I once had a mentor who asked me, “Do you have any of the wrong people in your company?”  And I said, “Yeah I’ve got one guy.”

He said, “How long have you known he’s the wrong person?”

“I’ve known for about six months,” I said.

“Why haven’t you let him go?”  He asked.

“Because I like him, because he’s been really good for the last couple of years. Because I really like him and he really cares.”

“Well why do you want to let him go then?”

And I replied, “Well he’s an emotional roller coaster…”

I had all these reasons why we needed to let him go and my mentor looked at me and said, “I need you to tell me the date that you’re going to fire him.”

“OK, I’ll let him go by Friday.”  This was a Tuesday morning.  We were at Denny’s on Broadway.

He said, “So you’ll let him go by Friday?”

And I said, “Yeah, Friday.”

Then he said, “That’s not good enough.”

I said, “OK, I’ll let him go Wednesday.”  Then he just stared at me, and said, “Chicken!”

And I said, “OK, I’ll let him go today.”

“Good. What time?”

This was 7.30 in the morning on a Tuesday. I’ve moved the firing from Friday to the very same day and he wants to know what time?!  So I said, “I’ll do it by noon.”

My mentor said, “Good. Call me at 12.05pm and I’ll be there for you, but you make damn sure you’re there for him. You make sure when you’re getting this person off your bus that you respect him, and his integrity. You treat him like a person, you mentor him to help him grow in his next career. You have an obligation to him because six months ago is when you should have let him go and for the last six months you’ve been stealing from him.  You’ve taken six months of this kid’s life because he didn’t want to quit because of you.  He wanted to be there to be loyal to you, and because you were too chicken to let him go six months ago when you should have, you’ve taken six months of his life. So you make sure that you’re there for him.”

That was some of the hardest-hitting and best learning I’ve ever had in business.  Hard to hear, easier to execute.

We both cried when I had to let him go that day.

I actually drove back to the office that day and I walked into the office and put my briefcase down and said, “Can I grab you?”  I hadn’t even sat down, but my mind was finally committed to do the right thing for the company and for him. I received emails and Facebook messages from the guy I let go even five or six years after it happened, “Hope you’re well. How are the kids? How’s Australia?”

The moral of this story is that you simply must get the wrong people out of your organization in the right way in order to build a very powerful culture.  If you remove people from your organization in the wrong way, you’ll destroy your culture.

For information on this topic, check out: Leadership at 100MPH.

How many employees do you need? When do you want them? Do you need to hire them all at once, or spread out over time? Perhaps you’ll want a few extra. What happens if someone quits? What about temporary staff? What if your employees leave for another company?

These kinds of thoughts and questions will arise with anyone who hires people.

Regardless of what you’re thinking, remember one thing above all else: If you scramble to hire, it’s game over. You lose.

To hire one truly remarkable person, I like to interview at least five to eight people. However I often interviewed many more to find truly stellar folk. On average, I’ve had 250 resumes and conducted 16 interviews to hire just one person.

But those numbers are only for top performing companies…

I once traveled to Boston with a colleague to hire for a position. After three intense days of back-to-back interviews, we ended up flying home empty-handed. We interviewed sixteen candidates, in multiple interview rounds. We combed through close to 150 resumes. Still, we walked away because we just didn’t find the right person.

There are 300 million people living in the United States and 35 million in Canada.  The right people exist for every role. You just have to keep looking. Trust your gut, too.  When your gut says, ‘no’ don’t let yourself keep trying to make it say ‘yes.’

Patience is a virtue when you’re hiring. Be willing to wait for the right person.

Most “A” players aren’t out there looking either, so you might just have to shake the tree a few more times…

For information on this topic, check out: Leadership at 100MPH.

Greig Clark, my good friend and founder of College Pro Painters, used to say that in order to build a truly great company, it has to be slightly more than a business and slightly less than a religion. It has to be a cult.

The cult-like culture starts with people who have a fantastic cultural fit, who are strong leaders, have proven ability to perform their roles, and will do it at one hundred miles an hour.

To build a cult-like workplace find new employees that raise the average skill set of the entire group.

A business’ hiring process is just like when you’re rebuilding a sports team.  You need to get rid of the wrong players and bring in those that raise the average of the team. A sports team never considers bringing in a bunch of C players – they obsess about bringing in better players to win the cup.

All champion teams have a cult-like environment.  Your company should be structured the same way.  And in our lifetime, the Toronto Blue Jays will win the world series again.  My dad says so!!!

For more information on this topic, check out: Building a World Class Culture.

A business owner recently told me they couldn’t hire any great employees because there weren’t any to hire in his city.

I said, “It’s not a tight labor force, there’s just a whole bunch of crappy companies to work for.

There are a ton of great employees–they just don’t want to work for you. It’s an easy market to find great employees when you’re a great employer.  Get your vision out there so everybody knows what you’re building.”

That’s when it gets easy.

At the beginning of every interview give a copy of your Painted Picture to each prospective employee.

If they apply by email, have an auto-reply set up that responds, “Thanks for applying to work for us.  Please read our Painted Picture below.  It explains what our company will look and feel like three years from now.  If this sounds like the kind of company you want to help build, please reply to this email with ‘interview me’ in the subject line.”

Before you interview people, your Painted Picture will attract the right people and repel the wrong people.

For information on this topic, check out: Leadership at 100MPH.

Ray Kroc grew McDonalds from a few locations to the enormously powerful brand we all know and secretly crave.

He had a particularly cut-throat saying about business: “When the competition is drowning, stick a hose in their mouths.”

While that sounds brutal, Kroc understood that in a recession competitors leave themselves vulnerable. He knew that the best time to eliminate your competition is when they’re at their weakest–during an economic downturn.

I once saw a Nike t-shirt that said, “Somewhere, right now, someone is practicing.  When they meet you head to head in competition, they’ll beat you.”

As a CEO coach, I see that this seizing on vulnerability is where business is most like sports.  Your competition is naturally your opponent, and when you come to the game unprepared for the challenge, someone will be waiting for you to choke, and when you do, they’ll happily leave you on the sidelines while they advance toward their goal.

Hiring competitors’ salespeople, proactively targeting your competitors’ clients and even re-pricing your products or services to attract those clients will help you and hurt your competitor.  Worry more about yourself, but when the competition is drowning, stick a hose in their mouth.  This is one area I mentor CEOs on when I’m coaching them.

‘Survival of the fittest’ isn’t just for the Serengeti – it is alive and well in your industry too.  Who’ll win?

pic Poliza

The old adage of, ‘hire for attitude, train for skill’ doesn’t work anymore.  A good attitude can’t overcome a lack of skills, and when you’re growing at 100% revenue growth a year, you need the people that will get the job done right away.

What should you do? I coach and mentor CEOs to go attract those who have proven skills and a personality.

Brad and Geoff Smart wrote an awesome book called Topgrading It’s one of the best systems for interviewing candidates and determining why you should bring someone into your organization. Topgrading recommends ‘leaning out’ two years into the future with every prospective candidate and determining what they have to achieve for you to be happy that you hired them at the end of those two years. Once you’ve started this ‘scorecard’ for the role, construct your job description around the milestones your candidate needs to have achieved after two years.

Once you have a tight job description, then you can interview against it to make sure that candidates have what it takes.

For information on this topic, check out: Leadership at 100MPH.

In Jim Collins book Good to Great, he describes the process of hiring as getting the right people ‘on the bus,’ the wrong people ‘off the bus,’ and ‘everybody in the right seats.’ He just never really explains how to make all of that happen.

Collins also talked about the ‘Merry Pranksters’ who drove around the United States back in the early sixties on their bus called ‘Further,’ tripping on acid. I’m not suggesting that you trip on acid to build your business–you’d get some weird press and some truly unexpected consequences if you did–but Collins talks about this group because when they were planning the trip around the United States that would last a year, they needed to make sure they only had people on the bus that they wanted to spend time with, and with whom they could have meaningful experiences.

In addition to finding the right people, the Merry Pranksters needed to get the negative people, the low performing people, or the high performing people who had bad values, off their bus. Collins does a good job of using the Pranksters as a model for building your team.

It’s worth adding that business people do not obsess enough about the wrong people getting off the bus. This is crucial to completing Collins’ final step in the process, which is getting people into the right seats.

As a business coach and mentor, I help companies get the right people into their organization and the wrong people out of it, so they can begin to really drive the business faster and further.

For information on this topic, check out: Leadership at 100MPH.

In my second year of university I took an organizational behavior course. One day my professor was teaching us how to hire people. I remember thinking, “This is stupid. It’s all textbook stuff that he’s just reading to us. I’ll bet he’s never interviewed or hired anyone.” So I threw my hand up and asked him point-blank, “Um, have you ever actually interviewed or hired anyone?”

“No, have you?” He replied. Uh, wrong question!

I replied, “Yes, in fact, I have. I have nine people working for me now in a house painting business I started.” 
Wrong answer!

The whole class turned around to look at me after my response, and right then and there I began teaching people how to hire great employees as I went on a fifteen-minute diatribe of what it’s really like to hire awesome people. This is the time I actually started using my business coaching and mentoring skills.

I didn’t become BFFs with the prof, but I got a cute girl’s phone number and serious classroom clout.

Just a quick reminder to put down the books and start doing it – you’ll learn more than the books can teach you.