5 Steps in Making People Decisions

There are no more important decisions within an organization than people decisions: staffing a job, placing people into jobs, promoting people, letting them go etc.

No matter how carefully you hire people, your people won’t perform if you put them into jobs that are the wrong ones for them. For example, putting an introvert on a job that requires him to be out most of the time making new people connections is a wrong fit. No matter how brilliant a company’s business or its strategy, they will produce results if the company’s people decisions do not work out.

Alfred Sloan, the man who built GM into the world’s largest and most profitable manufacturing enterprise, said that, “If the assistant plant manager of a minor division doesn’t perform; all our clever top-management decisions will not produce results”.

So it is obvious that your people decisions must work. Here are the 5 Decisions Steps in Making People Decisions:

1. First, carefully thought through the assignment. Please do not confuse job description with job assignment. The job description of a Business Development Manager is the same since Adam made the world’s first stool. Yet the assignment of Business Development Manager in this recession will be very different. For now we have to create business using little or low marketing cost. Following this example, make sure you get the right person, a person that worked on very thin cost and not a person that is used to big budgets.

2. Second, look at several qualified people. Formal qualifications are just a starting point. The most important qualification is that the person and the assignment fit each other. For example, a Business Development Manager must have the qualification of good in writing, good in finding new markets and good in sniffing out opportunities in this recession. So to get a good person you need to consider at least 3 to 5 good candidates.

3. Study the performance records of all your selected good candidates to find out what each did well. Look for the candidates’ strengths, and you determine if they are of the right strengths for this particular assignment.

4. The 4th step is the most overlooked yet most important: discuss the candidates with others who had worked with them. By asking for additional opinions, you can learn about strengths that impressed others yet were not noticed by you. Of course the best information comes through informal discussions with a candidate’s former bosses and colleagues.

5. Once the decision is made, make sure the appointee understand the assignment. The best way is to ask the candidate to think over what they have to do to be a success, and have him commit to the success in writing.

If you follow the above 5 simple steps in People Decision, you’d have avoided the many costly mistakes you made in the past and get a ‘more right’ person for the job. If the above fails, you must accept responsibility for it, otherwise you’re not really a manager but an overseer. More of this next week…

AndyTheCoach
www.asiacoachingtraining.com