So You Hired a Winner: Now What?

College graduation season is imminent, and that means 1.3 million new diploma holders are about to hit the U.S. labor market. Start wincing! The worst-prepared will struggle to find work -- while the standouts may run into a different sort of trouble.

Most of the college stars will be snapped up by elite employers, only to be thrown into sink-or-swim situations. They won't enjoy anything resembling a systematic approach to career training and development. Some will thrive; others will fail miserably. The majority will achieve an uneasy accommodation with employers who don't make the most of these newcomers' potential.

Fast forward a few years, and what typically happens to these one-time star recruits? They turn into the cynical middle pack of talent that keeps plugging away at companies without becoming legendary. They're competent, but they're not totally happy with their employers. And their organizations aren't totally thrilled either. No one likes to consider how much early potential gets squandered this way.

Such gear-grinding needn't happen. Lately I've been reading a fascinating book that explains how world-class organizations find talent, develop talent, and sustain a winning corporate culture over generations. The book, "What It Takes," is by long-time investment consultant Charles D. Ellis. He draws inspiration from a pool of companies very different from the Apples, Googles and Nikes that shore up most business books these days.

Ellis turns his attention, instead, to the overlooked virtues of elite partnerships. His heroes work at law offices (Cravath Swaine & Moore), doctors' partnerships (Mayo Clinic), consulting firms (McKinsey & Co.) and investment-management shops (Capital Group.) These organizations dodge publicity -- yet they quietly build reputations for excellence. In doing so, they nurture internal talent in ways that let them move from success to success over the years.

How do they do it? Ellis picks apart their habits in areas ranging from hiring to leadership. The sections I found most intriguing look at how these professional-services firms have mastered the training and development of their employees. Smart hiring is only a prelude; the key is to make the most of people who do come on board. Among the habits that impressed me:

1. Aiming high. It's not enough to train newcomers to emulate the level of work that's already being done. What's crucial, say the Cravath partners, is to provide recruits with a deep enough understanding of the business so that they can develop new best practices. That way, the firm is constantly finding new ways to pull ahead of the competition, instead of confining itself to what has worked in the past -- and hoping that time-tested rhythms won't go stale.

2. Teaching congeniality. You can't remake someone's entire personality, but you can try to shave off some rough edges. Ellis tells a nice story of a young Goldman Sachs hire who got back his first memo with two bits of feedback: overall praise at the top, and an "X" through each instance where he had used the word "I." The lesson, talk less about yourself, and people will like you more. As your ability to build rapport increases, so does your kack for getting things accomplished. The same principle holds at McKinsey, where people are encouraged to learn aggressive thinking without aggressive behavior.

3. Guiding newcomers via small teams. As organizations grow, it's easy to let a 20-person department become a 150-person department. But when that happens, everything becomes more impersonal. It's harder to reinforce newcomers' best work and to steer them away from bad habits. The firms that Ellis likes make a point of pairing newcomers with a few wise veterans in small teams. Capital Group goes a step farther and keeps reorganizing into more small teams as the overall business expands, so that hands-on learning doesn't fade away.

4. Instilling a cooperative spirit. Ellis makes the point that in college, you're expected to do most of the work solo. Asking a classmate for help is considered cheating. In the working world, just the opposite is true. Successful people know how to ask for help and how to share their expertise. Ellis's favorite development programs help ensure that that this attitude adjustment happens quickly and decisively. In less-structured programs, the switch may never occur.

For companies in a hurry, all of Ellis's prescriptions can seem annoyingly slow. Great career development takes years, even decades to play out. If managers judge everything by whether it will help them meet the next 90 days' financial targets, then they will end up chronically under-investing in employee development. Such managers' horizons simply don't extend far enough.

In a sobering passage, Ellis notes that Goldman Sachs (often regarded as Wall Street's smartest firm) has twice cut back its professional development programs because they didn't appear to be producing enough of an immediate payoff. Skeptics can mutter, too, that great development programs may end up strengthening people who might quit to start their own firms or work for competitors some day.

But there's a lot to be said for the careful, old-fashioned approaches that Ellis admires. Yes, the firms that he salutes are aren't seen as the current-day engines of American growth; they don't create billionaires or must-have products that define entire new industries. Yet the endure. They don't wreck decades of work with spasms of bad conduct and bad decisions -- brought about by people who dashed into positions of power without getting a good grounding in business basics.

Even for businesses that don't want to be as fundamentally conservative as Ellis's examples, it's worth studying the most impressive parts of these professional service firms' approach. After all, their emphasis on well-thought-out employee development pays off in the form of extremely low employee turnover, great reputations and an ability to sustain very satisfying and profitable long-term relationships with top-tier clients.Those are nice rewards.