common mistake is that guidelines for selecting and ranking top performers have not been well-defined. For example, sales statistics have been erroneously used to rank performance. As an example, Joe has been selling for us forever. His figures make him look like a top performer, but Joe developed his client base back when all he had to do was take orders as people called in. He was only salesperson in an easy market with little or no competition. Today, however, is much different. Competition is fierce. If Joe had to start from scratch in today's market, how would he fare? How long would it take to build that client base now, if he could at all? If you based your sales position's benchmark on Joe because his statistics look good and hired people with this benchmark as your guide, you may have hired ineffective people with Joe's traits.