No organization can do better than the people it has.
People decisions are the ultimate—perhaps the only—control of an organization. People determine the performance capacity of an organization. No organization can do better than the people it has. The yield from the human resource really determines the organization’s performance. And that’s decided by the basic people decisions: whom we hire and whom we fire, where we place people, and whom we promote. The quality of these human decisions largely determines whether the organization is being run seriously, whether its mission, its values, and its objectives are real and meaningful to people, rather than just public relations and rhetoric.
Any executive who starts out believing that he or she is a good judge of people is going to end up making the worst decisions. To be a judge of people is not a power given to mere mortals. Those who have a batting average of almost a thousand in such decisions start out with a very simple premise: that they are not judges of people. They start out with a commitment to a diagnostic process. Medical educators say their greatest problem is the brilliant young physician who has a good eye. He has to learn not to depend on that alone but to go through the patient process of making a diagnosis; otherwise he kills people. An executive, too, has to learn not to depend on insight and knowledge of people but on a mundane, boring, and conscientious step-by-step process.
ACTION POINT: Don’t hire people based on your instincts. Have a process in place to research and test applicants thoroughly.
Managing the Non-Profit Organization
* Source: The Daily Drucker by Peter F. Drucker