Thoughts on hiring right people

Seth Godin has an excellent post again – “Who should you hire?”. Managers and Leaders are often responsible for this challenging task of hiring people and this post surely a good reference for hiring people in your team as well as for doing some introspection ourselves.

Seth says –

“There is a fundamental shift in rules from manual-based work (where you follow instructions and an increase in productivity means doing the steps faster) to project-based work (where the instructions are unknown and visualizing outcomes and then getting things done is what counts.)”

I would certainly opt for people who know how to get things done. This also deals with an all important issue of accountability. People who are used to follow instructions can never really be accountable, as my recent experience suggests. They depend on someone else for taking small decisions related to task – they are afraid of being responsible for outcomes of their decisions. But that is not how we get things done.

We get things done by being passionate about the work we are doing, taking initiatives, following our instincts and by being accountable, taking responsibility for outcomes of our decisions – that is perhaps what differentiates winners from the also ran.