The best Employee

"Great companies are built by great People"

Remember this next sentence. "You don't have to be brilliant, you don't have to be the most experienced manager, just hire the right people."

I have seen the difference, not only in my companies, but in other successful companies as well. The impact of hiring the right people is almost incalculable. The right hires will become your best employees. When you look at an entire company and all the decisions, both large and small that are made by all employees every day, the shear number of decisions is staggering.

If you believe the fate of a company is determined by the collective decisions of all employees, then the ideal situation is to have capable employees making the best decisions.

Each day employees make hundreds of decisions. Some of them are as simple as what time am I going to get to work or how long of a lunch hour will I take. Some are a little more involved like, how much should I spend on copy paper or should I turn off the light in the bathroom after I leave.

Then again other decisions may involve meeting a competitors price to get the business or using technology to improve the distribution network.

Wouldn't you love to see someone put a value or cost to each of these decisions and build a model to see how profitable and efficient a company would be under different decision scenarios. What would be your guess? Would the company improve profitability by 5, 10 or 40%? What would the long-term growth curve look like?

Logic and your own experience would tell you the difference would be significant. Sometime during your career you had some outstanding salesperson and said to yourself, "I wish I could clone her". You said that because that person was so much more productive and out-performed everyone else.

This is such an important part of building and turning around a business and it is also the most frustrating at the same time. It is just plain hard to find the right people.

To do so, you have to make sure you have things working in your favor. And the number one thing you can do is make sure that your company is the type of company that good people will want to work for. Does you company meet their needs, is it a gratifying place to work, are employees appreciated? Are you the type of person that someone would want to work for?

This stuff has to be in place to attract the top talent that become your best employees. It's hard, seemly impossible, to find good people. So if you get the chance to get hold of one, you want to have the company working in your favor.

Lets also assume good people attract other good people. People like to be associated with winners. Do you want to play on a losing team or a winning team? Employees are no different, everyone likes to be part of a winning team. Probably more so for top-notch players. They are used to winning, and become frustrated if that look around and don't see the people that can put together a winning record. The best employees like to work with the best employees.

If you can get the company in the right place the next step is to hire someone that knows how to hire people. Pay them anything they ask for because this person is going to be the one to construct your company. This is your most important new hire. There was a NFL General Manager named John Butler who was the architect of the Buffalo Bills Teams that went to four Super Bowls and then built and incredible team in San Diego. He had a talent for hiring great coaches and talented players. Because of this talent, he changed organizations, it is a shame he died at the age of 56.

This person doesn't even need to come from your industry and doesn't need any technical knowledge or anything else about what you do. They only need the ability to know people. Can they sniff out the stable, hard-working, charismatic creative person that is going to show up early for work everyday? Someone that is easy to work with, a great attitude and infectious optimism. Are they going to develop into one of your great contributors two or three years down the road?

You or someone else will decide on whether or not they have the technical skills for the job. The other skills are more important and have a greater impact on the future success of the company.

At first the cost of hiring someone just to evaluate and hire people may seem like a luxury, but when you consider the cost of turnover and the opportunity cost of having a poorly staffed company, it becomes a cost saving.

Your turn-around starts when you start hiring right. If the meantime you are just plugging holes in the dike. You may have been doing this for years, so why put yourself through it any longer.

Often times the hiring is left to managers in the company. They weren't trained to hire people. They where trained to take care of the day to day operations. When faced with hiring someone, they usually hire the first person they like. Some managers like everybody they interview, that's a problem. Some managers hire the best of the lot, that's also a problem. The bottom line is most of your managers suck at finding and hiring the best people.

After years of observing companies, the companies that are good at hiring are in the minority. That is an opportunity for you. That may be the case in your industry as well. If it is, then this could be one of your competitive advantages.

Better employees, making better decisions translate to happier customers, better products and long-term sustainable growth.