Hire and Fire For Values – Part 1 Hiring
Why does one person get hired over another? Why does one person get fired over another? Performance is a good reason. Values are an even better reason.
A hypocrite is someone who says one thing but does another. Therefore, an organization that claims values that they do not demonstrate is hypocritical and so is its leader.
One way to demonstrate the importance the leader places on the organizational values is to have the Courage to hire and fire people based on the leader’s proclaimed values. Today, Part 1 focuses on Hiring For Values.
When hiring, I believe some leaders are either insane or just plain lazy. Insanity and laziness are often the culprits in hiring people who who do not match an organization’s values.
Insanity
“Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Some leaders continue to interview people and look for the most technically competent people they can find.
Once they hire them, they are amazed how many highly competent people are difficult to work with or always turning things in late. They shake their heads and wonder why another high potential hire has just lied to them.
Hiring for competence only – over and over again – and wondering why the results don’t get better – is pure insanity.
Laziness
I have been there. At the end of a day of interviewing, I have been so brain dead that I am willing to hire the best person so far instead of waiting on the best person for the job. Waiting to find someone who is qualified AND has values that align with my team’s values took time.
Determining a candidate’s talent and competence in an interview is relatively easy. Most decent interviewers can do that. The really good leaders dig beyond talent and competence. They ask questions that do go beyond what is on the resume.
They know that most failures are not the result of a person’s competence. They are the result of things like integrity, work ethic, teamwork and initiative.
Hire For Values
Are Your Values Valuable? That is a blog I wrote years ago. It’s a good question to ask yourself at work and in life.
When the rubber meets the road, is the leader willing to eliminate a qualified job candidate when she suspects the person may be a bad match for her company’s values?
An Example of Hiring For Values
There are many organizations that list Integrity, honesty or character as one of their core values. How do you hire for values in one of these companies?
Interview Question:
Was it difficult to get off work today?
Answer:
No. I just called in sick.
If I believe in the values of my company, I would not hire this person. If they will fake an illness with their current company, do they fit into a culture where Integrity is claimed as a value?
Hiring For Values
Competence is easy to identify on a resume by asking a few questions. HR departments everywhere teach leaders how to find talent. But, we have already established that talent alone is not good enough.
If I want an organization full of people who have values that align with what we claim to be important, then we must dig into their values in the interview process.
What questions do you ask in interviews to see if the candidate aligns with your team’s values?
Here are some questions I use to hire for values I mentioned above: Character, Initiative, Courage, Perseverance and Humility.
Character:
- What one experience in your life do you think shaped who you are the most?
Initiative:
- Tell me about a problem you identified at work in the last 12 months.
- Tell me about something that occurred at work that made your job more difficult than it should have been.
Courage:
- Tell me about an obstacle you faced in your life.
- Tell me about a time your boss or someone else did something morally questionable at work.
Perseverance:
- Tell me about an idea someone had that did not work for you.
- Tell me about a time when you failed to measure up to someone else’s standards.
Humility:
- Tell me about the toughest person you ever worked for.
- Tell me about a time when your boss criticized your work.
I am always careful not to ask “And what did you do about it.” People who believe in the same values as my team does will always volunteer that they did something.
If they focus on the situation they faced and not their actions, they may be talented, but they are not a match for my team. The answers I get will help me weed out the talented and aligned from merely the talented.
The Bottom Line:
Some leaders prefer to do the same thing they have always done in hiring and act surprised when they get the same results. Others do not want to put in the effort it will take to hire someone who is both talented AND is a fit with the company’s values.
If my company truly believes it has values, then it must be willing to make hard decisions to reinforce those values. Hiring and firing for values are often hard decisions. But, as my dad, General Jim Anderson told me many times in my teens:
“If doing the right thing was easy, everyone would be doing it.”
If I decide to be different and display the Courage it takes for me to build and maintain a team that demonstrates the values we claim to believe in, then I have to be a leader who is willing to hire and fire based on values.
Hiring is the critical step. The next step is Firing For Values. That is the subject of my next blog: Hiring and Firing for Values – Part 2.
Question:
What values are hardest to reinforce in an organization?
Dave Anderson is author of Becoming a Leader of Character – Six Habits that Make or Break a Leader at Work and at Home.
You can find Becoming a Leader of Character on Amazon by clicking here:
You can also find Becoming a Leader of Character at Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million and other retailers.
Fun topic and probably the most important process to get right, a company’s future depends on it.
I think the easiest to reinforce is Integrity. If your company consistently expresses it, everyone sees it; if they don’t…everyone sees it.
Humility in my opinion is the hardest to reinforce b/c it requires leaders to be vulnerable. They might have to admit they are wrong in order to express this quality effectively. Humility also requires a willingness to take and receive other’s ideas as better than your own. I difficult one for many.
Garrett
You are the expert in this area. Your books have taught a lot of people about the hiring process. I appreciate you checking in to my site. Your stuff has been an invaluable resource: http://www.cotria.com.
Dave,
Thanks for another great reflection.
Hiring for values is the way to shape culture in an organization. Common values bring people together in good times and in bad. Employees with shared values create a culture that brings these values into action at the workplace. These actions portray the organization’s culture to both employees and customers alike.
I think the hardest value to reinforce in an organization is selflessness. Placing the organization and others before self is counter to societal tendencies. It is too easy to ask “what is in it for me?” Selflessness requires a compelling purpose which is not always found or shared in organizations.
Blair, I agree. I have also found that people prefer to work in a selfless culture. A leader’s role is to shape that culture and demonstrate that selfless value. It may take time, but I have seen teams change from selfish to selfless thanks to a committed leader’s efforts.
Yes Values are important for the individual, but they need to line up with the values of the organization. Ones that can clearly state what those values are, and live by them, attract (funnily enough) the right people. Once you have attracted the right ‘values’, there is a need to recruit the right behavior for the role. It’s unfair to employ someone who has the value of say ‘honesty’ but who have a behavior of inflexibility when the behavior required is flexibility. So, although Values are important, it’s not the Silver Bullet (in my opinion)
I believe you should always be flexible in your methods but never flexible in your values. That includes individuals and organizations.