{"id":791,"date":"2017-01-04T10:00:59","date_gmt":"2017-01-04T10:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/?p=791"},"modified":"2025-07-01T17:20:23","modified_gmt":"2025-07-01T17:20:23","slug":"great-things-business-never-done-one-person-theyre-done-team-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/great-things-business-never-done-one-person-theyre-done-team-people\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Great things in business are never done by one person. They&#8217;re done by a team of people. &#8220;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If you\u2019re not a hockey fan, the name John McDonough probably doesn\u2019t mean much to you.\u00a0 But if you\u2019re a Chicago Blackhawks fan, you probably have a shrine to him somewhere in your home.\u00a0 He joined the Blackhawks in 2007 as President, and under his stewardship, the team\u2019s 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.\u00a0 Forbes Magazine has called his tenure with the Blackhawks, \u201cThe Greatest Sports-Business Turnaround Ever.\u201d\u00a0 Not bad for a guy who claims to have graduated 311<sup>th<\/sup> out of 356 in his graduating class at Notre Dame High School in Niles.\u00a0 He spoke recently at the Aurora Convention and Visitor\u2019s Bureau, and his speech was reported in the Daily Herald Business Ledger.\u00a0 In that speech, according to the Business Ledger account of it, McDonough revealed what he considers to be the key to his success.\u00a0 To learn what that key is, please continue reading below.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cGreat things in business are never done by one person. They&#8217;re done by a team of people.\u201d<\/strong><strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><strong><em>~ <\/em><\/strong><em>Steve Jobs<\/em><\/p>\n<p>John McDonough\u2019s key to success?\u00a0 Hiring.\u00a0 Not just hiring, but hiring well.\u00a0 He says, \u201cHiring is the most important under-rated executive skill that there is.\u00a0 If you hire well, you have a chance for really good things to happen.\u201d\u00a0 He further advises, \u201cStep back and allow these brilliant people that you\u2019ve hired do their jobs.\u00a0 Ask really good questions, make sure they know you\u2019re supporting them, and let them do their thing.\u00a0 And . . . at some point, the students lap the teacher.\u00a0 The reward for that is incalculable.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Matt Mullenweg, founder and developer of WordPress, echoes McDonough\u2019s advice.\u00a0 \u201cWe focus on two things when hiring. First, find the best people you can . . .\u00a0 \u00a0And second, let them do their work. Just get out of their way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>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.\u00a0 Even \u201cGood to Great\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<p>None of this is a surprise, right?\u00a0 We\u2019ve discussed it right here in many previous postings.\u00a0 We know we need to hire well.\u00a0 At least, we know <em><u>intellectually<\/u><\/em> that we need to do a good job of hiring, but somehow we don\u2019t always do it.\u00a0 Why do you suppose that is?<\/p>\n<p>There are several reasons:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>We\u2019re impatient<\/strong>. Once we\u2019ve decided to hire someone, whether it\u2019s to fill a vacancy or to create a new position, we want it done now.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 So we rush through it, cutting any corner we can, just to get all that stuff behind us and move on.<\/li>\n<li><strong>We panic.<\/strong> 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.<\/li>\n<li><strong>We lack experience.<\/strong> If we\u2019re 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.<\/li>\n<li><strong>We put too much emphasis on skills.<\/strong> We become enamored with his or her training, background, and prior work experience, and don\u2019t 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.<\/li>\n<li><strong>We try to hire on the cheap.<\/strong> We hire someone at the bottom of the pay scale for that position, but then expect that person to be a top performer.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So if you\u2019ve made a decision to hire, discipline yourself to slow down, give \u201chiring well\u201d the importance it deserves, and allow yourself the time to do it right.\u00a0 If this is a key position, all the more reason to get it right.\u00a0 Don\u2019t allow yourself to be pushed into a hasty decision.\u00a0 Find work arounds, stop-gap measures, bandaids, and anything else you can do to buy yourself the time you need.\u00a0 If you need help, get it.\u00a0 There are HR professionals and recruiters who can assist you, not only with finding the skills you need, but also with finding the right \u201cfit\u201d for your organization.\u00a0 And while they may cost a few bucks up front, their cost is nowhere near the cost of a bad hire.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, you don\u2019t <em><u>always<\/u><\/em> get what you pay for, but more often than not, you do.\u00a0 If OK performance is good enough, then OK pay is too.\u00a0 But if you really need a top performer, you\u2019d better be prepared to offer considerably more than OK pay.<\/p>\n<p>When conditions require that you hire someone, don\u2019t let it become a perfunctory task that you\u2019ve just got to muddle through somehow.\u00a0 Give it the importance it deserves and make it a priority, not just to hire, but to hire well. \u00a0After all, if you don&#8217;t have the time to do it right the first time, where will you find the time to do it again?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you\u2019re not a hockey fan, the name John McDonough probably doesn\u2019t mean much to you.\u00a0 But if you\u2019re a Chicago Blackhawks fan, you probably have a shrine to him somewhere in your home.\u00a0 He joined the Blackhawks in 2007 as President, and under his stewardship, the team\u2019s season ticketholder base has grown from 3,400<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/great-things-business-never-done-one-person-theyre-done-team-people\/\">Read More\u2026<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[33,22,20],"tags":[117,118],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":793,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791\/revisions\/793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rocksolidbizdevelopment.com\/ourblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}