When recruiting, hiring, and promoting, it’s all about performance and integrity and nothing else.
Your personal preferences cannot matter. Who you like or who is like you is irrelevant. Performance and integrity will always be found in people who are quite different from you. You should not care how different they may be from you. Once again, all you care about is performance and integrity. It’s all about the mission, team, culture, and customers and who I need to succeed.
The worst leaders like to only hire replicas of themselves. They get all their weaknesses and no new strengths. The most ineffective CEOs engage in stupid stereotypes when it comes to hiring and promotions.
The unsuccessful leaders allow subjective influences to drive these choices. They don’t think of the mission, culture, team, or customers – they think of can I control this person, is their talent a threat to me, do I like this person, or does this person protect my ego?
Personal biases cannot drive personnel decisions. Those who write personal checks on the company bank account miss and lose out on a lot of talent. Talent also avoids them and when they get it, it leaves because it won’t be rewarded.
The best leaders are very open to the idea that success walks, talks, and looks quite differently than they do. We study the talent market. We identify who we need to accomplish our mission, goals, and objectives. We employ the right recruiting strategies and talent pools and pipelines. We are model employers so diverse and talented individuals of integrity want to come to work for us and stay working for us.
Our teams will be highly diverse but bound by shared values. Our teams will share the same mission and culture and be highly committed to each other.
Diversity of skills, experience, personalities, and perspectives is a tremendous asset. Mission, culture, values, and leadership are the glue. People who are quite different from each other can work seamlessly and successfully as one team. In fact, they can and will do extraordinary things together as a team. All it takes is the right leadership.
From the Teacher: Leadership Lessons with Dr. Saviak is a weekly column with the esteemed Joseph C. Saviak, Ph.D., J.D., M.A., M.S., Management Consulting & Leadership Training
From the Teacher: Leadership Lessons with Dr. Saviak is a weekly column with the esteemed Joseph C. Saviak, Ph.D., J.D., M.A., M.S., Management Consulting & Leadership Training
