I’m in the market for a little outside help – which leads to the question, how to choose good people?

Whether looking for lawyers, accountants, developers, consultants, or anyone else, finding the right kind of help can be a challenge.

It seems to me the problem breaks down into three parts:

1. Deciding you actually need help in the first place
   In my world, I look for outside help when I know I want something done but I don’t have the vital ingredients of time, talent or inclination to do it myself.
   Time – like most people I’m pretty busy, there’s plenty of things I’m capable of but just can’t (or shouldn’t) prioritise the time to actually do.
   Talent – which really stands for talent or training. Some things I can’t do, like design or programming, whilst others I’m not qualified to do, like drafting contracts.
   Inclination – some things I could make time for and have the ability to do, but they’re just not high enough on my personal priority list. For example, B might need attention but all my focus is on A.
   There are obvious grey areas around things I could squeeze in, things I can do but am not very good at, and things I feel like doing but am not wholly committed to. Sometimes I have to force myself to be realistic.
   When I do decide to look for help the first port of call is always inside the organisation, there’s often someone looking for a challenge and who has the ingredients. But this article isn’t about them, so who?
2. Choosing the right people
   Two issues come to mind here – the right person to do what? and the right person? – that are often wrapped up together.
   Wouldn’t it be great if every time I needed help I knew exactly what was needed, I’d lay out the brief and ask for quotes. How much for this? Sometimes that even works. More often than not, working out exactly what needs to be done is actually part of what I need help with. What should we do?
   The harder the question, the more I have to rely on trust. Here’s my hit list in no particular order:
   1. A strong track record – can they point to their existing work or previous customers who can vouch for them?
   2. Informative – I like to work with people who know what they’re doing and can explain it in words I understand. This might mean a good web site or well written proposal but it certainly means someone who understands the why of what they do as well as the what.
   3. Attitude – will this person work in the trenches, getting elbow deep in mud if necessary?
   4. Focus – will they stay on point and get the job done, or would they rather be doing something else?
   5. Consistent – this is a catchall. Do they always turn up on time, sweat the small stuff, behave with courtesy and build their reputation in every meeting? In short, will they to continue to behave the way they did when we first met?
3. Getting along
   Having decided to get help, and then chosen the right help, it’s time to get specific and get the work done. Getting specific means deciding exactly what success looks like which normally happens after I’ve chosen my outsider and just before the actual work begins – it’s the final test. After that, it’s all about relationship and management.

The most common trap I’ve experienced is letting the project get off brief – both sides can be responsible.

Also, it’s easy to forget than even the most well paid, highly qualified and supremely confident person is still a person and likes to be told they’re doing a good job every now and again. If they’re not doing a good job, and they’re worth their salt, they like to know that too. In other words, managing an outsider is just like managing an insider.

There are certainly more robust ways of finding the right kind of help which are especially useful when making the most enormous decisions, but on the whole, the question that’s at the back of my mind whenever I’m sitting across the table from any kind of consultant is, “can I trust you?”

Neatly filed under Focus,Managing on May 6, 2009

Of course, there are times when you need someone for a job that has to be done right, or in a very particular way – if I’m in the market for a surgeon or an auditor I don’t want someone learning on the job – but most of the time experience is a poor relation.

So why do most recruiters hire on experience? Because they think it’s safe and cheap.

And they’re right, in the short run.

Safe and cheap? If someone’s made a living as a salesman, .NET programmer or marketing manager, if they’ve managed projects, PA’d or PR’d before, chances are they know the territory and can hit the ground at a trot, not stumble along, learning as they go.

Short run? If you’re hiring today and you need something done next week, contract it out. Hiring is a long term bet. Experience may make getting up to speed a little quicker, but the wrong kind of person is the wrong kind of person at any speed. Getting rid of problems costs time, recruitment fees, and the goodwill, productivity and attention of colleagues.

Hiring on experience is neither safe nor cheap. It won’t make the person fit the culture, pull their weight, perform to expectations, work as a team … it just means they walk in the door with some wear on their shoes.

Hiring good people is tough, there are no short cuts. If not experience, what?

Dee Hock, who founded VISA, wrote in Birth of the Chaordic Age,

Hire and promote first on integrity, then motivation, third capacity, fourth understanding, fifth knowledge and last experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.

Jack Welch, of GE fame, wrote about Hiring in Winning which I’ll paraphrase,   

1. Integrity – “people who tell the truth and keep their word. They take responsibility for past actions, admit mistakes, and fix them.”
2. Intelligence – “a strong dose of intellectual curiosity, with a breadth of knowledge to work with or lead other smart people. … Don’t confuse intelligence with education”
3. Maturity – a “grown up. … withstand the heat, handle stress and setbacks, … enjoy success with equal parts joy and humility.”

Hiring is a huge step – for you and the newbie. Mistakes happen – beating 50% can be a challenge.

What do you look for?

Top of my list comes attitude. In the kind of roles I’ve hired for, there’s no routine. I look for the kind of person who crawls around under the desk to fix the wiring or borrows a screwdriver to fix the chair, and “that’s not my job” never lights up the Broca’s area of their brain.

After attitude, I’ll go with Hock and Welch.

Whatever you call it – integrity, do the right thing, the golden rule – this is the value with the most impact on skippiness.

Neatly filed under Managing,Skippiness on May 1, 2009

One of the world’s most famous inventors said, “I have been impressed with the urgency of doing.”

Leonardo da Vinci, certainly knew a thing or two about getting things done.

The urgency of doing suggests doing the urgent, which is nothing but a very deep bear trap. Stuff comes up, email tumbles in, do you have a minute? could you …? I’ll just do this before …

All those little urgent nothings get in the way of actually doing something that matters.

Steven Covey says the heart of personal effectiveness is to spend time on the non-urgent important stuff. Putting time into the slow stuff today – like relationships, purpose, maintenance, planning and preparation – means less (quick) time fire fighting stuff tomorrow.

Here’s the full da Vinci quote,

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing.
Knowing is not enough; we must apply.
Being willing is not enough; we must do.

Don’t be so impressed with the urgency of doing that you do whatever comes along. Be willing to prioritise the important.

Photo credit – mallorcaquality who has a bunch of photos showing replicas of da Vinci inventions.

Neatly filed under Managing on April 27, 2009

Most HR departments do personnel administration, not human resources management.

Back when I was hired for my first job, I spent a few minutes with someone from Personnel who walked me through the mandatory administration tasks to get me on the payroll. Which was nice, obviously. My relationship with that department consisted solely of the monthly ritual of a wage slip passing into my hands.

I’m sure they did other things too. Hiring and firing type things. Working out benefits and salary structure type things. Administrative things.

Personnel departments mostly concerned themselves with hiring and administering good talent.

But it’s not the companies with the best talent who win. It’s not just about hiring well. It’s about nurturing and developing talent, bringing the best out of it, and getting it to work together for a common aim. Winning is about management.

Personnel people worked that out. They invented HR Management and talked about their role as strategic partners with a seat at the leadership table. Personnel departments became HR Management.

HR Management implies something more than handling the day-to-day administrative tasks. It implies the focused development of the expensive, value adding, parts of the organisation to improve performance of the individual and the whole.

Some companies pull it off.

But most don’t.

Twenty years after the revolution, HR departments mostly do Personnel. Working out payroll. Developing procedures not people. Administering not managing. Sitting in on interviews to ensure compliance with policy. Inventing arcane, time consuming, meaningless performance “criteria” that turn appraisals into exercises in form filling.

HR departments are perfectly good at doing administration – so were Personnel departments and so are specialist outsource specialists, probably at lower cost – but not much good at doing what they promise.

So what to do?

To misquote David Packard, HR is too important to be left to the HR department. Let HR do administration (whilst talking about strategy) and stop them getting in the way of humans, resources, or management.

Neatly filed under Managing on April 23, 2009

This week I got involved in a conversation that had lawyers sitting on the other side of the table. Thankfully not the kind of discussion that happens when things go bad, but the other kind, when things haven’t quite started yet.

This happens a lot in organisational life. Employment contracts, licensing agreements, partnerships, outsourcing, non-disclosures, service level agreements. Internally and externally, we rely on bits of paper to nail the detail. These things are so common that it’s easy to believe that this is the way to do business. That this is how to deal with difficult possibilities. That this will make everything ok. But it won’t.

Lawyering like this is good, but it will only reduce some of the wriggle room for some of the arguments that normally come up. Not eliminate disagreements altogether. Not stop problems happening. Just squeeze some of the juice out of the lemon – it’s still going to hurt, but not as much.

If it’s going to hurt, why do it? Why employ, agree, partner, outsource or do anything else that puts us in the hands of others? The promise of working together is that the business of the organisation will be better than before. An organisation’s success will increasingly be determined by its ability to work across formal boundaries – whether than means inter-department or inter-company.

• Go in with eyes wide open. By all means clock up some billable time with lawyers but don’t kid yourself that this means plain sailing from start to finish. There will be problems. Expect them to happen, however good your relationship and however willingly the parties sign at the start.
• Work through the bad times. When things start going wrong, put your collective heads down and work it out. Nobody wins when you walk away or run to litigation. Remind yourselves the reason you got together – to both be better than before – and find the path through the mountains.

When choosing which person or organisation to share ink with, work out who you’re dealing with (which is more about values than names or capabilities), and ask yourself “can I work with them when things go wrong?”

Ultimately, never allow the desire for a deal to cloud the needs of the business.

Neatly filed under Leading,Managing on April 18, 2009