GETTING THE RIGHT PEOPLE IN KEY SEATS
There is nothing more important in an enterprise than HR. It isn’t great assets or great ideas that create value and wealth—it’s the people in your organization that do that. Once you get past the point of being a sole practitioner, the first hire is your most important decision.
Now I am a terrible judge of character—I like everyone so the most important decision I made when I ran Terrace Investments Ltd. (the first parent company of the Ottawa Senators) was to hire Cyril Leeder, a CA, an excellent executive and, fortuitously, a good judge of character. Cyril remains with the Sens to this day as the COO of both the team and the building (Scotiabank Place). My next best decision was to let Cyril hire EVERYONE else.
Jim Collins (author of classics like Good to Great and Built to Last) published part of his research in a recent issue of BusinessWeek (May 25, 2009). His findings are of such importance that I repeat them here and strongly recommend you read them, twice—whether you are running a SMEE or a charity or a Not-For-Profit or a major Fortune 500 firm, I think Jim has got it exactly right.
We are going through a process where I work—there is debate going on about how much management is enough or too much. I tend to fall on the not too much end of the scale and some others think that staff need much more hands on, daily management. While I agree that there is no such thing as a ‘fire and forget missile’ in management and that you as a manager must always follow up, I don’t want to be around people who need to be told what to do every day or worse, five or six times a day.
That is why at the University of Ottawa’s Telfer School of Management, we are teaching entrepreneurship not only to would-be entrepreneurs but also to intrapreneurs who will take the entrepreneur’s skill set into established organizations. Skills like being a self-starting, self-correcting executive who initiates things, completes things, constantly innovates in both big ways and small ways, learns new stuff, adopts and adapts best practices from wherever they arise (from colleagues, direct reports and superiors to competitors) plus knows how to use smart marketing, social marketing and guerrilla marketing, knows how to get launch and pre-launch clients and how to raise bootstrap capital, can squeeze a dollar and make it go further, understands the cash flow cycle and the cash conversion cycle, tries to collect early and pay later, can build a successful business model with a strong value proposition which also includes many of the above attributes; all of this is crucially important to organizations of all stripes.
Anyway, here is what Jim Collins has to say:
“The specifics can vary, even within companies, but our research delivered six important traits that identify ‘the right people’”, Jim Collins, Author of Good to Great and Built to Last (as quoted in BusinessWeek, May 25, 2009.)
1. The right people fit the company’s core values:
Great companies build cultures in which those who don’t share the institution’s values are surrounded by anti-bodies and ejected like viruses. People ask: “How do we get people to share our core values?” The answer: Hire people already predisposed to them – and keep them.
2. The right people don’t need to be tightly managed:
When you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you may have made a hiring mistake. You need not spend a lot of time “motivating” or “managing” the right people. It’s in their DNA to be productively neurotic, self-motivated, self-disciplined and compulsively driven to excel.
3. The right people understand that they do not have “jobs” – they have responsibilities:
They grasp the difference between their task list and their true responsibilities. The right people can complete the statement, “I am the one person ultimately responsible for…”
4. The right people fulfill their commitments:
In a culture of discipline, people view commitments as sacred – they do what they say they’ll do, without complaint. Equally, this means that they take great care in saying what they will do, careful never to over commit or to promise what they cannot deliver.
5. The right people are passionate about the company and its work:
Nothing great happens without passion. The right people display remarkable intensity.
6. The right people display window-and-mirror maturity:
When things go well, the right people point out the window, giving credit to factors other than themselves; they shine a light on others who contributed. Yet when things go awry, they do not blame circumstances or other people; they look in the mirror and say: “I’m responsible.”