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, personal success grows directly out of the ability to choose the right people for 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, decentralized, 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, impending lawsuits, a failing strategy, mergers and acquisitions gone awry, a competitor 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.

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

But the truth is that organizations don’t really solve puzzles. People solve puzzles. Within every organization, a surprisingly large number of individuals—probably including you—have to make crucial people choices.

You may be part of a Human Resources (HR) group, formally tasked 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 your tenure on the board—will be asked to participate in choosing a new CEO or other senior executive. More likely, though, you’re part of a much bigger group in “the middle”—that is, the group of managers who are occasionally called upon to make a personnel-related decision for their 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 Decisions), people decisions are important to you, the decision-maker. If you prove to be skilled at solving “people puzzles,” your career prospects will almost certainly get brighter. Conversely, if you repeatedly fail to get the right person in the job, your career prospects will suffer. Think about the experiences of people you’ve worked with. Do you agree that good peoplefinders move up, while others move out?

The problem is that very few people get any formal training in finding and choosing good people. Business schools, especially at the graduate level, tend to downgrade Human Resources Management (HRM) issues in general, or at best focus on HRM as just a minor one of a half-dozen functional areas; they rarely get down to the level of skillbuilding that is required.

Sometimes I use an investing analogy to make this point. Would you 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 experience? 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 to become an expert. You need the right tools.

Great People Decisions puts those tools in your hand. It is a comprehensive toolkit for managers who want to improve their personal competence 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 paramount 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 to one study in which I participated, where we looked at thousands of executives in leading companies around the world, roughly a third of the executives we assessed turned out to be in the bottom half of the competence curve with respect to their peers at other companies in their respective industries.

In other words, even at great companies, the wrong people wind up in the wrong jobs. Can’t we do better?

My Background

Before proceeding any further, you should probably ask what my own qualifications are. Who am I to be telling you what’s important?

I’ve been in the profession of finding great people—and growing great people—for two decades. I was trained as an industrial engineer at Argentine Catholic University in my native Argentina, where I graduated first in my class, and then earned an MBA at Stanford, also with honors. I worked for McKinsey & Co. in Madrid and Milan, and in 1986, I joined Egon Zehnder International (EZI), a leading global executive search firm. Today, I am a partner with this firm, and a member of its executive 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-profit and not-for-profit situations. I personally have led some 300 such searches, and actively participated in another 1,500 or so. These searches have comprised positions on the most senior levels (chairpersons, presidents, 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 as well as for very small ones, and for a range of nongovernmental organizations (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 are typically 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 organization. This can be critically important in certain situations. In the context of a merger or acquisition, for example, the company has to decide how to allocate its management resources (even to the point of deciding who 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 often called upon. Management appraisals can also be very useful when a company faces a new competitive scenario, or when technological or regulatory 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 advice 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 actual performance and evolution of the managers whom we had appraised. Again, our accuracy at predicting both performance and development potential has been on the order of 90 percent globally, while the accuracy of some of our client companies’ internal assessments that we have analyzed have ranged as low as 30 percent.

I say all of this not by way of boasting, but rather to underscore two things. First, I have extensive experience with people decisions. I know the landscape intimately. Second, the prescriptions contained in this book cover the entire gamut of hiring and promoting—from both outside and inside the company.

I should add that I have an intense intellectual commitment to my field. In 1994, in addition to my search work, I became responsible for the professional development of consultants in our global network. Currently, I lead the development of our firm’s intellectual capital for our network of 62 offices worldwide. In the 1990s, I led a major effort to upgrade our work methodology for our executive search practice, and have recently once again led a similar effort to become even better at helping our 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 contributed 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 a much better place if hiring and promotion decisions at all levels, from the shop floor to the boardroom, could be substantially improved. I believe 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 organization.

Next, in Chapter 3, I explain why great people decisions are so hard. 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 conduct searches make one or more in a series of tactical mistakes, all of which combine 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 looking for. Throughout these chapters (and elsewhere in the book), I’ll tell you how and when to engage outside help, and I’ll explain why (at least in most companies) the decision to look only inside is a bad idea.

Most of the book is naturally about the hows of great people decisions: how to appraise, attract, motivate, and integrate the best people. Chapter 7 is devoted to the specifics of appraising people. Many people think this is self-evident: You bring the candidate in, interview him, and check his references. But in my experience, each of these tasks is more difficult than may appear at first. For example: How do you check references in an environment in which people are afraid of getting sued if they 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 to find 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 articles on the subject of integration, many companies still make the mistake of expecting a candidate to “sink or swim.”

In the final chapter, I circle back to the question of why this is important. I believe high-performing organizations not only provide good employment and generate returns for their owners, they also make our society better. A great company—full of great people—raises our standard of living, raises our sights, broadens our horizons, and gives us hope for the future.