💃 Hire Character, Train Skill - Salesforce Style!! 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! "Hire Character, Train Skill," the Linkedin-famous quote that guarantees 1000 likes! Is it the skill-less who are doing all the liking? That is not the point of today's post, so let's get to the point! 🎯

Agenda for today includes

• Hire Character, Train Skill - Salesforce Style!

• Daily Principle

• All the Memes

Hire Character, Train Skill - Salesforce Style!

We will assess this from the role of a Salesforce Admin.

First, let's align on common definitions of Character and Skill -

• Character - Principles, values, life view. If an individual has good core principles, quality values, and a positive view of life, then they have good character. Common attributes are - high-integrity, honest, personable, confident, and humble.

• Skill - Ability to do a thing. If you have great skill in basketball, then you can dribble, pass, and shoot well, or at least some combination of these; you are an effective basketball player.

Next, let's very briefly define the responsibilities of a Salesforce Admin -

An admin's responsibility is, per Salesforce.com, to support users, manage data, maintain security standards, and maintain the platform. Let's break this down -

• Users - Workers who execute a defined business process to meet a business objective.

• Data - The input of the user or contact (via webform, etc). May be modified by automations or users.

• Security - Ability for users to See, Create, Read, Edit, and/or Delete data.

• Maintain Platform - Support, enhance, troubleshoot.

So an effective admin will need to have an understanding of

• Business objectives

• Business processes

• User-specific processes (roles/profiles)

• Data model/schema, and the sorting and categorizing of the data

• Exception handling (troubleshooting)

• Automations (enhance)

• New release notes and their impacts to their org (support)

It will take a decent amount of skill to be proficient in some of these, and a significant amount of skill to have mastery of them all. How much overhead, time, money and resources, is a business willing to invest to skill-up a High Character, Low Skill Admin so that they can satisfy their responsibilities?

With their confidence and high-integrity, a High Character, Low Skill worker will no doubt get there faster than a Low Character individual. Of course, High Character AND High Skill is most desirable, but if this isn't an option, is the next best thing to have the High Character, Low Skill person over a Low Character, High Skill person? They each present their own set of challenges.

Conclusion

Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are not winning any character awards, but their skill has taken them to legendary heights. Tim Tebow and Popeye Jones are both high character, low skill (in professional sports measurements) players who had minimal professional success.

Ultimately, balance is key. High character can make up for low skill, and vice versa; but tipping the scales is not ideal. Someone who has solid character and solid skills will make the most immediate impact AND have a positive long-term outlook in terms of contribution and maintaining good relationships.

Daily Principle

If you had to give someone a 30 second explanation of who you are, what would you say?

There are two principles at play here - self awareness and distillation of thought.

What are the characteristics and attributes that define you? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What makes you laugh or cry? What makes you weird or exceptional? What makes you...you?

What do you want your audience to take away from this and how will you achieve that? Which words will you select that are most effective? What will you start with, and end with? What needs to go into the 30 seconds and what will be left out?

Practice your 30 second introduction. Write it down. Recite it to the mirror. Recite to your friends and family. Set yourself up for success when the opportunity arises for when you are pitching yourself.

Most importantly - be comfortable with change. As you iterate and refine this, your talk-track will constantly change, and that's ok.

and now....Your Daily Memes