Mediocre At Best

Take a good look at your company, region, store, or department.  Is it outstanding?  Are you achieving most of your goals and heading for greatness?  Do you have wonderfully low turnover, with a line of the best people waiting to work for you?  Is your team full of those people that you would love to clone?  Are almost all of your customers appreciative and very happy with what they are getting from you?

Now look at other businesses… The ones your company buys from, as well as the ones where you and your family spend your money.  Are most of them doing an impressive job of exceeding your expectations?  Are they responsive to your questions and needs?  Do you believe that they really care about you and are working hard to meet or exceed your expectations?  Are almost all of the people you interact with in customer service wonderful to deal with, and obviously happy in their jobs?  Do they belong in customer service?

Very few of us can honestly answer yes to more than a couple of these questions.

Why?  Why aren’t businesses able to be great instead of just OK?  One of the biggest reasons is because most of the time

The People Who Do The Hiring Are In No Way Accountable For The People They Hire!

We will, of course, assume that those people are doing their best, and that they care as much as anyone about the people they hire as well as the success of the company.  And unfortunately

The people who do the hiring are almost never responsible for the actual behavior (the work) of those hires.  And…

They are totally removed from getting any actual first hand, real world and real time feedback on the quality of those people. 

They are doing the best they know how, and they are shooting in the dark.  I would also bet that most of the time the people doing our hiring are finding people who have what they are looking for.  Unfortunately… our own experiences in the world show us that they are clearing looking for the wrong things.

Even if the people doing the hiring are interested in the fate of their hires, it is all too easy to pass the blame when those hires don’t work out (or at least not up to our expectations). 

“They misrepresented themselves in the interview process…”

“Something must have changed, they were great when we hired them…”

“The manager/supervisor/leader must be doing something wrong because we are sending them great people…”

Unfortunately, most of the time the responsibility is laid on the person to whom those hires report, and sadly for them, they are usually already responsible for the team as a whole meeting its expectations.  We assume as well that these Leaders are also doing the best they can, so…

Where do we go from here with this conundrum?

Stay tuned…