I’m a mystery reader, especially old mysteries, and one of my favorites is the Miss Silver series by Patricia Wentworth. I mention it because the opening lines in one are very apropos to hiring.

They go, “[she] became involved in a story which had begun a long time before, and whose end may be quite unknown, since what happened yesterday must needs affect today and set out a pattern for tomorrow. It is not, of course, necessary to follow the pattern, but it is sometimes easier, and ease is always tempting.“

That’s an excellent summation of your relationship with a candidate.

You hire based on past performance, which doesn’t a guarantee the future; when that performance doesn’t work out it is easier to blame the candidate than to look for shortfalls in your own management. And, as Wentworth said, “ease is always tempting.”

Stars are far more often made than born, and it is you, their manager, who makes them.

Bad/poor management can dim the brightest star, whereas great management can make even an asteroid shine.

It is your MAP that defines how you manage and, for most workers, no matter their level, how they are managed defines their productivity, creativity and star power.

Your MAP, your control, your decision.

A manager and I had an email discussion today that I thought would interest many of you. It started with a reference to a Gallup poll stating that ““Engaged performance” occurs when employees feel ownership of their jobs and invest themselves fully in their work and career.” (It also says that only 27% consider themselves engaged.)

He went on to say that one of the speakers at a networking event he attended yesterday said that “most successful companies (in the long term) retain and grow their human resource base from within the company, which insures engagement.” The speaker went on to intimate that when a company fulfills it’s human resource needs by hiring from the outside, in most cases, it’s picking up the “rejects” from other companies.”

That’s when I went through the ceiling. Of all the totally wrong-headed attitudes I’ve heard on the subject of hiring, there is only one that is comparable and, in fact, they go hand in hand. During every recession through which I worked as a headhunter, I’ve heard variations on the theme that the only employees worth hiring were the ones who were still working. Even when companies had cut 50% of their workforce and were still cutting, if you were laid off you were “dead wood.” My blood still boils when I remember the excellent people who were completely trashed by that attitude.

I do agree that growing people from within is good company policy, however, there are excellent reasons why a company would hire at levels other than entry.

First, I defy any company to grow from $X to $Y and not hire from the outside—it’s a given part of growth. For example, most startups and high-growth companies have neither the diversification, nor the depth, of talent needed when growth kicks in, so they hire at all levels. Next, hiring only at entry level and promoting only from within can create a hidebound culture steeped in a not-invented-here mentality, not only for products, but for processes—as happened at both IBM and HP.

But the major reason for my vehemence is that most people work to the quality of their managers—they don’t shine because they aren’t engaged! The saying is that 10% are “stars,” well, good luck trying to run a company on just 10% of the workforce, however, give people good managers and they can all be stars.

Finally, in addition to poor management, people change jobs for many reasons,

• the company lays off 5-10/20/30+% of it’s workforce;
• their manager or best friend leaves;
• they’re in the wrong culture or it changes due to executive turnover or acquisition; or
• they’re ready to grow, but there are no opportunities.

There are dozens of other reasons (think about your own experience), but the both the reject and the dead wood attitudes are way out of line.

Whoops, I didn’t mean to rant, but I do tend to go a bit berserk when work quality is laid completely at the door of workers with no responsibility on the managers.

Just a note: my correspondent is very pleased that in his company (my client) responsibility is placed at the door of managers, where he, too, believes it belongs; and that he works hard (successfully, I might add) to keep his people engaged.

There is a subject that makes me crazy whenever it comes up, as it did today in a meeting when the a senior manager started talking about “retaining stars.” To be honest, I get pretty hot, because I find not just the concept, but the way it’s so often done, offensive.

To start with, there’s the whole idea of “stars.” From the vantage point of my 25 years of headhunting I know that this is true: people work to the quality of their management. “Star” is a strictly subjective definition—one manager’s star is another manager’s pain in the behind.

In my experience the workforce breaks down into three segments.

• At the top you have the so-called stars, the 10% who succeed on their own no matter what;
• at the other end are the 3% I call destroyers—because that’s how they get their kicks.

Both these groups do their thing in spite of how they’re managed.

What of the rest?

• 87% are neither stars nor destroyers on their own, but can become either because of how they’re managed!

Aside from its being mathematically impossible to hire nothing but stars, would you really want to? Stars may be creative, but they also do it their own way. Because they’re leaders, they need constant advancement, if not in your company then in another. Don’t get me wrong, stars can be team players, but they play better if it’s their team. Sayings such as, “Too many cooks spoil that soup.” and “You can’t fight a war with nothing but generals.” have been around for decades because they are true.

What’s more, singling out a few people for special treatment turns off the rest of your organization. Let’s say you have a 30 person group out of which you identify seven stars. To retain them you create a program of special mentoring, training and development, and make sure that they have access to extra opportunities and they stay with the company for four years.

Around 30% of your other 27 people will spend six months to a year trying to gain entree to the program and will usually leave if they don’t. 10-12% will get angry over what they see as favoritism and start looking immediately. Over the next few years, the rest usually experience a drop in confidence, lower self-esteem, declining productivity, growing frustration and dissatisfaction culminating in a call from a headhunter or ex-colleague. By the end of the four years you still have your stars, but have experienced turnover in excess of 100%, since the same sequence of events will effect the replacements.

A far better approach, from CEO down, is to recognize that it’s your responsibility to provide the environment, opportunity, encouragement and support that inspires people to achieve all that they can and become a star in their own right.

Startup or not, people are working longer hours even if they aren’t in an office.

Millennials are burning out, because they feel guilty unless they are working.

People of all ages, even those well into their seventies are working longer and proud of it. Having spare time has become a symbol of low value, while being always busy equates to high status.

So it’s no surprise that companies and individual bosses are taking advantage and always pushing people to increase productivity.

When what they should be doing is sending them home, since working longer hours has been proved to lower productivity.

As countless studies have shown, this simply isn’t true. Productivity dramatically decreases with longer work hours, and completely drops off once people reach 55 hours of work a week, to the point that, on average, someone working 70 hours in a week achieves no more than a colleague working 15 fewer hours.

But that doesn’t stop various media from writing job shaming articles making fun of successful, well-known people working retail jobs.

Fans wondered why it was deemed newsworthy that a mother of two had taken a job in a different sector when her best-known role as an actor had wound down. (Soap stars, even on massive hits like EastEnders, do not earn early-retirement-level salaries.)

The fiasco echoed a similar attempt at job-shaming by another British tabloid last year, when the Daily Mail published photos of American actor Geoffrey Owens bagging groceries as a cashier at a Trader Joe’s, a retail chain known for its excellent job benefits. Fox News picked up the story in the US and both media outlets were ridiculed for it.

And, for a change, the trolls crawled quietly back under their rocks. Will wonders never cease.

Many of those working so-called low-level jobs are college graduates.

McKinsey findings show that 48% of employed U.S. college grads are in jobs that require less than a four-year degree.

Geoffrey Owens summed it up best.

“There is no job that’s better than another job. It might pay better, it might have better benefits, it might look better on a resume and on paper. But actually, it’s not better. Every job is worthwhile and valuable,”

Image credit: Kat

Poking through 13+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

Since this was written in 2012 things have gotten much worse, with deep fakes, audio and video, fake news and misinformation in general added to everything described in the post. Caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) is more true now and more important than ever before.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Do you look for peer reviews, such as those on Yelp, Amazon and most consumer sites, before buying the product, visiting the restaurant or booking the hotel?

Before the Internet we asked our friends and checked critics’ comments in newspapers and magazines, in order to increase the odds for a favorable experience.

These days we check the Internet.

“The wheels of online commerce run on positive reviews,” said Bing Liu, a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois, Chicago (…) Mr. Liu estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake.

Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.

Do rankings based on the number of followers people have influence your trust level or opinion of them? But how do you know they are real?

And it’s not just ego-driven blogger types. Celebrities, politicians, start-ups, aspiring rock stars, reality show hopefuls — anyone who might benefit from having a larger social media footprint — are known to have bought large blocks of Twitter followers.

Are you impressed when someone’s Facebook wall is filled with beautiful people?

They are for sale, too.

His idea, he said, was “to turn cyberlosers into social-networking magnets” by providing fictitious postings from attractive people. The postings are written by the client or by Mr. Walker and his employees, who base the messages on the client’s requests.

If having to choose between being a chump and a cynic isn’t up your alley, perhaps the best advice when it comes to reviews, followers and friends is ‘buyer beware’ and ‘if it seems to good to be true it probably is’.

Flickr image credit: Psychology Today

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

It’s said that money is the root of all evil, but there are plenty of evil people with no money and lots of wealthy people who do enormous good. I think it’s more accurate to say that greed is the root, since people will do anything to satisfy it. And often, what they do is perfectly legal — but legal doesn’t mean either ethical or moral.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

I’m no happier about the AIG and other bonuses paid to screwed up Wall Street banks, but I’m not sure why any of us are surprised.

“In the largest 25 corporate bankruptcies between 1999 and 2002, while hundreds of billions of dollars of investor wealth and over 100,000 jobs disappeared, the Financial Times found the “barons of bankruptcy” made off with $3.3 billion.”

Giant compensation packages, guaranteed bonuses and platinum parachutes are excused by Boards and executives as necessary to attract the “best and brightest,” but here’s what’s really going on.

The ‘names’ demand outsize compensation/stock options/guaranteed bonus/etc. in order to validate their ‘brand’.

Those responsible for hiring not only meet the demands, but even exceed them in an effort to attain or sustain the company’s reputation as a better home for ‘stars’ — the more stars you have the greater the bragging rights — mine’s bigger than yours in high school locker room talk.

Now let’s consider the folly of this attitude.

Those hiring often seek a name brand in the mistaken belief that the brand comes with a warranty that guarantees good results.

But no matter who you hire you’re actually paying for their past performance, which is always influenced by

• • circumstances—boss and company positioning in its market and industry
  • environment—culture and colleagues;

and let us not forget that minor factor

• • the economy.

The hiring mindset is that everything the brand accomplished was done in a total vacuum and dependent only on the brand’s own actions, therefore changing every single surrounding factor will have no impact on performance.

Put like that it sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it.

This is one of the prime reasons that so many CEOs bring their ‘own team’ over when they move, as do managers all the way down the food chain—they know they didn’t do it alone.

CEOs aren’t like movie and rock stars whose very names draw consumers into spending money—nobody ever bought a product from GE because Jack Welch was CEO, nor do they carry Jobs iPods—so why pay them that way?

Moreover, assuming that performance occurring during an expansion is a valid yardstick for performance in general, let alone a downturn, is sheer idiocy.

You have only to remember the difficulties faced by people whose management skills were honed between 1991 and 2000, the longest expansion in our history. When the recession hit in March of 2001 they had no experience whatsoever of how to drive revenue or manage in a down economy.

That recession and the previous one in 1990 lasted only 8 months each. The longest recession we’ve had was 2 years, January-July 1980 and July 1981-November 1982, and that one had a 12 month break in it. This means there are a very small number of managers with any actual experience managing in anything even close to what’s happening now.

The current recession officially started in December 2007, so it’s already 15 months old and the end isn’t in sight.

What experience makes these folks the ‘best and brightest’ for today’s world?

Just why the hell are companies still guaranteeing oversized compensation and exorbitant exit packages when now is definitely the time to pay for future performance—no guarantees.

Image credit: flickr

Do ads for smart stuff excite you?

Do you lust for a smart refrigerator, smart doorbell or some other smart product?

Do you want a smart home?

What about a smart city?

We already have a smart electric grid.

What do they all have in common?

They can be hacked.

It’s something to think about.

Smart = hackable.

Hacking a personally owned smart device is bad, but it pales in comparison to what happens if (when) the grid is hacked, whether by a foreign power or civilians for ransom.

Ukraine’s power was hacked in 2015, but old technology saved it from a far worse outcome.

A bill introduced in 2016 has been working its way through the US Congress. It would require similar old tech for US power grids. The bill provides a study period, so it will be 2020 before anything actually happens.

The old tech is actually the only solution that is immune to cyber/digital attacks of any kind.

Can you guess what it is?

If you guessed analog/manual/human give yourself a gold star. If you are under 40 you get five gold stars.

“Specifically, it will examine ways to replace automated systems with low-tech redundancies, like manual procedures controlled by human operators,” said US Senators Angus King (I-Maine) and Jim Risch (R-Idaho), who introduced the bill on the Senate floor in 2016. (…) The US is very close to improving power grid security by mandating the use of “retro” (analog, manual) technologies on US power grids as a defensive measure against foreign cyber-attacks that could bring down power distribution as a result.

Are you surprised? I’m not.

I always thought hooking the power grid up to the hackable internet was a dumb idea.

Kind of like locking your house and then taping spare keys to the doorframes.

Now we’ll spend millions on these “improvements.”

Stupidity really does rule.

Image credit: Midnight Believer

I’ve made my own hiring errors, as have we all (anyone who claims otherwise is lying).

So when interviewing, we have a few company-wide mantras (for lack of a better term) to guide us.

I find this one goes a long way to ensuring we don’t get caught up in people’s past, rather, it helps us focus on attitude and potential.

“The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team.” — John Wooden, basketball player and coach

Look at all the people who were stars at places like Goldman Sachs or Google, such as Marissa Meyer, or GE’s Bob Nardelli (who nearly destroyed Home Depot), who were unable to maintain their level of performance outside the culture, systems and management of that specific company.

That’s why it’s always dangerous to hire stars — more than anything else they are a product of their environment.

Image credit: Lee Haywood

Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.

Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.

You can not imagine the thrill when I see the stuff I passionately believe in mirrors the beliefs of people I hold in high regard, such as Fred Wilson, who knows and has experienced far more than I ever will. It’s a definite high.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

A few days ago Fred Wilson wrote about the importance of culture and fit.

Some entrepreneurs and CEOs buy into “hire the best talent available” mantra. That can work if everything goes swimmingly well. But as I said, it often does not, and then that approach is fraught with problems. The other approach is hire for culture and fit. That is the approach I advocate.

That’s the same approach I’ve advocated for decades.

What many forget is that “the best talent available” refers to whoever will perform best in your culture as part of your team and focus on your company’s success.

Too many founders, CEOs, other execs and even lower level managers seem to hire for bragging rights instead.

I wrote about hiring and culture here last Sept and included a link to an article I wrote for MSDN way back in 1999 that explained how to use your culture as a screening tool when hiring.

I’ve always told clients that the fastest way to success is to always hire the right person at the right time and for the right reasons.

Good hiring is like cooking Chinese—80% of the time used is spent prepping and the balance doing.

There really are no shortcuts; especially not hiring other people’s stars.

Not to sound self-serving, but I’ve been surprised at how closely the ideas I’ve always believed in parallel Wilson’s thoughts.

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here.

As a founder I’m identified as a leader, but I don’t believe that any position makes one a leader.

Nor do visions, speeches, brilliant presentations or skilled fundraising.

I believe you recognize a leader by the quality of their team.

That doesn’t mean hiring someone else’s stars, it means hiring good people and providing all of them an environment that helps them become stars.

Over the years, I’ve collected short quotes that inspire me and help me become a leader in fact, not just in name.

Here is one of my favorites.

The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.
John Buchan,
historian and political leader

I hope you find it as useful as I have.

Image credit: Wikipedia