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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

In business, no idea is real until it reappears, under an approved author’s byline, in the Wall Street Journal or Harvard Business Review.

Okay, I’m whining. But still. Nick Corcodilos and I have both written repeatedly about the fallacy of skill-to-task matching—the practice, common among internal recruiters, of carefully listing every skill a position might require, as if a perfect match between skills required and skills acquired does even a half-decent job of predicting a candidate’s performance once hired.

If you need convincing, two points should do the job, made over-and-over again in this space, in Leading IT: <Still> the Toughest Job in the World (under the headline “hire people, not resumes”), and by Nick on www.asktheheadhunter.com. The first: Employees who are stretching are frequently superior to employees who are happy to do what they’ve been doing. (But not always—”pinball players,” who do a great job so they get to play again, are nothing to sneeze at either, assuming you’re the sort of business leader who sneezes at employees.)

Skill-to-task matching favors applicants who are coasting over those who are stretching. That’s the first point. The second:

Especially in knowledge work, but really, in just about every kind of position in the company, the best predictors of success for any employee are:

  • Habit of success: Loving what success feels like, and knowing that’s needed to feel it again.
  • Love of achievement: An employee who takes pride in producing something important will (I trust “Q.E.D.” is all the proof you’ll need for this one) work hard to produce results they can take pride in.

Not always recognized—employees who work well in teams consider helping their team succeed to be a worthwhile achievement—it’s part of the love of achievement, not separate from it.

  • Intellectual integrity: Faced with reliable evidence, employees with intellectual integrity adjust their opinions, rather than insisting their “opinions” (the correct term is now “biases”) must still be right.

If you’re never convinced until you read it in HBR or the Wall Street Journal, check out David Wessel’s review of Peter Cappelli’s, Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs (“Software Raises Bar for Hiring,” WSJ, 5/30/2012 and well worth reading in spite of my regrettable need to say “I told you so”).

Cappelli blames the problem on the increased use of automated resume screening software, which he considers to be a response to the completely understandable desire to minimize cost while increasing the ability to wade through the very large piles of resumes that flood in for every open position in a time of underemployment.

Regular readers of Keep the Joint Running will respond, “No, it isn’t completely understandable! It’s assuming instead!” They’ll ask, that is, the most important question about any business function, which is how the six optimization parameters (fixed cost, incremental cost, cycle time, throughput, quality, and excellence) rank.

According to Cappelli, the top two are incremental cost and throughput. He’s almost certainly right that this is the fact. Understandable? Not so much.

This is how companies attract and select the people who will do the company’s work. What are the proper priorities for this, the most important responsibility business leaders have?

Excellence comes first—recognizing who will truly succeed the best in each position, even if that choice is unconventional.

Next, I’d put quality—the absence of defects. While skill-to-task-matching is a losing proposition, goodness of fit to what a position actually requires is not. Beyond that, conforming to the relevant laws and regulations, especially with respect to all forms of discrimination, really does matter.

Throughput, also known as capacity, comes third. Companies are faced with a flood of resumes for many open positions, and do need ways of coping with it. Not ways that reduce excellence or quality, though. Quite the opposite—companies need ways to spot the needles of great applicants in the haystack of all the rest.

That leaves cycle time (filling positions quickly), fixed cost (the cost of turning on the lights every day), and incremental cost (the cost of processing each applicant) to float — to be whatever they need to be so that companies make great hires.

Think recruiting would look as it does if companies were explicit about how the six dimensions rank in importance?

Not me. Not Nick, either. And, fortunately, it appears the world of mainstream business thinking might finally be coming around as well.

* * *

If anyone from WSJ or HBR is reading this … call me. We should talk.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

The world of business punditry is abuzz with JPMorgan Chase’s $2 billion loss. As it should be, I guess. Learning from the mistakes of others surely beats learning from our own.

On the other hand, there are many more ways to do things wrong than there are to do them right, and besides, for most of the business world the whole matter is about tribes who aren’t us—what “they” (JPMC’s) management) did wrong, and how “they” (our own management) should do things differently.

Ideas we can use ourselves are nowhere near as enjoyable. Valuable, yes, but enjoyable? No. And so, with some misgivings, I’ll forego the opportunity to critique yet one more blunder from yet one more group of grossly overpaid blunderers.

Instead, I’m going to tell you about a restaurant and some lessons it provides for you and your teams.

The restaurant is Travail. It’s a physically unprepossessing little place located in downtown Robbinsdale, Minnesota, an unprepossessing little Minneapolis/St. Paul suburb.

That’s as far as its unprepossessingness goes, though. It’s one of the rare eateries that makes a two-hour wait for a table a fine investment of your time.

Here’s the story:

The founders/owners/staff are thirteen or so talented chefs. The decor is early brick, with tables. The menu goes on two large chalkboards. The waiting list goes on a third. There’s a bar. The kitchen is visible, inside and through the front window.

What isn’t visible is the floor, because the place is packed. We arrived minutes after it opened, but the diners who had waited outside for the last hour filled all of the tables with crowd to spare.

Our group of four was fifth in line. “How long is the wait?” “Maybe 90 minutes.” We got drinks and chatted, not sure our patience was up to the task, but willing to find out.

When we finally sat, we ordered the Tastings — ten courses, none large. “What are they?” “Don’t worry about it.”

Served over a span of two hours, they were unique, without being either pretentious or contrived. Also, they were delicious.

Except, perhaps for the beets. I don’t eat beets, so I can’t say.

Travail is a wildly successful business in an industry known for its high rate of failure. So the factors driving their success might provide guidance for the rest of us:

  • Excellence comes first. Remember the six optimization parameters? Excellence … uniqueness, tailoring, customization, with no standardization … is what makes Travail’s food worth every minute of the wait. Quality (absence of defects: salmonella would be an example) matters too. The other four optimization parameters are whatever they are. Clearly, neither cycle time nor throughput matter, and the menu is priced so that fixed and incremental costs don’t matter either.
  • Every chef is a superb chef. Travail makes no compromises on staffing. It doesn’t try to substitute process for ability. It lives and dies on talent.
  • And, they work as a team. There’s no false dichotomy about talent and teamwork. They’re independent variables, and they’re both present in abundance.
  • Every chef takes turns as chef, sous chef, bartender, dishwasher … and server. Cheerfully — they enjoy talking with diners, explaining each dish and answering questions. Now pay attention: In their own way, chefs are geeks just as much as programmers and sysadmins, and yet there were no communications barriers, other than the ambient noise, just infectious enthusiasm about the subject.
  • The work doesn’t have to be fun, but it is fun. People can fake a lot of things, but they can’t fake that. When you’re preparing ten dishes per patron, plus the desserts (the dessert Tastings had four more dishes), with a room full of waiting patrons, the pressure is constant. Or could be. Instead, everyone working there wanted to be there.

Which leads to the final take-home lesson — the virtuous cycle that connects a sense of ownership to outstanding outcomes, and outstanding outcomes to a sense of ownership. At Travail, creating that sense of ownership is, admittedly, easier — everyone is, after all, an owner. But their legal ownership isn’t what makes everything work. It’s the attitude of ownership that drives them to achieve great results — not just the food itself, but the experience that surrounds it, which together were worth every penny.

Between the two-hour wait and the two-hour meal, that experience took four hours. It was worth every minute, too.

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