The hardest thing Adam
Singer had to do in the early days of his company was
to fire employees who were giving 150 percent.
It’s not that the founder,
chairman and CEO of IPC The
Hospitalist Co. Inc. didn’t
appreciate their passion. On the
contrary, he admired those
employees who wore the brand
proudly on their shirts and
practically lived at the office.
But when it came down to it, no
amount of passion could compensate for inadequate skill
sets.
Today, when Singer adds to
the 800 employees who work at
the nation’s leading private
practice hospitalist company, he
looks for candidates who are
overqualified for the position
he’s hiring for. By doing so, he
never has to let a passionate
worker go due to a lack of
skills, and he has developed a
steady reserve of talent that has
helped push the company’s
2007 revenue to $190 million.
Smart Business spoke with
Singer about why you should
overhire and how to slow down
when making decisions in times
of chaos.
Overhire. Always look to over-hire. Always look to find
someone who you think is
overqualified for the job that
you’re hiring for. Don’t settle
for, ‘Well, I think he can do it if
he had this or that. I know he’s
missing X, Y and Z, but I think
he can get the job done.’ When
you get to that kind of decision point, you’re probably
making a mistake.
When you’re young and you
have a young, entrepreneurial
business, you get people who
are really passionate, but you
end up burning right through
them. You want to get someone who can do this in his
sleep and then do more. In a
growing business, there’ll
always be more for them to
do, and you want them to
expand whatever your idea is
into something more.
You end up with a vastly better product or service and a
much more exciting place to
work. That filters down all the
way through the organization.
Make dissenters wear different
hats. [When creating a vision],
bring an open mind and bring
dissent into the room. What
sometimes happens is you get
frustrated when you get someone who just doesn’t believe
your story. It’s frustrating, and
it can kind of drag the group
down. If you properly manage
that naysayer, it can actually
stimulate you to have a much
better idea at the end.
You can’t allow them to suck
all the air out of the room.
Many times, what I’ll do in
those kinds of scenarios is I’ll
change everyone’s hats. I’ll
make the dissenter argue for
an idea that they might have
been against, and I’ll have
someone who is for the idea
be against it. That becomes a really interesting process in
the vision creation. It really
changes your mind when
you’re forced to argue for
something when you’re against
it and vice versa.
It really does stop someone
from sucking the air out of the
room because they’re no
longer arguing against it.