Team
Four things, in this order, for as long as the business exists: select them, align them, engage them, develop them. The first one is below in full and it is free. The other three are inside Base Camp.
Select them — on purpose
Think about your worst hire. Chances are the person wasn’t the problem — the seat was. You hired them into a job that didn’t really exist yet, or against a gut read you couldn’t point to. Selecting on purpose is how you stop repeating it.
The one that still stings
The worst hire I ever made was a woman I still admire — and it wasn’t her fault. We had just won a contract that tripled the operation in two weeks, so I was running interviews at a staffing agency just to get through the numbers. She came in for a driver’s job: thirty-five years behind the wheel, blunt, direct. Right there in the room I decided she would be my field manager instead — stand in for me. She had thirty-five years of proof at driving and none at all at the job I was handing her. Within months the drivers feared or disliked her; I moved her back down, and she quit.
Ask what the hole costs, not what the person costs.
Because the real bill wasn’t her. With no one in the field, my operations administrator became the drivers’ go-to on top of her own job — loyal, willing, and suddenly in the wrong one. She failed too, and you could still see it in the books years later. One bad hire pushed a good employee into a job nobody had written down either.
The one I got right, for the opposite reason
Another hire came with two sets of facts that flatly disagreed — years of poor reviews, and awards for how well his operation ran. Most people read that as a reason to pass. Instead I looked at the man’s life, not his file: recently divorced, three kids three hundred kilometres away, driving every weekend to see them. The roughness had a cause — and a fix. I didn’t win him with money; money is the bare minimum every competitor has. I won him with a schedule built around his kids — gone Friday noon, back Monday night — and it cost the operation nothing. His scores climbed, and the next year his operation scored highest in the country at audit.
What good looks like
When you hire against what people say about someone — and sometimes you should — you owe yourself two things, in writing: proof this person has already done this exact job, and the one thing you will change about their situation. If you can only name the change, you are teaching. If you can name neither, you are hoping. I had the change for the airport manager. I had neither for the field manager.
That is the story. The seat sheet is what stops it happening to you.
The one-page sheet that read one ends in, the three reads that follow it, and every printable page your direct reports actually fill in — they are all inside Base Camp, along with your own four gear results and a second reading ninety days out.
Three reads, and the sheets they end in.
Picking the right person is the first of four things and the only one that happens once. These are the three that keep turning.
Select them. Twenty minutes, one role.
Take the next role you will hire for and name the one trait it fails without — then how you would test it before the offer, not after. A trait nobody could fail is not a criterion. The sheet is free.
Open the free sheet, Select them →Inside Base Camp this is station one of Team, and Align them, Engage them, Develop them come next.
When nobody has told a person the standard, they start behaving like a bad hire.
Why the person you are about to call a bad hire may be behaving exactly as somebody with no standard behaves — and why that behaviour is then used as the evidence.
A person given no standard cannot meet one. What is less obvious is what happens next: they become tentative, they wait to be told, and they stop initiating — because initiating without a standard is how you get caught doing the wrong thing.
INSIDE BASE CAMPIf you do not tell people where they stand, somebody else will — and they will get it wrong.
The thirty-day board that turned one manager’s team into a whole location, and the morning walk that a union read as a manoeuvre.
When no formal channel tells a person where they stand, an informal one always fills the gap. It is faster than you, and it is far less accurate.
INSIDE BASE CAMPDecide on the evidence, or you are judging somebody without a hearing.
The gate that stops a decision being made on impression, the two minutes on somebody’s return that moved absenteeism a quarter, and the barbecue that did not.
A decision made early, on impression, and executed much later on nothing that was gathered in between. The leader calls that instinct. Everybody watching learns that evidence is not what decides things here.
INSIDE BASE CAMPOne belief, approached from four directions.
The manager is a multiplier, not a performer. A leader who refuses to be trained is refusing the multiplier. A leader who expects loyalty to substitute for balancing somebody’s interests is asking the multiplier to run on nothing. And a manager who is liked but not delivering, or delivering but resented, is a multiplier applied to only one of the two things that matter.
That is the spine of this gear. The other three — Direction, Operations, Finances — are inside your subscription, without paying again.
Every story in this chapter comes from the operating history of the people who built Summit. Companies are unnamed on purpose and individuals stay unnamed permanently. Nothing here is adapted from anybody else’s material.