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Hire and promote first on integrity

June 3rd, 2008 · Comments

At the recent Agile Leadership Summit in San Francisco, I had the good fortune to meet and listen to a number of like-minded people that I hope to continue to learn from. One of these was Pollyanna Pixton.

In her presentation she addressed the question of how to hire and promote The Right People. She summarized these views expressed by Dee Hock, Founder and CEO Emeritus of VISA International:

“Hire and promote first on the basis of integrity; second, motivation; third, capacity; fourth, understanding; fifth, knowledge; and last and least, experience. Without integrity, motivation is dangerous; without motivation, capacity is impotent; without capacity, understanding is limited; without understanding, knowledge is meaningless; without knowledge, experience is blind. Experience is easy to provide and quickly put to good use by people with all the other qualities.”

It is possible that that Mr Hock was referring to finding business associates, rather than staff, but nevertheless I like and associate with the romantic notion he describes. My daydreaming of an enterprise that followed these principles must have lasted for all of ten seconds, or the time it took Pollyanna to list them. I came crashing down in a ball of self-righteous fire when someone at the back of the room, likely David Anderson, pointed out that hiring on anything other than ability to perform a job would be legal quicksand.

<dream>One day I may get the chance to experience working at VISA and test for myself what it feels to be in such an environment</dream>

If you are intrigued, you can read about Dee Hock’s views on management here.

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    First let me congratulate you for opening this blog and say I am happy to put the first comment.

    Among other things in the linked article I will touch on the substance and form dichotomy which is less than efficient and typically ill advised (see what I wrote on this). I would even say it contradicts the idea of getting rid of old ideas.

    Further the concept of the 'right person' is downright wrong ! As is the idea that the qualities of a person (including integrity) can be ordered. They all need to mix to form a balanced individual that you will enjoy working with !
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    Thanks for your comment Denis.

    I guess you had to be there and I may have failed to match Pollyanna's practised delivery. She expanded on this with her interpretation of Dee Hock's views by saying that it was absolutely essential to be able to trust your people. If you don't trust them, be it to do the job right or even not to steal from you, then they should probably be removed or not hired in the first place, and the other attributes don't really matter in this case.

    In every-day situations such as software engineering, there are those who will refuse to develop functionality they suspect supports illegal or even dubious activity unless the legal department is brought in on the decision. These are often also prepared to lose their jobs to stand by their ethics and sleep well at night. There are others who accept such a request thinking that either no-one will ever know or that if found out they can hide behind the excuse that they were following requirements. I know which of these two I want to work with.

    When we exclude such boundary cases then I agree with you that the focus should be on the balance of qualities. Even more than that, the selection needs to pay due consideration for the balance of the team and the enterprise.
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    Trust goes way beyond than integrity and loyalty ;)

    You can entrust most people with a cash register without fear of theft but integrity will never be enough to entrust a passenger airplane.
 

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