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Greetings!
It's extraordinary how some of the most powerful business, performance, and specifically Recruiting lessons can found in some of the strangest places, if you know how to pull the lessons out and apply them. My latest experience with this phenomenon came with my recent diagnosis of Diabetes. Our story today...
 ...begins with the pancreas. Do you know what its function is? Up until about four weeks ago, I surely didn't! But, when you get diagnosed with diabetes, you begin a journey that takes you inside your own body. Your pancreas is the organ that measures your body's blood sugar and produces and releases the amazing hormone insulin. Insulin allows your cells to extract sugar from your blood. Your pancreas is one of the most perfect machines in the world.
Diabetes is the disease that results when your pancreas gets out of whack in producing and releasing the insulin you need to control your blood's sugar count. Until less than 100 years ago, it was basically a death sentence. But, in 1920 insulin was discovered, and we started down the long road of learning how to provide diabetics with the insulin we need by external means. If medical science hadn't found and learned how to regulate insulin from the outside, I wouldn't be alive today to share this information with you or to apply it to recruiting mastery.
In fact, let's turn to recruiting itself right now. We can easily break the art of recruiting down to just two elements: Planning and Execution. Certainly, there are tactics and strategies for all the many elements of execution, from making first contact to introducing people to each other, and on from there to closing the deal, building long term, strategic account relationships and mastering your market. However, the greatest practitioner of recruiting tactics and strategies who fails to plan well will always be left behind by those who also master the art of planning. Today's lesson from diabetes will give you a brand new way to look at and master your planning challenge.
Two Different Types of Insulin... Two Different Types of Planning
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Computer generated image of six insulin molecules bound together for storage in the body.
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Meanwhile, back to the insulin story...the state of the art today employs two basic types of insulin. One is fast acting or "surge" insulin, and lasts for the relatively short period of time of about 2 hours or so after rapidly entering your blood stream. The second is longer term, slower acting or "basal" insulin, and lays down a base if you will, for about 24 hours. The fast acting insulin is what you take prior to meals so that your body doesn't spike out of control as you add sugar to your system. The slower acting is what helps you build a more stable, ongoing flow of sugar through the body over time.
By the way, sugar itself has a bad rap. Not only is it NOT a bad thing, it is the fundamental fuel you must have in order to function at all. The greatest sugar addict in your entire body is your brain, which, other than the oxygen it requires to burn the sugar it takes in, consumes nothing else. About a third of both the sugar and the oxygen your body consumes is burnt up by the brain alone. So, be clear, you have to have sugar in order to function at all. Interestingly, in Diabetes, as your blood fills up with sugar the problem is that the rest of your body is suffering from a depletion of sugar. The rest of your body is absolutely running out of energy, just like your car does if you don't fill up the tank with gas.
As I've brought these lessons over to recruiting, a problem I've known about for many years resurfaced, and I have to thank both Kirk Sears, owner of The Wilmington Group, and Brian Gavie, owner of Spartan Search Group, for their help in this analysis. The problem both Kirk and Brian shared with me - unbeknownst to each other until right now - was this. After building a plan for the week, Monday and Tuesday are frequently great performance days. But, come Wednesday, the plan built on Saturday or Sunday often runs out of steam. When that happens, Wednesday through Friday are, if not lost, then at least simply not high-powered performance days. As a result, they found it almost impossible to hit their goals for the week as a whole.
The Application
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Dr. Frederick Banting, the discoverer of insulin, as depicted in a painting by Robert Thom
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Do you see the answer? There must two types of planning, not just one. One type of plan we require is a Slow-Acting or Basal Plan. It appears that the natural cycle for a Basal Plan is about 2 days of recruiting performance. Then, for each period of immediate performance, we must also have a Fast-Acting or Surge Plan. The right period of time for this faster moving plan seems, to me, to be about 4 hours worth of work or roughly a morning or an afternoon.
Precisely as I require a short term burst of insulin with my meals, you require the ability to cover a short, but intense, period of work. You also need a Surge Plan, if not for each morning and afternoon, then at least for each day. These Surge Plans are absolutely necessary, but not sufficient. You have to also see your longer term performance for the entire week to be sure you're moving forward on all the fronts you must keep in play at all times. Your Basal Plan gives you the context, reason and direction required so that your Surge Efforts really do move you forward. Clearly, you require both types of plan.
Since making this connection to Diabetes I've come to suspect that your best method will be a Basal Plan covering Monday and Tuesday, completed either on Friday of the week before or put in place over the weekend; then, a second Basal Plan covering Wednesday and Thursday, completed Tuesday evening and considering your week's total outcomes.
What Do YOU Think?
Do you have any reactions or feedback to what I've written today? Are you ready to implement a planning protocol like the one I outlined below? Have you learned any extraordinary Recruiting lessons from a strange source? Just click REPLY and leave a comment. I'd love to hear from you!
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