Sean: I wonder how many organizations you coach that make hiring mistakes and what do you do to improve that?
Jeff: You look at a couple of problems. One is job descriptions. Most jobs descriptions I look at, there's no one that meets that criteria. They just aren't made the job descriptions are there the purple unicorn with pink stripes.
But if people, if you're going out and look and people say, well, I want the best, well, have you gotten clear on what the best is? Forget about the job description because the job description is typically telling you what the job they need to do in some of the skills they need.
But it doesn't get to the heart of the person, the soul of the person, the essence of the person, the leader in the person, because people don't go and hire leaders. I'm saying, why not? And here's the problem. They'll say, well, we don't want to have not everybody can be a leader and I say, you're wrong. You can have too many managers, but you can never have too many leaders.
And I'll repeat that. That is so important. You can have too many managers, but you can never have too many leaders. So I'm looking to hire leaders. I'm looking for people who can make things happen. I'm looking for people who can empower everyone else who is going to make the organization better, not someone who does a job well.
So I think we tend to interview and hire based upon job descriptions versus people descriptions. Like who's this person. We tend to make, you know, Jim Collins said this is good to great, you know, he said you should hire slow and fire fast, big fan of that. We tend to hire quickly. We tend to hire and try to hire what we think will be high performers, never thinking about, well, what does our organization look like if we have a bunch of high-performers that sounds good.
Doesn't it? It sounds like, well, don't we want to have a bunch of high-performers. Depends. How do they perform it? Why do they perform? Are they high performers? Because all they care about is themselves and they're going to do whatever it takes to perform for themselves and to look good. Are they going to trample on the people around them?
Are they going to help make the people around them better? If they're the best sales person on the planet, will they make everyone better? I've had salespeople say, that's not my job. Why do they say that? Because the employer never made it clear. That is their job. You know, if I'm hiring someone, I'm going to hire everybody and say, one of the things I expect of you is I expect that you will make this organization better and you will make everyone around you better.
And if at the end of the year, you are killing it but this organization is not better than the people around you are not better. That's a failure. You will have failed. I don't think we get clear on what we really want and we don't get clear on what the organization really needs. So we go out and hire what we perceive to be high performers.
And the other thing I'll tell you about this, about what we make mistakes in hiring is we take too few risks in hiring. Most of the time we hire the safest pick, the person who seems like they connect the dots. They check all the boxes, but most leaders don't check boxes. Leaders don't fit in boxes.
You know, leaders are a pain, leaders ask questions, leaders challenge the status quo, but we hire, we make safe hires. And I'm a big fan of, I'm not saying make crazy risks, but sometimes we've got to say, who's the person I love to say this. If I've got a couple of candidates, which of these candidates is most likely to be running this place in 10 years or five years, why aren't we hiring the future leaders instead of the person who's going to, you know, do this task tomorrow. So focus on leadership and heart. That's what matters.
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