Looking for Good People

Like most LinkedIn users, I periodically get a wave of overtures from recruiters when firms are seeking to fill position with experienced candidates – it’s validating and gives me a sense that I’m in a growing profession – but this recent round I have become sensitized to the words “looking for.”   It’s a fairly standard and entirely sensible in a recruitment letter to say a firm is “looking for” experienced candidates, “looking for” certain skills, “looking for” those who are capable of accomplishing specific things.   But for whatever reason, those two words are beginning to get under my skin.

A company looks outside its own operations to obtain from the outside world the things it is unable to do for itself, or is unable to do as effectively as other firms – services that must be outsourced or contracted because the company does not have the core competence to do these things for itself.  A firm must look for a vendor to provide payroll accounting or social marketing because it simply isn’t any good at those tasks, and hasn’t the first idea how to develop that capacity internally.

Considered in that light, a firm that is “looking for” good people is implicitly admitting that it doesn’t know how to make its own – and must lure away workers who were trained in other companies, those who presumably have the competence to not merely hire and use talent, but to grow talent internally.  In a broad sense, it’s the tragedy of the commons – with every firm assuming that other companies are able to train and develop talent so that they can hire it away.

So the question arises: what firms are capable of making good people to fill the need of other firms that do not?  A partial answer might come from my recent experience in rebuilding a department after all their experienced employees departed within a period of months.  This firm is the hands-down leader in customer experience, with customer satisfaction ratings that left the second-place firms far behind – but when it sought to grow the discipline within the organization, it filled all the top slots with outsiders (people from firms who were second- or third-rate) and the experienced people, feeling unrecognized and unrewarded, sought positions in other departments or outside the firm.   This company grew good people, but failed to retain them.

And thus begins the downward spiral: a company does not invest in developing talent because it also does not invest in retaining talent.   Such a firm can only lose its best people, into whose professional development it has invested a considerable amount of time and money.  It then comes to the conclusion that it is not worthwhile to develop talent because some other firm will simply hire its good people away (which is a kind of psychological denial of its own inability to retain them).  And so it stops developing good people and starts to hire them from outside.   (But in this case, if you are the leader in a given field, the personnel of other companies are not as good as the ones you have, and have lost.)

And in the same situation, I was faced with a significant problem: if experienced people had left, then experienced people had to be hired to replace them.   There wasn’t time to hire a flock of recent graduates and bring them up in the profession – or at least, that was the response I got when I made that suggestion.  It was the same response I had received when I made the same observation years before: that there weren’t many greenhorns in the ranks to replace the old salts when they matriculated or left their positions.  So the net result is that the senior staff was all hired from firms that were not as good, and these second-rate individuals would be the new leadership to train the junior staff.   The prognosis in such a situation is not good.

I expect this situation is far from unique: a firm seeks to develop talent internally, then fails to reward and retain the talent they have developed, and their most talented individuals are lured away by other companies who lack the ability to develop their own talent, who are “looking for” and willing to adequately compensate people who developed skills at other companies that fail to retain them.  The folly of this is clear, but folly is perennial.

And so, I despair there is not a firm who sustainably grows and retains its talent – that through a brief period of crisis or a sustained degradation of culture, even a firm that has the capability to make good people out of raw recruits will cease to do so, and join the many who are “looking for” talent that it cannot (or will not) produce internally.   It’s perhaps a healthy thing that the giants of industry should crumble and make way for the next generation, perpetuating the cycle of life and death in the corporate jungle.

Fostering Innovation

I had the opportunity to chat with an acquisitions editor for a small publishing firm, and recognized that her job was highly analogous to the way in which innovation is fostered in commercial organizations.   Perhaps I’m chasing an analogy, but here goes …

The job of an acquisitions editor is to develop relationships with individuals who have interesting perspectives – or more specifically, individuals whose perspectives would be interesting enough to a sizable body of readers that her firm can make a profit on printing books that communicate those perspectives.

The editor, herself, is not possessed of an innovative perspective: if she were, she would write books instead of soliciting others to write them.  But at the same time, she is able to assess ideas and recognize when someone else has an idea that would be compelling to the market her firm serves, to establish relationships with those who have the potential to become authors and, and ultimately to deliver those ideas to a market that is willing to pay for them.

This strikes me as entirely similar to an executive when they sponsor an innovative project: they do not know the solution to their problem (or a method to seize an opportunity) and lack the domain knowledge to formulate a solution to the problem – but they are able to recognize when someone else has a good idea, to help them develop that idea, and to push that idea to the market where it will be profitable.

In terms of our conversation, the editor approached me because she saw all of this blabbering I do online and believed there might be potential to develop me into an author.   She is very aggressive in building relationships with unknown thinkers – because those who are already known have established relationships with other publishing houses, she has to hunt fresh talent from the body of people who are not already published. 

And back to the analogy: the executive who wishes to be innovative must seek out relationships with unknown innovators – the unrecognized people within his own firm, or those who are undervalued by their current employers – and bring them aboard his own organization.    Again, those people who are already known for having had innovative ideas in the past are already employed and valued by their employers, and are unlikely to move.  Not to mention that a person who is acknowledged for one idea tends not to have another – they exploit their one innovation for all it’s worth and cease to think laterally – but perhaps that is a separate topic.

The editor invests significant time and takes on significant risk in investing her firm’s resources in the development of unknown authors.  They are unproven, and their books may not sell as well as expected.   There is the constant hope of discovering someone who will become the next trendsetter and whose book will sell exceedingly well, and there are a lot of authors on whom the firm breaks even or takes a small loss – but this is not considered to be failure, but the cost of exploration.

Likewise, the executive takes significant risk in sponsoring an innovative idea that is, by its very nature, entirely different from ideas that have been tried and tested.   The innovative idea may take the market by storm, or it may fail horribly.   And ideally, the executive recognizes that the failures are merely bets that were lost on the way to placing one that will be a huge winner, and is not discouraged by innovations that do not have as much commercial success as was hoped.

Finally, something that this particular editor recognized is the need to build relationships with people before they become successful.   Once a person has been recognized for an idea, he will be beset by the larger publishing firms with more resources to bring him aboard.  The key to her personal success is establishing relationships with people who have untapped potential, so that when the time comes and they have a breakthrough idea, she is already known to them and stands a better chance of getting them to work for her, even when the bigger houses come to them after the fact.

Likewise, the innovative executive must build relationships with people who have promise, but have not yet produced their “big idea.”   If they do not show any interest until a person has an innovative idea, they are seen as parasites rather than facilitators of innovation, and people bristle when they are approached in this manner.   While some like to think that they own all of their employees ideas, they will find it very difficult to extract them unless there is already a trust relationship in place that began long before the innovative spark took flame.

In closing, my sense is that this particular editor is a very smart professional, who has succeeded in establishing a connection with me that she can exploit if ever I have a breakthrough idea (still writing, still waiting).   Her approach to gathering talent and managing relationships seems to be very sensible and perhaps even a bit innovative, given that it is highly unusual in the industry.  And I think that “leaders” in the commercial sector would do well to emulate her practices, as their challenge is the same – whether an innovative idea leads to a book or a commercial product is incidental, and the process of building a network of individuals with potential seems entirely analogous.