1 week Ago By HeadTopics.com
Advice from a former executive on how to bring on new talent—as well as when and how to let people go.has spent a career leading teams, building businesses, and managing people at every level. Along the way, he’s learned valuable lessons about the best ways to bring on new talent, as well as when and how to let people go.
Joel Peterson has spent a career leading teams, building businesses, and managing people at every level. Along the way, he’s learned valuable lessons about the best ways to bring on new talent, as well as when and how to let people go.In this episode, he shares his approach to hiring for top leadership positions and why it’s so important to slow down and take plenty of time with interviews.
Joel Peterson is the chairman of JetBlue Airways and he teaches at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He’s the author of the book Entrepreneurial Leadership: The Art of Launching New Ventures, Inspiring Others, and Running Stuff. Joel, thanks so much for being on the show.
ALISON BEARD: So, hiring and firing are such important things for managers to get right, but most of us don’t get formal training in them. So then, making sure that you have a bunch of candidates, so that you’re seeing a lot of people, having a whole team do the interviewing, meeting together as a team to share notes, doing reference checks and doing them yourself, not having somebody else do it. A lot of time people offload that.
Then I think taking longer on the interviews. I’ve learned to spend a fair amount of time on interviews for a really important position.JOEL PETERSON: Often an hour or more.
JOEL PETERSON: Yeah, that’s a really great point. I think that we’re obviously more comfortable with people who have similar backgrounds and similar values. So, values really if you think about them in terms of what a company does, it’s really how does it set its priorities? You want people who can get comfortable with the same set of priorities.
So, I think you want diversity, all kinds of diversity of thought, of optic or whatever, but you don’t want people to have different priorities. ALISON BEARD: Right. And surely that’s true for anyone you’re hiring to lead a team, or lead a function? ALISON BEARD: When you’ve hired a bunch of individual stars and individual entrepreneurial leaders, how do you get them to cohere as a team? ALISON BEARD: So, you’re not an advocate of putting someone into a role that they’re not quite ready for? So people, and the only reason I say that is because people have a sense that things aren’t quite going right.
Many times they defer dealing with it. They don’t say anything about, say well this would be awkward. My advice is to say right away, somethings not going right.
Let’s talk about how are you feeling about your job? How are things going for you? Because I’m feeling uncomfortable. As you have those inklings, you should start talking about it. JOEL PETERSON: Well, I think the Performance Improvement Plan, typically known as the PIP, is really sort of the precursor to letting somebody go in many cases.
And I think many employees view it as that. I think if you can set it up where you say, I want to give you feedback. Let’s keep talking about things.
Let’s have an agreement. You can keep it so it’s not quite as formal and as threatening as that. On the other hand the Performance Improvement Plan does give somebody adequate notice.
JOEL PETERSON: I think one of the worse ones people make is they wait for a triggering event. They wait for something. I know I don’t like what you’re doing.
I know you’re underperforming. This is a problem. This is miserable for both of us.
But you haven’t done anything yet that will allow me to fire you. I’m just going to wait. I’m going to pounce when that happens.
The problem with that is I’m usually upset by the time it happens. ALISON BEARD: But I think it’s hard because people will know you’re using euphemisms. You’re not letting me go, you’re kicking me out.
ALISON BEARD: Right, right. So, we’re talking here about empathetic firing. How much of that is showing in the room that you aren’t emotionless? That you aren’t reciting in monotone, here’s a checklist of things we need to go through.
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