Thoughts on hiring & promoting

This article is about one of the things you can do to help build a great culture in your company. Namely, hiring and promoting the right people.

All great performing companies have people and teams that create and operate within a great culture. It’s easy to think of culture as something that just “happens.” It does not, no more than a great relationship “just happens.” Culture builds and is reinforced over time. Most often, leadership sets the cultural tone, good or bad, and everyone else participates. But make no mistake, each person contributes to culture.

It’s hard to have a great culture, if you don’t have great people. Early in my management career I thought I was good at interviewing, hiring and promoting. I’d rely on a person’s listed experience, references, and whether they seemed at ease during an interview. If the person hit those check marks, they passed the big hurdle. When a hire did not work out, it was almost always a case of poor integrity, low motivation or simply the person could not grasp new concepts and grow as needed. How could I have known? How could I have avoided this costly mistake?

I thought it worthwhile to share something I learned in a course I had taken years ago and I’ve employed since. It’s worked well for me and I hope it helps spark some thinking in how you hire and promote in your business.

Dee Hock, the founder of VISA, said he hired and promoted on six attributes, in this order of importance: INTEGRITY, MOTIVATION, CAPACITY, UNDERSTANDING, KNOWLEDGE & EXPERIENCE. Without going into detail, it’s important to understand why these are in the order they are in. For example, you do not want someone who is highly motivated without integrity; whereas someone with integrity, will apply motivation properly.

Think about the best people you’ve ever worked for or with. I guarantee they exemplified the first three of these - integrity, motivation & capacity. Think about some of the worst you’ve worked with – I guarantee it had something to do with integrity, motivation or capacity.

One segment of the course focused on interviewing and evaluating these attributes. You may ask a person what the growth rate of their last company or division was and they may tell you 10%. That would be “knowledge.” Ask them why it was 10%, and see how they answer; that will tell you how well they “understand” the underlying contributing factors.

At the course we invested days learning how to ask questions, and listen carefully to help us evaluate these attributes in a person. After completing the course, I realized just how poor I was at interviewing, hiring and promoting people on the basis of the things that really matter - I was focused on the wrong things.

Hopefully what I have shared may shift some paradigms and practices you may have.