Getting the right people on board (for whatever type of organization) is a topic I've been wanting to cover for a while now, either via blog or podcast. The problem is that I hadn't found a good way to put it concisely, given my tendency towards long-winded pieces.
A friend recently lent me a copy Jim Collins' book, Good to Great, where Collins describes: (1) how companies transition from being good companies to great organizations, (2) how most companies fail to make the transition, and then (3) offers some practical suggestions to implement these ourselves.
In Chapter 3 ("First Who... Then What"), Collins writes about the importance of getting the right people on the bus (+ the wrong people off the bus) before figuring out where to drive the bus. I found Collins' writing about this topic fairly accurately expressed my sentiments, so I've decided to share a few passages from his book.
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The difference between Ruthless vs Rigorous (p. 53):
"To let people languish in uncertainty for months or years, stealing precious time in their lives that they could use to move on to something else, when in the end they aren't going to make it anyway - that would be ruthless. To deal with it right up front and let people get on with their lives - that is rigorous"
An expansion on the above comes from the second practical discipline for being Rigorous, Not Ruthless (p. 56-57; emphases mine):
Practical Discipline #2: When you know you need to make a people change, act.
The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake. The best people don’t need to be managed. Guided, taught, led–yes. But not tightly managed. We've all experienced or observed the following scenario. We have a wrong person on the bus and we know it. Yet we wait, we delay, we try alternatives, we give a third and fourth chance, we hope that the situation will improve, we invest time in trying to properly manage the person, we build little systems to compensate for his shortcomings, and so forth. But the situation doesn't improve. When we go home, we find out energy diverted by thinking (or talking to our spouses) about that person. Worse, all the time and energy we spend on that one person siphons energy away from developing and working with all the right people. We continue to stumble along until the person leaves on his own (to our great sense of relief) or we finally act (also to our great sense of relief). Meanwhile, our best people wonder, "What took you so long?"
Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the best people. Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.
Waiting too long before acting is equally unfair to the people who need to get off the bus. For every minute you allow a person to continue holding a seat when you know that person will not make it in the end, you're stealing a portion of his life, time that he could spend finding a better place where he could flourish. Indeed, if we're honest with ourselves, the reason we wait too long often has less to do with concern for that person and more to do with our own convenience. He's doing an okay job and it would be a huge hassle to replace him, so we avoid the issue. Or we find the whole process of dealing with the issue to be stressful and distasteful. So, to save ourselves stress and discomfort, we wait. And wait. And wait. Meanwhile, all the best people are still wondering, "When are they going to do something about this? How long is this going to go on?"
...The good-to-great leaders did not pursue an expedient "try a lot of people and keep who works" model of management. Instead, they adopted the following approach: "Let's take all the time to make rigorous A+ selections right up front. If we get it right, we'll do everything we can to try to keep them on board for a long time. If we make a mistake, then we'll confront that fact so that we can get on with our work and they can get on with their lives."
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The book, Good to Great, is said to be based on the findings from a large team of researchers who studied "6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project" (p. 9, Good to Great). Collins writes about the research process here.
If you're interested in giving the book a read, here's an Amazon link (no affiliation).
Also worth reading is James' criticism of this book on the Young Money blog.
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Too tired to think of a proper cover photo for this. Instead, here's a photo of Nicli Antica Pizzeria's flourless chocolate cake with the in-house vanilla bean gelato. Photo by me.