Of all the management practices and skills, recruitment is the single most important. The other skills will work if and only if the right people have been recruited. Jack Welch said
"that nothing matters more in winning than getting the right people on the field"
Indeed Dan DiMicco, CEO of Nucor Steel goes as far as to say:
"Hire the right people, give them the resources and tools to do the job, and then get the hell out of their way. "
If you recruit the right people, then everything else is fairly plain sailing. If you recruit the wrong people, then everything becomes really hard. Recruiting the wrong people will damage a large company and destroy a smaller company. A manager's job is to get things done (willingly) through people. The essence of the managerial job is to inspire, teach, develop and ultimately to delegate to people of ever-increasing knowledge, skill and confidence. However, this depends upon having the right people on board first.
What we are recognising, through the concept of tough love is that 'niceness' is not the end point - that people can be challenged, exhorted, tested, extended and pushed a bit harder. Accepting low standards, 'for fear of upsetting someone', is not acceptable. As Stuart-Kotze says:
"The behaviour centres on getting people to take responsibility for themselves, to challenge themselves, to take risks and stretch themselves, and to grow and develop. "
Again, the right people can and will do this – given that they respect the organisation – while the wrong people will not.
Who Are the Right People?
This is less about skills and knowledge and more about values, beliefs and commitment. Lencioni's fable of the evil HR manager is a case in point and Drucker was always (and properly) chary of experts who, he thought, rarely resisted the temptation to 'polish stones.'
You can only truly delegate to people who share your values and beliefs and, in Lencioni’s fable, the HR manager clearly did not. Jack Welch has said that new hires must have three things - integrity, intelligence, and maturity.
As we say in the glossary of Theory Y:
... for most people work is as natural as play … people have capacity for self-control … motivation also arises from the higher order needs such as self-esteem and achievement and … people, if properly managed, will be more than willing to take on responsibility.
Is this true? Douglas McGregor came to believe that it was only true for some people. The objective of recruitment must to be find these ‘some.’
"I thought I could avoid being a 'boss'. ........... I could not have been more wrong. It took a couple of years, but I finally began to realise that a leader cannot avoid the exercise of authority any more than he can avoid responsibility for what happens to his organization. Moreover, since no important decision ever pleases everyone in the organization, he must absorb the displeasure, and sometimes severe hostility, of those who would have taken a different course. "
To the degree that the ‘right’ people are on board, to the extent that people share a common vision and hold values in common, to that degree decisions will be more easily taken and the degree of hostility will be less.
Extract taken from our Online Development Academy.
Exceptional post. Excellent tips for managers in the hiring process. Nice..
Posted by: Leadership Development | 03/07/2011 at 20:47