This Issue: Get the Best People You Can

After all is said and done, more is said than done.

-- Aesop

One of the most important things I’ve learned is to watch what people do rather than listen to what they say. Sometimes I think people have no idea what they’ve talked about, judging on what I see them doing. It reminds me of a split personality, with the mouth going one way and everything else going the other way. One big step towards success is to get the words and action working in tandem. You will also find that when you do this it will save you a lot of time and energy.

I’ve said before that every new hire is a gamble because you never know exactly what you’re getting. Some people with great credentials don’t deliver, and some people with not so great credentials turn out to be great. There is simply no guarantee when it comes to people, and watching them in action turns out to be the proving ground. That’s why on The Apprentice, the candidates are told they are entering a job interview that will last for months. It’s a great way to see potential employees in action, versus listening to how great they think they are.

One quality of leadership is knowing your subject. That also extends to knowing people. It’s always a good idea to assume the worst because then you might be pleasantly surprised. I’ve had some solid gold people and some real scoundrels, and somehow it manages to balance out. But my expectations are realistic--not every person is going to be a perfect match. No matter how much you want to trust people, you still have to be a little paranoid.

That sounds tough, and it is, but never expect everything or everyone to be easy. To be blunt, we all have to watch out for ourselves. That includes you and that includes me. It’s best not to trust people too much because that’s just setting yourself up for some nasty surprises. I graduated from college in 1968, so I’ve had a fair share of experiences with people by now. If I were to tell you they were all great experiences, I’d be lying. I’ve met the gamut of personalities, and some of them had some disorders, to put it nicely. These disorders don’t always surface quickly, so it’s best to protect yourself from them to begin with. Be circumspect, if not paranoid, with people.

I’ve had people who have worked for me for over 25 or 30 years, so you may be wondering why I talk about being paranoid. It’s another way of saying “don’t take anything for granted.” I don’t take my solid gold employees for granted because they don’t take me for granted either. It’s a two way street and it works best that way. If you can aim for that, that’s the best way to go. I have evidence that it can happen.

On the other hand, I’ve had some complete wash-outs, people who managed to prove themselves to be not only incompetent, but untrustworthy. That’s the other side you have to expect from time to time. To think it won’t happen to you is a big mistake. I have been taken by surprise by certain unexpected behaviors, so now I rein in my expectations. My equilibrium is the better for it. A leader needs to know about people to remain a leader.

Most of us have been exposed to the work of Shakespeare, and he spends a great deal of time examining the facets of human nature. Some of the examples are extreme, but they aren’t so far fetched as to be unbelievable, or Shakespeare wouldn’t still be performed today. There’s something about his work that is timeless, and the timelessness comes from his insight into human nature. One of his greatest works was King Lear, which provides a good lesson in what happens to those who put trust in the wrong people. The king falls for the flattery of his eldest daughters, who say all the right things while acting to undermine his authority. The result of his misplaced trust is the loss of all that is dear to him--authority to lead, control of his kingdom, and, ultimately, his sanity. That’s a dark example, but it’s better to be aware than to be unaware of what the world can be like.

On the brighter side, I think most people want to be the best they can be. That’s probably one reason you’re reading this right now. You’ve chosen the high road, the path to more knowledge and experience. It’s one of the reasons I enjoy giving speeches and teaching. I can share what I know with people who are really motivated to know more, to be doing more, and to improving the quality of their minds and lives. It’s a great feeling. I hope you’ll continue to expand your life every day, and I’ll be here to help you along the way.

Ask most business leaders what the real key to their long-term success is and they’ll tell you it’s their people. You can operate in a hot market, use the most cutting-edge technology, or have a competitive product concept, but without the ability to hire and keep the right amount of passionate and intelligent people in your company your business will never truly grow.

Yes, with all the time and thought that’s spent on vision and strategy, it’s people--talented human beings--that are the ultimate competitive advantage in today’s business landscape. People implement. People execute. Building a successful business is a lot like participating in a long race. And hiring the best people will give your business the traction it needs to get started and keep going turn after turn.

So, does hiring the best mean spending the most? Not necessarily. You don’t always “get what you pay for.” Michael Lewis’s book Moneyball chronicled and analyzed how Billy Beane transformed the Oakland A’s baseball team from a low-winning marginal club into a high-winning division champion--all with the second lowest payroll in baseball. When averaging the payroll out over the number of wins between 1999 and 2001, it cost the Oakland A’s about $500,000 per win, while other teams were winning fewer games than the A’s were and paying millions for each one.

How did Beane do it? He looked for the players that the other teams passed on, or more specifically, the players that the other teams didn’t recognize as valuable based on traditional criteria. Beane knew that he couldn’t build a team the way, for example, the Yankees build a team. If he did it that way he would lose because the Yankees were spending three times more than he could. So Beane needed to recalibrate his hiring strategy. He had to find new players and career vets the market had “undervalued.” Beane was convinced that savvy talent-picking could beat big budgets.

Beane proved that a solid grasp of value pays off. When you understand how much a position is worth to you and you know how much you can and are willing to pay to fill it then you can go a long way towards zeroing in on what your hiring priorities should be. Knowing the value that you’re looking for in a candidate will help keep you from being blinded by his or her charisma and shiny resume.

Don’t just hire people who look like the best. Before you meet with a candidate, do some homework on them and learn some things that aren’t covered in their resume. Why? If you’re going to pay someone to do something, you should at least know how good they are--which means knowing as much as you can about their hits and their misses. Best does not mean perfect or flawless. Even the best person for a position has room for improvement. And that talented but imperfect person is the one that you’ll be working with on a day-to-day basis, not the slick interview machine that you met with for 20 minutes.

How do you separate the wannabes from the winners? You can start by rethinking your next job posting. Give careful consideration to how you define the critical skills that will set the virtuosos apart from the hacks. Then, make the interview more rigorous. Don’t let it turn into a staged press conference for the candidate. Give them a real-world challenge or opportunity to chew on. Ask yourself whether they actually offered any substantive ideas that they could realistically implement today? Getting a feel for a candidate's reasoning and overall thought process is one of the best ways to weed out the A players from the B and C players.

Questions to ask yourself during the interview: Are the candidate’s responses more than I expected? Do they address the test situation, but also offer an unexpected fresh perspective (that actually makes sense)?

After the interview, use charts and grids to rank the candidate’s strengths and weaknesses. This doesn’t need to be a complex or elaborate process, but the more you can apply an objective and systematic approach to hiring, the more precise your evaluation of each candidate’s potential will be.

The bottom line of Beane’s success with rebuilding the Oakland A’s was his readiness to look at his business from a different angle, which meant redefining who exactly the best was for his team.

In business, the more defined your hiring criteria is the easier it will be for you to identify the best from the rest.

“People are our greatest resource.” It's worth taking a second look at this marketing cliché in our automated age. Automation has too often resulted in less customer service and more mechanized commercial interaction. The signature cliché of this new, dehumanized environment is “Please hold, your call is important to us.” People often complain that it’s hard to get a real human being, but in certain areas of business, getting the best people is a secondary concern. Rather, the emphasis is on finding ways to eliminate people and having machines do their jobs. The advantages seem obvious: machines work at super human speed; they don’t get salaries or benefits; they aren’t prone to mood swings, injury, illness, and all the other complications that make humans less than perfect units of productivity.

The systems that operate the world’s major institutions--business, government, academia--have gotten so much more complicated. Technology has enabled capitalism in the modern world to expand like never before. Technology is arguably the primary enabler of contemporary progress.

Yet, the beneficial use of technology depends on the people behind the machines. Technology is inert without human energy and expertise. The best machines in the wrong hands accelerate the results of incompetence. By the same token, less cutting edge technology in the hands of smart, resourceful people can create a wholly different result.

One of the defining elements in the people/technology relationship is testing. Technology of any caliber cannot work well if people don’t adequately test how it functions in a practical context. Technology that is not “user friendly” will often fail to deliver the desired results. Technicians are those who have a talent for thinking like machines, but they have to think like people, too, in order to properly assess whether a technology will work well.

Ironically, a world of ever more complicated systems and technologies creates a greater need for smart management--the human touch. Technology does not organize itself; it does not automatically synch with other technologies. As one veteran of NASA put it: “In the old days, you could hold the whole spacecraft in your mind. Now you can't hold one subsystem in your mind. In the early days, the people who were building the hardware knew what they were building--knew all its functions, and if someone gave them a piece to build that wasn't right they'd know it. Now they don't. It's too complicated.”

In other words, technology problems are management problems. No matter what your process is, it cannot compensate for low quality people implementing the process. Remember: people before process. Despite the preeminence of technology in today's world, the old saw still applies: Get the best people you can get.