CHAPTER NINE
Staffing for Excellence
EFFECTIVE MANAGERS MAKE STRENGTH productive. They know that they cannot build on weakness. To get results, they use all the available strengths—of associates, of superiors, and their own strengths. To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organizations.
The manager first encounters the challenge of strength in staffing. The effective manager fills positions and promotes on the basis of what a man or woman can do, making staffing decisions not to minimize weaknesses, but to maximize strength. President Lincoln, when told that General Grant, his new commander–in–chief, was fond of the bottle, is reported to have said: “If I knew his brand, I’d send a barrel or so to some other generals.” After a childhood on the Kentucky and Illinois frontier, Lincoln assuredly knew all about the bottle and its dangers. But of all the Union generals, Grant alone had proved consistently capable of winning campaigns. Grant’s appointment was the turning point of the Civil War. It was an effective appointment because Lincoln chose his general for his ability to win battles, not for the absence of a weakness.
Lincoln learned this the hard way, however. Before he chose Grant, he had appointed in succession three or four generals whose main qualifications were their lack of major weaknesses.
In sharp contrast, Robert E. Lee had staffed the Confederate forces from strength. Every one of his generals was a man of obvious and monumental weaknesses. But these failings Lee considered—rightly—to be irrelevant. Each of them had one area of real strength, and it was only this strength that Lee utilized and made effective.
One of his generals, the story goes, had disregarded orders and completely upset Lee’s plans—and not for the first time. Lee, who normally controlled his temper, blew up in a towering rage. When he had simmered down, one of his aides asked respectfully, “Why don’t you relieve him of his command?” Lee, it is said, turned around in complete amazement, looked at the aide and said, “What an absurd question—he performs.”
Effective Staffing Aims to Build on Strength, Not to Avoid Weakness
The executive who is concerned with what a person cannot do rather than with what that person can do, and therefore tries to avoid weakness rather than make strength effective, is probably a weak executive. Such an executive probably sees strength in others as a threat. But no executive has ever suffered because of subordinates who were strong and effective.
Effective executives know that their subordinates are paid to perform, not to please their superiors. It does not matter how many tantrums a temperamental soprano or tenor throws as long as they bring in the customers.
Effective executives never ask, “How does he get along with me?” Their question is “What does he contribute?” It is always, “What can she do uncommonly well?” They look for excellence in a major area, and not for performance that simply gets by all around. The executive who does not first ask, “What can a person do?” is bound to accept far less than that person can really contribute. The executive thereby excuses non–performance in advance. The really “demanding” boss—and all effective executives are demanding bosses in one way or another—always starts out with what a person should be able to do well—and then demands that that person do it.
Building against weakness frustrates the purpose of organization. But one can so structure an organization that the weaknesses become a personal blemish outside of, or at least beside, the work and accomplishment. A good tax accountant, for example John Jones, might be greatly hampered in private practice by an inability to get along with people. But in an organization he can be set up in an office of his own and shielded from contact with others: One can make his strength effective, his weakness irrelevant. The executive who understands that it is his or her job to enable John Jones to do his tax accounting has no illusions about Jones’s ability to get along with people.
All this is obvious. Why, then, is it not done all the time?
The main reason is that the immediate task of the executive is not to place a man or woman. It is to fill a job. The tendency is therefore to start out with the job, and then look for someone to fill it. It is only too easy to be misled this way into looking for the “least misfit”—the one person who leaves least to be desired. And this invariably results in mediocrity.
The widely advertised “cure” for this is to structure jobs to fit the personalities available. But this cure is worse than the disease—except perhaps in a very small and simple organization. Jobs have to be objective, determined by task rather than personality.
One reason for this is that every change in the definition, structure, and position of a job within an organization sets off a chain reaction. Jobs in an organization are interdependent and interlocked. One cannot change everybody’s work and responsibility just because one has to replace a single person in a single job: It results in a dozen people being uprooted and pushed around in order to accommodate the one person.
But there is a subtler reason for insistence on impersonal, objective jobs. It is the only way to provide the organization with the human diversity it needs. Structuring jobs to fit personality is almost certain to lead to favoritism and conformity. No organization can afford either. It needs equity and impersonal fairness in its personnel decisions or else it will either lose its good people or destroy their incentive.
Avoiding the Trap of Staffing to Suit Personality
How, then, do effective executives staff for strength without stumbling into the opposite trap of building jobs to suit personality?
By and large, they follow three rules:
- They do not start out with the assumption that jobs are created by nature or by God. They know that they have been designed by highly fallible people. And they are therefore forever on guard against the “impossible” job.
Such jobs are common. They usually look exceedingly logical on paper—but they cannot be filled. One qualified candidate after the other is tried. None does well. Six months or a year later, the job has defeated the candidate. Why? It was probably created to accommodate an unusual person and tailored to his or her idiosyncrasies. It usually calls for a mixture of temperaments rarely found in one person. Such a job becomes “undoable.”
The rule is simple: Any job that has defeated two or three candidates in succession, even though each had performed well in previous assignments, must be assumed unfit for human beings. It must be redesigned.
Every text on marketing concludes, for instance, that sales management belongs with advertising and promotion under the same marketing executive. The experience of large manufacturers of branded and mass-marketed consumer goods has been, however, that this job is impossible. Such a business needs high effectiveness both in field selling, i.e., moving goods, and in advertising and promotion, i.e., moving people. These appeal to different personalities rarely found in one person.
The effective executive therefore first makes sure that the job is well designed. And if experience suggests otherwise, the effective executive does not hunt for a genius to do the impossible but instead redesigns the job. This executive knows that the test of organization is not genius. It is its capacity to make common people achieve uncommon performance.
2. The second rule for staffing from strength is to make each job demanding and big. A job should challenge people to bring out their strengths.
This, however, is not the policy of most large organizations. They tend to make the job small—which would make sense only if people were designed and machined for specific performance at a given moment. Yet not only do we have to fill jobs with people as they come. The demands of any job above the simplest are also bound to change, and often abruptly. The “perfect fit” then rapidly becomes the misfit. But if the job is big and demanding to begin with, it will enable an incumbent to rise to the new demands of a changed situation.
This rule applies to someone’s first job in particular because that is where a person’s strengths should have a chance to find full play. For a beginner like Jane Jones, for example, in her first job the standards are set by which she will guide and measure herself the rest of her career. Till she entered her first adult job she never had a chance to perform. All one can do in school is to show promise. Performance is possible only in real work, whether in a research lab, in teaching, in business, or a government agency. Both for a beginner like Jane and for the rest of the organization, her colleagues and superiors, the most important thing to find out is what she really can do.
It is equally important for her to find out as early as possible whether she is indeed in the right place, or even in the right kind of work. A young person who has the right strength for one organization may be a total misfit in another, which from the outside looks the same.
This not only holds for different kinds of organizations. It also holds for organizations of the same kind. I have yet to see two large businesses which have the same values and stress the same contributions. A happy and productive faculty member at one university may become lost, unhappy, and frustrated at another.
Young people in first jobs should ask the question at some point: “Am I in the right work and in the right place?” But they cannot ask this question, let alone answer it, if the beginning job is too small, too easy, and designed to offset their lack of experience rather than bring out what they can do.
The young person whose job is too small to challenge and test his or her abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle age, soured, cynical, unproductive. Executives everywhere complain that many young men and women with fire in their bellies turn so soon into burned–out sticks. These executives have only themselves to blame: They quenched the fire by making the job too small.
3. The effective executive knows that to get strength one has to put up with weaknesses.
The effective executive will therefore ask: “Does this candidate have strength in one major area? And is this strength relevant to the task? If this person achieves excellence in this one area, will it make a significant difference?” If the answer is “yes,” the executive will appoint the candidate.
Effective executives are above all intolerant of the argument: “I can’t spare Jack Jones; I’d be in trouble without him.” They have learned that there are only three explanations for an “indispensable person” like Jack Jones. He is actually incompetent and can survive only if he is carefully shielded from demands; his strength is misused to bolster a weak superior; or his strength is misused to delay tackling a serious problem, if not to conceal its existence.
In every one of these situations, the “indispensable person” should be moved—and soon. Otherwise one only destroys whatever strengths he may have.
One chief executive decided to move automatically anyone whose boss described him or her as indispensable. “This either means,” the executive said, “that I have a weak superior or a weak subordinate—or both. Whichever of these, the sooner we find out, the better.”
Altogether it must be an unbreakable rule to promote the person who, by the test of performance, is best qualified for the job to be filled. All arguments to the contrary—“She is indispensable”… “He won’t be acceptable to the people there”… “We never put anyone in there without field experience”—should be given short shrift. Not only does the job deserve the best person; the person of proven performance has earned the opportunity. Staffing the opportunities instead of the problems not only creates the most effective organization; it also creates enthusiasm and dedication.
Conversely, it is the duty of the executive to remove anyone—especially any manager—who consistently fails to perform with high distinction. To let such a failure stay on corrupts the others. It is grossly unfair to his or her subordinates, and to the whole organization. Above all, it is senseless cruelty to that person. People in situations like this—and again, especially managers—realize they are inadequate, whether or not they admit it to themselves.
Superiors have responsibility for the work of others. They also have power over the careers of others. Making strengths productive is therefore much more than an essential of effectiveness. It is a moral imperative, a responsibility of authority and position. Superiors owe it to their organizations to make the strength of every subordinate as productive as it can be. But even more, they owe it to subordinates as human beings to help them get the most out of whatever strength they may have. Organizations must serve individuals through their strengths, regardless of their limitations and weaknesses.
How to Manage the Boss
I have yet to find a manager, whether in business, government or any other institution, who did not say: “I have no great trouble managing my subordinates. But how do I manage my boss?” It is actually remarkably easy: make the strengths of the boss productive.
One does not do so by toadying to the boss. The effective executive accepts that the boss is human (something that intelligent young subordinates often find hard to do). The boss is human and therefore has strengths as well as limitations. Trying to build on the boss’s weaknesses will be as frustrating and as stultifying as trying to build on the weaknesses of a subordinate. The effective executive therefore asks: “What can my boss do really well?” “What has he done really well?” “What does my boss need to get from me to perform?” “What does she need to know to use her strength?” The effective executive does not worry too much about what the boss cannot do.
The effective executive also knows that the boss, being human, has ways of being effective and looks for these ways.
We are all experts on other people and see them much more clearly than they see themselves. To make the boss effective is therefore usually fairly easy. But it requires building on strength to make weaknesses irrelevant. Few things make executives as effective as building on the strengths of their superior.