High Performers Are Grown Not Found

I was asked the other day, “How do you find so many great employees”? The answer is you don’t! I am very proud to have the pleasure of working with some of the best people in the industry. They are not “employees” but team members, and I am as close to most of these people as I am with my own family. Actually when you think about it, I spend more hours a week with them, than I do with my own family. You have to feel this about your team if you ever want to be successful. Rarely will a person give you their unwavering loyalty if they don’t believe that you truly care about them first.


I have made it a point throughout my career to hire people with the right attitude and mind set, more than looking at candidates with the proper skill sets and resumes. I know that many companies focus on degrees, and the quality of the resume. However, they spend little time getting to know the person and their qualities. Over the years I have had my fair share of employees that were over qualified and under motivated thrust upon me, and was expected to continue offering the same level of customer experience and profitability. It seems more often to be the case that these types of individuals can’t seem to follow directions. They are incapable of learning anything, because in their mind they already know everything. Even after several discussions and warnings about what they are doing wrong or need to improve on, they only hear the compliments and ignore the constructive criticisms. Then when it comes time to remove them from the team, like the cancer that they are, they are shocked and don’t understand what they did wrong.

The problem with employees that boast an impressive background and years of experience is that along with those credentials comes an ego to match, and years of bad habits. It is much harder to break someone of their bad habits than to teach someone the right way upfront. I always preach to my team members, if you hire someone with the right attitude and train them, they will only know one way to do things, your way.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that my way is the only right way to do things. What I am saying is that everyone has different ways to get things accomplished, and different companies have different policies. If you have a particular structure of how things get done, you want everyone to follow that format. Along the way there are things that can be modified, improved, or changed, but that is done through collaboration and teamwork, not unilaterally by one person who is convinced of their preeminence.

So how do you find and grow the right team members? The easy answer is, find the people with the right personality traits and give them the proper training and support. You need to understand what you are looking for in order to find the right personality traits. For example: you wouldn’t want someone that is overly aggressive to handle customer service complaints, nor would you want someone who is an introvert to be your head sales person. There are many types of personality tests out there that can give you a good insight into a person’s personality traits. While I highly support these tests, I also think that you need to spend some time with a candidate before making a decision on hiring them since some people just don’t test well.

Too many companies put ads out and then have one, maybe two, half hour interviews and then make a decision. I challenge everyone, to have multiple interviews and take them out of the office and spend some real time getting to know who they are and how they will add value to your team.

Once you have decided on whom to add to your team, your job as a manager is to understand their goals and aspirations and help them achieve those objectives. You have to truly make their career a priority point of your efforts.

The final portion on growing a high performing team member is support. If you go back through my blog you will find a series called the “football management style”. This describes in detail what a manager needs to do to develop a high performing team. The same holds true for an individual, your team is only as strong as its weakest member and the lessons taught in that series applies to a team of one or more.

When I think of quality people it makes me think about tomatoes. What? Tomatoes? Stay with me here, I promise I haven’t lost my mind. A friend of mine went to Italy for a vacation. He sent me a post card from Florence raving about the tomatoes he had there. Over the next several days I received texts and emails from him raving about the food and the wine. Upon returning to the states we got together and he went on and on about how amazing the food was in Florence. He had never tasted anything like it before. I thought to myself, how great can it be? I mean we have some pretty good restaurants here and I came from an Italian family up-bringing, I’ve had real homemade Italian food.

Over the next several months, my friend kept telling me how he had to readjust to the “American food”. He claimed he was ruined for life after eating in Italy. It wasn’t much after that, I was watching a special on The Food Network about Italian food. They went into the whole history of Italian farmers, and how their family’s reputation rested upon the quality of their tomatoes. Generation after generation has cultivated the land and built their farms in the perfect weather conditions for growing tomatoes for the sole intent of producing the greatest tomatoes ever grown. They further went on to explain that Florence was the leader in producing the best tomatoes Italy had to offer. Things started to come together and I began to understand where my friend was coming from.

The next day I started thinking about the story. I also started thinking about the years of dedication it took to produce such a spectacular product. Then, as I do with everything, I started applying it to work related issues.

Consider how this applies to the above subject of hiring the right people. The chance of you going out and buying the perfect tomato right off the shelf (hiring the perfect team member) is unlikely. If you want perfection, you will have to put the effort into growing it. The first step is to make sure that you have the right seed (attitude & ethics). Then you must have the right soil and atmospheric conditions (working environment). Finally, you must tend to your tomato plant and put effort into supporting, pruning, and cultivating the plant and enriching the soil (support, training, re-investment, etc…). All of these lessons apply to growing a high performing team member. Only when you dedicate yourself to growing a premium product can you expect to cultivate excellence.