Why people are critical to a CEO’s success
Building a culture of like-minded people is critical to the role that a CEO plays, and it is as much an art as a science.
Building a culture of like-minded people is critical to the role that a CEO plays, and it is as much an art as a science. Hire the wrong person and morale crumbles and performance suffers. Bring on the right talent and performance increases and growth accelerates. Once the right people are on board, they grow and change, engage with new challenges and embrace the lessons of success and failure. This growth, while positive, can pose its own set of challenges.
CEO’s know that finding the right mix of skills, knowledge, experience, and cultural fit can be a Herculean task. As with most tasks, being intentional about the end result produces profound results. That job belongs to the CEO and no one else. While you may delegate specific tasks in the hiring process such as involving those who will work day-to-day with the new hire, the CEO must make the ultimate decision to introduce a new person into a carefully constructed cultural ecosystem.
Google’s former CEO and co-founder Larry Page famously approved or rejected every one of the company’s hires — over 6,500 people in 2017. When asked why, he explained, “It helps me to know what’s really going on.” Google employs over 85,000 people on six continents, yet the CEO still plays a personal role in each hire.
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Richard Fairbank, the CEO of CapitalOne, has more than 50,000 employees. He notes that, “At most companies, people spend 2 percent of their time recruiting and 75 percent managing their recruiting mistakes.” If Richard Fairbank and Larry Page and a host of other CEOs think that hiring is important enough to be part of their daily routine, shouldn’t it be part of yours?
Think about it this way. If we reduced a company to its mathematical variables, we might come up a with the following formula: Company = People x Culture x Numbers. To increase the value of the company, we must increase each of its parts. People matter more than any other variable, and there is no other place where a CEO’s impact will be more directly and widely felt.
Some CEOs may complain that recruiting takes up too much time; time that could be invested in other activities that would drive the company forward. They might suggest that others lower down in the organization are better equipped to know the skills necessary for a specific position. While not wholly incorrect, these sentiments betray a lack of nuanced understanding of the CEO’s role in the process. Hiring managers have different motivations than CEOs. While both want to fill positions with people who can do the job, only the CEO, as steward of the culture, is able to make the tough choices about hiring those who align with it best.
Acquiring the right people
Most CEOs recognize that hiring the right people is essential to the success of their business. How essential? The 2019 CEO Benchmarking Report reveals that finding the right talent has become the C-Suite’s top priority. Nearly 70 percent of CEOs say they need help with talent-related strategies. Key challenges include holding employees accountable, getting the maximum performance out of people, and creating a positive work environment.
Why is talent so important? A study of more than 600,000 researchers, entertainers, politicians, and athletes found that high performers are not just marginally better than their peers; they are 4 times better than average performers! The gap only rises with a job’s level of complexity. For occupations such as software developers, high performers are an amazing 800 percent more productive. Management guru Jim Collins sums it up best: “The single biggest constraint on the success of my organization is the ability to get and to hang on to enough of the right people.”
Though we may recognize the critical role talent plays in an organization, we often lack the tools and processes we need to best understand the people we want to hire and the positions they ultimately fill. As hiring CEOs, we must recognize that people are multi-faceted and seek only those whose purpose aligns with that of our organizations. Additionally, we must realize that every person is fundamentally wired to perform at a certain level, which will only marginally increase over a working career. Finding people who’s “level of work” match that required by our open position is critically important. Adding these two “lenses” to our recruiting telescope ensures better hiring decisions and serves as a foundation upon which we can build a hiring process that succeeds.
This means that you can bring people into roles where they can thrive, personally and professionally. This is the ever-elusive “fit” that CEOs so often pursue but cannot effectively describe or consistently achieve. When you hire the right people for the right positions, performance will go up, morale will improve, and employee churn will go down.
CEOs don’t hire people to fill a job. CEOs recruit talent to grow the company. CEOs understand that there is an inverse relationship between the control exerted by an executive and the proper functioning of a team. Control stifles creativity; creativity leads to performance.
Retaining the right people
Improving employee retention is a corporate holy grail. Nearly every CEO I have ever interacted with recognizes the constant drain on momentum created by a high turnover rate. The loss of momentum also engenders a growing frustration among employees who have to compensate for empty seats at the table, a frustration that everyone in the company can feel. We recognize that hiring and training new employees is costly, and each resignation letter represents a substantial loss in productivity. When you craft and nurture a healthy environment and place the right people within that environment, you naturally curb the most common drivers of employee churn.
Once your culture is in place and your talent acquisition process has been refined, you can begin to further affect the trajectory of your people in how you manage and lead them throughout their time with your company. Some level of employee churn is inevitable. Even if your culture is nearly perfect, external circumstances can motivate great employees to move out of state or to pursue opportunities elsewhere. You can, however, dramatically cut that churn to the point where you have a company where people not only want to be there, but want to stay.
Your job as CEO is to build an environment that is unique to your business and which fully supports the people you bring into it. Your improved understanding of how people work, how you can best go about finding and vetting talent, and what you can do to retain that talent will enable your business to assemble all-star teams at all levels.
The amount of work this takes may seem daunting, but the reward is a business where you do not have to micromanage or personally attend to every task for the company to prosper. You will have the right people in place who think and behave in alignment with the company’s values while also contributing their own engaged insights into how the business can continue to grow. That is the true power of people that only the CEO can wield.