Podcast Ep 100 | Topgrading: Hire and Keep the Best Talent

Do you know how to source, spot, hire and keep the best tal­ent for your organization?

Top­grad­ing is a hir­ing method­ol­o­gy from Brad Smart which is designed to pro­vide you with a 90% suc­cess rate when hir­ing and pro­mot­ing peo­ple on your team.

In this week’s pod­cast, Brad Giles and Kevin Lawrence are cel­e­brat­ing the 100^th Episode of the Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast and dis­cussing Top­grad­ing. Get close to hav­ing 90% A‑players in your com­pa­ny by con­sis­tent­ly by select­ing the top 10% of the avail­able can­di­dates at the pay offered for the role.

Brad and Kevin dis­cuss the rigour and dis­ci­pline of this proven hir­ing process, that makes all the dif­fer­ence and con­sis­tent­ly pro­duces great results.

EPISODE TRAN­SCRIPT

Please note that this episode was tran­scribed using an AI appli­ca­tion and may not be 100% gram­mat­i­cal­ly cor­rect – but it will still allow you to scan the episode for key content.

Brad Giles 00:13

Hel­lo, and wel­come to the Growth Whis­per­ers where every­thing that we talk about is build­ing endur­ing great com­pa­nies, and every­thing that you need to do that. I’m Brad Giles. And today, as always, I’m joined by my co host, Kevin Lawrence. Hel­lo, Kevin on this aus­pi­cious occa­sion. How are you today?

Kevin Lawrence 00:34

Yes, hap­py 100^th episode, Brad, it’s excit­ing that, you know, an idea that we had at the begin­ning stages that pan­dem­ic, and we’ve done it 100 times in a row con­sis­tent­ly. Nev­er had a week with­out an episode, 100 weeks in a row? That’s pret­ty darn impressive.

Brad Giles 00:53

It is. It’s 100 weeks, where every week we’ve spo­ken about a lot of inter­est­ing things. And what a jour­ney, we’ve cov­ered off so many sub­jects. And let’s be fair, it’s like a mini MBA.

Kevin Lawrence 01:15

If you lis­ten to all of these episodes, with all the stuff that we’ve spo­ken about, it might be more prac­ti­cal than an MBA, because it’s all from hands on small and medi­um enter­pris­es, you know, in the trench­es. Yeah, yeah, there’s so much val­ue. Cer­tain­ly, that even I’ve obtained from these con­ver­sa­tions, just learn­ing. You’re talk­ing to me? Yeah. You know, we get a lot of great val­ue back and forth, shar­ing and learn­ing from each oth­er. It’s, it’s awesome.

Brad Giles 01:49

Yeah. And that’s where it kind of came from the idea orig­i­nal­ly, because we would go to these con­fer­ence con­fer­ences in the US, and there’d be these amaz­ing con­ver­sa­tions. And real­ly, we start­ed think­ing, Well, what about if we were able to have these in the pub­lic domain, these sto­ries that we keep hear­ing about these grow­ing busi­ness­es, it’d be fantastic.

Kevin Lawrence 02:11

Well, and it has been, so let’s dig into our words of the day, and I’m going to start with mine. It’s relent­less exe­cu­tion, you know, just focus­ing and get­ting the work done. And we’re get­ting to 100 episodes. I mean, we’re find­ing times that ear­ly in the morn­ing, late at night, to get it done. And, you know, it’s the relent­less exe­cu­tion is those that show up and get the work done, you gen­er­al­ly get reward­ed and get a lot of progress. And it’s, you know, it’s not rock­et sci­ence, but it’s that relent­less exe­cu­tion that that real­ly does cre­ate the results. Whether it’s in work or life or pod­cast, it does­n’t mat­ter. I love it. Yeah, what’s your word of day?

Brad Giles 03:03

Mine is a book from Chip and Dan Heath authors you may be aware of, that I’m read­ing at the moment. It’s the pow­er of moments. And it says that there are these moments in our lives that we all remem­ber — a wed­ding, or a car acci­dent, or an event with our kids or some­thing like that, that we all remem­ber. But why can’t we make them curat­ed in our lives or in our busi­ness­es, rather than just acci­den­tal? So using the pow­er of moments in busi­ness­es to cre­ate engage­ment. Now, I don’t know how, but I’m look­ing for­ward to how you stitch these two togeth­er, as always. Maybe I final­ly got you after 100 episodes.

Kevin Lawrence 03:43

I think it might — I don’t know how to put those togeth­er. Hope­ful­ly, pow­er of moments, relent­less exe­cu­tion, relent­less exe­cu­tion of amaz­ing moments. I could go with amaz­ing moments, but well how about we move on? Let’s get into the top­ic today. So today, we’re talk­ing about the pow­er of Top­grad­ing. And now if I had $1, for every time I said the word Top­grad­ing, it’d be incred­i­ble because it’s, you know, it is an incred­i­bly, fair­ly sim­ple but the very, it requires a lot of relent­less exe­cu­tion. It’s chal­leng­ing to get the val­ue out of it for most peo­ple, but it’s a very dis­ci­plined process for eval­u­at­ing human beings. And almost all of our clients use it because it’s the best tool we have found to notably strength­en a team and exec­u­tive team lead­er­ship team man­age­ment team. And it’s the best tool that we have found to get a high­er hit rate north of a 75% up to 95% hit rate on hir­ing and pro­mo­tions to make sure that we get play­ers in the seats. And if you lis­ten to our last Episode Episode 99 about bril­liant jerks. It’s basi­cal­ly how do we avoid bril­liant jerks? Or avoid, you know, unin­tel­li­gent jerks? Who would be the low­er per­form­ing version?

Brad Giles 05:18

And what do we do about in the last episode? Absolute­ly, yeah. And so, top grad­ing is, I guess it was about 15 or 16 years ago, I first came across the idea of Top­grad­ing the con­cept. And why it’s so impor­tant, cer­tain­ly, to me as a con­cept is that you’ve got to get the right peo­ple, all employ­ees are not equal in the eyes of your com­pa­ny. Now, let’s not get into dis­crim­i­na­tion or any­thing. But in terms of your val­ues, in terms of your val­ue chain, your val­ue propo­si­tion and who you are as a leader, and what you val­ue. All peo­ple can’t be right for that they can’t all be right in that sce­nario. And there­fore, you know, the best peo­ple in the mar­ket, there is a bit of a war for the top people.

Kevin Lawrence 06:17

If you think about all the dif­fer­ent forms of trans­porta­tion there are. And even if you zoom in on cars, and you look at all the dif­fer­ent types of cars there are, and then zoom in on all the dif­fer­ent col­ors of the types of cars, there’s so many vari­ables, but yet every­one seems to find a car they like or in some cas­es, love. Um, and it’s the same with peo­ple in jobs, every­one is a high­ly desir­able employ­ee some­where, it just may not be your com­pa­ny. And whether it’s about the type of job and our abil­i­ty to per­form, or the cul­ture and how they fit. We’re just try­ing to put the right peo­ple into the right seats. That’s all that it is. And it’s hard. It’s real­ly hard, espe­cial­ly if you aren’t high­ly skilled with very pre­cise tools to be able to make those decisions.

Brad Giles 07:09

Yeah, a few episodes ago, we spoke about the bar­ri­ers to growth, what are the main bar­ri­ers to grow, then one of those was hav­ing lead­ers who can pre­dict and del­e­gate at the right lev­els. And, you know, those peo­ple are hard to come by, you can’t find those peo­ple with every job appli­cant that comes your way. So you need to have an effec­tive fil­ter­ing mech­a­nism to get to let peo­ple in, and to be able to grow your firm as you do grow. So this is, this is a great tool to be able to make sure that you’ve got a team of a play­ers. And that syncs a mas­sive dif­fer­ence to your firm.

Kevin Lawrence 07:56

So if you want maybe you just touch on a bit of the his­to­ry on it.

Brad Giles 08:02

Love to. Top­grad­ing. The first thing that peo­ple say when they say the book is it’s a real­ly thick book, com­pared to the aver­age busi­ness book. And that tends to turn peo­ple off. But yes, why is it? Why is it our go-to and why does it mat­ter? So orig­i­nal­ly, we’ve got to go back to Gen­er­al Elec­tric, and a guy called Jack Welch, who was the CEO, they’re arguably one of the most suc­cess­ful CEOs of all time. And so Jack Welch had a real­ly sim­ple strat­e­gy, which was we’re going to be num­ber one, or num­ber two, in every mar­ket that we oper­ate, or we’ll sell that busi­ness unit or shut it down. And what he real­ized is that the only way you can be num­ber one or two, num­ber two, the only way you can real­ly out­per­form is if you’ve got great peo­ple in and lead­ing those busi­ness­es. And when he real­ized that he need­ed to find some­one who could build a sys­tem through­out the whole of Gen­er­al Elec­tric that they could apply to be con­fi­dent that they would get, let’s say, some­one who’s in the top 10% of avail­able can­di­dates at the pay that they were offer­ing. And that guy that he turned to was a guy called Brad Smart. And Brad Smart suc­cess­ful­ly did that Gen­er­al Elec­tric cre­at­ing amaz­ing results. And then he wrote a book called Top­grad­ing about that expe­ri­ence. So that’s kind of the back­ground to Top­grad­ing and where it comes from. It’s got a very suc­cess­ful pedi­gree. And that’s kind of what appealed cer­tain­ly me to ini­tial­ly or what made me inter­est­ed in it, and then to see it con­sis­tent­ly work as well.

Kevin Lawrence 09:50

For sure, and for me, I had heard about it but then when I was doing the research for the book called Scal­ing up. Of the 50 CEOs I inter­viewed around the world, eight specif­i­cal­ly called out Top­grad­ing as the game-chang­er for their busi­ness. More even than the scal­ing up tools that we’re talk­ing about it was the core. Because it basi­cal­ly, they end­ed up with a team that was three times as strong as they start­ed with, and every­thing became a heck of a lot eas­i­er. So I spent a lot of time learn­ing and mas­ter tech­nol­o­gy. In our firm, we have a num­ber of dif­fer­ent peo­ple who helped to imple­ment it in com­pa­nies. Most com­pa­nies, when you look at A‑players in their com­pa­nies are in at about the 25 to 30%. And, you know, we’ve had many that crossed into 50 and 60, even a hand­ful that got over 90% A‑players now. Some­times I think maybe I should­n’t even talk about it pub­licly and just save it for my clients. Seri­ous­ly, I’ve had that inter­nal con­flict. And I’m a per­son who loves to share, but I’m like, our clients use it. And and and most peo­ple do not have the dis­ci­pline to do it. Most peo­ple end up with their fast and loose hir­ing process­es. And they’ll stick around their 25 to 30% of the play­ers, or they will have incred­i­ble turnover because they can’t get the right peo­ple, right. So let’s talk about the idea. The idea is, is to get close to that 90% A‑player’s by con­sis­tent­ly just pick­ing the top 10% of the avail­able can­di­dates now. It’s the top 10% avail­able can­di­dates at the pay that you’re offer­ing for the role. And if you’re hir­ing an account­ing role, that’s pay­ing $65,000 a year, and there’s some­one avail­able at 120. That’s not what we’re talk­ing about, it’s about the top per­son at the pace that you’re offer­ing in the mar­ket. So you’re, you’re basi­cal­ly learn­ing to skim your ver­sion of the cream off the top of the tal­ent pool.

Brad Giles 12:14

And that’s so impor­tant because that’s when many lead­er­ship team mem­bers and CEOs get hung up is is they think that Top­grad­ing is about get­ting the top 10% of avail­able can­di­dates, they imme­di­ate­ly go to, we can’t afford to pay the same amount as who­ev­er they see as being an expen­sive can­di­date in their indus­try. But it’s about the pay that you provide.

Kevin Lawrence 12:40

Right. So for exam­ple, we just hired inter­nal­ly in our firm, anoth­er admin per­son to sup­port our advi­sors. And we went through two rounds, In the first round, we did­n’t find some­one that we felt was good enough, and we just hired some­one last week, which is real­ly excit­ing. But we use the full method­ol­o­gy. So at that role at the pay that we’re offer­ing, we’re just look­ing for the best tal­ent we can get. And being pick­i­er about it and more sci­en­tif­ic in the eval­u­a­tion. So it’s, it’s a very basic lev­el. So at the base lev­el, the base tool, some­thing called the tal­ent review, which we’ve devel­oped and enhanced to be even more robust. But when you go through all of your top tal­ents, your most impor­tant roles in your com­pa­ny, every quar­ter, you do a mini eval­u­a­tion. And you do work think­ing about how can we help them thrive more now? If they’re in a how do we help them sus­tain that lev­el of per­for­mance? If they’re a B, how do they become an A? If there’s some­one with poten­tial? How do we help them get pro­mot­ed to their next role? Or how do we devel­op their suc­ces­sor? And if they’re not meet­ing the mark, either if they don’t fit the cul­ture? Or they’re not hit­ting their per­for­mance? How do we help them to get there? And if we’ve done every­thing we can, and it’s the end of the road? How do we cre­ate a grace­ful exit quick­ly. But this dis­ci­pline of every 90 days, review­ing your tal­ent mak­ing the next batch of choic­es for the amaz­ing ones, and the ones that need help, is the core dis­ci­pline, because peo­ple talk about their peo­ple being their great­est asset. But they don’t ever do a port­fo­lio review. Or if they do, it’s once a year and it’s weak. This is a key activ­i­ty that the CEO and exec­u­tive are involved in. And you know, if it’s a com­pa­ny, if we are a com­pa­ny of, you know, 300 peo­ple, the CEO and exec­u­tive are look­ing at the top 30 or 50, every 90 days it’s part of their great­est val­ue add is mak­ing sure the right things are hap­pen­ing with those key people.

Brad Giles 14:46

And it can be con­fronting first time you do it. When you look at it. You go whoa, we’ve got 30% C play­ers. We’ve got 30% of peo­ple who aren’t aligned with our val­ues and they’re not pro­duc­tive in the role. And even worse, they’ve been hang­ing around for a few years, it can be real­ly con­fronting, because the next ques­tion becomes, so what are you going to do about it? And then when you rinse and repeat that over a quar­ter, sev­er­al quar­ters, sev­er­al years, you get, you can get to the point where if you’ve tak­en action on it, if you’ve hired cor­rect­ly, where you’ve got a high per­cent­age of play­ers in your team.

Kevin Lawrence 15:26

And you’re bru­tal­ly build­ing dis­ci­pline into the orga­ni­za­tion, because that’s not a sur­prise that that per­son is a low per­former. Yeah. And their man­ag­er has been putting up with low per­for­mance. So a man­ager’s job is either help peo­ple to grow and be effec­tive in their role, look for a dif­fer­ent role that can be effec­tive in or move them out. But it’s so in many ways, it’s a man­age­ment dis­ci­pline to pay atten­tion to an act on a thing. So that’s the base lev­el. The next lev­el is score­cards, yes. A very detailed, almost math­e­mat­i­cal job descrip­tion. And it’s not all this bla bla bla word stuff that’s typ­i­cal. How do you mea­sure some­one against words, it’s hard, it comes up with clear out­comes or goals that that role needs to achieve, obvi­ous­ly, look­ing at them through the lens of core val­ues, and then look­ing at them on 50 dif­fer­ent com­pe­ten­cies. And, and some jobs, some of those com­pe­ten­cies are more impor­tant than oth­ers, but decid­ing what’s the min­i­mum lev­el of skill they need on these dif­fer­ent com­pe­ten­cies to be suc­cess­ful in the role. And that this, this, this takes a few hours for each role to fig­ure this out, right. But you’re so clear on what they need to pro­duce, how they need to fit the cul­ture, and then the com­pe­ten­cies they need to have. So then when you’re assess­ing peo­ple, you’re assess­ing against this real­ly detailed score­card ver­sus, you know, sev­en para­graphs of words. And it’s like, if we’re gonna go and build the Gold­en Gate Bridge, you could take the sketch that a kid did with their cray­on, and then send the crew to build it, they’re gonna fail. Yeah, or we get an engi­neer and archi­tect to do the draw­ing an engi­neer to do the draw­ings, the archi­tec­ture, draw­ings, that engi­neer to make sure every­thing is sound, and then give it to the crew to build. All we’re doing is get­ting engi­neered draw­ings for a job instead of a child’s cray­on scratch. And then let­ting the hir­ing peo­ple go assess ver­sus the engi­neer’s draw­ings, which are just much, much more clear and specific.

Brad Giles 17:39

Once you’ve hired against a job score­card, you are so clear that it does appear math­e­mat­i­cal. And then you go back and you look at oth­er firms, job descrip­tions, or oth­er firms, hir­ing adverts, and it does look like a child’s cray­on sketch it real­ly, real­ly because it is yeah, you just go what are all the words that are mum­bo jum­bo sort of mashed togeth­er, what do they miss, you copy and paste some­thing of some­thing else that you thought sound­ed cute. And it’s there’s no real tan­gi­ble, mea­sur­ing stick.

Kevin Lawrence 18:18

So I’ll give you an exam­ple. We hired a head of sales for an auto­mo­tive group that we do a bunch of work with. Now, it’s prob­a­bly eight years ago, the guy we hired, I loved him as a human being he was awe­some. And again, this is, you know, ear­ly days and work­ing with this client. The chal­lenge, auto­mo­tive is an hourly based sale. It’s very, very fast, very, very tac­ti­cal, but by the sales are made about a 60 minute, some­times 24-hour sales process. The guy that we hired, was that, you know, had run sales, and then was the the the lean improve­ment leader for a com­pa­ny that sold some­thing that was 10 times the price and had an 18-month sales cycle. Yeah, like all sales lead­ers are not cre­at­ed equal­ly. And some­one that is has the skills to do an 18 month high tick­et sales cycle busi­ness to busi­ness, ver­sus a busi­ness to con­sumer trans­ac­tion that takes 60 to 90 maybe, you know, 24 hours, he would fail before he was hired. He failed before he entered the build­ing because he just did­n’t do it. Although he was­n’t dri­ven drove sales and process improve­ment. It was not the same type of envi­ron­ment. He was not set up to win. And it’s like tak­ing a pro­fes­sion­al golfer and then throw­ing them into the nation­al Nation­al Bas­ket­ball Asso­ci­a­tion to play bas­ket­ball for the NBA. It’s like it’s a bad choice. But unless you have real­ly real­ly clear descrip­tions of what the role is As peo­ple make these deci­sions all the time, they for­get that there’s, you know, they for­get about, well, you know, golfers on aver­age aren’t sev­en feet tall and being sev­en feet tall is kind of impor­tant in the NBA, for exam­ple, and they get can­di­date lust. Now, I don’t say, you know, in a sex­u­al way, they get can­di­date lost, mean­ing, all they do is can­di­date is sim­ply going to solve all of my prob­lems. And they come from Apple, and they have the this, they have all right cre­den­tials, the right brands and the right personality.

Brad Giles 20:35

And that’s human nature to get that can­di­date last. And so we’ve got to have some kind of empir­i­cal mea­sur­ing tool stick sys­tem that can avoid that. And, you know, this is many for many entre­pre­neurs. They’ve start­ed based on an indus­try or a trade, and they’ve grown and grown. And HR is kind of an add on. And maybe when they had a job before, it was an add on that some­one else per­haps did or helped with or there was an exist­ing sys­tem. And so they just kind of build it and tack things on as they go along, not know­ing that mas­sive cost that bad hir­ing makes.

Kevin Lawrence 21:18

Absolute­ly. And the thing is, is that espe­cial­ly at a lead­er­ship lev­el, you don’t get there unless you’re per­sua­sive, and a good sto­ry­teller. They’re hard peo­ple to hire because they can spin a sto­ry. And I remem­ber, I came in late stage to a hir­ing process for one of my clients hir­ing a head of oper­a­tions. And I inter­viewed this gen­tle­man, who had been through five inter­views of a cou­ple hours each already. I had an hour, an hour and a half. And so I inter­viewed him, and they were going to hire him. And I tell you what, this guy was charm­ing. He had a slick pre­sen­ta­tion. He’d be a won­der­ful guy to go have a beer with right. As I dug in and start­ed using the top grad­ing inter­view, which we’ll talk about next, this inter­view process. He was an arro­gant, lying jerk. He was a bad man, he start­ed dis­clos­ing stuff at some point where it 75 min­utes into the inter­view. And I just, I just start­ed chat­ting about oth­er stuff, light­en­ing it up, because he balked. Because what he dis­closed in 75 min­utes was he knew he was­n’t get­ting the job. And again, the CEO and exec went from good to hire him that day to well, we need to change our mind. Yeah, because he was charm­ing his way through the inter­views, but when you dug deep on how he did his work, yeah, bad dude. So let’s go into the next part, which is then the assess­ment process. So there’s, so once you’ve got the score­card and the engi­neers draw­ing of the job, and you know, the type, you know, there’s prob­a­bly 25 dif­fer­ent sales roles out there and sales­man, they’re very dif­fer­ent depend­ing all of them. So you got your spe­cif­ic one. You know, there’s a screen­ing inter­view, half hour, 45 min­utes to get to real­ly sense of the can­di­dates worth the time and it’s enough of a fit. There’s some­thing called the, the, the tan­dem exec­u­tive inter­view, call it but it’s, you know, three, four or five hours, depend­ing on the posi­tion to inter­view­ers going back and start­ing from high school, and break­ing down in detail their entire career up until today, and with a lot of depth. It’s why we get so much detail and under­stand­ing. Because when you ask the same, it’s only a few sim­ple ques­tions. But you ask it every job from high school and get deep exam­ples, the pat­terns emerge like crazy. Yeah, no best exam­ple, sor­ry, the best indi­ca­tion of how a per­son will be in your role is how they were in oth­er roles. And those absolute­ly no edge. And the leop­ard does­n’t change its spots very much at all. You can take a look at some­one at 15 years into their career, and you can prob­a­bly pre­dict the rest of their career. It’s you know, that peo­ple might not like that I say that, but it’s, it’s true more often than not, per­haps it is. And then after you do that, even, you know, you’re going to notice a lot of stuff, but even you might have liked the can­di­date you might emo­tion­al­ly con­nect­ed but they still might not be good for the job. You got to take a cou­ple of days and cool down and write a report in a struc­ture that is rec­om­mend­ed. And then you go and talk to the ref­er­ences and the key is you go and talk to three, four or five of their past man­agers, not the list you give you. You go and you talk to past man­agers and ask very spe­cif­ic ques­tions, and I tell you what I’ve done. I get called fair­ly often for some ref­er­ence checks. It’s laugh­able the ques­tions peo­ple ask me. Like, it’s not adding any val­ue to the process. But we have a very spe­cif­ic process view. So you go from the base of the tal­ent reviews costs, improve your tal­ent, when there’s a new role — engi­neer the job descrip­tion. And then you go through this process of deeply assess­ing peo­ple and then mak­ing a deci­sion with boat­loads of data, not feel­ings. You can have your gut instinct on top of it. But it’s got to come back and say some­thing that does­n’t feel right. Which com­pe­ten­cy you’re con­cerned about, which core val­ue you con­cerned about? How do you know that’s true? Well, we don’t Okay, that’s a feel­ing great. How do we go and ver­i­fy that feel­ing? Because feel­ings can be help­ful? Maybe we ver­i­fy that through the ref­er­ence check, or we have a fur­ther inter­view, but it’s a very dis­ci­plined method­ol­o­gy, and it pro­duces out­stand­ing results.

Brad Giles 26:14

So one of the com­mon crit­i­cisms of Top­grad­ing would be that it’s too com­plex or too com­pli­cat­ed for my business.

Kevin Lawrence 26:26

Bike is com­pli­cat­ed, too, until you fig­ure it out.

Brad Giles 26:30

What would be if some­one said that to you, what would be your reac­tion? If they said, I’ve heard about that, but it’s too com­pli­cat­ed? We need some­thing that’s real­ly simple.

Kevin Lawrence 26:43

Yeah, it is. It just has great dis­ci­pline. So usu­al­ly, when we get involved in help­ing peo­ple to imple­ment it, it takes quite a while to build the dis­ci­pline into the orga­ni­za­tion. Because most peo­ple don’t have a lot of dis­ci­pline. Peo­ple aren’t dis­ci­plined by nature, it’s not com­pli­cat­ed. It’s just hard­er than how peo­ple nor­mal­ly do it. That’s all. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s, do you real­ly want the results, you know, that’s the thing, that’s, that’s why the CEO and exec­u­tive need to be bought into it, HR can­not dri­ve it, it won’t work. Yeah, CEO and exec­u­tive need to be bought in that we’re going to invest, what­ev­er it takes, you know, 100, to a cou­ple 100 grand over a cou­ple of years on the train­ing, the sup­port the expert, exter­nal inter­view­ers to work with our team until they become experts, tweak­ing our sys­tems, audit­ing our sys­tems, there’s, you’re invest­ing in this for what it does over the next decade, you’re build­ing an A, it’s almost like installing a more robust soft­ware sys­tem. It’s a it’s a com­mit­ment. And what I say to peo­ple, if you’re not com­mit­ted to invest into this and build on it over a peri­od of a cou­ple of years, don’t do it. Because you won’t get the results like anything.

Brad Giles 28:00

But the results, and what it can do for a busi­ness is just out­stand­ing and remark­able. I mean, let’s go back to Jim Collins, right? You got to get the right peo­ple, peo­ple on the bus doing the right things in the right way. And it’s at the very, that’s the first thing, and that’s what we’re talk­ing about.

Kevin Lawrence 28:27

So I’ll say one thing, but it’s actu­al­ly not com­pli­cat­ed. It’s very sim­ple. It’s just incred­i­bly rig­or­ous and dis­ci­pline. It is so acute, basic. It’s not com­pli­cat­ed. Yeah, I use the wrong word there. But it, there’s a lot to it is what I real­ly meant to say. There’s a lot for No, but that’s the crit­i­cism is peo­ple. That’s because they don’t under­stand it. Peo­ple are already doing a lot of stuff in their hir­ing process. This is just all of these steps are already hap­pen­ing. They make a job descrip­tion. It’s just fluffy and weak. They do screen­ing inter­views, they just missed the mark. They do prop­er inter­views, and they prob­a­bly spend more time with a can­di­date than we would. Yeah. So they are doing all of these steps. They’re just not doing them with incred­i­ble rigour and discipline.

Brad Giles 29:22

That’s the key. It’s the rigour and dis­ci­pline, rigour and dis­ci­pline that makes the dif­fer­ence and pro­duces the results. And that’s real­ly is the right response to that type of crit­i­cism or, or ques­tion. Awesome.

Kevin Lawrence 29:36

So that that is Top­grad­ing, you will not find a big­ger fan of it than myself. And I don’t stop talk­ing about my clients till they do it. It’s not even an option. And if they don’t want to use it, I don’t want to work with them. Because then I have to lis­ten to all the idi­ot­ic peo­ple deci­sions. So we know that it’s that it’s it is it’s true, I mean, and then again, exec­u­tive peo­ple deci­sions. Those are like mil­lion bucks min­i­mum screw up when you get it wrong. Basi­cal­ly it’s about stack­ing a deck with the best tal­ent based thing as a tal­ent review. So you’re build a cul­ture and a dis­ci­pline of con­stant­ly enhanc­ing your tal­ent. And then when you go to hire some­one, make sure they’re a great fit for that job through a score­card and a prop­er eval­u­a­tion process. And when you do a pro­mo­tion, the same thing. And ide­al­ly, you con­tin­ue build­ing and mov­ing towards 90%. A‑player’s and maybe you don’t want that strong of a team. That’s a seri­ous com­mit­ment. We put most of our clients in that direc­tion, but some peo­ple be hap­py at 60%. You’re already run­ning 30, and you get 60%. A‑player’s busi­ness is twice as strong.

Brad Giles 30:42

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It is a fan­tas­tic sys­tem. I’m a mas­sive advo­cate for it. Love it. I see it the best hir­ing sys­tem and process and tool that you can use for you know, upgrad­ing your talent.

Kevin Lawrence 31:03

Yes, and decreas­ing your own stress because you’re with bet­ter peo­ple. So thanks for lis­ten­ing. That has been the Toprad­ing dis­cus­sion episode 100. Brad, we did it. That’s all good. It’d be great if we were able to be in per­son and cel­e­brate we will some­time soon I hope. It’s been a Growth Whis­per­ers pod­cast with Brad and I’m Kevin. For the video Vision ver­sion go to youtube​.com and search the growth whis­per­ers and to reach Brad and his awe­some newslet­ter evo­lu­tion part​ners​.com​.au and for Kevin and his firm and their awe­some newslet­ter and ideas. Lawrence and co​.com Hope you have an awe­some week.