Wrong recruitment? Don’t lie to yourself

While a successful recruitment is a game changer and the most important achievement for any manager, unfortunately it does not work out every time, even if you have done everything to make sure this would be a successful hiring.

When you know that you have hired the wrong person, the worst possible decision is to keep this person because “you need someone to do the job”.

This is so wrong… this is such a huge and costly mistakes that we have all done. This is so wrong because this is not working, you think this person will do the job that you have no time to do, so you need this person, but you are actually digging your own grave as this person is going to accumulate mistakes that it will take you so long to clean up after.

The old adage that it is better to be single than in a wrong relationship applies extremely well at work. I promise it is better to have no one doing the job, than having the wrong person doing it. Every additional day when you keep the wrong person, you accumulate more issues, problems that will take you 10 times more effort to clean after. An IT developer will generate bugs that you will discover in 6 months and then you will have to rebuild the entire software, an accountant will record transactions in the wrong accounts and when you will close your books at the end of the year it will not work and it will take you a big effort to understand why and then to correct this, a sales rep will create frustrations with a client and you will find out only at the end of the contract when the client will not renew or the cost of rebuilding the trust will be huge. Whatever the job / role we should never keep someone who is the wrong person for the job.

Of course you can only know if the person is the wrong person for the job once you have done everything possible to help the person with training, coaching, mentoring etc… subject to ourselves being good managers. The point is not to give up as soon as we have a doubt, the point is that once we know it is not going to work then we should not wait, we should not lie to ourselves and take the difficult decision (and execute the decision).

Keeping someone who is the wrong person for a job is a huge and costly mistake for oneself, for the team, for the organization and even for the person herself.

The real mission of a manager is to become useless

The day I understood that the real mission of a manager is to become useless is the day when I became a much better manager. 

When your focus is to grow your team so that they take over your job / role, then you start creating a lot more value for them, for your organization and even for yourself.

The unsecured managers will try to keep the control (information & knowledge) so that they are always needed and cannot be replaced. This is the wrong approach as it will get their team to leave, at least the ones who want to grow (and they are the ones we want to keep), and they will slow down everyone else around them since they will be static, they will try to make sure the environment is not changing.

I ask very often to managers who in their teams could replace them and this question makes some of them uncomfortable while the ones who are unsecured are the ones uncomfortable with this question. 

When your daily focus is to invest on the ecosystem around you so that you are no longer needed then you will automatically focus on growing your team, sharing knowledge with them, teaching them to fish (to use the famous expression). You will then automatically focus your time and energy on what can have a lasting influence since only those long term actions can help you become useless. 

When I started to think that way I thought that at the end I would have less work, more time, I was wrong, and this is the second great indirect effect of this mindset. When you think and act to have a long term impact you are actually starting to focus on the big things, the big projects, the ones that are usually more difficult, complex. Those projects that you have always postponed, always with “good” reasons, because you were too busy…

By changing my mindset, I grew my team, I structured the organization and then I worked on bigger projects, I learned a lot more, I started to have a bigger impact and at the end of the day the entire organization started to benefit from this. We learn so much more once we start to focus on the long term.

I have met several founders who sold their businesses because they started to become bored, they were not learning anymore. I have never been in that situation, I feel that everyday I become less stupid, because I always try to move forward and be focused on the next step, on the next project, difficult, painful, complex, that will help my team, my organization and myself to grow. And this can be done in any type of job, whatever size of the team, business, market. This depends on our mindset, on your goal… do you want to keep doing your current job forever, or you want to keep growing? One of my favorite book is Mindset from Carol Dweck.

However, we should never confuse the managers who are trying to become useless with the ones who are actually useless. I have seen too many champions of forwarding everything with the usual excuse that they are very good at delegating. If the manager is not bringing any value, is not teaching their teams, and they just forward tasks, they are actually useless, and in that case if they have not asked to get more projects, tasks, work or another job, it means that you need to let them go.

It is always critical to make sure that everyone in the organization is adding value, starting with oneself.

Lack of strategic alignment

This is a very pompous title for this post. I could also have written “how to win a free bottle of wine by always winning bets”. The reason is that I have very often bet and always won with some managers that if they go to someone in their team and ask them what their top 3 priorities are it would never match what they expect them to answer.”

Unfortunately I always win! Lack of alignment between the manager and his/her team on the top priorities is a recurring issue.

We always massively overestimate how much we are understood. We always think that what is clear to us is clear to everyone else. The root cause is that we have thought so much about it, we have designed the plan for weeks in our mind, we have processed it over and over, we have discussed it, planned it, so once we share it, we make it public, we then think that everyone else will get the EUREKA instantly. Of course it should be clear for them since it is so clear for oneself!

Unfortunately this is obviously not the case, the main reason is that we have not given the same amount of time to the other party to process it, as we did. The real issue is that because it is so clear to us, we take it for granted that it is the same for everyone else, and this is a major problem because we then live in parallel worlds, we think everyone else understand, while they don’t.

We should all realize that we always overestimate how much we are understood. Once we are aware of this, then it allows us to take the necessary actions, which means to over-communicate, to over-explain, to repeat the message, to keep the message super clear and simple.

Then we need is to verify that we are understood, for this just ask questions such as:

  • what are our top priorities this month, quarter, year?
  • what do I expect from you?
  • what are the priorities of our team, company?
  • what is important to me?

Once a manager and his/her team are aligned big things can be achieved.

I cannot end this post without saying that I have made this mistake many times. There was one time when it really hit me, about 10 years ago, at a time when I asked a consultant to coach me, because I needed it. One of his first question was whether our strategy was clear to all the key leaders of the company and my answer as without any hesitation: Yes of course!

To be safe, we applied the tips I shared above and we asked them what they thought our strategy was, and guess what… I should have bought a bottle of wine to the consultant at that time because I lost big time!

But I need to also say that I have faced and still face this issue often. But now I am aware of this, so I can correct the situation sooner. Every time I face an internal frustration about something that is not done the way I was expecting it, the first question I ask myself is whether it was clear to the other person or team what my expectations were, and I often lose / win when I bet with myself, so this is why I very often open a bottle of wine for dinner!

If there is one thing to keep from this post is that we always overestimate how much we are understood.

You are not managing your team with day to day conversations

Don’t think you are managing your teams when talking about operational tasks daily with them.

The team members with whom I have the deepest conversations are NOT the ones who work in the same office / city as mine, they are actually the ones who are very far, the ones I travel to meet with.

In other words the people with whom we talk the most often are the ones we manage / coach / lead the less. We think we are close to them because we answer their daily issues, questions, we check on them every morning at the coffee machine, but then, because we see them often, we simply forget to sit down with them and work / discuss on long term plans, priorization, coaching sessions…

Everytime I travel I take the time to give full business updates to our local teams, I sit down with some of my colleagues to ask long conversations, to answer all their questions, to discuss their road map, talk about strategy, market changes… I take time for each of them, I don’t rush, I value this time a lot, always one to one. However I don’t do this enough with the teams that are the closest to me… and I know this is not making sense.

This is so important to break the routine with the teams that are close to you, the ones you see every day. You need to break the routine and take them to have a drink, a lunch, a 1to1 quality time just the two of you, and not just a quick talk in a meeting room.

I would say it is almost the same at home, you might have dinner with your partner, a parent, friend every night, still if one day you come home and take him/her for an unexpected dinner/lunch, the conversations will be different.

Get the best when checking candidate’s References

In the recruitment process taking references is a very important process but very difficult. It has actually become even more difficult in the past few years because people are getting increasingly afraid of getting into trouble for saying anything negative about an ex-employee… so they either refuse to give references or they just say some b****** stuff that are useless.

The other issue is that when we take references, this is usually because we really want to hire the candidate and so we have a bias to just validate our initial opinion…. so we ask the wrong questions just to justify our initial decision / impression and therefore this is totally useless.

From my experience and past mistakes on checking references:

  • Call with the goal of finding issues, not with the goal of getting the confirmation that the candidate is good. Set yourself in the right mindset.
  • The questions you ask are very important. For example, if you call about a sales candidate and if you ask them if the candidate is a good hunter, you might get a YES, although this is not true, but it is easier for the person to say YES than to say negative things and also because they know that by saying YES the call will be shorter. So don’t ask closed questions, ask open questions…. In that specific case ask the contact for what type of sales role he thinks this candidate is the best fit? Then the person will have to say if this is more hunter or farmer…
  • Questions I like: “If you were to hire this person back, for which job role you would hire this person?” or “What is the best job fit for this candidate?” As much as possible don’t tell the person you are calling for which role you are considering this candidate so that the person is not going to just confirm your choice. Ask very very open questions.
  • Another question I like: “My goal is to make this candidate successful in our company, what advice can you give me on how to manage this candidate?” then the person will tell you important information that will help you make your decision on whether to hire this candidate or not and if you hire this candidate it might allow you to onboard and manage this person more efficiently, this is a priceless information that will be good for the candidate and yourself.
  • Then, who to call is not easy…. of course you can only call the references that the candidate will give you…. you have to go through them…. but issue is that most candidate will give you the names of “friends” they had in their prior job… and even if those “friends” have great and impressive job titles, what really matters is to talk to their ex-boss, not their colleagues, friends, or even boss of other divisions… so you really need to verify this when calling the reference, you really need to understand what was the relationship between the candidate and the person you are calling.

Taking references is a major step in any recruitment process and unfortunately something we skip too often when we are too excited about a candidate.

And finally, you might end up hiring the reference of the candidate at the end…

There are tons of articles online on: The Right Way to Check Someone’s References