Q. How do you find
employees with the
same guiding
principles?
There are a couple
different levels of
folks. With one exception, we have not
brought in a single person from the outside to
immediately jump into
the management team.
Nor have we brought
in somebody to jump into a
fairly senior level in the
organization of an engagement manager, sales manger,
etc. I believe in rewarding
those for accomplishment
from the inside.
One of the big things that
you do in the interview
process is you do have to say
the words. So, we say the
words in the interview
process, and I personally am
involved in every final-stage
interview process. I don’t
care if it’s a consultant, sales rep, administrator, whoever
it is in the organization, I
want to meet that person,
and I want to ask them and
quiz them on examples of
their integrity and ethics in
the past.
It’s important that they
understand that they are
going to be asked to do the
right thing, so their core values need to align with ours.
Functional and vertical skills
are extremely important, but
they are kind of baseline
things.
I think the one thing that’s
a little bit harder to put your
finger on is the integrity and
ethics standpoint, and we
ask for a lot of examples —real-world stories where you
had a challenging decision
that you had to make and
how you arrived at the right
decision. I also do find that
in our processes, we try …
and shut up. We try to ask
some questions, sit back and
shut up.
We find that after five or
six or seven people interview
a person and we all triangu-late, we do come to the similar conclusion at the end. At
some point, somebody’s
going to trip up and say
something that’s inconsistent
if they don’t share in the
same guiding principles.
Q. What is a pitfall to avoid
when following guiding
principles?
You don’t want to have too
much pride. I’ve found that
human nature is, people are
forgiving — forgiving of honest mistakes. They are not as
forgiving of sneakiness.
My feeling is you are not
expected to have all the
answers. So, why pretend
you do?
So, don’t have too much
pride, be open, be honest,
admit your mistakes if you
make them or when you
make them. Don’t fear going
before your people and saying those things.
Human nature is, ‘Wow, Lou,
I appreciate you saying that,
and I like the solution that
you’ve come up with to rally
and move forward,’ and it
works every single time. I have
not had one single instance in
the 10 years that I’ve run this
place that, that approach has
been met with complete antagonistic behavior.
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