Hire the Best!: Motivate the Rest

By Dr. Larry L. Craft

Hire the Best! Motivate the Rest is the first “how to” tool kit designed to help the CEO, manager, or organizational leader significantly increase productivity by hiring the most qualified applicants, understanding what motivates them, and coaching them based on their unique personality. You’ll learn how to recruit, select, coach, and retain employees who have the:

* Will Do goal-orientation and drive to reach the highest levels of production

* Can Do skills, knowledge, and experience to minimize start-up training

* Follow-through work ethic to persist through the most difficult challenges

Based on Dr. Larry Craft’s groundbreaking research involving thousands of personal interviews and over one million applicant questionnaires for the past four decades, Hire the Best! Motivate the Rest respects your time and honors the need for immediate solutions to some of the most complex leadership challenges.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Dec 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781662401947

Book preview

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Hire the Best!

Motivate the Rest

Dr. Larry L. Craft

Copyright © 2020 Dr. Larry L. Craft

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2020

ISBN 978-1-6624-0193-0 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-6624-0194-7 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Interpreting the Will Do Test Results

Interpreting the Can Do Assessments

Prioritizing

Job Sampling/Onboarding

Motivation vs. Empowerment

The Supportive Helper

The Ninety-Day Action Plan

Six Secrets of Success: Leadership

Using the three dimensions of success to build a winning team of peak performers.

Whether you have ten or one hundred thousand employees, Dr. Craft offers a practical approach for identifying your own qualities and characteristics and how to use them to recruit, retain, motivate, and understand your employees.

—Robert H. Benmosche, Former Chairman of the Board and CEO, AIG and MetLife Inc.

We have been the largest US distributor and the only Asian distributor of Dr. Craft’s personality test for the past twelve years. We have helped over eight thousand small and large cap companies, nationally and globally, to hire the right people based on their natural aptitude for the job. Most of these companies have also used the Craft employment system to help employees develop all four levels of emotional intelligence. Our customers have found ‘CraftTests’ to be powerfully predictive.

—John Asher, CEO, Asher Strategies and US/China Business Solutions

While in management at MetLife, I saw firsthand how the CraftSystem literally changed the culture as the company began to hire more ‘racehorses’ and fewer ‘plow horses.’ Over the years that Dr. Craft’s employment tests were used, MetLife’s LIMRA agent retention rate improved significantly along with agent productivity. I recommend the Craft employment system to any company that wants to build a team of peak performers.

—Robert H. Baccigalupi CLU, ChFC, CLTC, Past President, GAMA International

"Our company has used the Dr. Craft’s personality tests for over ten years, and the most recent research has found his CraftMetrics Personality Inventory (CMPI) has a most significant and positive impact on our ROI. In our company, his assessment has consistently been a statistically strong predictor of identifying candidates that fit our firm’s culture and standards which have led to greater productivity. Dr. Craft’s book, Hire the Best! Motivate the Rest, shows how it is done and what you ‘can do’ to build a winning team of peak performers like we have."

—Edward G. Deutschlander, CEO-elect, North Star Resource Group

Dedicated to my wife, Carol, who provided the inspiration and motivation for this book and introduced me to levels of leadership I never knew existed.

Foreword

Robert H. Benmosche

Former Chairman of the Board and CEO, AIG and MetLife Inc.

Ifirst met Larry Craft in 1996 at a training session for several MetLife managers . The objective of the session was to provide each person with unique insights, self-tests, and concepts they could use to recruit , select , retain , and lead new agents . At the end of the day, what struck me the most about this session was Larry’s introspective technique. Everyone in the room (including me) gained tremendous insight into how our individual personalities can make us the leaders we are and, in some cases, the leaders we want to be. While much has changed since then, the ideas and approaches that Larry has shared with so many now-successful MetLife managers still ring true. What’s more, his strategies are all contained within these pages. In fact, this book’s own secret for success can be found in its straightforward, cut-to-the-chase approach.

Whether you have ten or one hundred thousand employees, Larry offers a practical approach for identifying your own qualities and characteristics and how to use them to recruit, retain, motivate, and understand your employees.

If nothing else, it will help you create a vision for your employees that will leave them standing tall, proud, and ready to follow you quickly.

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of what I have learned from a countless number of professionals who have contributed their knowledge and experience in a special way. Even more important, however, has been the contribution from a host of individuals who have touched my life in such a positive and provocative way, beginning with my wife, Carol. Her support kept me at my keyboard when my frustrations tested every ounce of my patience. Her intelligence and intuitive insight have been a true blessing in so many ways.

My father, W. O. Craft, gave me a role model as to the character of a true leader who built himself a winning team and empowered them to the highest levels of performance. His sacrifice and near-death experiences as a B-26 commander over the South Pacific during World War II gave me the inspiration for this book. If only I could be the leader that he is, not only to the hundreds of airmen who served him, but also to our family. My brother, Fred, was another proven leader in Vietnam who taught me the importance of purpose, persistence, and prioritizing (the third dimension of success). My sister, Diana, gave me the earliest motivation to understand human behavior and the needs of others. Each of our five children and sixteen grandchildren continue to help me grow in experience and knowledge of human behavior.

Dave LeLacheur, our programmer, graphic designer, and all-around consultant on test development, was an invaluable resource who donated countless hours of his time creatively providing solutions to the most complex problems.

I also thank those industry giants who provided the motivation and knowledge for this book—Bob Benmosche, Ed Deutschlander, John Asher, Steve Suggs, Randy Schwantz, and Ben Dominitz—who spent hours of their precious time providing wise counsel.

Introduction

We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats—and then they figured out where to drive it. The old adage People are your most important asset turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset, the right people are.

—Jim Collins

Author/Researcher, Good to Great

During my senior year at college, I entered the financial services industry and within a few years chose a career in sales management . My early attempts to understand human behavior must have been considered by some as a failure. I remember receiving a gag gift from a salesperson at our annual Christmas party. I opened the brown paper wrapping to find the book How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie . I only wished that he who had given the gift had been the only one to laugh, but unfortunately, that was not the case. The truth hurts. And sometimes it is a life-changing revelation.

Over the next few weeks, I read the book cover to cover and became fascinated by its insights into personality and motivation. Shortly after that, I decided to test the validity of its recommendations. I began to practice what it preached. I listened more, talked less, and began to ask why questions that helped to define human behavior. Most importantly, I shifted the emphasis of my conversations from the pronoun I to the pronoun you.

I remember a leadership workshop I attended at the company’s Philadelphia home office where I got a chance to practice what the Dale Carnegie book had recommended. I avoided talking about myself and focused on the interests of the other twenty new managers in the workshop. At the end of the three-day workshop, we were told that one of our participants would be selected as president of the class and make a presentation to the other participants and the executive officers of the company at a special awards banquet. Throughout my life, I had earned several awards, but few, if any, were the result of a popularity contest. Not only that, but the president of the company’s son was one of my classmates! When the ballots were counted, there was a tie. He and I were asked to step outside the room for a recount. When we returned, Dale Carnegie had won!

That evening, my presentation focused on every member of the class. I took us back to the future and pretended that we had returned for our twentieth reunion. I used every note I had taken on the personal interests of my classmates and projected them into leadership positions relating to their interests. While most speakers seek applause at the end of a presentation by solicitously saying thank you, I did just the opposite. I solicited applause for the host of the conference and the home office staff who had made it such a special learning experience for all of us. Then I discreetly returned to my seat. Within seconds, one of my classmates rallied the group to acknowledge my contribution with a standing ovation.

From that day on, I was hooked on the study of human behavior. I was fascinated by the fact that everyone wants to feel significant. Yet no two individuals have the same personality and motivation. I began to research and study these individual differences, and my discoveries changed my life forever.

In 1975, the employment testing program that was administered to every new applicant at the company where I worked was frustrating. The company was using LIMRA’s Aptitude Index Battery (later renamed The Career Profile™). It was measuring biodata information that was characteristic of peak-performing sales personnel. I noticed, however, that salespeople who passed the AIB may have had the skills, knowledge, and experience to be successful, but they too often lacked the drive and motivation to convert their experience into the immediate results required to justify their financing/salary programs.

The realization came to me that there was a profound need for a personality test that measured sales drive and motivation. I called numerous vendors without success. Most of the tests were created by psychologists in mental health institutes or universities. Only one questionnaire that could help me measure drive and motivation was found, but its cost was prohibitive because it required interpretations by PhD psychologists. None of the tests allowed managers to administer the test on their own computer and immediately retrieve the results for employee selection and development/coaching.

By 1978, I had created my own personality test. Initially, I used it for my own recruiting and selection, but then other companies realized that it could successfully complement the AIB and began to use it to hire their sales personnel. Because of its comprehensive coaching reports, LIMRA even joined in and began to market it in tandem with their Career Profile.

To market the questionnaire successfully, I created CraftSystems and, along with my staff, donated the initial use of the questionnaire to managers in exchange for personally reviewing their test results. Because of our marketing advertorials (Are you hiring Racehorses or Plow Horses?), literally dozens of managers each week chose to take the complimentary questionnaire and participate in the telephone interpretation of their results. Over a period of twenty-five years, I personally interpreted the results on over five thousand administrations, and our consulting staff matched or exceeded that number. At the same time, these managers administered over one million of our personality tests to their own applicants and employees. In addition, thousands of managers and CEOs have provided invaluable feedback at literally hundreds of my workshops and seminars.

This feedback led me to my most profound discovery: the importance of one powerful personality trait that repeatedly showed correlations with success in numerous job descriptions, especially commissioned sales positions. I must admit, I obsessed on trying to understand the origin and the significance of this trait. I continuously changed its label to better relate to the ongoing research. Over a period of 40 years, what began as Energy, soon became Emotional Intensity, and later Goal Orientation, and most recently Intensity/Drive. Unlike other researchers, I believed its origin was nature not nurture. More recently, this behavior has finally been accepted as a genetically based temperament found on the dopamine receptor 4 (DRD4) gene. (See J Psychiatry Neurosci. 2003 Jan; 28: 27–38). Twin and adoption studies research has cross-validated its genetic origin. In the early 1970’s I saw evidence that it was related to a salesperson’s goal-orientation and more specifically, earned commissions. This unique trait became the hallmark of the three personality assessments I developed.

The combined quantitative and qualitative data collected from these telephone interpretations, workshops, and employee testing provided the foundation for Hire the Best! Motivate the Rest. As a result, most of the ideas and recommendations are not original. The credit must be given