If you’re not a hockey fan, the name John McDonough probably doesn’t mean much to you. But if you’re a Chicago Blackhawks fan, you probably have a shrine to him somewhere in your home. He joined the Blackhawks in 2007 as President, and under his stewardship, the team’s season ticketholder base has grown from 3,400 to more than 14,000, the team has brought home three Stanley Cups, and has led the NHL in attendance for eight consecutive seasons. Forbes Magazine has called his tenure with the Blackhawks, “The Greatest Sports-Business Turnaround Ever.” Not bad for a guy who claims to have graduated 311th out of 356 in his graduating class at Notre Dame High School in Niles. He spoke recently at the Aurora Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, and his speech was reported in the Daily Herald Business Ledger. In that speech, according to the Business Ledger account of it, McDonough revealed what he considers to be the key to his success. To learn what that key is, please continue reading below.
“Great things in business are never done by one person. They’re done by a team of people.” ~ Steve Jobs
John McDonough’s key to success? Hiring. Not just hiring, but hiring well. He says, “Hiring is the most important under-rated executive skill that there is. If you hire well, you have a chance for really good things to happen.” He further advises, “Step back and allow these brilliant people that you’ve hired do their jobs. Ask really good questions, make sure they know you’re supporting them, and let them do their thing. And . . . at some point, the students lap the teacher. The reward for that is incalculable.”
Matt Mullenweg, founder and developer of WordPress, echoes McDonough’s advice. “We focus on two things when hiring. First, find the best people you can . . . And second, let them do their work. Just get out of their way.”
So Steve Jobs tells us we need a team to achieve greatness, and John McDonough and Matt Mullenweg tell us to get really good people on our team by hiring well. Even “Good to Great” author Jim Collins weighs in telling us to get the right people on the bus and to make sure we put them in the right seats.
None of this is a surprise, right? We’ve discussed it right here in many previous postings. We know we need to hire well. At least, we know intellectually that we need to do a good job of hiring, but somehow we don’t always do it. Why do you suppose that is?
There are several reasons:
- We’re impatient. Once we’ve decided to hire someone, whether it’s to fill a vacancy or to create a new position, we want it done now. All the stuff we have to go through . . . writing job descriptions, advertising on job boards, working with recruiters, reviewing resumes, administering tests, and conducting interviews is just too tedious and time-consuming. So we rush through it, cutting any corner we can, just to get all that stuff behind us and move on.
- We panic. The open position is a key one, and we convince ourselves that filling it with the first person who walks through the door, has a pulse, and can fog a mirror is better than leaving it open for awhile longer.
- We lack experience. If we’re a small company, we may not have developed a formal hiring process, or if we have, we may not hire often enough to get very good at using it.
- We put too much emphasis on skills. We become enamored with his or her training, background, and prior work experience, and don’t put sufficient weight on personality and behaviors. We need to dig deeper to figure out how this person will fit into our culture and how his or her work behaviors will blend with the work behaviors of the people he or she will be working most closely with.
- We try to hire on the cheap. We hire someone at the bottom of the pay scale for that position, but then expect that person to be a top performer.
So if you’ve made a decision to hire, discipline yourself to slow down, give “hiring well” the importance it deserves, and allow yourself the time to do it right. If this is a key position, all the more reason to get it right. Don’t allow yourself to be pushed into a hasty decision. Find work arounds, stop-gap measures, bandaids, and anything else you can do to buy yourself the time you need. If you need help, get it. There are HR professionals and recruiters who can assist you, not only with finding the skills you need, but also with finding the right “fit” for your organization. And while they may cost a few bucks up front, their cost is nowhere near the cost of a bad hire.
Finally, you don’t always get what you pay for, but more often than not, you do. If OK performance is good enough, then OK pay is too. But if you really need a top performer, you’d better be prepared to offer considerably more than OK pay.
When conditions require that you hire someone, don’t let it become a perfunctory task that you’ve just got to muddle through somehow. Give it the importance it deserves and make it a priority, not just to hire, but to hire well. After all, if you don’t have the time to do it right the first time, where will you find the time to do it again?
Rock Solid Business Development
Phone: (847) 665-9134
andy@rocksolidbizdevelopment.com
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