Sunday, July 28, 2013

THE RIGHT PEOPLE

1. The Right People Fit with the Company’s Core Values. Great companies build almost cult-like cultures, where those who do not share the institution’s values find themselves surrounded by antibodies and ejected like a virus. People often ask, “How do we get people to share our core values?” The answer: you don’t. You hire people who already have a predisposition to your core values, and hang on to them.

2. The Right People Don’t Need to be Tightly Managed. The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you might have made a hiring mistake. If you have the right people, you don’t need to spend a lot of time “motivating” or “managing” them. They’ll be productively neurotic, self-motivated and self-disciplines, compulsively driven to do the best they can because it’s simply part of their DNA.

3. The Right People Understand that They Do Not Have “Jobs”; They Have Responsibilities. They grasp the difference between their task list and their true responsibilities. The right people can complete the statement, “I am the one person ultimately responsible for…”

4. The Right People Fulfill Their Commitments. In a culture of discipline, people view commitments as sacred—they do what they say, without complaint. Equally, this means that they take great care in saying what they will do, careful to never over commit or to promise what they cannot deliver.

5. The Right People are Passionate about the Company and Its Work. Nothing great happens without passion, and the right people display remarkable intensity.

6. The Right People Display “Window and Mirror” Maturity. When things go well, the right people point out the window, giving credit to factors other than themselves; they shine a light on other people who contributed to the success and take little credit themselves. Yet when things go awry, they do not blame circumstances or other people for setbacks and failures; they point in the mirror and say, “I’m responsible.”

From "How the Mighty Fall and Why Some Companies Never Give In" by Jim Collins