Dan Sanders is the CEO of the award winning service oriented United Supermarkets. His book Built to Serve
talks about how to put people first and how by doing that it increases the bottom line. Some insights I gained -
- There is something special about being called to serve
- Team members remember leaders who make the time to take the time
- The vision is everything!
- Above all Have Fun
LIT is preparing to gather to create purpose statements. I found this book very insightful. It mentioned that an effective vision statement has less to do with success and more to do with significance. It compared organizations to a team, and a team has fans and players. Players represent a team every day. Regardless of whether they are playing or not, they are still part of the team; players rely on one another. Fans on the other hand are fickle (fair weather) If a team recruits "warm bodies" rather than hiring for the vision, fans tend to infiltrate the team. The larger the team, the more difficult to spot the impostor(s). Team players are the first to spot the impostor, and the leader(s) tends to be the last. Fans don't contribute much to the team. In fact they may cause more damage than if the team had played a man down for a while until the right person could be found to fill the vacancy. Once a fan has infiltrated the team, it can be painful to remove them from the organization. Scouting for "players" is time well spent. It's important to remain faithful to the values and make decisions based on your beliefs and/or principles not on what is popular. Time should be taken to fully explain what our team(s) represents and make sure the commitment/vision is understood and embraced whole heartedly before a long term contract is entered into. I am going to keep these lessons in mind as I work on team descriptions for our church website. I now see the importance of recruiting with the team vision foremost in my mind, not just to bring people on-board because we are short handed somewhere.
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Monday, March 10, 2008
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7:52 PM
My boss has quoted statics to our department that a bad hire costs an organization $100K to $300K. Between recruitment, time investment in training, poor productivity and critical mistakes as well as the impact to team morale and time to clean up after the bad hire is gone, well the impact of that bad hire is monumentus. That's right, upward of six figures.
I relate this to what you picked up on in this book regarding fans infiltrating the team, with the team players being the first to realize the bad fit and the leader is (typically) the last to know. Now if players consider themselves leaders and leaders consider themselves players, this creates a forum for open dialogue of communication to discuss a potentially difficult situation sooner, rather than later.
OK, OK, I'm rambling again...