Introduction:
The Critical Skill

The critical constraint on the growth and success of your business, or any business, is the ability to attract and keep good people. All other resources are freely available and can be acquired with relative ease. You can get all the capital, real estate, furniture, fixtures, manufacturing and distribution equipment, and packaging and marketing materials you need. But what makes all these factors productive and profitable is the quality of the people behind them, and there has never been such a shortage of high-quality people as we are experiencing today.

Employers in the twenty-first century have to make a major mental paradigm shift. They have to direct their thinking completely away from earlier times, when plenty of capable people were available, to the current situation, where the number of good people is quite limited. In making this shift, employers have to direct their attention toward hiring and keeping good people and focus on that goal as a major responsibility of management. This may be the most important responsibility of all.

In the course of my thirty-year career, I have personally started, built, managed, or turned around twenty-two different businesses. I have consulted for more than five hundred corporations and trained thousands of managers and executives in the key skills of finding and keeping good people.

I have found that attracting good people and getting them to stay is a key business skill, perhaps the key business skill. The good news is that, like all business skills, it is learnable by virtually anyone through practice and repetition. Countless managers have developed this skill to such a high level that they consistently make good hires, year after year.

Meanwhile, other managers have not yet mastered this critical skill. As a result, they fumble through interviews, hire largely on the basis of guesswork and intuition, and are constantly amazed when as many as 70 percent of their hires don’t work out. They often compound this inadequacy by blaming their poor hiring decisions on the people they have hired, thereby making it almost impossible for them to learn and grow from their mistakes.

However, the truth is that if an incompetent or inappropriate person is hired, it is the manager who is incompetent, not the employee. The fact is that hiring is a key managerial skill. If someone consistently hires people who cannot or will not do the job properly, the manager should be replaced before he or she does irreparable damage to the company. Many businesses flounder and go under because of the incompetence of a single key person in a key job, placed and kept there by an incompetent superior.

In the pages ahead, I will share with you twenty-one of the greatest ideas ever discovered to help you to become vastly better at hiring and keeping the people you need to make your business a success. By practicing these principles, you will become one of the best managers of your generation. You will make an extra-ordinary contribution to your organization and become invaluable to your company.