February 11, 2010
Last year I wrote about “Where Are You on the Depth Chart?” You can see the earlier Blog here.
A new baseball season is approaching, and each Major League team is determining who they will be inviting to Spring Training. This ritual of spring forces each team to re-examine their existing players and their prospects for those 25 coveted positions on a Major League roster.
What are you doing to put your best team on the field?
I am a big fan of Jim Collins’ “Good to Great.” One of the key chapters, in the book about how mediocre companies became great, was Chapter 3 – FIRST WHO … THEN WHAT. Jim points out that the companies that became great first concentrated on getting the right people into the company, then putting them in the best position in the company, then getting the wrong people out of the company.
The leaders of the companies learned that by doing that three benefits accrued:
- If you first get the right people in the company and they are in the correct positions within the company, you are better able to adapt to changes in the business world. This is an accommodation to the fact that the only constant in the business world is change. For example: If you are currently in the business of making paper and you load up the company with PhD’s for making paper and then you need to change to making a variety of consumer goods, then you may not have the right people to approach this new assignment. However, if you have great people who were excited about working with other great people, then you can make this type of change on a dime.
- If you have the right people in the company, the problems with managing them largely disappear. The right people are internally driven to do a great job, they manage themselves. With this situation, the time and effort that you had previously had to devote to motivating and managing people can be reallocated to developing positive initiatives that are in line with the company’s current goals.
- If you have the wrong people in the company, you cannot become great. You will be constantly challenged to solve internal disputes, motivating lackluster performers, and generally not doing the things that will allow the company to focus on customers and
Do you have the right people in your company?
Are they in the best positions within your company?
Do you have the will to career counsel the wrong people out of your company?
These are all challenging questions and next week we will examine how to determine who the right people are.
That is it for this week. Post your comments on the Blog and let us stimulate the discussion.
Thanks,
Ted S. Miller