Recruiting and Hiring Champions in Plain English: Foreword by Joe Gibbs

By Xlibris US

I was blessed to work with BUTCH and see first hand how the approach and strategies he discussed WORKS. Butchs tactics are time-tested and have generated results for him for YEARS leading to his SUCCESS in business and in life. Greg Monroe


This practical book puts the spotlight on critical leadership competencies for ultimate SUCCESS. With the art of leadership vanishing this book should be your reference manual to take your leadership effectiveness to the NEXT level. VERY timely... Winston Connor, Master Certified Coach COACHING DYNAMICS, INC.



Butch has hit a homerun with this book. It is all about surrounding yourself with the right people. He gives you some EXAMPLES of best practices on leadership, recruiting and hiring. Youve got to have champions to WIN. This a must read if youre trying to BUILD a championship team.
Marty Schottenheimer



It is not often that you read a How-to book that really grabs you, but Recruiting and Hiring Champions by Butch English does just that. His simple, thorough, STEP BY STEP approach to recruiting should be a must read for anyone striving to be the best. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and I learned some very important lessons from a true PROFESSIONAL. Jeff Mullins

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493153428

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Butch English With Landon Horton.

Library of Congress Control Number:      2013922791

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4931-5341-1

               Softcover      978-1-4931-5340-4

               eBook            978-1-4931-5342-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 01/09/2014

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris LLC

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part One   It’s All About Leadership,Or Is It?

Chapter 1   The Greatest Leader I Have Ever Known (Part 1)

Chapter 2   What Makes A Leader Great?

Chapter 3   Somebody Has To Follow

Part Two   Know Exactly What You Are Looking For?

Chapter 4   The Power Of Self-Discovery

Chapter 5   Nonnegotiable Interpersonal Skills

Chapter 6   Nonnegotiable Intellectual Skills

Part Three   Recruiting Is An Art

Chapter 7   Recruiting Best Practices

Chapter 8   Down The Street Recruiting

Part Four   Hiring Is A Science

Chapter 9   Final Exams

Chapter 10   Signing Day

Part Five   What Really Matters

Chapter 11   So Many Blessings

Chapter 12   The Greatest Leader I Have Ever Known (Part 2)

Appendix A    Leadership Competencies

Appendix B    My Complete List Of Nonnegotiable Competencies

About The Author

Endnotes

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Carolyn English Brandon, my sweet loving mother who has stood beside me at all times and continues to pray for me in all circumstances. She has cried with me in difficult days, disciplined me in my younger days, and shown me by her actions what being a good person really is. God has used her as a major influence in my life to make me the person I am today. Mama, I thank God for you, for the gifts you have given me—your great sense of humor, your unfiltered honesty, and your unconditional love.

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Foreword

I first met Butch English several years ago on a golf course. I had been invited to play with a group of guys that included Butch. He and I immediately hit it off and before the round was over, a close friendship began. The first thing I noticed about Butch that day was his competitive spirit, and maybe that was the chemistry that started our friendship with each other. He played to win. I play to win. That competitive nature we share has continued to this day, and since our friendship began, we have played many rounds of golf together all over the country.

Off the golf course, I have seen firsthand how his competitive spirit contributed to his business success. Before his recent retirement, Butch was an Agency Executive for State Farm Insurance. He was in charge of a large geographical area and was responsible for recruiting and building teams to compete against other insurance companies. I witnessed his people skills in recruiting and team building because I had the opportunity to speak for him occasionally in his business. I saw the success he had and witnessed the annual awards his teams won for consistently leading the country in performance.

When Butch told me about his idea for writing a book on recruiting and hiring champions, I told him that I thought it was a great idea. First of all, there aren’t many books out there on the topic. In fact, as far as I am concerned, I haven’t seen any. There are a lot of books on other business topics, but not so much on recruiting. I should know because I could have used a book or two on recruiting during my career.

Recruiting has been such an important part of my life. My coaching career began on the college level. I coached at San Diego State, Florida State, Southern California, and Arkansas. In each of these places, recruiting was one of the most important things that I did. I had to try to sell eighteen year old kids to come to our university. After coaching a number of years in college, I was blessed to coach in the National Football League. It was during my time as head coach of the Washington Redskins that the league began free agency. This meant that throughout my NFL career, I had to try to sell professional football players on the idea of coming to play for the Redskins or in some cases, to keep playing for the Redskins. Outside of football, I began building a small family business in racing. From the beginning, I had to sell people on the idea of coming to work for our race team. We started with seventeen people the first year at Joe Gibbs Racing and today we have four hundred fifty team members. In the racing business, we recruit crew chiefs, drivers, engineers, technical people and front office people in a highly competitive environment. Any advantage our team can gain over the other teams in hiring the best available people, the better positioned we are to win championships.

That’s why this topic is so important. I have learned through the years that to win championships, you must have great people around you. You can’t win it all by yourself. Recruiting and hiring champions will make you a champion. If you are in a position of leadership in any area of life and want to be successful, you can gain a competitive edge if you are great at recruiting.

This book will help you gain that competitive edge. In it, you will find lots of creative ideas that most people will never think of about how to find and hire the next champion for your team. Reading this book will expand your knowledge and polish your skills in this important aspect of business and life giving you an advantage over your competition.

That’s one reason I am excited for you to read this book, but there’s more to this book than first meets the eye. I am most excited for you because you will get to know my friend whom I met on the golf course several years ago and have grown to love through the years. As we go through life, we make many acquaintances, but have very few deep relationships that become our inner circle of friends. Butch English is in my inner circle. He is my Sunday School teacher and prayer partner. We have prayed together for each other’s children and grandchildren. He is someone I lean on when seeking advice. But the greatest bond that he and I share is that we are both on the same team—God’s team. We both have asked Christ to come into our lives, to forgive us of our sins, and to be our Lord and personal Savior. That is the most important decision that we could ever share with anybody, and Butch will share this with you in his book. Why? Because he believes like I do that at the end of the day when our life ends on earth, the trophies, championships, and awards we may have won lose all their value. Please, don’t miss the last chapter because in it you will read about what really matters in life.

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Joe Gibbs

Three-time Super Bowl winner as Head Coach of the Washington Redskins

Enshrined in NFL Hall of Fame

Owner of Joe Gibbs Racing and three-time NASCAR champion

Author, Game Plan for Life

Huntersville, North Carolina

Preface

This book is for leaders who want to be champions in their field and in life. That was always my goal in everything I put my mind and physical energy toward. For the majority of my career, my field was insurance, but it did not start out that way. I graduated from college with a Physical Education Degree, coached at the high school and college levels for a few years, and sold office equipment for 3M before I found my sweet spot with State Farm Insurance.

I learned a lot about recruiting during my early adult years as a college basketball coach. I was able to move from the high school level to college coaching at the age of twenty-six. At that time, I took the head coaching job at Lafayette College, a Junior College in Fayetteville, North Carolina that is no longer in operation. It was there that I learned to recruit. Being a good recruiter was a must in order to be able to eat and to pay my bills. You could say that my life depended on recruiting champion caliber people. The practices that I learned in those days served me well when my move into the business world occurred.

After coaching, I was blessed with success in sales working for 3M. In sales, as in recruiting, it is all about people and that is my strong suit. In 1985, I left a successful career selling office equipment and began a new career with State Farm Insurance. For quite a while I had been intrigued with the insurance business, but back then that particular field had a negative association to it. There was a standing joke in those days that if your current job did not work out for you, you could just go sell insurance. But, I certainly did not see it that way. For me, it was a real opportunity to do what I enjoy doing the most—helping people. The philosophy of State Farm drew me to their company. State Farm is a noble conservative mid-western company that has become one of the largest insurance companies in the world. They have achieved this because they believe that what they do really matters and what they do best is take care of people.

Coaching college basketball and selling office equipment provided me with the foundation needed to be successful in the insurance business. Recruiting and hiring champions became my number one goal. Focusing on people and helping them find what they wanted or needed in life became my greatest passion. It was these things that had made me successful before, so why not do these now with State Farm?

I was right. It did work. Over the course of my State Farm career, we made a total of fifty-seven hires. Five of those had to be terminated. Ten just did not pan out as expected. But forty-two turned out to be champions. Additionally, fourteen agents who were hired moved into leadership roles within State Farm. Several Agency Field Specialists we hired did the same. Through the years, these people helped me win numerous awards and promotions including twenty-seven consecutive years as a winner of the Ambassador Travel Award which was a nice incentive trip. For sure, I made some mistakes over the course of my twenty-eight years with State Farm. No one will ever get it right one hundred percent of the time when it comes to recruiting because we are dealing with people and certain unknown variables. But I can tell you that if you recruit and hire the right people for the right position at the right time, you can be a champion. It was a blessing to have twenty-eight championship years at State Farm.

Then, in October of 2012, the company announced that changes were coming to the organizational model. I was sixty years old at the time, an executive with the company, and within two to three years of retirement. A change of this magnitude was not on my bucket list. However, when they announced the new model at one of our leadership meetings, I was intrigued. They said that the executive positions would now be more of a sales leader position serving as a consultant to our agents. That was what I had enjoyed doing the most. I would be moving out of a lot of the administrative and operations responsibilities and doing more of the sales leadership. Working with people was really my sweet spot. I could finish my career doing exactly what I loved to do. This sounded wonderful to me. So, during a break in the meeting I called my wife Linda to tell her the great news.

After the break, the corporate leadership then announced that everyone who had worked for State Farm for a certain number of years and were at a particular age would be given the opportunity to retire early. It was a golden parachute indeed, because after considering the math, it was a no-brainer for me. I called Linda back and