Understanding Individuals

I have spent a lot of time studying human beings in a very broad and general capacity and have found that it is nearly impossible to fully understand people. However, I believe it is imperative for those in my industry (and really almost any vertical) to do whatever possible to try and really understand people as individuals.

Today, we like to group people into categories like Millennials, Gen Y-ers, Gen X-ers, Baby-boomers, top-performers, bottom-performers - the list goes on and on and on. Why do we do this? Because it's easier and it allows for us to market to the masses. Instead of truly taking the time to get to know people for who they are as individuals, we extract a few data points like age, gender, race, and/or success metrics and act like we have people figured out. It is highly concerning to me that this is our modern attempt at understanding people.

Understanding people is an incredibly challenging skill to hone. It's a skill that we're never formally taught. When I entered the workforce, I was horrible at understanding individuals. Like many others, I grouped people into buckets based on certain characteristics, qualities, and skills. Since I started my career in the world of transactional, volume-based contingent staffing, I typically tried to understand people via a sheet of paper (resume) and a 15 minute phone screen. I was unfulfilled because I wasn't allowed to better understand individuals for who they are as human beings through genuine human interaction.

The process of understanding individuals takes a lot of time, and oftentimes in business, we're not given an adequate time frame to really understand someone as an individual. It cannot be done on a 15 minute phone call. It requires us to step outside the walls of our own biases and subjective thoughts and more than anything else, it requires us to put ourselves in the shoes of others. Successful leaders are the best at this. I'm not talking about corporate supervisors that "manage". I'm talking about real leaders - the leaders who people will follow no matter what the circumstances are.

A friend of mine recently wrote about "8 Leadership Lessons from a Marine Officer and Business Leader" where he describes an impactful conversation he had with a 22-year Marine Corp veteran/Fortune 500 executive sales leader. The vet made a very interesting point in that "Leaders Focus on Individuals, Not Groups" and that "groups do not follow leaders, individuals follow leaders" (Leadership lessons from a marine officer and business leader ).

As a search partner, I do not believe I can be successful for my constituents unless I'm able to really get to know candidate prospects as individuals. It is the most challenging part of my job and it's one of the main drivers behind the structure of each search engagement I lead. I must be allowed the time to be able to get to know each candidate that I represent as an individual, a human and a professional. Operating this way allows for a higher success rate in matchmaking and also allows both for my client organization and client candidate to be fully educated on what to expect in their journey together.

When you think about the best leader you've ever met, or even worked for, do you believe they did whatever they could to try and understand you as an individual?

Brian Peterson
Owner/Principal
Cultura Solutions

Cultura Solutions is a strategic search firm in Minneapolis that partners with executive leaders to help bridge high-impact talent gaps. Cultura employs an extremely disciplined and transparent search process with a targeted sourcing model and outreach focused on genuine human-to-human interaction, allowing us to turn non-active prospects into interested candidates. Visit www.cultura-solutions.com for more information.