Some time ago I came to know of  an organisation which started out with a BIG BANG! Big plans, team selected from the best organisations across the country, lots of advertising spend- the works! However, a couple of years later the same organisation could barely limp the distance- it’s employees were jumping ship, it’s customers disgruntled and dissatisfied and its future prospects very bleak! By all counts, it had failed on every parameter to achieve even a reasonable amount of success!

Why?

One word: People!

Get the right people for the right job. Groom the right people for the right job. Promote the right people for right job! Seems simple, right?

Not for this organization! Classic people mistakes were made all along! Wrong people hired! Wrong people were placed in leadership positions. No grooming or training. Wrong people promoted. Promises were made and then broken- again and again. In the end, many talented but disillusioned people left for other pastures.

People…..

Performance…..

I am currently working on building my sales team for the coming year. While I have inherited a pretty good team, however, I would need to add a few new members for the next two years. So I decided to brush up on and add to whatever little I knew about building and managing a sales team. Getting the right people on the bus and providing them the opportunity to perform. Amongst the various books and articles I am reading on sales and sales teams, one which stood out was an article by Drucker (who else!) on picking people.

Basically, what he says is that getting the right people for the job is critical to any organisations’s performance and therefore one of the most important tasks that a manager should do. This should not be delegated! He talks of how Alfred Sloan used to scrutinize the profiles of lower hires and how the Chairman of Deutche Bank was responsible for picking more successful CEO’s in German companies than any one else. This phenomenon was highlighted in the placement season last year where certain organisation’s priorities towards new hires was on display when they flew down their senior most management to hire for the entry level position of a management trainee. Attention to detail!

Another illuminating point that Drucker makes is that if the person you picked for the job doesn’t perform to expectations, it is not his fault, it’s yours! Ha! Because YOU are responsible for getting the fit right! The right person for the job is your responsibility!

The third learning for me from this article was about making sure that the appointee knows CLEARLY what is required of him. All too often it is assumed that if he’s read the job description, he’s ready for the job. Unfortunately, that is not the case all too often. And therefore, it is the manager’s task to call in the new recruit after a month or so and make sure that he understands what the company requires of him in his current assignment.

Reading Drucker is like trying to drink from a hosepipe! He leaves you with so many thoughts- each of which could lead to an improvement in your performance! It is a shame that management schools in India do not make reading Drucker a compulsory subject! You would think that would be a given……. what with him only being the Father of Modern Management! Duh!