When You’ve Hired the Wrong Person…

Published
on June 11, 2005
in StratBlog
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I’ve been searching for an article written by Jim Collins in the April 1999 issue of Inc. Magazine. The title was “When good managers manage too much.” What grabbed my attention was the tease on the cover, “How to know when you’ve hired the wrong person,” and the subtitle should have been, “And what to do about it!” The answer is, you get rid of them

Today, I came across an interesting entry on Don Blohowiak’s Leadership Now blog:

“What are the most pressing problems facing your business today?” That’s a question my good friend Michael Hudson, Ph.D., put to managers in a wide variety of businesses across the USA.

“Surprisingly,” Michael writes, “the most frequent answer is not recruiting or retaining people. It is, in fact, the exact opposite: How to get rid of the people who don’t belong.”


Blohowiak cites Hudson’s plan for “making sure you have the right people on the bus.” It’s a good approach, but very difficult to implement anywhere, especially in public enterprises. I wonder how Hudson and Blohowiak think about evaluating your team members for performance and values?

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    Thanks for picking up the thread from the Leadership.Now. blog.

    I can tell you what Blohowiak thinks regarding your question about evaluating your team members for performance *and* values: It's perfectly appropriate to assess for values -- as evidenced by behavior. (How else could you evaluate values -- and why would you even try if they didn't impact behavior?)

    Here's the thing: It's tempting to want to know what's in someone's truest heart -- what they believe at a core level. But beliefs and values only matter when they affect what someone does. Actions are the only basis for assessing a person already on your payroll. You can try to divine values when interviewing a new hire, but that is a speculative and tricky business indeed.

    Don Blohowiak
 

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