There are some people who will take personal advantage of every situation. There are some people in whom the dark side wins. Your company should rigorously weed these people out. You can do it with compassion (remember, it was your mistake to hire them in the first place); but it should be done.
Fortunately, these people are rare. And we donât base this claim solely on a personal faith in human nature.
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Yet, to have an innovative company, itâs also wise to have tolerance for a few unruly crazies. As Max De Pree of Herman Miller puts it, âIf you want the best things to happen in corporate life, you have to find ways to be hospitable to the unusual person.
Your company is a maximization machineâit wants to make the best use of its finite resourcesâso it is greatly interested in identifying precisely who to invest in, and how.
The problem with this stems from the way your company executes on these good intentions. Why, for example, does it assume that it will net a good return only from certain people? Surely, the clichĂ© that âOur people are our greatest assetâ applies to all of the people in the company. As weâve seen, every human brain retains its ability to learn and grow throughout adulthood. For sure, each brain grows at a different speed and in a different way, but this implies only that each person learns differently, not thatâcategoricallyâsome people do and some donât. Therefore, the best course of action for any maximization machine worth its salt would be to figure out where and how each brain can grow the most, rather than zeroing in on only a select few brains and casting aside the others.
You canât wear your disdain for people on your sleeve, though. You end up either cowing them into submission or frustrating them into complacency. Either way, you sap them of the pride they take in their work. Over time, nearly everyone abdicated responsibility to Peter and Strat Planning, and Michael was comforted by the analytical rigor they represented.
When hiring, try to surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do. Genuine decencyâan instinct for fairness and openness and mutual respectâis a rarer commodity in business than it should be, and you should look for it in the people you hire and nurture it in the people who work for you.
Letâs face it, no one, regardless of how experienced or talented, is equally adept at every aspect of a job. In any case, as Immelt points out, even if you are above average across the board, no leader has the time to concentrate on every aspect of the job, especially in the earliest days of a new position. Think about where your personal involvement will yield the most leverage and where someone else might do an even better job.