“You work with good people, you win.”
I had breakfast with Robert and Jonathan Kraft today, and at the risk of seeming a name-dropper or a sniveling kiss @ss, spending time with them is like a lesson in the values that contribute so much to the success or failure of a business. Among Robert’s most often sited maxims, reinforced at every opportunity, is the importance of working with “good people.”
What does he mean by this? Of course “good people” means competent people, people who are good at what they do. But he means more than that. He means people of high moral character. He means people who are decent, sensitive, smart, ethical, and loyal. “Mensches” who not only do their jobs well, but who make doing yours that much more enjoyable.
It can be a trivial thing to say this. It’s almost a truism - you hear it all the time from parents, teachers, coaches, and CEOs… I mean who’s out there looking for the really bad people?
It is a dec
idedly non-trivial, and altogether more rare thing, to stick to this value when put to the Tyrant test.
Tyrants are people with high job performance and low character, the upper left folks in the matrix. We’ve all seen them - the high-performing sales guy who abuses the delivery team; the departmental superstar despised by his peers and subordinates; the external media darling who puts style over substance. There are more than a few archetypes in this quadrant, sad to say. All of them can seem invaluable to a business in the near term, which leads managers to overlook their “personal issues.” Tyrants interpret this as reinforcement of their own power, which engenders further bad behavior, and the cycle continues. Value is destroyed in the enterprise - friction is created, and good people leave.
Only leaders with the conviction to dump the Tyrant without hesitation hold “good people” as a value rather than a slogan. This is the Patriot Way, and it will be ours as well.
April 23rd, 2007 at 5:53 pm
Michael
Clearly given the choices laid out in your 2×2 matrix, Stars are what we all SAY we want. However I’ve worked for too many companies where ’stars’ revert to Tyrant mode just as things get challenging.
Thinking in software development terms, this is similar to the developer who always does unit testing until crunch time happens. Then just as you absolutely need unit testing, they drop it because time doesn’t allow for this nicety.
Another way to measure how truly leaders hold to the ‘good people’ value is how much they insist on this standard of behavior (you’ll know it when you DON’T see it) across the entire team when things get challenging.
Here’s another question. Tyrants can be very charming when times demand it. How would you determine where people fall in the 2×2 when you’re interviewing them?
April 25th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
This 2×2 is particularly useful on sales guys.
February 27th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
[…] wise man once said ‘you work with good people, you win‘ and for some reason that has stuck with me even though I read it about a year ago. Maybe […]