One of the really serious problems that you face when you are boss is when you have to hire staff.
There are many factors that must be taken into account when searching for the ideal candidate for the position that you want to replace. There is something inside that makes us hire the person who is most like us instead of hiring the person who best responds to the needs of the organization. The problem with hiring someone related to our beliefs is that there will be no confrontation of our ideas.
In this particular we remember Mariano one of our clients who highly valued our contribution as consultants because we always had a different point of view about those things that were vital to his business, Mariano complained that before a new idea that he always presented to his executives They agreed, they never contradicted him, so he couldn't assess if his idea really was a good one.
We also remember what Eng. José Leñero at some point raised as a requirement for hiring people, "A person's attitude is more important than their resume", The desire to want to learn, and to do different things is more important than a trajectory of many years of experience.
We also learned from Don José the maxim that "it is not the same to have 10 years of experience than to repeat for nine years what we learned in the first year".
Unfortunately we have staff who have spent many years benefiting from what they learned in their early years, but have not bothered to keep up-to-date with the latest trends in both administrative techniques and professional practice.
Don Eduardo, manager of one of the companies in which we had the opportunity to grow in our professional development, said, "The problem is not hiring a person who does not provide the expected results, the problem is staying with that person." We are afraid to fire someone and that exists long before companies considered the problem of staff turnover. When indicators such as the turnover rate have been set, to achieve the goal, we keep people who are not in line with what the company requires. Nowadays, with the proposal of the BSC (Balanced Scorecard), turnover is not a good strategic index, what is important is the contribution that each one of the people provides in achieving the strategy that is vital for the company.
Many of those who followed the teachings of the Japanese employment system were likely to praise the famous lifetime hiring that many of the companies preached about. In very early times, Konosuke Matsushita himself had serious doubts about the promotion of a person following different positions before reaching higher levels. Matsushita was questioned, if people were not getting, under this concept, to Peter's principle, where the limit of his incompetence is reached. On the other hand, the potential that a young executive with great ideas could obtain is lost. Matsushita died in 1994, more than 10 years ago, however what many companies are discovering today, was pointed out by him quite some time ago.
Some organizations are accustomed to having a person first appointed to a position temporarily for a certain period of time. If he meets the requirements, the firm appointment is made. The Japanese apply what is known as the philosophy of ambiguity, not naming a person in a position until the position has been earned. On the contrary, in the West, the person is named, they are given all the prerogatives of wages, vehicle, cell phone, new office, etc., to discover that an excellent operator was lost and a bad supervisor was hired.
In the 80's we remember the experience, when tired of having problems with the warehouse manager, we hired an industrial engineer to take charge of motivating and training the staff. His main responsibility, as explained to him, was to help the winery's work team achieve the goals of order preparation time and the reduction of the number of errors, as well as maintaining an adequate work environment.
During the three months, the results were more than outstanding, this being noticeable even by the general management. Unfortunately, the human resources department issued a personnel action stating the true name of the position, which was handed over to the engineer of the winery. Within 15 days his attitude changed, including requesting that he be given the office assigned to the headquarters. Before, in his own words, he said that the entire warehouse was his workplace. Once he knew he was the boss, he assumed their characteristic poses, with which the work climate changed, with the consequent consequences on the results. In the end he suffered the same fate as other winery "bosses".
Today there is talk of high performance teams, "coaching", "empowerment", etc., which seek to achieve results similar to those obtained, before the title of boss was given to the character in our story, unfortunately if there is no a radical change in the tasks and responsibilities of those who are in charge of the headquarters, it is difficult to achieve the expected results.
