How to find (and keep) the best people for and in your team

This article is based on 33 years in business, roughly half of it with large multinationals around the world and the other half working in and with startups and medium sized businesses.

As with all my articles, use this as inspiration for your own journeys and circumstances rather than absolute truths. And enjoy the pics! I use my articles also as a sort of travel blog to remind us what an interesting world we live in.

What we can learn from the best restaurants in the world...

For the life of me I can't recall the title of the book (it was an old one) but one example stuck with me and it so captures the - in my view - erroneous approach so many of us take with regards to identifying, onboarding and deploying talent in our organisations.

The authors of the book did a big research project on understanding what the best (as defined by constant profitability and low staff retention) did that made them profitable over the long run. And the findings were a total surprise because it wasn't what most of us would assume.

The restaurants that did the best (staff retention, consistent profitability, etc) were - for the most part and of course assuming other things are taken care of like stock control, quality etc - doing just one thing particularly well: they didn't try and make people fit into specific roles and responsibilities but rather adapted the job to fit the personality and character of the staff member.

This is RIDICULOUSLY important and reflects my own observations around succesful businesses over the years.        

Don't fit the person you're hiring to the job but rather the job around who you are hiring

What they did specifically was beautifully illustrated by a story told by one of those succesful restaurant managers: he told the researchers that he spent an inordinate amount of time at the beginning trying to understand the person he was hiring and then testing the person on the ground to see their personality, character and interest AND ONLY THEN starting to define the roles and responsibilities around that person's specific character.

For example, he gave the example of two waiters working for him:

One is ultra chatty, amazing at small talk with guests and the guests love him and often end up following his food and drink recommendations.

The other waiter is a much more shy person who steers away from guest interaction (generally speaking, though of course always polite) but is an efficiency machine, able to spot a missing fork on the other side of the restaurant, always perfectly on time with serving hot food etc.

Both are "waiters" but the manager - realising that trying to change each personality would be a herculean task - decided to shape the responsibilitiies around each person's character. The two waiters love working there because the job is shaped around their character and they are thriving, something guests can feel.

The role of managers

Managers - generally speaking - have been disempowered to the max. Most are now just implementers of rules, bureaucracy and - often nonsensical - rules created by someone who isn't too aware of the administrative pain of implementing those rules.

The researchers in the book realised that the succesful restaurants empowered the managers to shape the job around the staff's personalities. Yes. It meant more time spent understanding the staff at the beginning and a little more headaches figuring out how to change the job according to the person, but it meant incredibly happy staff which resulted in less staff turnover (staff turnover is much more expensive than you think), more efficient and effective teams paying more attention to doing a great job that they enjoy and - perhaps more importantly - happpier customers.

Customers can see if the staff are happy from miles away. Never forget this. I can't personally tell you how many people I meet in big companies that really hate working for the companies but keep doing so because of the money (believe me... nothing makes me not want to do business with a company as seeing unhappy employees).

Company culture schmulture

If I was to give you one piece of advice: stop the nonsense about company culture, especially if you speak of great innovative company culture and then make people go through a classical CV submission process that makes you no different to everyone else. The company culture is a result of the things you do to help you staff create the job they love. Yes. It means it is less process optimised that you might want, but is process optimisation your goal or staff happiness and customer happiness?

When was the last time you posted a job around the qualities of the person you are looking for? And instead of asking people to submit a CV which is beyond idiotic as someone - human or computer then has to spend time reading these CV. Why not create an interactive form that asks lots of questions etc (for example: For this role it is really useful if you understand the world of banking, the language, jargon etc. How many years experience do you have specifically in the financial sector? You can even follow up with a few multiple choice questions to test if the person knows their stuff).

Company culture is not what you write you are but what do and what people see you doing. And it is much easier for the world to see than you realise: just what you decide to share online in posts (think linkedin) says a lot about your culture. Do you just share polished pieces of PR work? Or do you give publicity to your team and the wonderful work they might be doing also outside of their work (charity involvement, etc)?

So you think this doesn't apply to a startup?

Let me give you a personal example using our own startup, The StartUp Tribe . We have a small(ish) team whose roles and responsibilities are very fluid but - perhaps more importantly - built around the specific competences, interests, ways of working and times that the team member prefers. When I was in #Barcelona visiting one of the most innovative schooling projects in the world (check out Christopher Pommerening LearnLife project) I was struck by how different students would start school at different times because the science shows that different ages require more sleep etc. They realised it is unhealthy to force people (I forget the age now) aged X to arrive at 8 because their minds at that age are at their best at 9am.

In the past I might have hired for a specific job. And it worked fine. Today we hire on attitude and personality and then mould the job around them. Let me give you a practical example: our beyond brilliant Nabeela Vazeer has been with us almost from the beginning of the journey. But her true passion is teaching and she is an amazing teacher. So we shaped the role she has in the company around her availability and interests. It makes her happy and for us that's our first goal. But then we are in a situation that we have less of her time for us.. ok. So we focused on what she's good at and started chipping away all the stuff that isn't strictly relevant, looking under the administrative hood to really check in to see if that's really important to us.

Make it easy to work in your company!

We essentially removed as much as possible that which is isn't really important from a administrative side. We use Trello and Google so technically have unlimited history. We prefer spending the occasional 5 mins trying to find the history of a specific conversation that forcing someone to spend 20 mins each day updating some silly CRM system. This works for us specifically. We just don't see the value of wasting countless hours asking someone to do something really boring just for the OCCASIONAL chance that we need it.

Ditto for the phenomenal Mughtaar Aghmad Gool who is perhaps one of the most talented cartoonists I have come across (our linkedin company page banner is his art work). He has a very specific set of digital skills and talent and works best in a very specific way... so we spent a lot of time understanding how he works best and removing stuff from his plate where he would struggle. It meant a good amount of work for us on this, but the result is that Mughtaar enjoys the work, finds it easy and delivers really brilliant results consistently because it just comes naturally to him.

Now... There are times when the work is boring. Absolutely. But we try as much as possible to really look at each task and ask ourselves if it is really necessary.

Ask your clients!

One of the most surprising things we found is that when we asked our clients if they needed a specific report. feature, etc and explained how much effort it is, the majority of the clients actually helped us cut down our workload enormously. Often a lot of the output we produce for clients is based on assumptions or a conversation with a client (a client will always say yes to things)... what we did is involve the clients in our actual work and make them partners. We helped them understand that for us to keep the prices as low as possible we needed their help to reduce stuff that isn't crucial to them. I should have measured this but guesstimate is that we removed 70% of the crap we used to do that we thought they needed. This has helped keep our administrative burden so low that we literally run the online academies of close to 450 cities with a team of 4 people (and a few experts we call in when needed).

Hybrid or office: a discussion around who you are trying to attract to work with you (and the huge talent pool you are missing out on!)

It depends. In my view and having spoken to really a lot of people across many countries, the best approach around this decision is "ask your team what works for them!". Some people are amazingly self motivated. Others are less so and need the stimulation of others around them. I personally am very self motivated BUT need people around me so often work in public spaces (libraries, co-working spaces etc). We - across the various companies I am involved in - work entirely hybrid for the following reasons:

• None of us enjoys communiting to work.
• We all have different hours where we are at our best so forcing on each other to adhere to a specific time is silly.
• We can attract amazing talent from everywhere in the world.
• Our outcomes based approach also means we don't need someone to just work with us but rather get the job done. It makes it also less burdensome on the monitoring side. We literally don't care how you do something with two caveats: the client is happy and if you decide to go on a sabbatical someone can take over easily. That's it.
• We constantly reduce the administrative burden to the absolute min. The rule of thumb: is YOU wouldn't enjoy doing a task why should someone else? What is so important about the task to make someone's working life less happy?
• Our team decides how to do something. We don't follow rules. Rules are often created out of someone doing something naughty once off... so because one person did something once or twice you create a rule that makes life hell for everyone else for eternity. I never understood that. That's the reason we hire for attitude and not skills. We all make mistakes. There's no fool proof way. And just adding tons of rules doesn't stop mistakes from being made.
• We don't try to have a company culture. I honestly don't even know what it would be. We just passionate about what we do and try and do our best. That's it. The rest we really couldn't care about.

In summary....

• Please don't ask people to send it their CVs and a cover letter. It is embarassing and it shows how little you care as a company.
• Use technology (free and paid for) to help you and the person applying understand each other better and then get a experienced manager to identify talent and give them projects (when I was hired by Costa Crociere S.p.A. the highly experienced Erika Ettore and Barbara Brunetti interviewed me for a job but then actually assigned me to a different role that was far more fitting to my talents and skills. Aside from the actual quality of my work, what this made me is a great ambassador for the brand because of how they treated me and tried to understand me vs forcing a round employee in a square role. Who does this RIDICULOUSLY well is PoliHub - Innovation Park & Startup Accelerator in Milan (the onboarding form that Luca Canepa and his team uses to understand people is beyond brilliant and saves tons of time for the organisation and the person applying).
• Remove all the administrative burden that you can. Really ask if a process, step, paperwork etc is truly necessary.
• Try and never hire from the outset but work with people on small projects. Nothing shows you the person's talents like what they actually do vs what they say they can do. Obviously it isn't always possible.
• Design the job around a person's personality and you'll have staff for life! And even if they leave they will speak of your organisation for years to come ane be amazing brand ambassadors.

Hope this helps get the thinking juices going...

Yours

York, The Chief Coffee Drinker