Chris Carmouche is an operating partner and president at HireBetter, a new kind of recruiting firm that offers permanent search, interim solutions and advisory services. He’s uncovered a way to make internal business reviews mean something more at his company — and make an impact on performance, specifically helping take the company from $3.8 mm to $7 mm in revenue in just one year. In this guest blog post, he shares his tactics that have turned business reviews into an art of caring, transparency, accountability and real results.
When I arrived at HireBetter, I quickly noticed there were some people in the wrong seats, and as such the company as a whole wasn’t achieving what it was capable of.
The culture here has always been that of competitiveness with a dash of accountability and a familial flavor. Some days I have to open my arms for a hug and other days I must point toward the invisible time-out chair.
I took the opportunity at our internal business reviews to get to know people. The business reviews broke out into weekly stints with the sales team, the marketing team and one-on-one top-level executives; every other week one-on-one with other employees; and a quarterly off-site meeting where we bring in leaders from around the world as we realign to our core goals and values.
While metrics are crucial, I make the meetings about each person and building relationships.
If you and I ever sit down at a meeting together, you’ll likely be asked, “How are you doing?” And I’m not asking about how are you doing on the job. I honestly want to know how you are doing as a person, inside and outside of the office.
There are meetings where we never get to the metrics. I value the individuals I work with and care about their lives outside of their jobs. I want them to be successful in all aspects of their life.
When meetings become about people, new metrics and a different kind of data become relevant: a person’s strengths, weaknesses, goals and skills.
I will use the information I glean from meeting with people and openly and transparently rank them on what they are doing well and where they could do better.
If one of my employees needs a challenge, I will uncover a piece of the business that isn’t working and provide them the opportunity to fix it—on a crunched deadline. When you push someone, they will either fold or stand up to the challenge and prove their problem-solving skills and come out even stronger on the other side.
More than building relationships with employees, internal meetings allow for tough discussions and real growth
As a leader, I’m open and transparent — and willing to have hard conversations to help people reach their potential and meet their personal and professional goals.
I want people to find their right role, their right fit, even if that means it isn’t with HireBetter. By getting to the core of each individual at this company, I have since shifted people around to their ideal roles and we’ve gone from $3.8 to $7 million revenue. That is reason alone not to blow off business reviews as not worthwhile.
