The First C of Great Teams: Why Character Comes Before Skill
RECRUITING AN EFFECTIVE TEAM
Great organizations are built on great team members. And you as the leader will be judged in part by the people you select to serve beside you. Choosing effective people will not only determine your ultimate success as a leader but will greatly influence the amount of energy you expend to achieve that success. This choice, as you know, produces significant ripple effects in and through your organization.
Finding the right person is hard work, requiring time, energy, and patience. The larger the organization becomes, the more you can feel like the door attendant at the Hilton—constantly opening the door for team members entering and departing.
So how do you choose? To audit prospective team members, you must carefully consider the three C’s: Character, Competency, and Compatibility.
Character
Senior leaders know they cannot wink at character shortfalls despite impressive credentials of experience, personality, or education. A potential hire must possess a heart of goodness, authenticity, and ten other important qualities:
Integrity. They are the same people at home, at the office, or on the golf course. They can be trusted by their spouse, friends, neighbors, and supervisors. They have earned a good name.
Devoted to family. Their lives are not built around personal attainments but are centered on the welfare of their families. If you spend time with their spouses and children, you learn that they are loved, cared for, and secure.
Positive attitude. Attitude keeps them going, fueling their fire. Their perspective is optimism and hope, not despair. When attitudes are right, there is no barrier too high, no valley too deep, no dream too extreme, no challenge too great.
Content and secure. They have come to terms with their strengths, weaknesses, and capacities, and are comfortable acknowledging them to others.
Charles Garfield, in his book Peak Performers, illustrates this concept with a story about David Ogilvy, founder of the large advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather. He sends every new manager a Russian Matryoshka doll, a unique carved and hollow wooden doll. There are five dolls in all, four of which contain smaller ones inside of them. Ogilvy inserted a message in the smallest doll, which read: “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs, but if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, Ogilvy & Mather will become a company of giants.”
Responsible and accountable. They have more than good intentions, but a track record of meeting deadlines, achieving results, fulfilling responsibilities. These actions are attested by others.
Teachable. They are comfortable being reviewed and appreciate the input of others, understanding that it brings them another step closer to greater potential. The person who heeds correction gains understanding (Proverbs 15:32).
Kindness. A kind person makes others feel accepted and affirmed though word and action.
Resilient. They do not give up, at least not easily. Though wearied by difficulties, they carefully consider others methods to achieve a goal and give it another try.
Value-driven. Do they have internal beliefs that govern their outward behaviors? Their responses to the throws of life should not be guided by expediency, but by principle. “The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person. Reactive people are driven by feelings, by circumstances, by conditions, by their environment,” writes late-author Stephen Covey.
Loyal. Allegiance to the team and vision is not feigned. Their loyalty does not suppress differences of perspective but provides a profitable forum for interchange and resolution. Team members share a common ideal that, regardless of minor differences, they fight for it, shoulder-to-shoulder.
Your assessment of the character of a prospective team member is crucial. Yet, without competency, the person will not add professional value. We’ll touch on the second C of hiring next week!