great PEOPLE DECISIONS Why They Matter So Much, Why They Are So Hard, and How You Can Master Them phần 1 ppt

To my beloved wife María, the greatest people decision I ever madeTo our beloved children Ignacio, Inés, and Lucía, the greatest people decisions God could possibly have made for both of

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

PEOPLE

DECISIONS

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Copyright © 2007 by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

Wiley Bicentennial Logo: Richard J Pacifico.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive,

Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600, or on the web at www.copyright.com Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, (201) 748-6011,

fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation You should consult with a professional where appropriate Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.

For general information on our other products and services or for technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at (800) 762-2974,

outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats Some content rsvg appears in print may not be available in electronic books For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

1 Executives—Recruiting 2 Executive ability—Evaluation 3 Employee retention.

4 Organizational effectiveness I Title.

HF5549.5.R44F47 2007

658.4'07111—dc22

2006101040 Printed in the United States of America.

To my beloved wife María, the greatest people decision I ever made

To our beloved children Ignacio, Inés, and Lucía,

the greatest people decisions God could possibly have made for both of us

The Make-or-Break Choice

Great People Decisions will help you improve your personal competence

at hiring and promoting great people

Literally, nothing is more important For almost every manager,

per-sonal success grows directly out of the ability to choose the right peoplefor his or her team

But making key appointments is hard Few people get any formal

training in this all-important activity, and no comprehensive tools exist

to make up for that lack of training

Great People Decisions fills that gap.

As you’ve already discovered in your own career, organizations are

all about people It doesn’t matter how high-tech, stripped-down,

decen-tralized, offshored, outsourced, or automated your organization is (or,

more likely, thinks it is) At the end of the day, your organization is still all about people.

Managers lose sleep over lots of things: poor cash flow, impendinglawsuits, a failing strategy, mergers and acquisitions gone awry, a com-petitor making a direct move against a profitable product line, and so on

What successful managers mostly lose sleep over, though, is people: How

do I get the very best person in the right job?

People are the problem, and also the solution How does a manager

go about fixing a serious problem? Usually, he or she goes out in search of

great people, whether inside or outside the organization.

ix

Organizations that are skilled at solving the “people puzzle”—finding, recruiting, hiring, promoting, and retaining the very best peo-ple for the job—tend to thrive (Jack Welch has told me that in hisyears with GE, he spent more than half his time getting the right peo-ple in the right positions.) Those that are bad at it tend to fail in thelong run.

But the truth is that organizations don’t really solve puzzles

Peo-ple solve puzzles Within every organization, a surprisingly large

num-ber of individuals—probably including you—have to make crucialpeople choices

You may be part of a Human Resources (HR) group, formallytasked with making these kinds of decisions on a daily basis Or you may

be a member of the board of directors, who—once or twice in yourtenure on the board—will be asked to participate in choosing a newCEO or other senior executive More likely, though, you’re part of amuch bigger group in “the middle”—that is, the group of managers whoare occasionally called upon to make a personnel-related decision fortheir division or functional area

These are vitally important decisions And by important, I mean

two things

It’s Vitally Important to You

First (and this is the main reason why I’ve written Great People

Deci-sions), people decisions are important to you, the decision-maker If you prove

to be skilled at solving “people puzzles,” your career prospects will almostcertainly get brighter Conversely, if you repeatedly fail to get the rightperson in the job, your career prospects will suffer Think about the expe-riences of people you’ve worked with Do you agree that good people-finders move up, while others move out?

The problem is that very few people get any formal training in

ing and choosing good people Business schools, especially at the ate level, tend to downgrade Human Resources Management (HRM) is-sues in general, or at best focus on HRM as just a minor one of a

gradu-half-dozen functional areas; they rarely get down to the level of

skill-building that is required.

Sometimes I use an investing analogy to make this point Wouldyou like to be as successful an investor as, say, Warren Buffett? I would,too! Would you like to get there without any relevant skills or experi-ence? Me, too—but that seems like an unlikely goal In order to become

as good at people finding as Warren Buffett is at investing, you have tobecome an expert You need the right tools

Great People Decisions puts those tools in your hand It is a

com-prehensive toolkit for managers who want to improve their personalcompetence at hiring and promoting people This is not an art; it’s a

craft that can be learned And it’s important to you that you learn this

craft

It’s Vitally Important to Your Organization

My second point is that making great people decisions is vitally important

to your organization Getting the right CEO, for example, is of

para-mount importance And yet, about a third of all CEOs who leave their

positions are either fired or forced to resign What are we doing wrong?

The same holds true at other levels of the organization According toone study in which I participated, where we looked at thousands of ex-

ecutives in leading companies around the world, roughly a third of the

executives we assessed turned out to be in the bottom half of the petence curve with respect to their peers at other companies in theirrespective industries

com-In other words, even at great companies, the wrong people wind up

in the wrong jobs Can’t we do better?

I joined Egon Zehnder International (EZI), a leading global executivesearch firm Today, I am a partner with this firm, and a member of its ex-ecutive committee While I live with my family in Buenos Aires, my role

is global, and I constantly travel around the world

Maybe the phrase executive search needs some elaboration at this

point Executive search includes what some people call “headhunting,”that is, hiring external candidates for senior positions both in for-profitand not-for-profit situations I personally have led some 300 suchsearches, and actively participated in another 1,500 or so These searcheshave comprised positions on the most senior levels (chairpersons, presi-dents, and CEOs) all the way down to first-time managers I have served

in this role for companies with billions of dollars in annual revenues aswell as for very small ones, and for a range of nongovernmental organiza-tions (NGOs), foundations, and not-for-profits My personal success rate

at hiring external candidates has been consistently above 90 percent,which is a very high percentage in light of the fact that external hires aretypically made when times are particularly tough

But executive search, broadly defined, also includes the activity of

management appraisal, that is, assessing managers within a client’s

organi-zation This can be critically important in certain situations In the text of a merger or acquisition, for example, the company has to decidehow to allocate its management resources (even to the point of decidingwho should stay and who should go) Or, to cite another circumstance,when a new CEO arrives and wants a rapid, professional, accurate, and

independent assessment of his or her team, people like myself are oftencalled upon Management appraisals can also be very useful when a com-pany faces a new competitive scenario, or when technological or regula-tory changes suddenly rewrite the rules of the game In all of these cases,

my colleagues and I assess not just competence (the current ability to do

the current job) but also the individual’s potential to grow We offer

ad-vice on promotions, assignments to new roles, development plans, and so

on—all functions aimed mainly at internal candidates.

I led our Management Appraisal practice worldwide for some time.Recently, we went back and compared our assessments with the actualperformance and evolution of the managers whom we had appraised.Again, our accuracy at predicting both performance and developmentpotential has been on the order of 90 percent globally, while the accu-racy of some of our client companies’ internal assessments that we haveanalyzed have ranged as low as 30 percent

I say all of this not by way of boasting, but rather to underscore twothings First, I have extensive experience with people decisions I knowthe landscape intimately Second, the prescriptions contained in thisbook cover the entire gamut of hiring and promoting—from both out-side and inside the company

I should add that I have an intense intellectual commitment to myfield In 1994, in addition to my search work, I became responsible forthe professional development of consultants in our global network Cur-rently, I lead the development of our firm’s intellectual capital for ournetwork of 62 offices worldwide In the 1990s, I led a major effort to up-grade our work methodology for our executive search practice, and haverecently once again led a similar effort to become even better at helpingour clients hire or promote the very best people in the world

I have read literally thousands of books and articles pertaining to

some aspect of people decisions I’ve written articles for the Harvard

Business Review and the MIT Sloan Management Review I have also

con-tributed a chapter to The Emotionally Intelligent Workplace, a book edited

by Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss, and collaborated with Jack

Welch on his book, Winning, and with Jim Kouzes on the latest edition

of The Leadership Challenge.

And finally, I have a passion for helping others improve their hiring

and promotion decisions I honestly believe that the world would be amuch better place if hiring and promotion decisions at all levels, fromthe shop floor to the boardroom, could be substantially improved I be-lieve they can be improved I believe that I have the skills, and therefore

the obligation, to contribute to that improvement.

What You’ll Find Here

In the first two chapters of Great People Decisions, I go into depth as to

why great people decisions matter so much—both to you and your nization

orga-Next, in Chapter 3, I explain why great people decisions are sohard Yes, part of the problem lies in the talent pool, but a bigger part lies

in the “eye of the beholder.” All too often, the people who conductsearches make one or more in a series of tactical mistakes, all of whichcombine to make a successful outcome that much more elusive

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 address the whens, whats, and wheres: when to

look, what to look for, and where you’re likely to find what you’re ing for Throughout these chapters (and elsewhere in the book), I’ll tellyou how and when to engage outside help, and I’ll explain why (at least

look-in most companies) the decision to look only look-inside is a bad idea.

Most of the book is naturally about the hows of great people

deci-sions: how to appraise, attract, motivate, and integrate the best people.Chapter 7 is devoted to the specifics of appraising people Many peoplethink this is self-evident: You bring the candidate in, interview him, andcheck his references But in my experience, each of these tasks is moredifficult than may appear at first For example: How do you check refer-ences in an environment in which people are afraid of getting sued ifthey tell you the negative truth about a former employee? (The answer:

Dig deeper I’ll tell you how.) Should people “down the ladder” from the

job for which a candidate is applying be allowed to appraise candidates?

(The answer: as a rule, no.)

And as you’ve probably discovered on your own, it’s not enough tofind a great person You also have to successfully recruit that candidate,

with the right package of incentives, and then integrate her into her new

organizational context Despite the profusion of recent books and cles on the subject of integration, many companies still make the mis-take of expecting a candidate to “sink or swim.”

arti-In the final chapter, I circle back to the question of why this is

im-portant I believe high-performing organizations not only provide good

employment and generate returns for their owners, they also make oursociety better A great company—full of great people—raises our stan-dard of living, raises our sights, broadens our horizons, and gives us hopefor the future

CHAPTER ONE

Great People Decisions:

It was mid-1986, and I was about to attend a very important meeting inZurich Over the course of the previous four days, I had made stops inLondon, Paris, Copenhagen, and Brussels In each city, I sat for inter-views with consultants from Egon Zehnder International (EZI), the in-ternational executive search firm I had already completed some 30 suchconversations, including sessions with a great variety of partners in thefirm as well as its full Executive Committee

But now, here in Zurich, I was about to meet with Egon Zehnderhimself—the firm’s founder, and at that time its chairman I was keyed

up, to say the least (Even today, I can still summon up some of that ago nervousness.) I was well aware of the stature of the man in front of

long-me who—having graduated from Harvard Business School the year that

I was born—launched the executive search profession in Europe in 1959,and in 1964 started his own search firm, which he immediately began ex-panding internationally He was, simply put, a legend

I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t remember many of the questions

he asked me that day For some reason, though, I do remember some of

the questions I asked him In particular, I remember asking him a

ques-tion that went something like this: Based on your experience of more than

25 years of executive search practice, meeting with both successful clients and candidates for high-level positions, what makes a person successful?

1