Right Attitudes

Ideas for Impact

Hiring & Firing

How to Make Wise People Decisions

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Here are eight basic management principles for making wise people decisions:

  1. Pay attention to your people decisions. These are the decisions that determine your team/organization’s performance. Hiring and coaching employees is a manager’s most important task.
  2. For any assignment, pick people who’ve shown at least some evidence of the ability to do it well. Don’t expect them to be productive in their new role within days or weeks.
  3. Do not give new people major assignments. First, put them into positions where expectations are known and help is available. Help them make the transition.
  4. Set the right expectations. A manager can forestall a great deal of employee problems by proactively setting expectations.
  5. Don’t ignore concerns until they morph into problems. Conflict can be emotionally distressing, but being decisive and doing what’s best eventually works out well for everyone.
  6. If an employee is doing poorly, first attempt remediation and coaching. If those don’t solve his/her underperformance, it’s usually prudent to cut your losses. Giving the employee more time to improve not only wastes time and energy, but increases the mutual hostility and chances of a claim of wrongful termination.
  7. Take responsibility for mistakes. Don’t blame the person you hire or promote for not performing. Your decision put them there.
  8. Take your managerial duties seriously. It’s your obligation to make sure that responsible people in your organization perform. In turn, they have a right to expect you to be a competent manager.

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The Duplicity of Corporate Diversity Initiatives

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Corporate Diversity Initiatives Even after years of diversity initiatives in corporate America, “inclusion” is more about meeting the numbers on gender, race, and other obvious differences, and less about pursuing intellectual, ideological, pedagogical, and stylistic diversity within teams and organizations.

Overall, the workforce diversity initiatives have succeeded in deterring explicit discriminatory behavior and preventing employee lawsuits. However, to make the representation numbers look good, corporate diversity initiatives have largely resulted in exclusionary practices for the preferential hiring and promoting of underrepresented demographic groups, much to the chagrin of those who are more competent, yet arbitrarily overlooked because the latter belong to groups that are numerically “overrepresented”—reverse discrimination, indeed. For fear of reprisal, the shortchanged majority is reluctant to speak out against this veiled unfairness or to call attention to the dichotomy between the ideals and the practice of affirmative action in the workplace.

Even if nearly all corporate mission statements extol the virtues of “valuing differences,” managers stifle individuality down in the trenches. They are less willing to be receptive of distinctive viewpoints and seek to mold their employees to conform to the existing culture of the workplace and to comply with the existing ways of doing things. Compliant, acquiescent employees who look the part are promoted in preference to exceptional, questioning employees who bring truly different perspectives to the table. The nail that sticks its head up indeed gets hammered down.

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When an Employee Threatens to Quit

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If an employee decides to use the threat of quitting to coerce your organization into fulfilling their demands, it’s time to take action.

Of course, it’s always important to listen to and consider employee requests, but when these requests escalate into persistent threats, it’s time to communicate firmly with the employee. Let them know that this type of behavior is unacceptable, and if they cannot accept the organization’s decision, they are free to leave.

Documentation is key in these situations to protect the organization from potential wrongful termination claims. It’s important to have a clear record of the events that led to the employee’s departure, including any attempts made to resolve the situation.

While a valuable employee may seem irreplaceable, it’s important to remember that no one is indispensable in an organization. That’s why succession plans are crucial to ensure that continuity and stability are maintained even in the face of employee turnover.

Giving in to an employee’s threats sets a dangerous precedent that can erode organizational control and encourage further bad behavior. It’s important to stand firm and reinforce the organization’s position, making it clear that threats and coercion will not be tolerated as means of achieving goals.

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  5. How to Make Wise People Decisions

Hiring: If You Pay Peanuts, You Get Monkeys

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If You Pay Peanuts, You Get Monkeys During the economic slowdown last year, a manager had a choice between two consultants for a critical project to turnaround the prospects of his division. The first candidate was five years out of business school; his billing rate was $370 an hour. The second, more experienced candidate’s was $510 an hour. Without much deliberation, the manager hired the first candidate because he would fit in the manager’s budget. Things did not work out as well as the manager had expected. Three months later, after considerable delays and missed opportunities, the manager fired his consultant and recruited the second candidate anyway. This consultant had an earlier experience similar to the situation at hand and succeeded in his mission in due course.

The best don’t come cheap

Recruiting is the toughest responsibility of a manager. Prudent hiring processes start with a realization that talented professionals are the heart of successful organizational endeavors. Many managers simply do not take in this fact and signup those who cost the least instead.

Economic downturn or lower project budgets are no reasons for careless hiring decisions. It is exactly during though times that managers should recruit the best people. And, the best don’t come cheap.

Now, I am not saying that high-priced consultants and employees are necessarily good. The converse is not automatically true either. Market demand for talent often dictates billing rates and compensation of skilled professionals. There is often a strong reason for them being in demand and commanding premium fees. No manager dare overlook such considerations.

Wondering what to read next?

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Origin of the Expression “You are Fired!” [Business Folklore]

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The term ‘fired’ is a colloquial expression for dismissing a person from employment. It became more popular as a result of the NBC reality show The Apprentice where the host, American businessman Donald Trump, eliminates contestants for a high-level management job by “firing” them successively. In 2004, Trump actually filed a trademark application for the catchphrase “You’re fired!”

Some sources suggest the expression may have originated from the verb “to fire,” as in “to discharge a gun.” However, legend has it that the phrase originated in the 1910s at the National Cash Register (NCR) Company.

NCR founder John Henry Patterson (1844—1922) is widely recognized as the pioneer of sales management and for developing formal methods for training and assessing salespersons. In spite of all his genius, Patterson was quirky. He sought total control of his surroundings, imposing his personal values on employees. As a food and fitness fanatic, he had employees weighed every six months. He often dismissed employees for trivial reasons just to deflate their self-confidence and, soon after, rehire them back.

Patterson’s employees and customers branded him abusive and confrontational. Patterson once dismissed an executive by asking him to visit a customer. When the executive drove back to NCR headquarters, he found his desk had been thrown out on the lawn. Right on time, his desk burst into flames. He was “fired.”

Thomas Watson Sr. was “fired” by NCR

Famously, NCR’s star sales executive Thomas Watson Sr. (1874–1956) met a similar fate. In 1914, Watson argued that NCR’s dominant product, mechanical cash registers, would soon go obsolete. He proposed that NCR develop electric cash registers. Patterson resisted the idea. He warned Watson not to overstep his boundaries and demanded that Watson focus on sales only and intrude into product innovation. Following an argument at a meeting, Patterson dismissed Watson. In a fit of rage, Patterson had workers carry Watson’s desk outside and had it lit on fire. Watson Sr. was thus “fired.”

Watson Sr. still believed in the potential for electric cash registers. He joined a smaller competitor, Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR,) which soon grew into International Business Machines (IBM.) Watson Sr. led IBM for forty years and turned it into the world’s leading technology company.

Source/Source: Keynote address by Mark Hurd, then-president and COO of Teradata at Kellogg School of Management’s Digital Frontier Conference on 17- and 18-Jan-2003. Teradata was previously a division of NCR Corporation, the company Patterson founded.

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General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers

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Jack Welch's Four Types of Managers

Four Types of Managers

Jack Welch, Chairman and CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001, described four categories of managers in General Electric’s year 2000 annual report.

Type 1: shares our values; makes the numbers—sky’s the limit!

Type 2: shares the values; misses the numbers—typically, another chance, or two.

Type 3: doesn’t share the values; doesn’t make the numbers—gone.

Type 4 is the toughest call of all: the manager who doesn’t share the values, but delivers the numbers. This type is the toughest to part with because organizations always want to deliver and to let someone go who gets the job done is yet another unnatural act. But we have to remove these Type 4s because they have the power, by themselves, to destroy the open, informal, trust-based culture we need to win today and tomorrow.

We made our leap forward when we began removing our Type 4 managers and making it clear to the entire company why they were asked to leave—not for the usual “personal reasons” or “to pursue other opportunities,” but for not sharing our values. Until an organization develops the courage to do this, people will never have full confidence that these soft values are truly real.

Live by Corporate Values

Organizations face the challenge of developing and sustaining a culture that is both values-centered and performance-driven. They begin by developing mission and value statements that, in due course, become little more than wall decorations because the organization’s leaders and managers fail to uphold these values.

Nothing hurts morale more than when leaders tolerate employees who deliver results, but exhibit behaviors that are incongruent to values of the company. For instance, an organization that thrives on teamwork will suffer, over the long term, if a manager habitually claims all credit for his team’s accomplishments.

Idea for Impact: Core Values Matter!

As a manager, drive accountability. Hold employees responsible for their behaviors. Reward employees for proper behaviors and publicly discourage behaviors that do not uphold values. Do not make exceptions—exceptions signify your own indifference to the upholding of values.

As an employee, understand that an essential requirement for your success in your organization is your fit. Your behaviors must be congruent with the character and needs of your organization. Even if you are talented, you will not fare well if your behaviors are inconsistent with the values of your organization. Reflect on your behavior. On a regular basis, collect feedback from your managers, peers and employees. Seek change.

Keep the company values front and center in people’s mind.

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  3. Eight Ways to Keep Your Star Employees Around
  4. How to Manage Overqualified Employees
  5. Don’t Push Employees to Change

The Skills-Attitudes Competence Model

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While poking around the internet, I recently bumped into a few articles that refer to a study by either Harvard or Stanford or both that concluded that 85% of one’s success at work is due to his/her attitudes and just 15% is due to technical skills [1, 2]. While most of us agree with this statement in principle, we could question how a survey could quantify attitudes and technical skills and the contributions of these traits to professional success.

The simple skills-attitudes competence model shown below will help quantify one’s talents and understand the relative contributions of skills and attitudes to professional success. This model is a graphical indication of one’s positioning with respect to technical skills (x-axis) and attitudes and behaviors (y-axis). Every job carries a certain level of expectation for both of these disciplines. A threshold line divides this landscape into the proficient and vulnerable zones. The position of the threshold line vis-à-vis the lines of expectation signifies a lower tolerance for poor attitudes in comparison to insufficient technical skills.

Consider six people, A to F, in the landscape. ‘A’ possesses lower than expected skills, but possesses the right attitudes to learn, grow and get things done. ‘B’ and ‘C’ possess the same level of skills as ‘A’, but possess worse attitudes and risk being labeled incompetent. ‘B’ could move into the secure zone by developing skills (transitioning along the x-axis) or by developing positive attitudes (transitioning along the y-axis) or by developing on both (transitioning along an inclined line). ‘D’ and ‘E’ may be extremely skilled; their skills may be critical to the success of the organization. However, if ‘D’ fails to fails to conform to the core values of the company or exhibits behavior that is difficult to tolerate, the organization may eliminate him from his position. ‘F’ possesses the best attitudes and skills and thrives in the organization. The farther away ‘F’ is from the threshold line, the more secure he or she is.

Use this skills-attitudes competence model to define tangible attributes of skills and attitudes expected of you in the context of your current position or your desired future position. Identify your position on this chart. Under the guidance of your supervisor and mentors, identify what skills and/or attitudes you can develop towards a successful and satisfying career.

Wondering what to read next?

  1. General Electric’s Jack Welch Identifies Four Types of Managers
  2. Ten Rules of Management Success from Sam Walton
  3. Seven Real Reasons Employees Disengage and Leave
  4. How to Manage Overqualified Employees
  5. Fire Fast—It’s Heartless to Hang on to Bad Employees