November 2026

If you want better employees, stop recruiting like everyone else. Start competing for talent the way your sales team competes for customers.

You can’t hire great employees if they never apply. Yet employers spend enormous amounts of time trying to identify the best candidates while overlooking a more basic problem. They don’t have enough good candidates to choose from.

When positions need to be filled, customers are waiting, and employees are stretched thin, hiring standards start to slip. Instead of choosing the best applicant, employers settle for the best of whoever is left. Their applicant pool has become an applicant puddle, and it’s often full of mud.

But what if your hiring problem isn’t a shortage of good people? What if those people simply don’t have a compelling reason to apply to your company?

Think about the effort your sales and marketing teams put into attracting customers. They identify target markets, study their needs, develop compelling offers, and create messages designed to win their business. They don’t expect their best potential customers to find them by accident.

Now think about how your company recruits employees. Do you approach recruiting with that same level of strategy, or do you post another generic help-wanted ad and hope for the best?

Your HR department should be your company’s second sales force. The same strategies that help you win valuable customers can help you attract, hire, and retain valuable employees.

Great Employees Are Like Customers You Haven’t Won Yet

Your sales team doesn’t assume that good customers will find your company simply because you have something worth selling. They work to get noticed, learn what potential customers want, understand their problems, and explain how your company can make their lives better.

They also recognize that different customers buy for different reasons. A customer who values convenience responds to a different message than one who values price. Someone interested in long-term reliability may care little about the features that attract a buyer looking for the latest technology. Good salespeople understand those differences and adjust their approach accordingly.

Now consider what happens when companies recruit. They write a job description, list the qualifications, mention competitive pay and benefits, and invite people to apply. Then they wonder why they aren’t attracting more or better candidates.

The problem is that the message is written almost entirely from the employer’s point of view. It tells applicants what the company needs but offers little insight into what the applicant stands to gain.

Imagine a salesperson approaching a prospect and spending the entire conversation explaining what the salesperson needs from the customer. That salesperson probably wouldn’t last long. Yet that’s remarkably close to how many companies approach recruiting. If you want talented people to become interested in your company, you have to give them reasons that matter to them, not just reasons that matter to you.

A Four-Step Strategy for Attracting Better Applicants

Years ago, Allen Minster, my co-author on Sales Utopia, introduced me to a practical approach to sales and marketing built around four simple steps. I’ve found that the same approach can be remarkably useful for recruiting employees.

The process starts by identifying specific groups of people you want to attract. Next, you identify the problems those people face, determine which problems your company can help solve, and translate those solutions into benefits people will value.

Here’s how to put the four steps to work.

1. Identify the people you want to attract.

Start by identifying specific groups of people who could become valuable employees. Depending on your business, those groups might include college students, interns, recent graduates, retirees, military veterans, parents returning to the workforce, or people looking for a career change.

Don’t lump them all together. A retiree looking for part-time work has different priorities than a college student trying to gain experience. A parent returning to work after raising children may have concerns that wouldn’t occur to a recent graduate.

They could all become excellent employees, but they’re not all looking for the same things. Your recruiting messages shouldn’t treat them as though they are.

2. Identify the problems they face.

Once you’ve selected a target group, think about the obstacles and frustrations those people face when looking for work. The more you understand their circumstances, the easier it becomes to identify reasons they might find your company attractive.

Take college students, for example. They may have limited availability because of classes, little professional experience, and few business contacts. Some don’t have reliable transportation, much money, or a wardrobe suitable for a traditional office environment.

They may also be unsure about what kind of career they want or how to get their foot in the door. These concerns can influence whether someone applies for a job, accepts an offer, or even bothers reading your advertisement. You can’t expect your recruiting message to connect with people if you haven’t considered what’s going on in their lives.

3. Identify the solutions your company can offer.

Now look at the problems you’ve identified and ask how your company could help solve them. You may discover that several things you already provide could become powerful recruiting advantages.

For college students, perhaps your office is within walking distance of campus, eliminating the need for a car. Maybe you offer flexible schedules that accommodate classes or a casual dress code that means students won’t have to spend money on professional clothing.

You might offer paid internships, hands-on experience, mentoring, or opportunities to work alongside experienced professionals. You could give students exposure to different departments, helping them discover which types of work they enjoy and where their strengths lie.

Some of these solutions may already exist in your company. You just haven’t thought of them as reasons someone might want to work for you. Others may require changes that are relatively inexpensive compared with the cost of leaving positions unfilled or repeatedly hiring people who don’t work out.

You don’t have to solve every problem. You need to identify the ones you can address and make sure potential applicants know about them.

4. Turn those solutions into benefits people want.

Here’s where your recruiting messages can become far more persuasive. There’s a difference between describing what your company offers and explaining why someone should care. Salespeople learn to translate product features into customer benefits, and recruiters should do the same.

There’s a simple way to tell whether you’ve identified a genuine benefit. Put the words “What this means to you is…” in front of it. If the statement doesn’t make sense, you’ve probably listed a solution instead of a benefit.

For example, you might offer flexible schedules around college classes. What this means to students is that they can earn money and gain work experience without having to choose between their education and their job.

You might provide opportunities to work with experienced professionals. What this means to students is that they’ll build relationships with people who could become mentors, references, or valuable contacts when they launch their careers.

Perhaps you offer paid, hands-on experience in their chosen field. What this means to students is that they can graduate with experience that makes them stronger candidates for future positions and may help them qualify for better-paying opportunities.

You might also provide opportunities to work in different departments. What this means to students is that they can discover what they’re good at, what they enjoy doing, and which career paths might be right for them.

Even something as simple as having an office within walking distance of campus can be a meaningful benefit. What this means to students is that they won’t need a car, won’t have to spend money on transportation, and won’t waste valuable time commuting.

Notice that we haven’t mentioned health insurance, retirement plans, or other traditional employee benefits. Those may be important, but they aren’t necessarily what will catch the attention of a college student. You’re selling the opportunity to gain something the applicant wants, not simply describing a position you need to fill.

One Job. Different Applicants. Different Messages.

Imagine you’re trying to fill several part-time customer service positions. A typical advertisement might read:

Part-time customer service representatives wanted. Competitive pay, flexible hours, and a friendly work environment. Apply today.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with that advertisement, except that it sounds like thousands of others. It describes the position but gives applicants little reason to prefer your company over another employer offering similar work.

Now imagine marketing the same position to three different groups. For college students, you could emphasize flexible schedules, opportunities to develop communication skills, professional experience, and contacts that could help them get better jobs after graduation.

For retirees, you might emphasize the opportunity to stay active, meet people, use their experience, earn extra income, and enjoy meaningful work without a full-time commitment. For parents returning to the workforce, you could highlight predictable schedules, opportunities to rebuild professional skills, supportive colleagues, and a path back into the working world.

It’s the same position at the same company, but you’ve created three different reasons for people to consider it. Instead of hoping one generic message appeals to everyone, you’re giving each group a reason to pay attention.

You could take this further by placing those messages where each group is likely to see them. College career centers, campus organizations, and student publications could help you reach students. Community centers and local organizations could help you reach retirees, while parent networks and return-to-work programs could help you connect with people reentering the workforce.

Your marketing team wouldn’t rely on one message in one place to attract every potential customer. Why should your recruiting team?

Better Recruiting Gives You the Luxury of Being Selective

Attracting more applicants isn’t the ultimate goal. Attracting more qualified applicants is what gives you the freedom to make better hiring decisions.

When you’re struggling to fill positions, it’s tempting to lower your standards, overlook warning signs, or hire someone simply because they’re available. But a poor hiring decision doesn’t become a good one just because you were desperate.

The wrong employee can create performance problems, hurt morale, frustrate customers, and consume valuable management time. If that person leaves or has to be replaced, you’re right back where you started, only now you’ve lost time and money in the process.

With a larger pool of qualified applicants, you have more opportunities to identify people who possess the skills, attitudes, and personality traits needed to succeed. That’s where a well-designed selection process, often including appropriate pre-employment assessments, background checks, and drug testing, can be especially valuable.

But even the best hiring tools can’t identify an excellent candidate who never applied. You need to attract strong candidates before you can select them, and once you’ve hired them, you need to give them reasons to stay.

Stop Waiting for Better Applicants to Show Up

You wouldn’t accept a sales strategy that consisted of posting a product description and waiting for customers to call. Yet that’s remarkably similar to the recruiting strategy some companies continue to use, even while complaining that they can’t find good people.

If you’re unhappy with the quality of your applicants, don’t automatically assume better candidates aren’t available. Maybe you’re fishing in the wrong places, using the wrong bait, or being overlooked by talented people because you’ve never given them a good reason to consider your company.

Start with one position you struggle to fill. Identify two or three groups of people who could succeed in that role, list the problems each group faces, and identify the solutions your company can offer. Then turn those solutions into benefits that speak directly to each group’s needs and ambitions.

Use what you’ve learned to create targeted recruiting messages and put them where those people are likely to see them. Measure which messages attract qualified applicants, which sources produce the strongest candidates, and which employees ultimately perform well and stay. Then improve your approach based on what you learn.

You may discover that the talent you’ve been searching for was available all along. Those people just weren’t looking for you because you hadn’t given them a compelling reason to do so.

I once spent more than an hour trying to navigate a medical provider’s supposedly easy-to-use app. Seven employees couldn’t solve the problem. When the organization’s quality control department invited feedback, I called the number provided and waited another 17 minutes before anyone answered.

The person who finally picked up was polite and honest. She could document my complaint, but she couldn’t change anything. Her job was to summarize feedback for the executive team.

I wondered how many other patients had simply given up. How many abandoned the call after five minutes? How many never bothered reporting a problem because complaining required almost as much effort as getting help?

Somewhere in that organization, executives were probably reviewing customer satisfaction reports without realizing their complaint process discouraged complaints. They might have interpreted the absence of complaints as evidence that the system was working.

Dr. James Killian, author of Obsessed: Cultivating the Customer-Driven Leader, has spent more than 25 years examining the relationship between leadership behavior, employee experience, and customer outcomes. His perspective raises an uncomfortable possibility: A company can report excellent performance while employees work around broken processes and customers quietly look for alternatives.

Are Your Customer Service Metrics Rewarding the Wrong Behavior?

Consider a customer service representative evaluated primarily on average call handling time. A customer calls with a complicated problem requiring research, patience, and perhaps assistance from another department.

I’ve experienced the consequences. After waiting approximately 45 minutes to reach a representative about a complicated issue, I encountered someone who appeared more interested in ending the call than solving the problem. Eventually, they disconnected the call, sending me back into another lengthy queue.

That employee may have appeared productive on a performance report. Meanwhile, the company had wasted my time without resolving anything.

Average handling time has legitimate operational value. But when it becomes more important than resolution, employees learn to protect the metric at the customer’s expense.

Executives should examine whether problems were solved, not simply how quickly interactions ended. Otherwise, they risk rewarding employees for creating repeat calls.

Your Employees Know Which Policies Are Driving Customers Away

During a stay at an upscale Las Vegas hotel, I encountered several frustrating problems that seemed relatively easy to correct. Rather than post a negative review, I requested a conversation with someone responsible for the property.

The manager’s response surprised me. She wished I would publish a terrible review.

The executives controlling the hotel’s operating procedures worked in another city. Employees couldn’t persuade them to correct problems they experienced every day, but public complaints got their attention.

Consider what that reveals about management. An employee responsible for protecting the guest experience believed publicly damaging the hotel’s reputation was the only effective way to improve operations.

The information wasn’t missing. The process for getting it to someone with decision-making authority was broken.

Killian describes four leadership categories: customer-avoidant, customer-tolerant, customer-centric, and customer-driven. A useful way to distinguish them is to examine what happens when customer needs conflict with internal convenience.

Does management protect existing procedures, margins, and departmental boundaries? Or does customer evidence influence those decisions?

When employees need five approvals to solve a basic customer problem, helping customers becomes a personal risk. Customer avoidance becomes a rational response to management’s rules. The employee may appear uncooperative, but executives created the conditions that encouraged the behavior.

Stop Asking Who Made the Mistake

Killian described working with a fast-casual dining organization where a serious customer complaint prompted a different management response. Instead of asking who was responsible, a leader asked, “What in our systems allowed this to happen?”

That question changed the conversation. Employees and managers could examine the process together instead of spending their energy assigning blame or defending themselves.

There’s a practical reason this works. When employees expect punishment for reporting problems, bad news gets minimized, positive results get exaggerated, and operational failures remain hidden.

Executives consequently make decisions using incomplete or distorted information. I’ve seen how easily management confuses employee silence with operational success. A CEO who wants accurate information must make it safer to identify a flawed process than to conceal one.

That doesn’t eliminate individual accountability. It helps distinguish an employee’s poor judgment from behavior management has inadvertently encouraged.

Punishing someone for following a defective procedure leaves the procedure intact. The next employee inherits the same problem, and customers continue paying the price.

Why Employee Engagement Programs Can’t Fix Broken Systems

When employee engagement scores decline, executives often introduce recognition programs, incentives, or appreciation initiatives. Those efforts are relatively easy to implement, but they may ignore what makes employees frustrated in the first place.

Killian recommends examining where employees lose time, energy, discretion, and the ability to help customers. His warning is direct: “Don’t decorate a broken system. You redesign it.”

Consider an employee who spends every day requesting unnecessary approvals, correcting preventable errors, or explaining policies that frustrate customers. Recognition doesn’t remove those obstacles, and neither does another engagement survey, unless management changes something based on the findings.

Every unnecessary approval, repeated explanation, and unresolved complaint also consumes operating capacity. Companies can spend more money trying to improve morale while preserving the problems responsible for declining engagement. Before funding another recognition initiative, executives might learn more by tracing recurring customer complaints through employees’ actual workflows.

Why HR and Customer Experience Shouldn’t Operate Separately

HR measures engagement, retention, and workplace satisfaction. Customer experience departments monitor complaints, satisfaction scores, and service interactions.

Each function can perform well against its individual measures while customers continue receiving inconsistent service. Killian points to the service-profit chain, which connects employee conditions, service delivery, customer response, and business performance.

Consider a department experiencing declining employee satisfaction alongside increasing customer complaints. Reviewing those trends independently provides only part of the explanation. Together, they may expose inadequate resources, restrictive procedures, or missing authority that prevents employees from helping customers.

Executives don’t necessarily need to rotate every employee through every position. But they should recognize the danger of departmental metrics that reward individual functions while overlooking the customer’s complete experience. Customers encounter one company, regardless of how many departments appear on its organizational chart.

AI Can Handle the Interaction, Someone Still Owns the Outcome

As organizations automate customer interactions, the distinction between efficiency and accountability becomes increasingly consequential. An AI system may answer questions, route requests, or make decisions faster than an employee. But responsibility for incorrect decisions and unresolved problems remains with management.

Killian puts it plainly: “AI can automate a decision, but it cannot absorb accountability.” Reducing employee-handled interactions may lower costs without improving customer service. If customers cannot correct automated decisions, reach someone with authority, or obtain an understandable explanation, the company has simply automated its obstacles. Before expanding automation, executives should examine how exceptions are handled and who can resolve them.

The same principle applies to traditional customer service operations. Efficiency measures have limited value when customers cannot accomplish what they contacted the company to do.

The Real Test

Killian recommends asking what evidence exists about how executive decisions will affect customers and the employees serving them. I would go further. The next time management reviews a customer service report, follow an actual customer through the process.

Pretend you are the customer. Call the support number. Try resolving a complicated problem. Use the newest software. Count how often you must repeat information before someone can help. Then compare that experience with the performance report presented at the next executive meeting.

If the two tell different stories, the report isn’t necessarily false. It may accurately measure what management requested while overlooking what customers need.

A company’s priorities become apparent when solving a customer problem requires sacrificing a favorable metric, changing an established policy, or admitting that an executive decision was wrong. That’s when executives discover whether they’re managing the customer experience or merely managing the numbers that describe it.

A CEO can make the right call and still damage the company by mishandling the moment. Pressure does not just reveal judgment. It reveals whether the person in charge can control the reaction everyone else is using as a signal.

Marc Hildebrand, a former LAPD Sergeant with 20 years of experience, has seen people respond to dangerous situations with remarkable discipline. He has also seen leaders create more confusion than the situation required. Business leaders are not managing crime scenes, but the principle transfers cleanly: when people are uncertain, they study the person in charge before they decide how worried to be.

Your Reaction Can Become the Bigger Problem

Hildebrand remembers officers in command who became overwhelmed and started shouting over the radio. Everyone listening could hear the uncertainty, and it shaped the confidence of the people trying to respond. He also remembers a lieutenant who stayed calm when situations became complicated. His demeanor made the problem feel serious but manageable.

That same dynamic shows up inside companies. When a major customer threatens to leave, a key employee resigns, or a department misses a critical target, employees are not only listening to what the CEO says. They are watching tone, pace, and self-control.

A leader who immediately demands explanations or assigns blame may think they are creating urgency. Often, they are creating self-protection. People get careful. They share less. They start managing the leader’s reaction instead of solving the problem.

Calm does not mean passive. It means the executive refuses to add emotional noise to an already difficult situation. The first responsibility in a crisis is to protect the team’s ability to think clearly.

Are You Correcting Behavior Before You Understand It?

One of Hildebrand’s most useful lessons came from a police partner whose behavior suddenly changed. The easy move would have been to correct him on the spot. Instead, Hildebrand noticed that the behavior was out of character and asked what was going on.

His partner was dealing with marital problems and issues involving his children. That did not excuse the behavior, but it changed the conversation. Hildebrand could offer support and still make clear what needed to change.

Managers miss this all the time. An employee becomes impatient, misses a deadline, or reacts defensively, and the manager quickly assigns a cause: poor attitude, weak discipline, lack of commitment. Sometimes that diagnosis is right. Sometimes it is lazy.

An employee who does not understand expectations needs a different response from an employee who refuses to meet them. Someone dealing with an unusual personal problem needs a different conversation than someone with a sustained pattern of poor performance. Accountability gets stronger, not softer, when it is based on the real cause.

Hildebrand’s relationship with that partner improved. The officer later asked to work with him long-term and became more curious about other people’s circumstances instead of assuming the worst.

That is a leadership advantage a lot of leaders overlook. People generally tell the truth faster when they believe the person in charge cares, understands, and can handle it.

The Thinking Pattern Behind Bad Decisions

Hildebrand teaches a framework he calls the Growth Model: reality, perspective, emotion, response, and results. Reality is what happens. Perspective is the meaning we assign to it. That interpretation creates emotion. Emotion shapes response. Response affects results.

The model is simple enough, which is why many leaders need it. Executives usually can’t change the immediate reality. They can often change the perspective that determines what they do next.

Hildebrand experienced this after working about 12 hours when a child abuse call came in. He and his partner were exhausted. His first reaction was frustration because the assignment would extend an already difficult day. The reality was fixed. They were tired, and the call still needed a response.

What changed was his perspective. Instead of viewing the call as one more burden, he considered whether they might be exactly the officers those children needed. The investigation ended with two children being removed from their parents, including a child with a broken arm. What began as an assignment he wanted to avoid became a roughly 20-hour day he remembered with pride.

The same pattern shows up in business. A department misses a deadline. The CEO’s first perspective may be that the manager is careless or incapable. That interpretation produces anger, and the conversation becomes accusatory. The manager gets defensive.

A better leader still treats the missed deadline as a performance problem. The difference is that the leader does not pretend to know the cause before examining it. Were expectations clear? Were resources adequate? Did the manager fail to follow through on a clear commitment? Those questions are not softness. They are how adults find the actual problem.

Employees Resist Decisions They Don’t Understand

Hildebrand saw this when the LAPD changed its vehicle pursuit policy. Officers could no longer pursue someone solely for certain minor traffic infractions. Many officers were frustrated because minor violations sometimes led to more serious discoveries.

As a new sergeant, Hildebrand understood the frustration, but he also knew that repeating complaints would not help him lead. He researched the issue and found information showing that certain pursuits created serious danger for officers and the public, sometimes over relatively minor offenses.

He did not pretend to know every reason behind the policy. He explained what he had found, acknowledged what he did not know, and treated his officers as professionals capable of understanding a hard tradeoff. That didn’t make the policy popular, but it changed how people received it.

CEOs should pay attention to that. When leaders announce changes to compensation, staffing, procedures, or priorities without explaining the reasoning, employees do not sit quietly in a vacuum. They create their own explanation, and it is rarely generous.

Explaining a decision does not mean putting it up for a vote. It means showing that management has considered the consequences and can defend the business rationale. A decision may be final, but the explanation determines whether people support it, comply reluctantly, or quietly resist it.

Don’t Demand What You Don’t Demonstrate

Hildebrand’s standard is direct: before expecting someone else to demonstrate a behavior, he needs to be willing to demonstrate it himself. That includes staying composed in hard conversations, responding thoughtfully to mistakes, and doing the work he expects from others.

Executives diminish their influence when they miss this. A CEO who demands accountability but excuses personal mistakes has not set a standard. A manager who expects professionalism under pressure but loses control in meetings has taught the real rule.

Employees notice the gap. Authority may give a leader the right to make decisions, but it does not make the leader worth imitating. That part has to be earned.

The test comes when the leader is tired, frustrated, disappointed, or under pressure. Anyone can endorse patience when nothing is going wrong. Employees learn what the standard really means by watching what happens when the person in charge has every excuse to abandon it.

A CEO does not need to eliminate frustration, fear, or uncertainty. Those reactions come with consequential decisions. Employees remember the moments when good judgment is hardest to access because those moments reveal whether the person asking them to stay composed and professional can do the same.

A business owner receives an email from a prospective client declining an offer. The immediate financial impact is manageable. The emotional reaction is another story. Within seconds, one disappointing email becomes a threat to the entire business. Revenue projections collapse. Financial security disappears. The mind starts preparing for a disaster that hasn’t happened.

Amy Kemp knows this pattern because she’s experienced it herself, despite running businesses for 25 years. She can recognize how quickly her thinking moves from imagining a successful future to anticipating financial catastrophe. The problem is when imagined outcomes begin controlling her next decision.

Executives spend considerable time improving systems, developing employees, and measuring performance. Yet the thinking patterns that influence how they interpret information, respond to setbacks, and make decisions often escape the same scrutiny.

Kemp, CEO of Amy Kemp Inc. and author of I See You, calls these patterns thought habits. Her work raises an uncomfortable possibility: The thinking that helped build a successful business can eventually become one of its greatest constraints.

When Does Experience Become a Liability?

Experience gives executives advantages. They’ve encountered difficult customers, survived financial pressures, and learned to recognize problems before those problems become expensive. On the other hand, repeated experience also creates predictable reactions.

Kemp distinguishes between visible behavioral habits and subconscious thought habits. The latter operate beneath conscious awareness, influencing how someone interprets an event before deciding what to do about it.

A business owner who has successfully navigated years of financial uncertainty might become exceptionally good at anticipating risk. That ability can protect the company. It can also lead to excessive planning, unnecessary worry, and hesitation when the business needs decisive action. The same ability can be productive in one situation and destructive in another.

Kemp uses an assessment called Habit Finder to identify where people are at risk of falling into unproductive thinking patterns. She emphasizes that the assessment measures risk rather than personality or competence. That’s very useful for executives accustomed to performance evaluations.

An assessment that identifies a potential weakness doesn’t invalidate someone’s record of achievement. It identifies a condition under which an otherwise capable person might make a poorer decision.

The question isn’t whether a leader has a particular characteristic. It’s whether that characteristic produces the right response under the circumstances.

Your Best Idea Can Become Your Biggest Obstacle

One thinking pattern Kemp frequently encounters involves becoming excessively attached to ideas. Consider an executive who has spent months developing a plan to improve operations. The research is complete, the financial projections look promising, and the executive has mentally rehearsed how everything should work.

Then the management team starts questioning the proposal. Someone identifies an operational problem. Another person suggests an alternative. A third challenges the projected results. Instead of receiving valuable information, the executive experiences those questions as personal criticism.

Kemp describes the problem through a physical analogy. An unhealthy attachment to an idea is like carrying it into a meeting pressed against your chest. Any criticism feels directed at you. A healthier alternative is to place the idea on the table, where everyone, including its creator, can examine it.

This becomes particularly expensive when executives control the room. Employees quickly learn whether questioning an executive’s proposal produces useful discussion or an unpleasant confrontation. If disagreement repeatedly creates tension, the executive will eventually receive less candid feedback. The resulting silence can easily be mistaken for agreement.

I don’t need my preferred solution to win an argument. I need the business to achieve the intended outcome. If someone identifies a better, faster, or less expensive route, defending my original proposal only delays the result. The executive’s job is to evaluate the quality of the decision, including the information that challenges it.

Stop Responding to Customers Who Haven’t Said Anything

Kemp describes an established business owner preparing to change how her company serves clients. The proposed changes include new pricing, different packages, and adjustments to the business structure.

Before communicating anything, the owner began imagining negative customer reactions. Then she developed responses to those imaginary objections. Those responses led to additional concerns, which produced still more hypothetical conversations.

The business owner was effectively negotiating with customers who hadn’t been given an opportunity to respond. Meanwhile, the actual change remained unfinished. Kemp’s recommendation was straightforward: Communicate the proposed changes, collect real customer feedback, and make adjustments when there is evidence that adjustments are needed.

Executives understandably want to reduce uncertainty before introducing a major change, particularly when established customer relationships and revenue are involved. However, there’s a point where more internal discussion stops reducing risk. The team is simply rehearsing objections it hasn’t verified. A reasonable test with actual customers can reveal more than another round of predictions.

What Does a Distracted Executive Fail to Notice?

Another thinking pattern Kemp identifies is preoccupation: being physically present during an interaction while mentally occupied elsewhere. It might appear harmless. An executive continues thinking about a financial problem during a conversation with an employee, or checks messages while someone describes an operational concern. The meeting still happens. Information is exchanged. Everyone returns to work. But something may have been missed.

Kemp points out that executives frequently receive valuable information through small, informal observations. An employee responds differently than usual. Two colleagues appear uncomfortable around each other. Someone who normally contributes enthusiastically becomes unusually quiet.

None of those observations establishes that something is wrong. Each might warrant attention.

When executives are mentally preoccupied, they lose opportunities to notice changes before those changes surface as formal complaints, missed deadlines, or resignations. That’s a management cost that rarely appears on a financial statement. Executives can review performance dashboards without understanding the tensions developing inside the teams responsible for those numbers.

Kemp also observes that this pattern can extend beyond work. Someone may devote their best concentration to employees and clients, then return home with little attention remaining for family. The underlying issue is the same: Attention is being allocated without much consideration of what deserves it.

Why Working Harder Eventually Stops Working

Kemp’s own career provides a useful illustration of what happens when a productive habit reaches its limit. She had built a successful professional life through an exceptional willingness to work. Hard work was familiar, reliable, and closely connected to her identity. Then a meeting with a financial advisor exposed a problem.

Her family was managing its money responsibly, but its income wasn’t sufficient to achieve its financial goals, including supporting three children’s education. Kemp was already working hard. Her husband had an established career in education, and she wasn’t willing to sacrifice the evenings spent supporting her children’s activities.

Adding more work hours wasn’t an acceptable solution. As Kemp puts it, “You can’t outwork your thought habits.” Her realization was that the method she had depended on for years could no longer produce the outcome she wanted.

Executives encounter similar limitations when their companies grow. An owner who personally solves every difficult customer problem may become the obstacle preventing employees from developing judgment. A sales executive who succeeds through extraordinary personal effort may struggle to build a process that produces results without constant intervention.

Working harder can temporarily conceal these structural problems. Eventually, the executive reaches a limit in available hours, attention, or decision-making capacity. When that happens, additional effort preserves the very operating pattern that needs to change.

Structure Works Better When It Allows Some Rebellion

Business owners often value autonomy. They create companies partly because they want the freedom to make decisions without following someone else’s rules. That independence can produce innovation and efficiency. It can also create resistance to useful routines.

Kemp recognizes this tendency in herself. For more than two decades, she’s used a simple planning practice called the Six Most Important Things list. At the end of each workday, she identifies six priorities for the following day. Those items guide where she starts the next morning.

She also occasionally resists using her own branded planning sheets. Instead, she’ll write the same six priorities on scrap paper. The tool still works. The priorities still get completed. She simply satisfies her desire for independence without abandoning the structure.

Her explanation is memorable: “I will let myself rebel in ways that aren’t harmful.” That principle has implications beyond personal productivity.

I’ve completed six Ironman triathlons and two ultramarathons, including a 100-mile race, without following a rigid daily training schedule. The objective was never negotiable. I needed enough swimming, cycling, and running to finish safely. Yet the specific activities could change with weather, physical condition, and opportunities to train with friends. The absence of a fixed daily schedule didn’t eliminate discipline. It gave me the flexibility to maintain it.

Business structures should serve the same purpose. A process that defines outcomes while permitting reasonable discretion can survive changing conditions. A process that demands perfect compliance, regardless of circumstances, can encourage people to abandon it altogether. Executives sometimes confuse consistency with rigidity. The two produce very different behavior.

A Better Response Starts Before the Next Crisis

During the 1993 Mississippi River flooding, I served with a Missouri Army National Guard unit deployed to protect Ste. Genevieve, Missouri. At one point, a large military truck transporting sandbags suffered a flat tire. The river was rising approximately an inch an hour, and the community needed those sandbags delivered to the levee.

We could have focused entirely on the lost transportation capacity. Instead, we considered whether another method might work better.

Local pickup trucks became the solution. They could reach places the larger military vehicles couldn’t, and the community could provide more of them. What initially seemed like a serious setback led to a more effective transportation operation.

The crucial change occurred before the first pickup arrived. It was the decision to treat the problem as an opportunity to reconsider the method rather than as proof that the operation was failing.

Kemp’s approach follows a similar principle: Recognize the familiar thought pattern, interrupt the automatic response, and return attention to an action that can improve the actual situation. That might mean taking a short walk before responding to a disappointing email. It might mean inviting criticism of a proposal or testing a pricing change instead of anticipating every possible objection.

None of those actions requires abandoning ambition or lowering expectations. They require recognizing when a familiar way of thinking has stopped producing useful decisions.

A company can outgrow its original business model, staffing structure, and operating processes. Its executives can also outgrow the mental habits that helped them succeed. The harder problem is recognizing when that has happened, particularly when those habits have been rewarded for years.

A manager can answer every question, solve every problem, and make every decision for the team. From the outside, that might look like effective leadership. Inside the organization, something less productive may be happening.

Employees stop making decisions they’re capable of making themselves. Problems travel up the organizational chart unnecessarily. The manager becomes the person everyone waits for, and the team gradually loses the ability to operate independently. The irony is that the manager may have created the problem by trying too hard to be helpful.

Dr. Chris Bittinger, who has coached more than 1,000 individuals and teaches coaching and leadership at Purdue University, sees a fundamental difference between how managers typically approach problems and how effective coaches approach them. Managers are accustomed to finding solutions. Coaches recognize that the person sitting across from them often has enough knowledge, experience, and judgment to develop a solution without being given one. For executives responsible for developing future managers, improving performance, and building organizations that don’t require their constant involvement, that difference deserves attention.

Are You Developing Employees or Training Them to Depend on You?

Consider what happens when an employee brings a difficult decision to a manager. The manager listens, evaluates the situation, and recommends a course of action. The employee follows the recommendation, and the immediate problem disappears. Everyone gets what they wanted, at least temporarily.

Longer term, the employee hasn’t necessarily learned how to make that decision. The next time something similar happens, there’s a good chance the employee will return for another answer. Repeat that pattern across an entire management team, and you’ve created a decision-making bottleneck.

Bittinger connects this dependency directly to succession planning and employee development. When employees repeatedly rely on their managers to solve problems, organizations struggle to develop people who can assume greater responsibility.

I’ve always believed that decisions are only as sound as the information they’re based on. Something managers occasionally overlook is that the employee seeking advice may possess considerably more relevant information than the person providing it.

That employee knows the history of the situation, the personalities involved, the previous attempts to solve it, and details that might never surface during a brief conversation. A manager who immediately supplies an answer may be replacing a reasonably informed employee’s judgment with a recommendation based on incomplete information.

A better starting point is often a question. What options have you considered? What do you think should happen next? What information would help you make the decision? These questions require employees to exercise judgment rather than simply accept instructions.

That doesn’t mean managers should refuse to make decisions or withhold expertise. It means recognizing when supplying an answer is genuinely necessary and when doing so prevents someone else from developing the ability to find one.

A Question Can Be Advice Disguised as Coaching

Changing statements into questions doesn’t automatically make someone a better coach. Bittinger identifies a common mistake: managers who already have a preferred solution ask questions designed to steer employees toward that answer. “Do you think you should do this?” is technically a question. It also communicates a recommendation.

The employee can usually recognize where the manager wants the conversation to go. Instead of examining alternatives, the employee begins working toward the expected response. The manager may believe coaching has occurred, but little independent thinking was required.

Genuine curiosity produces a different conversation. Bittinger emphasizes observing what someone says, noticing possible inconsistencies, and asking about them without prematurely deciding what those observations mean.

If an employee becomes visibly uncomfortable discussing a particular responsibility, a manager could assume resistance or lack of commitment. A better question might explore what’s causing the reaction.

The difference is especially noticeable during one-on-one meetings. Bittinger encourages managers to examine the percentage of time they spend talking compared with listening. An executive who dominates these conversations may be collecting updates while overlooking what employees actually need.

It’s worth examining whose agenda controls the meeting. If every conversation revolves around the manager’s questions, priorities, and proposed solutions, employees have little opportunity to surface problems the manager hasn’t anticipated. Sometimes the most productive thing a manager can do is stop talking long enough for someone else to think.

The Smallest Behavioral Changes Can Produce Noticeable Results

One of Bittinger’s coaching experiences involved a client who repeatedly dropped his hands emphatically while speaking. The behavior had become habitual, and the client didn’t appear to recognize that he was doing it.

Bittinger noticed the movement and described how he experienced it. Rather than labeling the behavior as inappropriate, he asked whether that impression matched what the client intended to communicate. The client hadn’t realized he was making the gesture. Once he understood how it might be perceived, he decided to change it.

Approximately 90 days later, the client reported that he had stopped the behavior. Other members of his team had noticed the change, and the client believed it was improving how he led people.

There was no elaborate development program or lengthy diagnosis. Someone identified a specific behavior, described its impact, and allowed the individual to decide what to do about it.

The example illustrates something useful about management development. Executives sometimes approach performance improvement as though they must fundamentally change someone’s personality. Yet an employee’s effectiveness may be limited by a narrow, observable behavior that has never been brought to their attention.

The difficulty is providing feedback without turning the conversation into an accusation. An observation invites examination. A judgment invites defense. The employee still has to choose to change. The manager’s responsibility is to make the behavior and its consequences visible.

Poor Performance Requires Clarity Before Correction

Coaching isn’t an excuse to avoid uncomfortable performance conversations. When someone isn’t meeting expectations, a manager still has to establish what acceptable performance looks like and address the gap between current and required results.

Bittinger recommends identifying the person’s existing strengths and considering how those abilities could help improve performance. That’s a useful departure from the tendency to build every improvement conversation around weaknesses.

If an employee has demonstrated abilities that could contribute to better results, those abilities deserve a place in the improvement plan. Strengths alone aren’t enough. Expectations must be unmistakable. A manager can explain a requirement thoroughly and still leave the employee uncertain about what’s expected.

Silence is particularly misleading. An employee may remain quiet because they understand the assignment. They may also remain quiet because they’re confused and don’t want to admit it.

Bittinger recommends checking understanding by asking employees to explain what they’ve heard and identify their next steps. That provides a more reliable indication of alignment than asking whether everyone understands and receiving no objections.

The conversation also needs to remain focused. In From Conflict to Courage, Marlene Chism describes what she calls the “island of distraction,” a situation in which someone redirects an uncomfortable conversation away from its original purpose. An employee confronted about missed expectations might introduce complaints about coworkers, question the manager’s behavior, or raise another unrelated problem.

Those concerns could be legitimate, but addressing every new topic immediately can prevent the original issue from being resolved. A manager can acknowledge the concern, establish that it deserves a separate discussion, and return to the performance expectation.

The purpose is to get from current performance to an agreed-upon result. Once that destination is clear, the conversation can address missing skills, available resources, operational barriers, and individual accountability without becoming a contest over blame.

How Do You Coach Someone Through Conflict When You Only Know One Side?

Managers rarely receive a complete account of a workplace conflict. The person describing the disagreement naturally presents events from their own perspective, often emphasizing what someone else did wrong.

Bittinger recommends moving the conversation toward a question that can initially feel uncomfortable: How did you contribute to the situation? That question shifts attention from evaluating another person’s behavior to examining what the employee can actually influence. It also creates an opportunity to prepare for a more productive conversation.

Bittinger uses role-playing to help people work through difficult interactions before having them. The preparation involves deciding how to open the discussion, what to say as it develops, and how to close it. The desired outcome becomes the organizing principle.

An employee who enters a conflict conversation determined to establish who’s wrong will behave differently from someone who wants to clarify responsibilities and restore a working relationship.

This is where managers have to distinguish between supporting an employee and validating every assumption the employee makes. Listening carefully doesn’t require agreeing with the employee’s interpretation of events. A manager can acknowledge frustration while still examining the employee’s contribution, preparing for the other person’s perspective, and identifying what a successful resolution would look like.

An Overwhelmed Employee May Need a Different Conversation

Performance problems and stress can look similar from a manager’s perspective. An employee misses deadlines, struggles to prioritize, or appears disengaged. The manager assumes the person needs better direction or greater accountability. The underlying problem may be an employee struggling to cope with competing demands.

Bittinger’s doctoral research examined executive coaching, stress, and burnout. He distinguishes temporary stress responses from burnout, which involves persistent exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced professional efficacy. That difference influences how a coaching conversation should proceed.

When someone is experiencing stress, Bittinger emphasizes providing enough room to process what they’re experiencing before moving toward problem-solving. He observed in his research that people processing stressors often began identifying practical responses around the eight-minute mark.

The managerial implication is straightforward: An immediate solution isn’t always the most useful opening. Sometimes employees need space to organize their thoughts before they can evaluate their options.

Boundaries also deserve attention. When an employee already has a full workload, accepting another assignment without adjusting existing priorities can make the situation worse. A productive conversation might establish which responsibilities must remain, which could be postponed, and what resources are available.

Persistent burnout calls for more than another productivity plan. Managers need to recognize when the workload or working conditions themselves require attention. The objective is to understand what kind of problem exists before prescribing a response.

AI Can Supply Answers, Which Makes Human Judgment More Valuable

Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly capable of analyzing information, suggesting solutions, and helping employees work through decisions. That creates an interesting question for managers: If employees can obtain reasonable answers without consulting their supervisors, what value should a coaching conversation provide?

Bittinger points to empathy, careful listening, presence, and the ability to recognize what someone needs beyond an immediate solution. A conversation about a difficult decision may require reflection rather than another recommendation. A performance problem may require an observation the employee hasn’t recognized. A disagreement may require someone to examine a contribution they’ve been unwilling to acknowledge.

AI can help generate questions and explore options. Managers remain responsible for understanding the actual people, relationships, and expectations involved. That responsibility becomes harder when the manager is accustomed to demonstrating value by having the answer.

The executive who makes every important decision may feel indispensable. Unfortunately, indispensability becomes expensive when the organization can’t function effectively without that person’s constant involvement.

Perhaps a better measure of managerial effectiveness is what employees can handle when the manager isn’t available. If employees can evaluate problems, communicate expectations, resolve disagreements, and make sound decisions without waiting for permission, something valuable has been developed.

The manager has become less necessary to the routine decision, while becoming more valuable to the organization’s long-term capability. That may be the clearest evidence that coaching is working.

A company can spend millions trying to solve a staffing problem without realizing it already has enough employees. The real problem may be that those employees are in the wrong places, doing the wrong work, at the wrong times. That possibility should make any CEO uncomfortable, particularly when the proposed solution involves adding payroll.

Debbie McKinley, Chief People Officer at Herschend Family Entertainment, and a former Vice President of Human Resources at Home Depot, has spent much of her career confronting the difference between what executives believe is happening and what actually happens on the front lines.

Her approach challenges a comfortable assumption about executive leadership: The higher someone rises in an organization, the more they can rely on reports, dashboards, and people further down the chain to understand the business.

Those tools have their place. But an executive who has never experienced the work being measured may be making expensive decisions with incomplete information.

The $12 Extension Cord That Exposed a Management Blind Spot

McKinley spent a full shift working in housekeeping at a resort that was part of Herschend’s portfolio of entertainment properties. She made beds, cleaned bathrooms, dusted rooms, and discovered how physically demanding the work was. After making six beds across three rooms, her back was already protesting.

Then she noticed something that had apparently escaped management’s attention. The housekeepers were vacuuming their way out of completed rooms, leaving the familiar clean carpet lines guests expect. But the vacuum cleaners had 12-foot power cords. That meant stopping midway through the room, unplugging the vacuum, relocating the plug, and repeating part of the process. The employees had accepted the inconvenience because those were the machines management had purchased.

McKinley recognized the wasted effort immediately. The company bought appropriate extension cords from a nearby hardware store, and she instructed the housekeeping supervisor to specify 24-foot cords when purchasing replacement vacuums. A relatively inexpensive operational solution had been hiding in plain sight.

Consider how many times an executive might approve a labor budget, discuss housekeeping productivity, or review operating expenses without ever discovering that an equipment purchasing decision was creating unnecessary work. The spreadsheet could show labor costs accurately while offering no explanation for some of the time being consumed.

McKinley describes her approach with a phrase from her military background: “I learned to dig a ditch.” That means participating in the work rather than observing it from a comfortable distance.

At Herschend, executives are required to work on the front lines. McKinley has made corndogs, operated rides, and performed other jobs that directly shape the guest experience. There’s an important condition: Executives have to stay long enough to experience the work.

A two-hour visit, particularly one arranged for photographs, is unlikely to reveal much about the physical demands, recurring frustrations, or operational obstacles employees face. Worse, employees recognize the difference between someone trying to understand their jobs and someone performing concern for an audience. The executive’s presence becomes another interruption.

Before You Approve More Payroll, Consider Alternative Solutions

One of McKinley’s clearest examples of strategic HR came during her career at Home Depot. The company faced a familiar retail complaint: Customers couldn’t find enough associates to help them.

The intuitive response was to increase staffing. More employees wearing orange aprons should mean more available customer assistance. However, adding substantial numbers of employees across thousands of stores would have created an enormous recurring expense.

McKinley and her colleagues examined the problem differently. They visited stores at different times, studied the labor models, observed customer traffic, and evaluated where employees were actually spending their time.

What they discovered challenged the premise behind the staffing request. Employees weren’t necessarily absent. Some were stocking merchandise in aisles where they felt comfortable working without customer interaction. Others were assigned to locations that made sense under normal conditions but not during changing customer traffic patterns.

The issue was partly how employees were deployed. Instead of supporting a broad staffing increase, the team developed an additional store leadership position that functioned like an air traffic controller. These employees would continually circulate through the store, monitoring activity, identifying customers needing assistance, and directing associates toward those customers.

The approach concentrated on coordinating existing labor, with roughly two people filling that function during busy periods rather than adding large numbers of associates across every shift. It also created another opportunity for supervisors to advance into higher-paid positions and develop leadership skills.

That combination is worth examining. A staffing complaint produced a proposed solution involving operational coordination, labor efficiency, customer experience, and career development. HR contributed beyond its conventional administrative boundaries because the analysis began with how the business made money.

The solution doesn’t establish the financial savings or subsequent customer-service results, and those shouldn’t be assumed. The decision illustrates a useful discipline: Before accepting a request for additional headcount, executives should establish whether the organization lacks capacity or is failing to use the capacity it already pays for. Those are very different problems, with very different price tags.

Strategic HR & Earned Influence

There’s a persistent complaint among HR professionals that executives don’t give them a meaningful seat at the table. Sometimes that complaint is justified. McKinley’s career raises a harder question: What has HR demonstrated that would cause an operating executive to seek its advice on a major business decision?

Knowing employment policy isn’t enough. Neither is being an effective employee advocate. A strategic HR executive needs to understand the company’s financial goals, operating pressures, customer expectations, and competing uses for capital. That doesn’t mean becoming the CFO or COO. It means understanding how people-related decisions affect the outcomes those executives are responsible for producing.

McKinley identifies two essential responsibilities for strategic HR: advocating for frontline employees when resources are allocated and coaching executives to improve their judgment and performance.

The first responsibility creates healthy tension. There will always be competing demands for money. Operations wants investment, shareholders expect returns, and employees need the tools, compensation, and working conditions required to deliver the product or service. HR should be able to explain why investing in employees produces a business return, rather than relying exclusively on arguments about employee satisfaction.

The second responsibility requires something equally uncomfortable: telling executives when their behavior or decisions are ineffective. That can mean explaining why a meeting failed, identifying people who were alienated, or recommending that an executive repair a damaged working relationship.

McKinley also acknowledges that an organization accustomed to transactional HR may need time to understand a different model. Influence has to be demonstrated through contribution. Simply demanding inclusion doesn’t establish credibility.

When HR Solves Every Management Problem, Managers Stop Learning

A strong individual contributor becomes a supervisor. That supervisor performs well and eventually begins managing other managers. Organizations frequently treat those promotions as natural progressions of the same skill set. They aren’t.

Managing frontline employees requires different judgment than leading people who are themselves responsible for managing teams. McKinley sees coaching as one of HR’s central responsibilities, but she draws a firm boundary between coaching a manager and doing the manager’s job.

Early in her HR career, after serving in operational roles at Home Depot, she sometimes crossed that boundary. She could see what she believed needed to happen and would step in to make it happen herself. At other times, she became so personally invested in another executive’s struggles that she absorbed responsibility for their failures. Neither approach helped her remain effective.

Her conclusion is direct: “I’m not the QB. I’m the coach.”

That’s a useful standard for any executive support function. If HR repeatedly takes over difficult employee conversations, makes routine supervisory decisions, or resolves conflicts that managers should handle themselves, the organization may become increasingly dependent on HR. The immediate problem gets resolved, but the manager misses the opportunity to develop judgment.

Effective coaching requires asking what the manager observed, how they evaluated the situation, what alternatives they considered, and what they intend to do differently. The manager still has to make the decision and own the outcome.

McKinley learned not to judge every operator against how she personally would have performed the job. If the customer experience and business outcomes are strong, a manager’s different approach doesn’t automatically require correction. An HR executive who can’t accept difference in delivery can become an obstacle to capable managers rather than a resource for them.

Behaviors and Purpose

Corporate values are easy to announce. They’re considerably harder to enforce when a productive executive consistently violates them. Herschend takes an unusually concrete approach to that problem. Its culture, called Heartspitality, emphasizes specific leadership behaviors associated with its commitment to treating people with care.

Employees in salaried leadership positions receive quarterly evaluations in which half the assessment concerns cultural behaviors and the other half concerns financial performance or goal achievement. That allocation sends a message that executives can’t safely ignore. Financial results alone don’t determine whether someone is meeting the organization’s expectations.

McKinley describes the challenge of being patient, forgiving, truthful, and respectful even under pressure. Those qualities are evaluated through feedback, including conversations when an executive hasn’t demonstrated the expected behavior.

The company also connects those behaviors to a common purpose: bringing families closer together by creating memories worth repeating. That purpose has operational relevance because Herschend’s properties, including Dollywood and Silver Dollar City, compete for families’ leisure time and spending. The relationship between employee behavior and customer experience is direct.

Compare that with a company that advertises respect as a core value while continuing to reward a financially successful executive who routinely mistreats employees. The written value and the actual incentive disagree. Employees will learn from the incentive.

Herschend’s system doesn’t eliminate difficult behavior. McKinley openly acknowledges that practicing the company’s values can be demanding. Defining behaviors and incorporating them into performance reviews gives the organization a way to address the gap between what it promises and what its managers do.

Focus and Diagnosis

McKinley uses another practice from her military experience to keep her HR team focused on solving the right problems. Once a month, a team member examines a business issue using the military planning framework known as SMEAC: Situation, Mission, Execution, Administration and Logistics, and Communication.

For a project involving employee recognition, that means:

1. investigating current practices across properties
2. studying employee feedback
3. identifying gaps
4. defining the actual problem before proposing a program

The analysis might reveal that the company needs better recognition tools. It might reveal that new managers don’t know how to recognize employees effectively. It could also reveal that no additional program is necessary. That’s a more disciplined approach than assuming every perceived gap requires another initiative.

The same reasoning applies to the staffing challenges at Home Depot and the vacuum cleaners at their resorts. Executives often begin with a proposed solution because someone has already framed the problem for them. The solutions often look like more hiring, better productivity, or another employee program. However, the request itself may rest on an assumption nobody has tested.

I’ve seen how easily an organization can start debating the cost of a solution before establishing whether it has correctly diagnosed the problem. The executives who contribute the most aren’t necessarily the ones with the fastest answers. They’re the ones willing to point out that the question being discussed is the wrong one.

Sometimes that requires detailed financial analysis. Sometimes it requires challenging another executive. Sometimes it requires spending an entire shift cleaning hotel rooms. The next costly operational problem may already be obvious to the people doing the work. The question is whether anyone making the decisions has bothered to experience it.