Today's lesson will focus on guideline 2, which is highlighted:
 
1.  Put On Your White Belt
2.   Build Your Plan
3.  Dedicate Yourself TO Your Plan
4.  Pick Up The Phone And Call
 

Last week we learned that we must put on our White Belt in the morning before the day's work commences. With our White Belts on, what is the first thing we must do?
 
Exactly as the earth's turning ensures a sunrise every day, so also must putting on your White Belts indicate the act of building your plan.  You must generate light for the coming day's work.  That light is your plan.  As the sun withholds no light or heat, you too must pour your entire self into your plan.
 
What does White Belt Recruiting teach us about planning?  The truth it teaches us is that we cannot know what we will do before we do it.  We can intend and we can try.  But, the real world does not bend to our will.  Often, we don't bend to our will, ourselves! 
 
This lack of knowledge in advance means that we must build the best plans we're able at this stage of development, and that demands simplicity. 
 
At its simplest, a plan is nothing more than a list of actions proposed for immediate execution.  If we were perfect Black Belt planners, we would suffer no separation between planning and execution.  A Black Belt plan would follow this simple formula:
 
1 Planned Action = 1 Executed Action
 
The allure of believing we can attain that ideal is great.  Your White Belt, however, provides you with complete protection against this tempting illusion.
 
Not only must you put on your White Belt in the morning when you build your plan, you must make sure you have it on throughout the day until you finish your work and begin your White Belt analysis.
 
What is White Belt analysis?  Simply, the comparison of executed actions to those that were planned.
 
Can you see the power of this daily ritual?  You seek eventual equality between planned and executed actions.  Your learning comes from looking at today's  plan as you contemplate what you did, what you did not do, what you did well and what you did not do well.
 
The White Belt Recruiter's heart cannot be hardened.  Your ego cannot overwhelm the truth.  You must see the reality of your work and you must fight the separation between planned and executed actions with all you are.
 
The inch of progress you seek is nothing more than reducing that gap, daily.
 
This is why you build your plan with such care and passion.  Doing this comes as close to assuring your survival and ultimate success as is possible, period.
 
We will follow other avenues of building our plan in the rest of this lesson.  But, be clear. Studying and reducing the separation between plan and execution is your first mission and is the reason you must build your plan with care and love each day.
 
Additional Planning Elements
 
When building your plan there are only two types of goals that matter.  All your efforts must result in communication or contact. This contact can be reduced to just two simple categories:
 
Connect and Learn About
Build Decisions Together
 
Before you can build decisions, you must connect and you must learn about each other.  People do business with people they know, like and trust.  If you don't connect and if you don't learn about each other, how will you ever get to know, like or trust each other? 
 
As you connect, and as you do so repeatedly, you will begin to know each other.  You'll filter through those who don't like you and whom you don't like.  And you'll find your way to building trust.
 
In building your ability to serve and support real decisions, one of the best steps you can take is to study the natural life cycle of a decision.  It starts out as attention and consideration, it grows through the stages of internal argument until a type of natural certainty arises and then, voila! It is a decision!  All decisions take the form of Yes or No.  Sure, we can argue that "Maybe" is also a decision, as is procrastination and simply not making a decision.  I of course, along with all old school sales trainers, teach that if it isn't yes it is no.  The great Jedi Master Yoda also agrees with this.
 
Your plan must delineate who you will contact. This means that building your plan is both a strategic and a tactical endeavor.
 
Even as a White Belt, you must not be shy to stake your claim in the strategy of your work.  I know you don't yet know what your strategies are and may even be confused between strategy and tactics in general.
 
If so, take comfort. Many Black Belt Recruiters are just as uncomfortable as you.  The place to begin is with the traditional business terms, Vertical and Horizontal analysis. 
 
What level of positions do you fill; what is the level of performer you place?  Where on the Corporate White Chart do your open positions and performers fall?  Rising up and down the Org Chart is the Vertical Axis of Recruiting Strategy.
 
Horizontal strategy is easily understood by picturing suppliers to the left, competitors in the middle, and customers to the right. 
 
Most recruiting strategies rightly seek to center you amongst competitors in your industry, right in the middle.  I support that. But please understand, strategy is the sort of choice you must ultimately make for yourself.  You may thrive with a "wider" strategy as well as with the "narrow" strategy most often indicated. 
 
In building your plan, your strategy is expressed in the form of today's tactics, which is little more than a list of people to contact.
 
It is still tactical, though, to consider the purpose of each call.  When you're contacting Candidates, your most basic question is: "Should you stay where you are or should you pursue a new opportunity?" 
 
As a White Belt you have a tremendous advantage to exploit. You honestly don't know if they should stay or go.  This is a great aid.  You can simply ask them, are they ready to move, or are they happy where they are? 
 
There are advantages to your White Belt.  None are of greater meaning than the fact that you do not know what is best for your candidates and actually must ask them.
 
Your best tactical focus with Hiring Managers should be defining and discovering the opportunities to improve if not catapult performance.  Here yet again, your White Belt is your greatest asset.  You do not know what performance is for your clients.  You don't yet know what performers themselves look like. 
 
As you gain your Black Belt, you will come to know true performance and how to build it better than any of your clients.  Now, though, you must rightly turn to each prospective hiring manager to discover and be taught what performance is and who the performers are.  You must be ready to study your clients' perspective so that you can find the people that they cannot find, yet be sure that those people meet your clients' definition of real ability and fit. 
 
Remember, you're not just seeking openings.  What you really are there to do is transform companies for the better. 
 
In closing, let us turn numerical. Keep the number of actions you attempt to plan as simple as possible.  Focus on such things as the calls you will initiate and complete. Then, as the sun sets upon your day of work, this number, and the count of your actual execution will teach you the art of planning.