Because I loved the football analogy my colleague, Andrew Freedman, used in his recent post about the best talent for your team and because he asked, here’s a bit more about how to pick the best team for your organization as seen through the prism of “Johnny Football.”
You’ll recall that Johnny Manziel, the first round draft choice of the NFL’s Cleveland Browns, has yet to play in a meaningful way this season. The team is doing surprisingly well led by its more experienced quarterback, and Andrew chronicled behavior and statements that suggest a lack of maturity and a current lack of fit with the team’s culture being instituted under their new head coach. Andrew generously allowed for the possibility that the player’s mindset may evolve and allow him to become the leader the team – any team – needs at the quarterback position. This is where the sports/business parallel gets a bit murky. It’s rare that we bring in a recent college graduate or inexperienced hire and expect them to run the company right away. Instead, successful companies have a structured onboarding process and are open to investing years in the development of their people to support the development of their ability to ascend to more significant levels of responsibility and contribution in the organization. What if Manziel had been actively onboarded by the team, with team officials explaining what they were looking for from him and even assigning a veteran player as a mentor? Some of the challenges he’s created for himself may have been avoided or muted; and his emphasis on learning and growing quickly may have been greater.
Thoughtful and active induction into a new team increases the likelihood of a better case scenario than what we’ve seen in Cleveland. My sense is we’re likely to see even worse because Manziel was drafted by the owner without the support of the coach…and thus he never should have been drafted by the team at all. Not only do the owner and coach not appear to be on the same page in terms of the priorities of their talent acquisition, but the owner has exacerbated the situation by verbally turning on the player (Manziel) he brought in. I’m working with a client organization right now where a leader is proposing to hire a critical team member on behalf of one of his managers with the idea that the manager then can grow to like the hire. This is a highly risky, if not fatally flawed, approach. The manager is going to have to coach this person and therefore needs to be involved in the process to select the person if only to enhance the manager’s buy in. Hall of Fame football coach, Bill Parcells, is famous for having said that, if he’s got to cook the dinner (coach a team successfully), he should be allowed to shop for the groceries. More precisely, the players we bring on to our team need to have the individual talents we need, they need to complement other team members’ skills, and they all need to share the values that, as an organization we have identified and defined as way in which we bring our talents to bear to be highly and consistently successful. You don’t have to fall into Bob Sutton’s realm of undesirable colleagues to be a bad fit (the Stanford professor authored a book called “The No Asshole Rule”); but his admonishment to avoid be suckered by what appears to be success elsewhere as a guarantee of success with us is good advice for all of us to heed.
Here’s some additional – if less colorful – advice for selecting your team:
• Define your labels—too often we think and speak in code. Whatever you’ve adopted as your shorthand for “good” needs to be spelled out. Hiring someone just like Emily doesn’t tell us what we need to know; identifying the key things that make Emily extraordinarily valued gets us closer. Then, we need to define what those things look like in terms of behavior. If you’re hiring based on “what” someone can do and not attending to “how” they do it, you’re asking for trouble.
• Share the load—a good selection process benefits from the involvement of a variety of people filling a number of roles – from technical experts, to managers, to colleagues who can offer insight into exactly what it’s like to work here…and offer their assessments of candidates to the hiring team in the context of your hiring criteria. Managers and leaders must agree on their decisions to ensure that everyone has skin the game when it comes to the hard work of supporting the success of new colleagues.
• Don’t stop at the offer—a good hire is born of everything that happens after you extend and offer and they accept as it is from your sourcing and interviewing process. If we think about hiring as an ongoing process informed by seemingly unrelated reminders like the ones you hear when you fly (“we know you have a lot of choices, but thanks for choosing us”). We work hard to find the right people for our team; we need to remember to keep working hard to ensure their engagement, their loyalty, and their tenure…and the great news is that, when we do that, they’re working in a way that makes them even more valued than they may have been when we started making this effort.
Talent, team building, performance, success. There’s no magic bullet to ensure success, but there is magic in you and it’s unleashed simply through the act.
Jeff Lesher, Principal at entreQuest, blends his deep knowledge of organization design, human capital, and leadership with a pragmatic approach drawn from his own business experience and eQ's philosophy to help eQ's clients focus on their core purpose and move people effectively to action.