Mind your Hiring process!

Getting the right people

I was watching Simon Sinek’s videos lately, when he talked about the culture of  high performing employees, both leaders and subordinates, vs. the trustworthy ones. He raised the importance of keeping trustworthy people in the organization, regardless of their low performance to maintain the success of the organization on the long run. The message is very crucial and made me question my own approach in this regard, and what exactly I would rather to keep in the same situation. The main issue, which was raised by Simon, was how to measure “ trust”. "Performance" is very measurable and easy to notice. Trust is a psychological feeling and sounds very subjective, therefore, it is hard to measure. This took me back  to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, to the bottom of the hierarchy, where the feel of security can be attained through the mentioned trust. Both leaders and employees tend to feel secured first. Working with trustworthy people can secure this feeling. This is human being!

In his famous book “Good to Great” Jim Collins described the level 5 leaders as paradox, driven, and success builders. He also mentioned that when these leaders moved their organizations from Good to GREAT, the first thing they did was to hire the right people. If they had doubts ,they kept looking, but never hired the wrong people. Furthermore, Jim Collins explained the hedgehog unique concept, great organizations follow. This concept is about focusing on a single goal you want to achieve.  It is about being able to do one thing well,  and ignore the complexity around that might distract you from achieving that goal. This goal is usually defined as; what you are passionate about, what will make you the best in the world, and what will drive your economic engine. You can see both of the intrinsic and extrinsic motives clearly stated here. This great concept is study-worthy!  Big successful names, in the education sector,  flashed in my mind, while I am reading about it. Those who decided to stand out, because simply they do things their way, regardless of the world complexity. The culture of these organization was high discipline and high ethic of entrepreneurship.

In his next book “Great by Choice” Collins went further and described those organizations who reached the peak, and were able to maintain staying there, by sustaining their superior results for a long period of time. A major indicator was “discipline” and “ never rely on luck”. You might be lucky once and reach success, but you will never sustain it by counting on it again.

The reason I am discussing all this is to answer a question raised after watching Simon’s video. Are the right people, who put the company performance ahead of everything, stated by Collins, are the same trustworthy ones, mentioned  by Sinek? Do we hire the trustworthy or the high performing employee? We definitely want to hire both! Or shall we go with  level 5 leaders approach and hire the right people, who probably have a big chance of being trustworthy? Are trustworthy people are the  right employee we need to hire to move our organizations to the next level?