Great People Decisions

There are plenty of books out there that promise to reveal the secrets to business success. But although they might offer plenty of sound advice, they often miss one of the most important factors on your journey to success: other people.

Books boasting the best business secrets don’t teach you how to make great people decisions, that is, how to find great people and put them in the right places.

While there are, of course, many factors that will determine your career successes, being adept at people decisions is critical.

It’s certainly true that genes, education, career choices and personality, among other factors, play an important role in boosting some people toward success and leaving others behind. However, people decisions are just as important as these other factors, and perhaps even more so.

First, as your career progresses, you will be more likely to move into roles that require you to manage more and more people. Naturally, being highly skilled at finding the right people for the right positions is essential.

Second, you can never do your best work alone. According to career expert Marcus Buckingham, no one has unlimited potential. If you want to keep developing and succeeding, you’ll need the help of others who can complement your skills and help you move forward.     

Unfortunately, despite the great importance of people decisions, many of us fail to develop this valuable skill. This is in part because people tend to think that the ability to judge people is based on “gut” feelings and intuition – it’s not something that can be learned, but something you either have or don’t.

But this simply isn’t true. The ability to make great people decisions – to judge whether someone is good at a particular job or in your team – is one that can, and indeed must, be learned.

How exactly? That will come a little later; the next step is to look at the benefits that great people decisions bring to organizations.