You must fight for talent - Cultivated Management Newsletter
Hi,
Welcome to this week's Cultivated Management newsletter. I hope you're having a great week.
I've had a busy, but productive week.
On Sunday I flew to Poland to visit our team over there in Wroclaw. Beautiful city by the way. The team are doing great and I'll be writing more about how to grow a team in another country on the blog soon. I ran some career clinics with the goal of uncovering ambitions, learning resources I needed to source and how people are developing personally. Great insights. Career clinics have been a great way to discover more - definitely recommend them as a strategy. Again, I'll write more on career clinics on the blog.
Finding Talent
As a manager your job is to build a team made up of the right people. This may mean hiring new people to the team. Keep the bar high. Trust me. Take time to hire amazing people. It's a false economy to rush through recruitment and hire the wrong people. They take more management, don't deliver as much productive work and will often have the effect of dragging others with them. The drag effect is so very real, so hire people who pull people along in a positive way.
In my career I have interviewed (phone and face2face) 450+ people over several years. Of the 450+ I've likely hired 100. It's an expensive business but getting the right team is exactly why we managed to achieve the results that we did. Good people achieve good things.
So when you find talent hire them. Keep them. Work out how to stop them getting poached (because they will have lots of options if they're good) and keep adding great people to your team. Good people want to work with good people.
This is summed up nicely by a short passage from this week's book of the week. The book is "How to get rich" by Felix Dennis. I didn't enjoy some of the book - it felt a little "brutal business", but at the end of the day the book is about getting rich.
One passage really stood out though:
"What talent seeks, as often as not, is the chance to prove itself and the opportunity to excel....... You must identify talent. Then you must move heaven and earth to hire it. You must nurture it, reward it properly and protect it from being poached. If necessary, dream up a new project. Better still, get the talent to dream it up. " Felix Dennis - How to get rich
In order to get rich you need good people. Whether being "rich" is your goal or not, to get good work done that adds value, you need talented people. And talented people need to flourish, to grow, to own their own work - and to have a manager that cares about them.
Cultivated Management is all about treating people like people and upgrading yourself to do so. By treating people well and developing your skills you'll likely attract talented people to work for you - and with that you should achieve whatever goals you have in your business life.
Go forth and manage.
Rob..