3 Criteria to Ensure You Get the Best Fit for Your Team
It’s popular to say the customer is always right. It’s also not true. Whether you run a business, nonprofit, or ministry, your team comes first.
Get the right team, and you’re off to the races. Hire the wrong team, and you’ll likely move slowly—maybe even backwards.
So what’s the trick for getting the best people in place?
Making a Bad Hire
We’re hiring three new positions right now so this question is top of mind. It might be for you too. If it’s not now, it will be.
Just about everyone in the corporate, entrepreneurial, nonprofit, or ministry world will be involved in hiring new teammates eventually.
The risk is in making a bad hire. I’ve had my share over the years. They’ve cost me plenty in terms of dollars, headspace, emotional energy, and time.
But maybe avoiding all the problems is not as complicated as it seems.
Hiring Made Simple
Dee Ann Turner is vice president of corporate talent for Chick-fil-A. Creating effective teams has been a key part of their massive success as a chain. And Turner has now written a book explaining the ins and outs of the company’s approach to its people.
It’s My Pleasure boils down hiring to three key criteria. (These line up pretty closely with my own H3S approach.)
For Turner it comes down to three C’s: character, competence, and chemistry. If you get these right, you’ll significantly reduce your risk of a bad hire.
- Character. When it comes to picking team members, Turner identifies character as “the most important thing.”
Get this right, and you’ll have someone you can trust to get the job done and represent your organization well in the process.
Get this wrong, and no amount of skill and talent will make up for the potential damage your bad hire might cause your brand and business.
- Competence. Character is essential but not sufficient. Your best hire will also have a level of competency—not just about the job, but also interpersonal skills.
Get this right, and you’ll have someone who rings the bell for your business and makes you honored to have them on board.
Get this wrong, and you’ll spend all your time cleaning up messes, including fixing relational problems with other team members and your customers.
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Chemistry. This one is tough. “Chemistry is always the most difficult to identify,” says Turner. But if you’ve ever been in a situation with bad chemistry, you know this one is non-negotiable. “When attempting to put together a diverse team who compliments each other’s strengths, the ability to discern [chemistry] is critical in the selection process,” says Turner.
Get this right, and you’ll enhance your team. You’ll create positive vibe that will energize your people and power your progress.
Get this wrong, and you’ll damage your team and compromise your results. A team is like an ecosystem; bad chemistry is like pollution.
It’s My Pleasure has some helpful advice on applying the three C’s, but you can start just by crafting your interview questions around these three criteria.
Anyone hoping to build a positive and effective team needs to think through these criteria and apply them. The potential costs are far too great not to.
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