Hiring is one of the things where the “move fast and break it” mantra can cause real damage, including blowing product release schedules and, in extreme cases, blowing holes in your team or even destroying it.

A couple of yesterday’s links offered ways to avoid the Peter Principle when hiring, here are some others.

1. Analyze your openings and identify the attitudes needed to perform and be successful in your company, not the experience. Just because they have held a similar position previously doesn’t mean they did it well. And even if they did, the ability may not carry over with a different boss and/or culture.
2. Interview for attitude above experience and don’t rule out someone who hasn’t held a similar position — at some point every boss became one via promotion.
3. Managing is composed of various skills; in that respect it is no different than any other specialty, such as engineering, marketing or finance. Supply training/coaching to anyone promoted to management; nobody is born knowing how, nor is it taught particularly well in college.
4. Find ways to reward exceptional effort beyond promotion to a position that isn’t aligned with ability and interests. When people know there are financial/prestigious alternatives to management they are more likely to speak up when offered a promotion they don’t really want. The image above shows one approach that has been successful in technical and nontechnical fields, because the compensation between pairs is equal on each level.

As in most cases, to change results, change how you think.

Image credit: RampUp Solutions

It’s amazing to me, but looking back over nearly a decade of writing I find posts that still impress, with information that is as useful now as when it was written. Golden Oldies is a collection of what I consider some of the best posts during that time.

Unengaged workers was a growing problem long before I wrote Who Cares in 2011and it has escalated since then. The results of a January Gallup poll show 67.5% of US workers are unengaged and the reason at the end of this post still holds true. Read other Golden Oldies here.

I’m hearing the same lament from a lot of managers these days; the words and circumstances are different, but it boils down to the same thing—s/he has the knowledge, but doesn’t do anything.

It’s not just younger workers, but all ages.

The current term is “unengaged” and the problem is rampant.

Most managers who call don’t use that term, they complain that people just don’t care. They don’t care about doing more than the minimum; they don’t care about doing great work, instead of just adequate; they don’t care how the company is doing; the list of ‘they don’t care’ goes on and on.

They all see this as a problem with the people they hire.

They ask me where to source good candidates; how to better interview, so they can hire “people who give a damn.”

Some complain that the so-called entitled attitude of Millennials has spread to all ages.

These managers are a disparate group; they come from different industries and range from management newbies to senior executives, but they all have one thing in common.

None of them sees “not giving a damn” as a result of the way they manage, but 98% of the time it is.

So the next time someone you know (or you) complains about people not caring, suggest they ask the only person who really knows the answer—the one they will find in the mirror.

The old adage “you reap what you sow” holds just as true for bosses and companies as in any other circumstances.

Flickr image credit: antkriz