One of my favorite assignments has been to visit my alma mater and recruit graduating students. It’s been fun to sit across from them as they start their careers and give them a sense of what is possible in the corporate world. They are eager, bright and full of potential. Who knows what they will accomplish as they follow their passions and develop their skills?

I fondly remember my own college interviews. My interests came down to two very good choices of solid companies. Both did the kind of work that interested me. Both were in good geographic locations. Either might have worked out well. I chose the Texas company and never looked back. All these years later, I can state that I was well rewarded for my career there. I learned, contributed and gave back to the company many things.

The inducement to work for one company or another comes down to the factors that are important to you. As I mentioned, I cared about the focus of the company, my specific assignment, where I would live and, of course, the pay. More or less standard concerns, I would guess. That’s the way I was recruited and it was the way that I recruited others that were starting out in corporate life.

What about recruiting for the competitive intelligence function that you are building? Why do you need other people? What inducements make a difference to the people you want to recruit? And how is the best way to approach your candidates?

In the formation process of the competitive intelligence function, it will be essential to recruit help from within the company.

Here are three reasons why that is true.

1. There is too much to do for one person. A prior step of The Human Side of Competitive Intelligence series dealt with expanding the scope. If that step was successful, you are now into areas beyond what you started doing. Engaging with other senior managers (besides your sponsor) will introduce a wide range of topics. Your choice will be either to accept the new assignments (which means that you will need more resources) or reject them because the people to help are not currently identified. I suggest that you accept and put a staffing plan together. More about this later in this article.
2. The needed knowledge (e.g., financial, marketing, technology, business development) is unlikely to reside in one person’s head. The exciting challenge of competitive intelligence is the diversity of subjects involved. The valuable competitive intelligence work comes from people that can integrate the disparate information into patterns and stories. Given a choice, this is where you want to focus. The implication is that you will work with a range of experts that have narrower focused than yours. Your task is to identify and begin nurturing these contributors. Make is easy and rewarding for them to supply you with information.
3. Less intuitively, it is important to cede ownership of some of the work to cement the support for competitive intelligence. Even if you could do everything, you wouldn’t want to do so. The reason is that you are after meaningful change in the organization’s strategies to make the business more successful. Most businesses involve many people that must understand and support change. And there are not people more interested in these topics than the people that feel ownership. Your job, after recruiting for scale and specialties, is to recruit owners. One way you do this is to give them some say in the direction of the analysis and the interpretation of the results.

How do you recruit someone to help with competitive intelligence?

My wonderful son stood in front of me excited to be retelling the adventures he had at church camp last week. He was full of words and stories. I just love hearing him talk about his experiences and answer questions. I asked him about his favorite food, the friends he made, the different play activities, the bus trip and so on.

Did he remember the things that his mother told him before he left on the trip? For instance, did he always put on sunscreen (the Texas sun is bright and very hot in July)? Yes, he assured me that he always had done so.

Did he remember to always wear his swim shirt to the lake? That’s when he averted his eyes, shifted his feet and changed his tone. “Well,” he said “I only went to the lake twice.” And then he grinned at me and I knew. TRANSLATION: Dad, I forgot about the shirt.

When you know someone really well, you can often sense their message from many cues that are more telling and accurate than their words. All of the other signals give them away. In fact, in a strange way, the actual words are distracting as often as they are informative.

Interpersonal signals abound among those we know best (and that know us). I use this often with close friends.

We might be listening to a speaker when one of us will signal the other with a lifted eye brow (TRANSLATION: can you believe this speaker?). A casual flicker of the hand (TRANSLATION: this is not important), a half smile (TRANSLATION: I’ll tell why it’s amusing later) or rolling eyes (TRANSLATION: we are wasting our time) can all be quite meaningful when interpreted correctly.

In competitive intelligence we can use the same signals (except that our subjects are other companies).

There are many lessons that I have learned in my adult life. One of them had to do with saying, “I don’t know.” Who knows why this was so difficult? I just know that years went by after I got married and my wife swears that she never heard those words from me.

“Where is the place that we are going?” she would ask. My answer was always, “Don’t worry, we’ll find it.” My motto was that we weren’t lost until we ran out of gas. (Note: If you have the same motto, always leave home with a full tank.)

Well, the cure for my malady was children. We have two and they are questioning machines.

“Dad, how much does that building weigh?”

“Daddy, is a gazelle faster than a horse? Which one is taller? Which one lives longer?”

“Dad, who was the best baseball player ever? Who was the second best? …”

Questions can tumble from their mouths faster than water goes over Niagara Falls. There is no defense except to admit the obvious – I don’t know. (Perhaps I know a few things. I am pretty sure that a horse is usually taller than a gazelle.)

It occurs to me that we learn a lot about life and business from the questions that are asked. Sometimes we also learn from the questions that are not asked. Of course we learn from the answers. How an organization deals with questions, answers and change say a lot about them.

What can you learn about a business by their competitive intelligence questions? Here are some ideas.

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Certainty is a virtue, isn’t it?

Where would we be without confident, black and white answers to important questions? There is great comfort in knowing something to be true or in taking a position that does not need to be reexamined each day. So, we test our beliefs and fix them in our minds. Without such a process, life would be too incredibly complex. It is enough to deal with the new things without having to question what we already know. Makes sense to you?

And yet, unyielding certainty can be a trap.

When my daughter was young, it was a regular event every few months for her to ask if she could have a dog. My answer was always the same, “No, Sweetie, a dog is a lot of responsibility and work.” She cheerfully and consistently accepted my short answer (which never varied) for years. Then she approached me one night while I was sitting on the couch with my son. “Daddy,” she said, “could I have a dog?” Well, the usual tape started running, “No, Sweetie, a dog is a lot of responsibility and work.” When I resumed talking with my son, I could see out of the corner of my eye that my daughter had not moved. Turning back toward her, I could also see that there were tears in her eyes. Off she ran upstairs. My son and I exchanged bewildered looks. “What was that all about?” he asked.

That night as I was putting my daughter to bed, I found her lying there still affected by my answer. I asked her if she was upset at me. Without making eye contact, she nodded her head “yes.”

Quietly, I said, “But, Sweetie, you know that I always say ‘no’ when you ask for a dog. A dog is a lot of responsibility and work.” (Perhaps if I whispered the words she would accept them better.)

Turning to look at me directly, she delivered to me an important lesson.

“Daddy, you could have said ‘maybe’.”

There is so much simplification that occurs in strategy and competitive intelligence work.

Much of that simplification is necessary because the competitive environment is simply too complex to think that analysis can start from scratch each day. So, we analyze, categorize and prioritize so that the few most critical issues are worked hardest. Over time, the people that are involved know and can repeat the common answers to both the lower priority issues and those that are getting special attention. Indeed one measure of the success of a competitive intelligence program is the general awareness of the conclusions of the competitive intelligence efforts. What’s the problem with all of this?