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Look hard at your company. How did you fare with the motivation flash cards above? A solid score means you've been actively managing your environment. It will make hiring and keeping the remarkable people you need far easier. You are more prepared than before to see which traits and values really make a difference in your organization.

For instance, in building the perfect countertop display for a trade exhibition, is it technical skill that matters most or is it the ability to build in actual talking points to facilitate the selling process on the trade show floor? You know what's best for your firm and it's you who can now tailor your recruitment practices to find that person. Act on what you know.

The following observations are on traits and values and their impact on the business you worked so hard to build. Hiring people with the right traits will lift your dream, while the wrong traits can burn it down.

• Studies show that the most promoted employees have high job performance, exhibit good corporate citizenship behavior and are committed to the organization.
• Additional research shows that promotions occured where employees viewed the organization's problems as their own.
• Happy people are promoted more often than neutral or negative people.
• Humor goes hand-in-hand with happiness — is any quality more important than a sense of humor in these times?
• There is a direct relationship between your employee's attitude, customer service and employee turnover, but it gets really out of hand when people with shared negative attitudes get together. It becomes a brush fire on a dry, windy day. In those situations, you often find real trouble that hijacks morale and crashes productivity.

There aren't many revelations here but far too often we overlook the obvious. Have you found a way to get your employment candidates talking about these important topics? Do you ask situational interview questions about loyalty, volunteerism or how they work to improve (or measure) their own productivity? It's perfectly legal to ask someone if they're happy or what it would take to make them act as if your company were their company. This is how you find remarkable people even if you don't have a big company, a fancy conference room or the biggest paychecks in town.

To further emphasize what you've heard here before, great hiring has great impact. Many candidates are overlooked or discarded for the wrong reasons. If you want to continue managing people more than your workplace environment, then rededicate yourself to working hardest at managing your selection of new employees — make it a sacred mission. Remember, a perfect step reached at an early stage (hiring perfection) is elemental and has a greater impact on your world than a perfect step performed at a later stage (i.e., withholding a raise from a poisonous employee is late-stage perfection). Get good early and you will manage to be successful!

About the author:
Chris Traynor, SPHR, is the director for Whip-Smart Management Consulting, Wayne, N.J., and has 25 years of experience in the solid surface industry as a consultant to fabricators, distributors and manufacturers. He can be reached at ctraynor@whip-smart.com.