Picking People:The Basic Rules

Peter Druker 1985

Executives spend more time on managing people and making people decisions than on anything else.and they should. No other decisions are so long lasting in their consequences or so difficult to unmake. And yet, by and large, executives make poor promotion and staffing decisions. By all accounts, their batting average is no better than .333: at most one-third of such decisions turn out right; one-third are minimally effective; and one-third are outright failures.In no other area of management would we put up with such miserable performance.

The Basic Principles

Some executives' people decision have, however, approached perfection. they followed, and quite consciously, much the same principles in making people decisions:

1. If I put a person into a job and he or she dose not perform, I have made a mistake. I have no business blaming that person, no business complaining. I have made a mistake.

2. It is the duty of managers to make sure that the responsible people in their organizations perform.

3. Of all the decisions an executive makes, none is as important as the decisions about people beause they determine the performance capacity of the organization. Therefore, I'd better make the decision well.

4. The one "don't": Don't give new people new major assignments, for doing so only compound the risks. Give this sort of assignment to someone whose behavior and habits you know and who has earned trust and credibility within your organization. Put a high-level newcomer first into an established position where the expectations are known and help is available.

Sucessful example: To initiate a projects, a U.S company sent to Europe a U.S. executive who had never before worked or lived there but whom people in the head offies knew thoroughly and understood well. in turn he was thoroughly familiar with their companies. At the same time, each organization hired half a dozen young Europeans and placed them in upper-middle executive jobs in the United States. Within a few years, the company had a solid European business and a trained, seasoned, and trusted corps of executives to run it.

In the corporation as in the military, without personal knowledge built up over a period of time there can be neither trust nor effective communication.

The Decision Steps

Just as there are only a few basic principles, there are only a few important steps to follow in making effective promotion and staffing decisions:

1. Think through the assignment. When the task is to select a mew regional sales manager, the responsible executive must first know what the heart of the assignment is : to recruit and train new salespeople because, say, the present sales force is nearing retirement age? Or is it to open up new markets because the company's products, though doing well with old-line industires in the region, have not been able to penetrate new and growing markets? Or, because the bulk of sales still comes from products that are twenty-five years old, is it to establish a market presence for the company's new products? Each of these is a different assignment and requires a different kind of person.

2. Look at a number of potentially qualified people.

3. Think hard about how to look at these candidates. If an executive has studied the assignment, he or she understands what a new person would need to do with high priority and concentrated effort. The central question is not "what can this or that candidate do or not do?" it is , rather, "what are the strengths each possesses and are these the right strengths for the assignment?". Effective executives do not start out by looking at weaknesses, you cannot build performance on weaknesses, you can build only on strengths. Harry Truman said, if effect: " Never mind personal weaknesses, Tell me first what each of them can do. "

4. Discuss each of the candidates with several people who have worked with them.

5. Make sure the appointee understand the job. It's the executive's responsibility to call that person in and say: what do you have to do to be a success in your new job? Think it through and come back in a week or ten days and show me in writing.

The High-Risk Decisions 

Even if executies follow all these steps, some of their people decisions will still fall. These are, for the most part, the high-risk decisions that nevertheless have to be taken.

There is, for example: Yet there is no correlation between performance as a professional and performance as a manager. We do not know how to test or predict whether a person's tempreament will suit a new environment. To keep misfits in a job they cannot do is not being kind, it's being cruel, but there is also no reason to let the person go, the proper course of action is to offer the misfit a return to the old job or an equivalent.

People decisions may also fail because a job has become what New England ship captains 150 years ago called a widowmaker. When a clipper ship, no matter how well designed and constructed, began to have fatal "accidents", the owners did not redesign or rebuild the ship. They broke it up as fast as possible. Whenever a job defeats two people in a row, who in their earlier assignments had performed well, a company has a widow-maker on it's hands. When htis happens, a responsible executive should not ask the head hunter for a universal genius. Instead abolish the job.Any job that ordinarily competent people cannot perform is a job that cannot be staffed.

Making the right people decisions is the ultimate means of controlling an organization well. Such decisions reveal how competent management is, what its values are, and whether it takes its job seriously. No matter how hard managers try to keep their decisions a secret, people decisions cannot be hidden. They are eminently visible. As we have known for a long time, people in organizations tend to behave as they see others being rewarded. And when the rewards go to nonperformance, to flattery, or to mere cleverness, the organization will soon decline into nonperformance, flattery, or cleverness.

Executives who do not make the effort to get their people dicisions right do more than risk poor perfoormance. They risk their organization's respect.