"a business will live or die by the commitment, confidence and competence of its people"

Mark Shields Best of the Best Award Acceptance Speech Barclays International Conference 2006

The HPO and Exceptional Individuals

HPO'S have a tendency to focus on recruiting a certain type of individual. The qualities they look for include having strong natural rapport building skills, great communication skills, good listening skills, and individuals that have a natural interest in other people. Its the potential and experience a future member of staff may have thats important, not necessarily the qualifications they hold.

Building rapport is the process of developing that connection with someone else. Being able to join them in their map of the world. Building Rapport is a Critical Selling Skill It is the foundation of a relationship based on connection and affinity. People have a natural preference for doing business with people whom they can get to know, like, trust, buy, then refer. The know, like, trust, buy and refer model is referred to later in the course.

Building rapport is one of the most important skills HPO's look for when recruiting sales & service staff. It is featured heavily in the NLP training throughout the course.

Common Skills Of HPO Individuals

• A HPO creates a learning organisation by continuously investing in training and upgrading of skills, establishing good management development and top-of-the-line training programs, and by constantly identifying and accessing new competencies.
• A HPO attracts exceptional people with a can-do attitude who fit the culture, nurtures highly talented employees and gives bright people space to change and excel.
• A HPO attracts exceptional individuals who take full responsibility for delivering on their income targets, are happy to be fully accountable and are great team players.
• A HPO engages and involves the workforce by involving people in developing vision and values, in interactive discussions and the decision-making process and by communicating issues and developments important to the organisation.
• A HPO creates a safe and secure workplace by giving people a sense of safety (physical and psychological) and job security and by not laying-off people (until it cannot be avoided).
• A HPO masters the core competencies and is an innovator in them by deciding and sticking to what the company does best, keeping core competencies inside the firm and outsourcing non-core competencies.
• A HPO develops people to be resilient and flexible and recruits a workforce with maximum flexibility.
• A HPO aligns employee behavior and values with company values and direction at all organisational levels by translate vision into local objectives and letting individuals realise they have accountabilities and obligations to themselves and the organisation.
• A HPO empowers people and gives them freedom to decide and act by devolving decision making authority and giving autonomy to organisational members to operate, within clearly established boundaries and constraints of what is allowed and what not.
• A HPO establishes clear, strong and meaningful core values and makes sure they are widely shared within the company with all staff.
• A HPO develops and maintains a performance-driven culture by fighting inertia and complacency, challenging the enemies of a winning mindset, focusing strongly on getting high excellence in whatever the organisation does, and stimulating people to achieve high performance.
• A HPO creates a culture of transparency, openness and trust with its people by establishing a shared understanding, openly sharing information and fostering informality.
• A HPO creates a shared identity and a sense of community by ‘uniting the tribe’, cultivating a feeling of corporateness and adopting and fostering an ‘all for one, one for all’ mentality.
• A HPO maintains good and long-term relationships with all staff, teams and stakeholders by networking broadly, being generous to society, and creating mutual, beneficial opportunities and win-win relationships.