Years ago I was given this advice from one of my mentors. “Hiring is a leader/manager’s most important job. Try to hire people you wouldn’t mind reporting to one day.” Author Jim Collins, of the classic leadership book ‘Good to Great’, says something similar with his “First Who, then What” guidance. He said great leaders “first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it”.
“Hiring is a leader/manager’s most important job. Try to hire people you wouldn’t mind reporting to one day.”
For managers and leaders early in their careers, this can seem frightening. Thoughts of “Is the person you hire going to be so good that they take your job someday?” run through your mind. That’s one way to think about it. What if, instead, it actually helped (or pushed) you to improve, grow, and develop. That’s the way I’ve chosen to think about it and have been fortunate to hire people that have done exactly that. I’m grateful for those people.
“Great leaders first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it”.
-Jim Collins, ‘Good to Great’
As a leader, the job is to fill the seats with the right talents to fulfill the mission and to achieve the objectives of the business. There’s a trap, however, we’re often faced with in the name of scale and growth, which is to just ‘fill the seat’. There have been times in my career where I was getting top down pressure to make sure we had sales ‘butts in seats’ as the concept of more sales reps equals more bookings. Not the case. I would say the formula is more of the right sales reps, with the right process and approach can equal more bookings. I use sales as the example here but it just as easily applies to developers, marketers, customer success reps, etc.
The idea of ‘hiring people you’d report to’ may seem counterintuitive at first glance, but when you think about the qualities of someone you’ve enjoyed reporting to, it starts to make more sense.
Here are some qualities to think about, framed as “Is this person……X?”
Is this person….
- Curious
- Inquisitive
- More experienced in X area
- Someone who will uplevel the team
- Motivated
- Passionate
- Intelligent
- Someone with a growth mindset
- Caring
- Compassionate
Just to name a few in my personal list.
Someone I’ve worked with for many years uses the concept of ‘people she’d want in the boat’. Meaning, if you were trapped at sea and you could only have a small number of people with you, who would they be? I think this is another good way to think about the hiring process. It’s a helpful analogy.
Would you feel good about reporting to some of the people you’ve hired? Why or why not?
