EP# 129: Is There a Formula For Success: The $100 Million Question (Geoff Smart, CEO ghSMART, Best Selling Author)

Is there a formula for success? This week’s Paper Napkin Wisdom guest, Geoff Smart – CEO of lead consulting firm ghSMART – proposes just that . Dr. Smart, the best selling author of Who: The A Method for Hiring and the newly released Power Score: Your Formula for Leadership Success, holds a PhD in Psychology and has spent the last twenty years collecting and synthesizing data from over 3000 leaders and their teams.
While most books on leadership suggest that most prominent trait of successful leaders is honesty, Dr. Smart discovered that this wasn’t necessarily a special trait, and that most people (successful or unsuccessful) rated themselves highly in this category.
The Power Score (P x W x R) takes a look at the empirical data surrounding common traits of leaders and proposes that if teams are good at prioritizing, hiring the right people and building the right relationships, they are twenty times more likely to be successful than if they don’t have these traits. The concept was birthed by his publisher, who suggested that Dr. Smart take a more holistic approach to his new book as opposed to just providing tips on hiring as he had for his previous work “Who”. “The formula is multiplicative,” Dr. Smart explains, and akin to an athlete performing in a triathlon — he or she must be good at all three in order to be successful.
The “P” stands for prioritizing and refers to the need for leaders and their teams to be equally plugged into the top goals and objectives of the organization. According to Dr. Smart, only 24 percent of leaders in the sample were good at prioritizing, while 90 percent said they had too many priorities. Working collaboratively to establish goals and a step-by-step process to achieve them is crucial to the success of any team.
The next letter in the equation, “W”, stands for Who. This value represents the team members themselves and evaluates whether they are all-stars or average from the beginning of the hiring process. To dig a bit deeper, Dr. Smart suggests asking the following questions prior to hiring a new team member:

• What does performance mean? What will it take for this person to be an all-star in this role?
• How was this candidate sourced? Was it a referral from an internal party?
• Am I asking the right interview questions and avoiding any hypothetical statements or situations in the interview?
• Am I selling this person on how great of a fit it is, how much time they’ll have with family, how much freedom they’ll have, the amount of money they’ll make and how fun it is to work here?

Because the majority of managers worldwide only have around a 50% retention rate for the staff they hire, these questions are pertinent in order to ensure the new hire will bring value to their new team.
Finally, “R” stands for relationships. “Simply stated,” Dr. Smart explains, the right people need to be talking at the right time.
Check out the latest podcast and Dr. Smart’s new book to learn more about the formula for success!

Check out this episode!