4. Hire And Fire For Attitude, Don't Get Stuck On Skills - Business Bits - 30 Days Challenge

Sooner or later, if you do the right steps, you’ll reach a point where you’ll need more than one person to take care of the business. Entering the bumpy road of building a team.

In my experience, there is only one principle that needs to be followed here is: hire and fire for attitude.

It means putting skills on the second place when you evaluate a person. His or her attitude (the way that person interacts, his or her personal values, his or her way to solve problems) is much more important than the sheer quantity of skills on display.

You may have in front of you a brilliant programmer, but his arrogant character prevents him to properly function in any team in your organization. Hence, even though he has impressive skills, they’re not even used at full capacity.

It sounds nice and I’m sure many people agree with that at the first glance, but why not every one of you follow through?

I think there are at least 3 reasons for that.

1. First reason is that when you think at the big picture of your company, you think in terms of skills, not in terms of attitude. It’s like you have the timeline of your project in front of you and think: "we need at least 20 more programmers". What you want to think is: “we need at least 20 more programmers worth of output”. That will create the necessary distinction between the skills you need to add to the company and the way you will add those skills to the company.

If you think “I need 20 programmers” then you will hire the first 20 programmers with the best skills. Most likely, down the road, the attitude discrepancies will start to surface and you will end up with more problems than your thought you’ll solve by hiring 20 programmers.

1. The second reason is TTD, or “time to deliver”. People in charge usually want results fast. The outside pressure (being it competition or just investors asking for return) will force the head of the operations to find the shortest path from hiring to results. When you focus on skills, the TTD is low. When you focus on attitude, the TTD is significantly higher. It takes time to teach somebody something.

But what happens, most of the time, is that you don’t get those promised, brilliant and small TTDs so fast, because the attitude gets in the way. Maybe they will leave before the project ends, for $500 more on the payroll, maybe they will just give up and move to Thailand, or maybe they will just get bored. All of these scenarios can be mitigated properly if you put the attitude first (and by attitude I also understand honesty, reliability and emotional stability).

1. And the third reason is actually about the other end of the hiring process, namely letting people go. It’s hard, I know, because I’ve been in this position, of letting people go, many times, but it’s also a very necessary part of the business.

Most of the time, the person with a bad attitude but good skills is somehow protected. “Let’s cut a slack to this guy, I know he’s a terrible person, but he’s so good with PHP or whatever and we need that now.” Nope, you don’t need that. The opportunity cost of keeping a bad apple in the basket is way bigger than the reward.

If you don’t fire for attitude, you will actually forge a bigger problem in your team. The skills that you get will come at a way bigger cost that you can afford.

Every been in the position to hire or fire someone? Would love to hear your opinion on that.

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This article is part of a 30 days writing challenge. Get all the articles here.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running.