In my introductory post, 12 Vital signs of Organizational Health, I listed the 12 signs. Here is sign #7:
A healthy organization excels at finding, nurturing, and keeping its talent. (“The right people…”).
The premise is simple. If you hire incompetent, untalented, unprepared people with a mediocre work ethic, you’re going to have a pretty unhealthy organization.
I have a theory – nearly every “personnel” problem is actually a mistake made at the hiring end. The better we get at picking the right people, the better we get at moving forward and having a really healthy organization.
But picking the right people is genuinely hard to do. People who are hired to hire people, people who are “professionals,” have not mastered this. Here’s a startling reality check: In 2010: only 18% of HR Managers say they are “winning the war for talent.” Run that out, and you realize that over 80% of hires are not quite what is needed/wanted. In fact, a friend of mine quotes a study he read years ago that says this: “if you took a stack of resumés, threw them into the air, and grabbed the ones you could as they floated down, and hired those people, your success rate would be about the same as the typical HR hiring track record.”
Just ask yourself this question: have you ever worked with, or interacted with, a person that you just knew was not up to the standards needed? My bet is that your response would be: “you should see my long list…”
(And by the way, your name might be on someone else’s list of “disappointing folks to work with.” You know, “physician heal thyself…”).
Here’s the formula:
Hire the right person.
Give them the additional training they need to get better at their job.
Give them refresher training constantly, because people have to keep their skills up.
And, make sure that they have the right “chemistry” to get along with the folks they work with.
And, encourage them in their work.
And, make the work place a little more fun that drudgery.
In other words, hire the right person, then nurture that person in his or her work, then never take them for granted!
Oh, and find a way to break down those silos. Make sure that those “right people” from one department interact with those other “right people” from other/all departments. You want your best people interacting throughout the company, so that new and good ideas are born and pursued.
One very sharp CEO that I know reminded me that there are two kinds of people to hire: some hires, you hire to simply do a “job.” As long as you find competence, honesty, and enough work ethic to get the job done, don’t invest too much time in such folks. But, for the positions that require full participation with the team, invest a lot-of-time in these folks.
You can’t not take this seriously.
There are plenty of books to read to help you pick the right people But the one I like the best in my recent reading is The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else by George Anders. Here are a couple of excerpts:
The best experts in any field constantly stretch their horizons so they can do something new. That is how they stay sharp. Nobel laureates do this; great composers do this—and so do the savviest judges of human potential. They refuse to become so habit-bound that familiar customs unthinkingly turn into ruts. Instead, they keep analyzing their own track records, looking for new opportunities and unexpected misfires. Doing so helps turn agility and continual improvement into a way of life.
Knowing what to do when a jagged-résumé candidate enters the picture is the single biggest differentiator between leaders with a gift for picking winners—and those who keep wrong-footing themselves.
And, according to Anders, you’ve got to remember this – you are hiring for a specific job. You have to get so many things right…
Solving the talent puzzle means looking for exactly the right ethos that’s vital for a particular job—rather than trying to match candidates to a long list of universal virtues that might or might not be especially relevant.
Try to hire the same people everyone else wants—without any differentiators—and you soon discover that conformity is a tax.
So, as you progress on the path to genuine health for your organization, make sure you pay attention to the people around you. The people you hire become the team members that lead others, and then become the executive team that shapes the strategy. So, as I have said, you’ve got your work cut out for you.
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Strong suggestion: Read The Rare Find: Spotting Exceptional Talent Before Everyone Else by George Anders. And/or you might want to order my synopsis of this terrific book. My synopsis comes with a multi-page comprehensive handout, and the audio of my presentation from the First Friday Book Synopsis. Order from our companion web site: 15minutebusinessbooks.com.
First Friday Book Synopsis 