What is Selectivity?

This is an overview of  what I mean by "selectivity" and building a "selective organization." Details and tips regarding selectivity are provided in many of the posts on this blog.

Hiring, firing, and promoting are usually seen as three distinct processes, but they are actually all aspects of a single process: selectivity. All three are based on inclusion and exclusion, on acceptance and rejection:

• If you have ten applicants for a position and hire one of them, you include one and exclude nine.
• If you have ten employees and fire one of them, you include nine and exclude one.
• If you have ten employees seeking a promotion and promote one of them, you include one and exclude nine.

Viewing selectivity as a single, integrated process makes it easier to understand hiring, firing, and promoting more clearly and perform them more successfully. For one thing, it makes it easier to discard the assumption that hiring and promoting are inherently positive while firing is inherently negative. In fact, all three are equally capable of playing a positive or negative role depending on whether they are skillfully performed. Skillful hiring, firing, and promoting is how you build a selective organization.

You can build a selective organization whether you manage a team, a department, or an entire company. This is possible, although more challenging, even if your company's procedures do not include you in the hiring process and limit your ability to fire or promote.

In hiring, firing, and promoting there are three important questions to be answered: who, when, and how.

• Who: Most managers are not nearly selective enough regarding who they hire, fire, and promote. You can succeed as a manager by gaining a clearer understanding of who you should include in, and exclude from, your organization and your leadership team, and then enforcing that standard rigorously.
• When: As a general rule you should be in less of a hurry to hire and more of a hurry to fire than you currently are. Most managers make the mistake of "hire in haste and fire at leisure."
• How: This is the most neglected aspect of selectivity. Much is written about how to decrease risk in the firing process, but little attention is paid to the specific procedures and techniques that can be used in the hiring and promoting processes to maximize the successful candidate's likelihood of success. I will be posting a number of tips on how to hire, fire, and promote to minimize risk and maximize benefit.

Building a selective organization through effective hiring, firing, and promoting is about 80% of what you need to do to succeed as a manager. It requires relatively little time but a great deal of discipline and attention. Everything else you do as a manager, which occupies the vast majority of your time and energy, only affects the remaining 20%. This means that the selectivity process gives you maximum leverage as a manager. It provides the best return on your investment of attention, time and effort.

If you have not already built a selective organization pretty much everything you are doing as a manager is damage control. You're seeking to minimize the harm done by your poorly-selected staff and you're working like crazy to extract some minimum level of productivity and quality from them. You're spending a lot of time and energy disciplining bad behavior, motivating slackers, responding to rumors, and all the rest of that ugliness. You're building your organization on a weak foundation, and all the good ideas you try to implement will be constantly in danger of cracking apart and collapsing. Plus, the good employees you do have will be surrounded by toxic co-workers, trapped in the kind of miserable work environment that is all too common.

On the other hand, if you have built a selective organization, life is good. You still have lots of important work to do in order to succeed, but you are building on a strong foundation. You are spending enjoyable days with great people who are fun to work with and getting great results. Your organization is filled with smiling faces and a relaxed but energetic atmosphere. You can spend most of your time doing rewarding work like reinforcing your positive workplace culture, measuring and analyzing results, and designing new ways to get even better results in the future. This is when being a manager is a pleasure and a privilege.

If you are currently managing a non-selective organization and you want to transform it into a selective organization, you have a real job ahead of you. I won’t to try to kid you on this; you're in for quite a ride. First of all, you're probably going to have to fire some people and in the context of a non-selective organization that can be difficult and unpleasant work. You're also going to have to reshape your workplace culture, win managers over to a new way of thinking, and instill the new ideas, skills, and standards that will make selectivity possible. It will not be easy and it won’t always be fun. You'll feel like you are pushing a heavy wagon up a steep hill.

But the day will come when you reach a tipping point. You will suddenly find yourself at the crest of that hill and now you can ride the wagon down. Suddenly everything gets easier, more fun, and more successful. All the time and effort you invested begins to pay large and unexpected dividends. Plus, you will have created a wonderful place in the world, a place where good people can enjoy doing great work, a refuge from the petty, the lazy, the cynical, and the cruel.

If this sounds like something you would like to accomplish, check out the blog posts. Also feel free to post a comment. I’d like to hear from you!