Merita Consulting

Skills First

In the ever-evolving landscape of business, one truth remains constant: a company is only as strong as its workforce. This is where skills-first hiring and promoting come to the forefront, offering a means to fill positions and a catalyst for driving your company’s growth. When you strategically hire for skills, you open doors to enhanced innovation, heightened productivity, and an overall surge in business success.

Skill Definitions

Determining the skills for each role is a critical first step in building an adaptive workforce. These definitions are the foundation for your job descriptions, job postings, career pathways, and workforce development programs, all of which provide the platform for implementing a skills-first hiring and promotion program.



Skills Assessments

Skills assessments are crucial to the skills-based hiring process. They are the litmus test that helps employers determine if a candidate’s abilities align with the role’s requirements. Yet evaluating technical skills alone is not enough.

You must embrace a holistic approach to skills assessments to find the perfect fit for your team.


Internal Meetings – Don’t hate them, hate the way they are practiced

Posted on by Dwayne Nesmith
Image courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Image courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Communication and cooperation go hand in hand in keeping the various parts of a fast moving organization ticking along in the same direction. Face to face meetings, conference calls, and video meetings all help do this, but when was the last time someone said they really wanted to be in more meetings? The looks people give when asked to join a meeting often reminds me of my sons’ old cub scout pack when the leader would mention announcements. The kids would scream/sing in unison, “ANNOUNCEMENTS! ANNOUNCEMENTS! A terrible way to end the day! A terrible way to die!” When someone mentions a new meeting, I catch myself looking around to see if anyone is going to scream “MEETINGS! MEETINGS! A terrible way…” Well, you get the picture.

So why do we dislike something that helps people and groups communicate something that is terribly (pardon the pun) important to our businesses. I think it is because too many internal meetings are not managed properly. Chuck Todd, the new host of NBC’s Meet the Press, regularly tells people who say they hate politics, “No, you don’t. What you hate is politicians who don’t know how to practice it”. So, in this vain, I’m going with, “It’s not internal meetings people hate. What you hate is internal meeting organization that is poorly practiced.”

And with that in mind, let’s talk about what we can do to improve this problem. In a multi-part series, I’ll discuss a series of internal meetings that companies around the world use on a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis to keep each of their companies moving in lockstep. These companies have adopted the Rockefeller Habits as described by Verne Harnish in the 2002 book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, and automated by Rhythm Systems in a product called Rhythm.

After outlining the overall communication’s plan, we’ll look at each of these meetings in detail from the objectives, the participants, the agenda, and preparation required to make each meeting worth more than the cumulative value of the participants’ time. And at the end of the day when we complain about a meeting, isn’t what we really are saying is “Man, I wish I could have spent this time doing something valuable.”

Series:
Part 1: Internal Meetings – Don’t hate them, hate the way they are practiced
Part 2: Rockefeller Habits – Communications and meetings
Part 3: Rockefeller Habits – Quarterly Theme
Part 4: Rockefeller Habits – Regular Meeting Rhythm