Marc Estes

If you have been involved in leadership for any length of time, you know that ‘who’ you have involved on your team is as important as ‘what’ the team is created to accomplish.  You can have a great vision, but the wrong people will greatly hinder your ability to fulfill it. You can have an abundance of resources, but a lack of the right personnel can squander these resources in a hurry derailing the team from fulfilling it’s intended purpose. 

Yesterday, I picked up Jim Collins’ new book, “How the Mighty Fall”  (see below) and once I began reading, I just couldn’t put it down. I read it from cover to cover. You may recall, his last book,  “Good to Great” was a best seller that focused on how good companies could implement key principles that would move them toward becoming a great company (I highly recommend this book for every leader).  His new book took the opposite approach and dealt with how great companies made critical mistakes that ended in their demise.  It is surprising just how clear these mistake are in principle, but how many leaders fall trap to them in every day life.  One of these key areas was  having the wrong people on the team.  Here are some keen insights from his book that should be considered as you develop your teams: 

1. The Right People Fit with the Company’s Core Values – Great companies build almost cult-like cultures, where those who do not share the institution’s values find themselves surrounded by antibodies and ejected like a virus. People often ask, “How do we get people to share our core values?” The answer: you don’t. You hire people who already have a predisposition to your core values and hang on to them.

 

2. Right People Don’t Need to be Tightly Managed – The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you might have made a hiring mistake. If you have the right people, you don’t need to spend a lot of time “motivating” or “managing” them. They’ll be productively neurotic, self-motivated and self-disciplined, compulsively driven to do the best they can because it’s simply part of their DNA.

 

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, without complaint. Equally,  this means that they take great care in saying what they will do, careful to never overcommit or to promise what they cannot deliver.
5. The Right People are Passionate about the Company and its Work – Nothing great happens without passion, and 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 other people who contributed to the success and take a little credit themselves. Yet when things go awry, they do not blame circumstances or other people for setbacks and failures; they point in the mirror and say, “I’m responsible.”