Great People Decisions summary

Image you’re an anaesthetist who only manages to revive your patients 33 percent of the time. Would you be considered a success? Of course not. In fact, you’d be arrested for such serious malpractice!

Incredibly, according to the father of business excellence, Peter Drucker, when it comes to making effective people decisions, executives only get it right 33 percent of the time.

We now know that hiring the best people and putting them in the right places will go a long way in advancing both your career and your company. And yet, so many of us fail to make great people decisions. Why?

There are four main reasons for this trend; in this blink, we’ll focus on the first two.

Would you consider yourself a rational person? Probably. In fact, most of us think that we make decisions by carefully (and rationally) weighing the choices available to us. But this simply isn’t the case.

Our minds are far from perfect, rational computation machines, and we’re prone to psychological biases that affect the way we think and make decisions. This is no less the case when it comes to people decisions. Two of the most common biases are procrastination and herding.

If you want to start making great people decisions, the first thing you need to learn is how to identify when it’s time to make a change.

We often make critical decisions at the very last possible moment. As you’ve learned, procrastination is among the psychological biases that keep us from making the best people decisions.

Once you’ve recognized that change is necessary, it’s time to start making great people decisions. But where should you begin? It all starts with knowing what to look for.

When building your team, you aren’t looking for the “perfect employee,” as they almost certainly don’t exist. Rather, your job is to ensure that your employees have the right combination of skills.

When it comes time to fill a role, most companies post an application online and wait for people to apply. Simple, yes – but also ineffective. This method only allows you to reach the people who are looking for a job and using that particular site to find one. As a result, many potential candidates get left out. So what should you do instead?

One way is to develop a shortlist of the best candidates using a technique called sourcing.

How many job interviews have you attended in your life? How did they go? Were the questions relevant, or did they seem bizarre? And what about the interviewer: did he or she tend to ramble?

You probably answered “yes” to at least one of these questions. In fact, most job interviews are not particularly effective; they are largely unstructured, and the questions don’t elicit information that is actually valuable.

If you follow all the advice presented thus far, you will be well on your way to finding the best candidate for the job. But there’s still one factor left to consider: what if they don’t want to join?

Recruiting is a two-way affair: you want to hire the best person for the job, and they have to want to work for you. If either of these is missing, it’s “no deal.”