Decency as Hiring Filter

“When hiring, try to surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do. Genuine decency—an instinct for fairness and openness and mutual respect—is a rarer commodity in business than it should be, and you should look for it in the people you hire and nurture it in the people who work for you.”

“Which is another lesson to be taken from his hiring: Surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do. You can’t always predict who will have ethical lapses or reveal a side of themselves you never suspected was there. In the worst cases, you will have to deal with acts that reflect badly on the company and demand censure. That’s an unavoidable part of the job, but you have to demand honesty and integrity from everyone, and when there’s a lapse you have to deal with it immediately.”

“Bill looked for four characteristics in people. The person has to be smart, not necessarily academically but more from the standpoint of being able to get up to speed quickly in different areas and then make connections. Bill called this the ability to make “far analogies.” The person has to work hard, and has to have high integrity. Finally, the person should have that hard-to-define characteristic: grit. The ability to get knocked down and have the passion and perseverance to get up and go at it again. He would tolerate a lot of other faults if he thought a person had those four characteristics. When he interviewed job candidates to assess these points, he wouldn’t just ask about what a person did, he would ask how they did it. If the person said they “led a project that led to revenue growth,” asking how they achieved that growth will tell you a lot about how they were involved…”

“PICK THE RIGHT PLAYERS THE TOP CHARACTERISTICS TO LOOK FOR ARE SMARTS AND HEARTS: THE ABILITY TO LEARN FAST, A WILLINGNESS TO WORK HARD, INTEGRITY, GRIT, EMPATHY, AND A TEAM-FIRST ATTITUDE.”

“this became the company’s number one priority. Charles: “The important thing is this can-do attitude. It’s a damn-the- torpedoes, full-speed-ahead, ready-aim-fire approach that says the hell with anything else, and it’s that kind of take- charge, we-can-do-it, nothing-can-defeat-us people who move ahead and it doesn’t matter where. In other companies, people with that kind of attitude don’t move ahead, they keep hitting this wall, and they pile up or leave. They leave—or get acquired, the whole company. Here that’s what gets people ahead. What kind of person succeeds at CA? I say self-moti- vated people. Hungry people, people who have been through a little pain in life. First-generation immigrants—they know, they've seen their parents struggle, people who arrived in this country with three suitcases, two suitcases. They’ve seen struggle, they've seen people go to school at night. They know. Something about Queens, Brooklyn people—they are so down-to-earth. You know the people. They come out of city schools, and there is something about them, there is a hustle in them, a thing that says, ‘I can do it, and if I can’t, Ill find a way—it’s not a big deal.’ That’s the kind of people who succeed. The ones who don’t succeed are the ones that come”

“Charles: “Tt all comes down to a couple of very simple things, which are: One, we ve got to get people. People who work for you. Work for you. But they’ve got to have reasons. They want to have a sense of career and that what they say has some impact. They’ve got to know their contribution has some meaning. You don’t want to work for something where you just punch in, be there for so many hours. That’s mind- less, and people will resent that, and that’s when you polarize groups. So you get them involved in decisions. Ask them. Make mistakes, but correct them, and make sure the people are always heard. The second piece of it is they want to have fun doing it. You’ve got to have a relaxed kind of driven. Driven but relaxed.””