How to Think Differently About Leadership and Your Hiring Practices to Gain a Competitive Advantage

Hiring the talent you need has never been more important to your company – and essential to the economy as it is right now. While there are many reasons that companies fail, invariably the single most critical factor that will determine your success comes down to your people.

Your ability to effectively top-grade the level of talent you need to thrive going forward represents an enormous competitive advantage, and yet the vast majority of companies will miss the opportunity because they will fail to hire the right people.

Is there anyone you know who doesn’t make hiring mistakes?

The only people I know who I know who have never made a single hiring mistake are those who have never had to hire anybody.

The obvious single reason why it is so difficult to get hiring right is because what you are hiring is people. We can all learn to manage to acquire things with relative competence. But people are very different than things. We can manage things, but cannot truly manage people. We must lead people, and therein you encounter the problem.

One added, and not-so-fine point – is that you are not actually acquiring people. The important distinction regarding managing things, versus leading people, it that you can actually own the things you must manage.

Ever since human slavery was outlawed society has rightfully determined that people are not property. Yet many managers behave in ways that suggest otherwise. They attempt to manage people in hopes that they will perform as needed in order to accomplish whatever business-related objectives depend on their efforts. What you need to do in order to elicit people’s capacity to perform is to effectively lead them. And this begins with how you hire.

What Is Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset?

This is a trick question I have been asking CEOs and business leaders for many years. The trap is that you will answer, “my people.” And you would be wrong.

As already noted, you don’t own your people. You actually rent them, or more specifically, rent their service. An asset is something you own. Leases would actually fall into the accounting category of a liability.

If you have hired your fair share of people, you readily understand why employees are actually liabilities.

Beyond the clear statutory responsibilities – how they perform on the job can damage or even destroy your organization. Toxic employees infect the culture of entire organizations – and incompetent people have the potential to create enormous dysfunction and damage – including massive legal liability and exposure. At a minimum, poorly performing workers represent an expense that drags down profits.

You need to think of people as a form if capital. The “thing” you do actually own is their work-product and the quality of their performance. (You may also own any intellectual property they develop while in your employ.)

Your business is a function of leveraging the capital you control against the risks of the market where you engage your customers.

As Liz Wiseman brilliantly points out in her book “Multipliers” (which incidentally just celebrated it’s ten-year publishing anniversary) – as a leader you have the ability to either increase and improve the performance and value of the people who work for you – or you can diminish their talent.

How well you perform as a leader is what will determine whether or not you convert the human capital at your disposal into an asset.

Exceptional leaders are highly competent when it comes to crafting high-performance organizations – one that outperforms all others by doing what it does best by continuously improving and adapting in order to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. To do this, you must excel at attracting and developing the right people to fill the roles that are needed in order for your company to accomplish the things that matter most.

The Art of Leading a Competent Hiring Effort

Competent organizations, meaning those that consistently accomplish what matters most, are successful in attracting, hiring and developing highly competent people.

In part this requires have competent systems that drive the processes that guide the effort. Hiring is a process that must be well managed in order to be consistently successful. Most organizations are ineffective and inefficient when it comes to their hiring programs. They create needlessly burdensome procedures that add complexity without improving results. Or else they are sloppy and disorganized and employ random techniques out of frustration with the poor results they are getting. Hit or miss results shouldn’t be an acceptable standard, yet for an overwhelming percentage of hires this is exactly how they are.

Employing HR experts and staffing professionals will not dramatically improve the outcome of a poorly functioning system. Competent people working in an ineffective system are hobbled to the point of themselves becoming incompetent. You cannot perform competently in a system that hinders beneficial outcomes. Similarly no system or tools make an incompetent person adept at hiring. Any tool is only as good as the hands that it is in – and a brilliant system tends to expose incompetence in people rather than eliminate it – or make up for it.

As noted above, hiring is a component of leadership. You are leading people into a role and to a level of performance that meets the needs of your organization.

It is easy to guide people to a desk or a machine – but ensuring that they perform capably in another thing altogether. The problem at the root of most hiring mistakes is mistaking guidance for leadership.

An organization will be defined by mediocrity when you are attracting people who must be guided rather than securing people capable of being inspired to lead themselves in constant self-improvement and adaptation.

Improving results requires first having a smart system that enables and supports the efforts of competent people. But you must also be competent at working with even a usable hiring system.

As the old adage suggests, before climbing a ladder, first make sure it is placed up against the wall you need to scale. 

When hiring, you must first know what you are looking for in order to find what you need.

If you are just looking for someone who can do a job – you will find your task seems easy. But if you look beyond what the person you hire must “do” and instead define what it is they must accomplish – you begin to discriminate towards those who will perform well – versus those who might just show up.

As a leader, you must understand what roles people must play – beginning and especially with yours. You must be clear about the purpose your company is built to serve. What is it you must accomplish to realize this purpose?

And you must be clear about your own role relative the organization’s purpose. As a leader, your role is to ensure that it has the means to remain sustainable against the threats and odds you can anticipate, and to be prepared to withstand those you cannot. In business this means the ability to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage.

You role comes down to four fundamental tasks:

1. Prepare to make yourself into a competent leader of your organization,
2. Attract and develop the people who will see what is possible and make it necessary.
3. Inspire and provision the organization to serve its purpose to its fullest potential.
4. Define and communicate the purpose so it is clearly understood to be a noble cause.

This is literally what you are PAID to do!

These are not simple tasks, and exceptional leaders are those who simply conscientiously aspire to accomplish these tasks better today than they were able to yesterday. And by doing so, you set the example of what is expected of those you might hire into the roles they must serve.

• Are you hiring a controller to supervise the accuracy of financial data, or someone who understands that their role is to provide leadership with the insight needed to safely make decisions and take bold steps forward?
• Are you hiring a sales manger to monitor the activity of your sales force in the field? Or someone who will lead your salespeople to strive to perform better by being more effective, more efficient and more conscientious in their efforts?
• Are you hiring someone to sweep the floor – or, as the famous story of President Johnson visiting the Kennedy Space Center, and being introduced to a custodian with a broom who ably made clear that his job – was to help put a man on the moon?

Roles matter, and without an understanding of not just what is expected, but exactly what must be accomplished – it is possible you will find yourself hiring people to fill space, consume oxygen and collect a paycheck. But by engaging a system that will enable you to fill roles, you will build a durable organization where high-performance is the standard and success isn’t something you demand of your people, it is something they demand of you and of each other.

3-Cs: A Better 3-Step System for Competent Hiring

To effectively fill a role, there are three simple steps to take. The second builds on the first and the third requires you first engage the second step. It may seem simple enough, but the blunder most people and nearly all organizations make is beginning on the third step.

The three steps are assessing essential qualities for high-performers:

1. Curiosity
2. Caring
3. Capability

The typical hiring process looks first at capabilities. Can this person adequately perform the necessary tasks associated with the job? 

While this is obviously important, is obscures the reason that most hires fail.

It makes sense to weed-out those who are fully unqualified or demonstratively incapable of doing the job – but it misses the most critical aspects of what makes a candidate ultimately successful in contributing real value to your organization.

When you find a candidate that checks off all the boxes for whatever competencies are deemed essential, meaning they have exactly what you are looking for in terms of

• Knowledge
• Skill
• Talent
• Experience / Credentials.

Given how difficult this alone can be, it seems natural to want to hire this person. You might be so smitten that you will justify any other defects in order to secure their interest and seal the deal. This would be a huge mistake.

It’s likely that at some point you have either been taught, or discovered for yourself that we tend to “hire for ability and fire for fit.” 

The greatest source of a toxic or dysfunctional culture is tolerating people that do not fit – even more than having people who cannot perform to the needs of their jobs. Both are unacceptable, but toxic employees will diminish the performance of even those who are otherwise entirely capable.

This is why taking the first two steps is critical.

Curiosity is the quality that demonstrates a candidate’s interest and ability to learn. Anyone new to any organization must learn how to perform in their role – regardless of the prior experience or success. People who believe they know everything they need to know, who are resistant to coaching, who are unwilling to adapt – are of little value to the organization. Worse – their arrogance blocks any possibility that they will transform themselves into fully competent performers. To be fully curious, you need to have intellectual humility: you accept that you can and need to grow, that you do not know everything and that accepting being wrong is the only way to ultimately get things right.

Caring is the quality that enables an organization to maintain alignment with its purpose. Everybody cares about something. But the question is whether a candidate cares about what’s important to you and your organization. There is something slightly perverse and counterintuitive for most leaders when it comes to evaluating this quality. When your intentions are to demonstrate that you care about the person you are interviewing, there is a tendency to accommodate or even overlook behaviors that are entirely inconsistent with what matters most to your organization. What you should be testing for is whether the candidate demonstrates that they care about what matters to you, your organization. Of course they may not – and they certainly do not have to – but if they don’t you cannot hire them.

If you find that a person is curious and cares about the things that do matter most, it makes sense to explore their competencies.

Competencies speak to the capacity to perform in a role. However, capacity is not absolute. People are actually capable of doing more than they believe or even imagine – under the right circumstances. People who are curious, who operate in “learning mode” discover all sorts of things about their potential – that people stuck in “knowing mode” fail to see. The stoic philosopher Epictetus said that a person cannot learn what they think they already know. Stretching requires getting comfortable with being uncomfortable. Expanding your potential requires that you are conscientious; that you understand that your efforts are contributing to something that serves more than your own personal needs or interests. What people care about matters greatly when it comes to realizing their fullest potential. Competencies can be developed only when one’s character makes it possible.

These 3-Cs are the basis of the system that you can build your organization upon. It is not just possible, but necessary to understand the full dynamics of what enables people to be fully competent, to be successful in accomplishing what really matters.

It may be good news for you that most organizations will stubbornly go about getting hiring wrong. This only ensures that there will be an abundance of people who are ready and able to serve your cause: people who are purposeful and mindful, people who are adaptable, who are green and growing.

While your competition scrambles to fill empty seats, run their machines and send bodies out into the field, you can craft an organization staffed with the kind of talent that will give you an unfair competitive advantage – simply by understanding that to win at hiring – it’s not just doing it better, it’s thinking different. It amounts to approaching hiring, not as a manager, but as a leader.

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