Hire and Step Back

HIRE AND STEP BACK
by Liz Ryan

I was on a tour of a local employer’s facility with its human resources leader when we heard raised voices. We turned a corner and saw a middle-aged man venting his spleen on a young colleague.

"Our CEO," the HR chief whispered to me.

"A yeller?" I asked, and she replied under her breath, "Not normally."

We ran into the CEO again in the cafeteria, where he came over to introduce himself. "You witnessed me losing my temper," he said. "That's not really like me, but I must say I was very angry at something that happened this morning."

Naturally, I wanted to hear the story.

Turns out that the young associate had asked the CEO for permission to handle a high-stakes customer issue, and the CEO had agreed. The young man had dropped the ball, badly. The CEO had been expressing his displeasure with the incident when we ran into him. He'd only learned about the ball-drop when the customer called him to complain.

"We try to hire people who don't need a lot of direction," the CEO told me. "Ninety-eight percent of the time, it works. Two percent of the time, we give some heavy guidance or we make a change. I can't imagine running this place any other way. If our managers had to watch people like hawks, we'd be done — it's too expensive."

The CEO got no disagreement from me, because he's right on the money. It is expensive to spend supervisory time watching people work, double-checking their output and second-guessing their decisions.

Granted, there are regulatory requirements (Sarbanes Oxley being just one) that require us to conduct audits and set up groups to watchdog one another's processes. But in the vast majority of business actions where that sort of oversight isn't required, why would we impose it?

It takes more time and more careful interviewing (notice I didn't say more steps in the selection process) to hire people who view their jobs the way Harry Truman ("the buck stops here") did, but the savings in leadership time are enormous. Why would we hire anyone else?

I spoke to a group of HR leaders at a workshop last week, and we talked about the silly ways that employers too often approach the hiring process. We pilloried the time-honored job-ad phrase, "Must be able to hit the ground running."

That company is saying it would rather hire someone who knows every aspect of the job and can be productive right away, than a person with twice the talent and vision who doesn't have the specific skills the job requires. What a bad trade!

If we hire a person expecting him or her to stick around for a year or three, why would we trade off long-term potential for the ability to navigate some software developer's latest release - especially if the fine points of that newly released application could be mastered in two days?
Short-term thinking is the culprit.

We can't wait; we need you to hit the ground running! That’s poor leadership on display.

But we get to choose.

We can hire people capable of learning what they need to know on the job, quickly; folks whose intellect and character will move our companies forward dramatically.

We can hire people who don’t need constant watching via internet snooping programs that count their minutes on Facebook or Ebay.

We can hire people who can be trusted to get their jobs done without a manager’s eagle-eyed supervision.

If we have the confidence to hire Harry Trumans and set them free, we'll have the advantages the CEO in this story has. He raises his voice two or three times a year at an employee who is confused about what the word 'commitment' means.

The rest of the time, he deals with the issues on a CEO's plate and lets the employees, capable adults that they are, manage themselves.

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