Published on: Monday, August 02, 2010
Keeping the Wrong Leaders Out of Your Organization
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Lots of very smart people talk about the critical nature of organizational culture as an indicator of future business performance. An equal number of business leaders talk about the importance of recruiting and developing superior executive talent to gain a competitive edge.
Yet the challenge of filtering the wrong people out of an organization when they poison the cultural well, so to speak, and keeping them out of your company in the first place, is so often overlooked.
I'll admit that I've been so focused on executive recruiting practices that I've not paid enough attention to the critical task of keeping the misfits out and making tough calls about longtime employees who've stopped serving the organizational mission.
All this reminds me of something I heard recently. That is, "The right time to move someone out of the organization is the very first time you think about it." It also reminds me of the perspective shared recently by Jeffrey Hollender, the co-founder of Seventh Generation, which makes consumer products for the home with an eye on environmental impacts.
"The best place to stop the wrong people from entering your culture is the front door and not letting them in," Hollender said at the recent World Innovation Forum, citing the example of W.L. Gore, the company known best for its GORE-TEX fabrics. The Gore company, Hollender said, gives recruitment appointment and travel coordinators the cultural authority to cancel interviews with any would-be employee (even potential executive hires!) who exhibit behaviors not aligned with company values. If the guy's a jerk on the phone, he'll be a jerk in our company, so the candidate is simply told, "Thank you, but your interview has been cancelled."
"The most important challenge is the kind of culture you create through the whole company," Hollender said. "That Goldman, Toyota and BP have problems — the problem is in the company — it didn't give voice to people who raised the questions no one wanted to answer. It all starts in the company."
Joseph Daniel McCool
Joseph Daniel McCool is senior contributing editor with ExecuNet and principal of management recruiting/succession advisory firm The McCool Group. He is also the author of Deciding Who Leads: How Executive Recruiters Drive, Direct & Disrupt the Global Search for Leadership Talent, recognized widely as "one of the best business books of 2008," and its Brazilian Portuguese translation, Escolhendo Líderes, published in June 2010.
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