RECRUITING, TRAINING, AND RETAINING STAFF

Over the past few months, some of the small business leaders I lunch with at the Arvada Chamber of Commerce Tuesday Leads Luncheon Group have needed to hire new staff. That is usually a good sign for a small business when it represents growth and expansion.

For any business, adding staff is a crucial decision. But, for a small business size and scale magnify the importance of ensuring you have the right person. The small Arvada companies have taken their time to find the right fit – from four to six months!

Our group has identified “recruiting, retaining, and training staff” as a top small business priority in 2025.

Bill Martin & Associates uses a variety of models, tools, and processes to support high quality staffing in all three areas.

RECRUITING
Hire for values and train for skills!

Mission, Shared Vision, and Core Values are a company’s North Star. Success flows from the aligned behavior to these Core Principles. Aligned staff are an unstoppable force.

Successful companies share their Core Ideas with potential candidates ahead of the interview and explain they are looking for people who can move the Mission, Shared Vision, and Core Values forward with passion. The Interview Process is designed to find the most aligned person.

TRAINING
Every new staff member arrives as a novice to the company. Even if they possess the skills necessary to do the job for which they were recruited, they are new to the new, unique business context.

To generate collective competence within the company’s context takes time and attention – not allowing time for this is a critical problem in many companies. Collective competence must be learned and practiced.

The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition postulates a series of levels in skill development:

At the novice level, behavior is rule governed. The novice needs structures and rules to guide their performance. When you transfer a person to a new area of work, in that context they become a novice, and need job descriptions and guidelines to support them.

At the advanced beginner level patterns are recognized, but it is hard to know what is salient in any situation. There is a hunger for predictability and certainty, the assumption that there is one best or right way to do things, and that someone will know this. There is typically a search for books and experienced people with “the answers”.

At the competent level, which commonly takes two to three years of relevant experience to reach, performance is efficient, organized, analytical and planful. There are conscious goals and plans, and personal emotional responsibility for the outcomes of work.

Proficiency involves learning to trust your great store of knowledge and intuition. To make the transition from competent to proficient involves moving beyond analysis. This is extremely difficult for some people who have an unshakeable faith in analysis. Proficiency involves driving behavior off the context, seeing things as wholes, and focusing on synthesis. When you are proficient at something, you see the “big picture”.

Expert performance is highly intuitive and characterized by doing the right thing at the right time. There is a great capacity for handling the unexpected. Expert knowledge is highly nuanced and context specific. The contextual rules of experts are not those needed by novices; indeed, they will confuse novices.

The Dreyfus Model is helpful for understanding the level of development of a person in each work/skill context, for identifying training needs, and for targeting training more closely to the stage of development of the participant. The needs we each have as novices entering any field are commonly ignored.

Bill Martin & Associates supports organizations to build Skills and Attitudes Matrixes (SAMs) based on the Dreyfus Model as part of the staff training process.

RETAINING
Orientation to company culture is essential to retaining staff. Building and caring for culture is a primary leadership function. Cultural activities are designed to model, teach, and reinforce the company Mission, Vision and Core Values to staff. A company’s culture will determine whether staff will stay or leave.

Company culture focuses on knowing staff personal stories. Meet with staff to find out about their life signature path. Listen with understanding to the life story that unfolds. Paying this personal attention has benefits in the workplace. Staff feel included, respected, and would give back with their work. More than that, when staff know you support their personal visions, they will always be aligned with the company Mission, Vision, and Core Values.

They will stay!

May the New Year be marked by great success in all that you do.

Fondly,
Bill