According to leadership coach and best-selling author Mark S. Lewis, business owners or CEOs must understand their job candidate’s motivations, values, and thinking processes before they can hire the right person to fit their company culture. In his latest book, “The Unthinkable Approach to Hiring,” Lewis provides a guide with interview prompts. This unique and successful method helps business owners and CEOs find an “A” player with the right attitude amongst their resumes.
Lewis’s “Unthinkable Approach to Hiring” interview tool includes 90+ prompts to help business owners and CEOs find the best candidates with the right skills for the job. The prompts are simple: the interviewer asks one to two words or phrases, revealing the job applicant’s thought process and tendencies. How each candidate responds will demonstrate how they think critically, solve problems, manage stress, and whether or not they will be a good cultural fit for the company. “This tool may help you successfully locate the star player with the MVP attitude that may have been lost in an enormous pile of applications,” Lewis says.
As a best-selling author, celebrated executive coach, inspirational speaker, thought-provoking business leader, and successful serial entrepreneur, Lewis maintains the same message of his first book, “Give a D*mm!: The Ticket to Cultural Change,” with his CEO Round Table Playbook. The playbook, designed to inspire and transform leaders teaches them essential skills in ten monthly sessions. “Participants will learn how to gain the upper hand in professional growth and benefit themselves and the organizations they represent. The course promotes collaboration between participants, which evolves into a valuable peer-to-peer exchange of different visions. I believe better ideas come to us when we focus our attention on people first,” Lewis said, “I teach business owners and CEOs new ways of thinking.”
Lewis built the CEO Round Table Leadership Course around the core values of education, empowerment, and empathy. Participants learn strategies in several areas, including building a plan for success and developing the best practices in sales, marketing, and human resources. The course also informs leaders how to inspire productivity through employee engagement or boost employee morale. Some of the “indispensable skills” leaders will learn to include better hiring approaches, reducing waste, increasing productivity, and setting goals aligned with core values. Throughout the ten round table discussions, leaders will also learn to:
- Craft a superior vision or mission statement,
- Set goals using the SMART method,
- Apply the best practices in human resources and human capital leadership,
- Develop best marketing and sales practices, understand financial statements,
- Discover new ways of thinking toward success, implement practices that improve employee morale, and
- Expand leadership through emotional intelligence and empathy.
The leadership course has developed a reputation for including something for every type of business owner. A sample agenda for the monthly round table includes networking for CEOs, ways for them to discuss their business goals, identify the challenges they want to address, and workshop their core values collectively.
Lewis recently explained the importance of his leadership course curriculum during an episode of the Beyond Confidence podcast with Divya Parekh. “The most important thing a business owner or CEO can do is to set business goals. You communicate these goals to the employees within your company, so they help you get toward those goals,” he said, “Goals have to be specific, measurable, obtainable, realistic, and timely. Make sure you measure where you are relative to those goals and then pivot accordingly due to the economic environment and other factors.”
