This aspect of innovation cannot be stressed enough. Your HR director must be elevated to the same level as your COO and CFO. In today’s competitive and uncertain times, you absolutely must find and retain the best people, period.
No strategy planning or decision should take place until you have the right people in the right places, and the wrong people are gone.
Employees are no longer “cogs in the wheel.” They are means by which your organization can create success or failure. They should be made to be “co-owners” of the business and not just “employees” who show up for work and then clock out at five. Your employees must become active and integral part of all ongoing innovation initiatives.
Your HR strategy must be linked to your over all corporate strategy.
- Do your people have the skills needed to profit from the challenges of tomorrow?
- Are you doing everything you can to create a pipeline of qualified leaders from within your company?
- Are you making it easy or difficult for your employees to grow as individuals?
When recruiting and hiring new employees, focus most of your attention on their intelligence and personal character, and less on a paper trail of education, degrees and certificates. It’s more important to know “who they are inherently” as opposed to what they’ve done. Level of education, schooling and degrees are a dime-a-dozen – it’s not hard to find people with impressive academic records or extensive work experience.
In today’s world of political and corporate corruption and failure, the qualities of creativity, intelligence, initiative, honesty, independent thinking, imagination, leadership and ethical decision making are very rare personal characteristics and are the qualities your hiring process should be looking to identify and attract. You can always send someone with great personal character to college to get a degree. You can’t send anyone anywhere to “get” initiative, passion, kindness and honesty – they either have it or its absent.
What you want are the best minds and personalities, NOT primarily people with the best degrees. You want passionate people who can think, communicate, create and solve problems. If they happen to have a degree too, then super!
As I’ve always said, people, not money, make the world go round. In this case, your people either make your company outstanding or they’re slowly grinding your company to a halt, so choose wisely.
Copyright 2006 Christopher A. Gayle & Capital Genesis LLC ©. All Rights Reserved.
