Utilizing Your Institution’s Sorting Hat
BY: Kenda Gatlin and Tiffany Shelton
Note: This is the second article in a two-part series. The first article, Life, Interrupted: How to Help Your Staff Maintain Their Sanity at Work, was posted on the PACRAO web site January 2008.
For those avid readers of the Harry Potter series, you know that the “sorting hat” assigns each new student to one of four houses: Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, or Slytherin. Each of these houses has certain characteristics which the hat senses within the student. As a supervisor, your role is much like the sorting hat – when hiring you have to determine what skills and abilities the new employee needs to bring to the position.
In our first article, Life, Interrupted, we touched on the importance of balanced living in the workplace. We focused on the importance of a cross-trained staff, flexible work schedules, celebrating outcomes through play and recognition, and emotional support and trust as keys to maintaining satisfied and loyal employees. In this follow-up article, we are going to explore the need to utilizing the special gifts and talents that employees bring with them to the workplace.
In order for an individual to fully utilize their strengths and talents within the workplace, they need to have the support and encouragement of the leaders in their office. By inspiration and motivation, leaders pull out the potential inside of their people.
Great managers, according to the Gallup research, have the following behaviors that set them apart from others:
1. They select an employee for talent rather than for skills or experience.
2. They set clear expectations and define the right outcomes rather than the right steps.
3. They motivate people, by building on their strengths rather than trying to fix their weaknesses.
4. As each employee grows, they encourage them to find the right fit for their strengths within the organization.
To have satisfied staff, leaders need to utilize each employee’s unique strengths and talents to best impact the organization. According to Dennis Bakke, author of Joy at Work, the key to joy at work is the “personal freedom to take actions and make decisions using individual skills and talents. By far the most important factor of what makes a workplace special is whether people are able to use their individual talents and skills to do something useful, significant, and worthwhile.”
SEVEN DEVELOPMENT TOOLS
Meet Torrey. A charming extrovert, he is frustrated by a dull routine and doing things by the book. He is spontaneous, energetic, and benefits from a lot of encouragement.
This is Ingrid. An introvert by nature, she has difficulty stopping in the middle of a project, and craves an orderly work environment. She also desires praise for her work, which she does patiently and carefully.
How does one manager supervise these two unique people?
By helping each staff member to understand their strengths and talents, the supervisor and co-workers benefit by being able to draw upon those skills. In SAS this has resulted in redesigned processes and revised job responsibilities. In Student Academic Services over the years we have dedicated time in our annual retreat and monthly staff meetings to professional development.
The development tools we have used include:
1. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®
“The MBTI is primarily concerned with the valuable differences in people that result from: where they like to focus their attention, the way they like to take in information, the way they like to decide, and the kind of lifestyle they adopt.” These indicators include the following scale:
Where do you prefer to focus your attention?
Extraversion: People who prefer extraversion tend to focus on the outer world of people and the external environment.
Introversion: People who prefer introversion focus more on their own inner world.
How do you acquire information?
Sensing: One way to “find out” is to use your sensing functions.
Intuition: The other way to find out is through intuition, which shows you the meanings, relationships, and possibilities that go beyond the information from your senses.
How do you make decisions?
Thinking: Thinking predicts the logical consequences of any particular choice or action.
Feeling: Feeling considers what is important to you or to other people.
How do you orient toward the outer world?
Judgment: People with a preference for judging prefer to be structured and organized and want things settled.
Perception: Those who prefer a perceptive process like to live in a flexible, spontaneous way.
It has been interesting to analyze the characteristics of the different areas of the office. For example, registration and records members tend to score higher on introversion than the academic counselors.
2. True Colors Personality Styles Training
Knowing personality type allows us to tune into ourselves and others so we respond appropriately, intelligently, and consciously. Awareness of the colors of each team member allows us to work together as a team to accomplish our personal goals as well as the goals of our organization. We can determine who to ask for help with a job based on the employee’s skills, and we can alleviate the suffering that sometimes goes along with functioning “out of color.”
The four colors and their characteristic include:
Blue Harmonious “To thine own self be true”
Orange Adventurous “Where’s the action?”
Gold Responsible “Proud to serve”
Green Curious “I’ll think about it”
*Adapted from Carolyn Kalil’s Follow Your True Colors to the Work You Love, Book Partners, Inc, Wilsonville, Oregon, 1998. Other tests exist that employ different colors and characteristics, but the essence of the styles is the same.
Generally, the registration and records unit scores highest on the gold/responsible versus the academic counselors who score highest on blue/harmonious. This result was not a surprise since registration and records main focus is on processes and paperwork, whereas the counselors work directly with the undergraduate student population.
3. Employee Motivator Chart
Charts such as this motivator chart help staff to explore what is most important to them at a given time. We have seen the results vary from the time a new staff member takes it right after receiving their undergraduate degree, to a couple of years later after they have some experience under their belt and priorities in their life have shifted. Actually, it is beneficial to retake all these tests every few years to retain an accurate reflection of each staff member.
RANK THESE IN ORDER OF WHICH IS MOST IMPORTANT / 1 to 13To be assigned interesting and challenging work
To be kept informed on work-related subjects
To think for myself
To have my ideas listened to
To be respected for my skills
To be given the opportunity to improve skills or learn new ones
To be recognized for my efforts
To be paid well
To have opportunities for advancement
To see the end result of my work and feel good about it
To be empowered, with the responsibility to get the job done well
To work for effective managers
To contribute to something you believe in
It is important to know what motivates your staff members. The easiest way to determine this is to ask them. When SAS was asked, they responded with:
· Autonomy, Trust and Support
· Positive Feedback and Recognition
· Great Working Environment
· Leave Room for Fun, Celebrate Triumphs
· Pride in Their Work, Feeling of Accomplishment
· Helping Others
· Give Credit to Whoever Performed the Work
· Communication – Freedom to Work with Others
4. Strength Survey
Within the first six months of becoming registrar, Ruth Adams compiled a strength survey that all of SAS contributed to. In the cover memo to the staff, Ruth wrote, “It is one of my goals for SAS to know and appreciate the strengths of our team. It is also my goal to provide opportunities for people based on the strengths we need to continue to serve students, staff and faculty well. The best way to do that is to share with one another what we believe we bring to this important work AND to consider the strengths of the rest of the member.
One of the keys to team success is knowing the strengths and gifts of the group to insure we are utilizing the right people in a decision or on a project. Each individual brings something unique and important to their work; everyone needs to know what their contribution is and how they impact SPU.”
Each staff member was asked to respond to the following questions:
· What skill, trait or strength do you bring to your job?
· Can you give an example of how you are able to utilize this gift?
· What about your work brings you joy?
· What contribution do you make to SPU?
· Give an example of when you felt respected, empowered or valued in your position.
Then each staff member was asked to respond to the following question about each of their co-workers:
· What skill, trait or strength do you appreciate about this individual as it relates to their work?
All responses were kept confidential. The summary included categories such as work skills, team skills, customer skills, personality/spirit and work ethic, as well as a compilation of the strengths of the SAS leadership. The ability to emphasize each other’s strengths helps the office as a whole utilize and benefit from them.
There is more to us and our strengths than just what our job description requires. It is beneficial to know what hobbies and interests staff members have. For instance, we have willingly utilized staff members who are talented at photography, baking, entertaining, calligraphy, graphic design and even pop culture trivia! We have sought lunchtime activities, such as movies and modified game shows to bring together offices within our vice-presidential area. Through these fun and inexpensive activities we have expanded our friendships and appreciation of offices outside of our own.
5. Generational Differences
There are currently four different generational groups in the work force. SAS is mainly comprised of the more recent generations, but we are blessed to have representation from all four, and the strengths that each group brings to our office.
Number of SAS staff that fall under specific generation category:
Traditionalist (born 1900-1945) 1
Baby Boomers (born 1946-1964) 2 (late Boomers)
Generation X-ers (born 1965-1976) 6
Generation Y-ers (born 1977-on) 7
All 13 SAS student workers fall under Generation Y.
The Generation Range working within our office
People born in these eras bring different values to the workplace.
Just as it is important to understand the incoming college students, it is important to understand the characteristics of each of your employees.
For some informative articles on understanding generations, we refer you to the following helpful articles written by fellow PACRAOans:
Leading the Next Generation by Ruth Adams: http://www.pacrao.org/docs/resources/writersteam/LeadingtheNextGeneration.doc
Understanding the Millennial Generation by Alicia Moore
http://www.pacrao.org/docs/resources/writersteam/UnderstandingTheMillennialGeneration.doc
Focusing on the specific generation does not diminish the need to share the stories and knowledge from those who have been in the office. A deeper respect of coworkers and of the advances in technology develops when those who worked in SAS share stories about what work was like before the internet, voice mail, and paper transcripts. Max DePree in his book Leadership Is An Art refers to this as “tribal storytelling.” For the newer employees, they gain a better historical perspective and the “why” behind a process. This deeper understanding allows us to limit history repeating itself in what could be a bad decision.
6. Retreats/Staff Meetings
It is critical to have established goals and objectives for each meeting, to keep people motivated. We all know of meetings that we regret attending because we feel our time could be better spent elsewhere. A good rule of thumb is that if it can be handled via email, it should be.
The formats of our staff meetings and retreats have been influenced by staff input over the last few years. Two years ago, we focused on teamwork within the office, based on requests from staff for additional training. Ruth Adams, in her PACRAO Writer’s team article, “Leading the Next ‘Y’ Generation,” said “It was a step I would never have taken if they hadn’t stepped out and took the initiative to let me know this was a need.” This past year the focus has been on areas that staff wanted to improve in such as tips for being more organized and ways to better handle stress.
Other benefits of a staff meeting or all-day retreat include a time of connection among the staff, and uninterrupted time away from their desk. From experience we have seen great ideas evolve because the staff is freed from the daily stress and distractions of an in-office meeting.
At our last Registration and Records retreat we set our goal to revamp our FERPA training for the university. For the past 15 years, we have utilized a training video that we wrote and filmed on campus. In the past couple of years we moved the video into Blackboard and new staff and faculty are able to be trained via an online tutorial. Both of these projects were very time consuming, and nobody entering our retreat time was excited about updating the video clips to provide new scenarios. Our retreat allowed us enough time to brainstorm all options. Through this, one member suggested creating a FERPA website instead of changing our video. On this site, we will keep FERPA training scenarios updated, and staff and faculty will be required to review these scenarios as part of their annual FERPA refresher. This was a better and easier –to-maintain option than anyone expected, and it only occurred because we allowed ourselves time to brainstorm the best option.
In the past we have utilized great team-building activities from a book called “Team-Building Activities for Every Group” by Alanna Jones. We have written “Glory Stories” where the objective was to share positive traits of fellow group members through a written story. Another activity was to build a totem pole tower using an empty paper towel roll for a base and creating an animal that characterized each group member’s unique quality.