WHY THE RIGHT PEOPLE AREN'T IN THE RIGHT JOBS

Common sense tells us the right people have to be in the right jobs. Yet so often they aren’t. What accounts for the mismatches you see every day?

Lack of Knowledge: Leaders often rely on staff appraisals that focus on the wrong criteria. Or they’ll take a fuzzy and meaningless recommendation for someone a direct report likes.

Lack of Courage: Most people know someone in their organization who doesn’t perform well, yet manages to keep his job year after year. The usual reason, we find, is that the person’s leader doesn’t have the emotional fortitude to confront him and take decisive action. Such failures can do considerable damage to a business. If the nonperformer is high enough in the organization, he can destroy it.

The Psychological Comfort Factor: Many jobs are filled with the wrong people because the leaders who promote them are comfortable with them. It’s natural for executives to develop a sense of loyalty to those they’ve worked with over time, particularly if they’ve come to trust their judgments. But it’s a serious problem when they loyalty is based on the wrong factors.

Bottom Line: Lack of Personal Commitment: When the right people are not in the right jobs, the problem is visible and transparent. Leaders know intuitively that they have a problem and will often readily acknowledge it. But an alarming number don’t do anything to fix the problem. You can’t will this process to happen by issuing directive to find the best talent possible. As noted earlier, leaders need to commit as much as 40 percent of their time and emotional energy, in one form of another, to selecting, appraising, and developing people.

From "Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done"
By Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan