To implement a change often requires you to take new people on board. In this, you should follow the principle ‘hire for attitude, train for skill’. The attitude should be right, the rest can be learned.

Who is a better fit for your organization? Someone who is like all the others, meaning someone who has a high cultural compatibility? Or someone who contributes many new behaviors and values and whose presence could result in a significant cultural disruption? This decision has to be made individually for every case and depends on what the organization currently needs. Especially in the beginning, the second group needs a lot of support from the leaders to make sure it is not rejected by the organization.

It is therefore highly valuable to deal with one’s own recruiting process in due time. How do we look for new employees? Who represents the organization’s personnel marketing externally? One thing is for sure: using classic methods, one will have a hard time finding extraordinary or different people. This shows that change managers should work closely with the HR department.

In this context, courage is also critical. The courage to hire one’s own competition or in other words: strong managers hire good employees, weak ones hire weak employees.

Tips

  1. Have the courage to disrupt your organization with a new hire. Be aware, however, that this situation needs support from the very beginning.
  2. Have you been dissatisfied for some time with who the HR department suggests for selection? If so, critically examine the recruitment process in your organization and question why you don’t attract the right people.
  3. In the first 100 days, give new employees typical and challenging tasks to explore their attitude. After that schedule an evaluation and decide whether the employee is really a good fit.