The Right Team Makes A Great Company
By Willis C. Triplett, Pharm.D.
In 230 B.C., the mathematician Archimedes said, "give me a lever and a place to stand, and I will move the world." One person can exert a force many times his or her own strength when leverage is understood and applied. When a leader has to turn a dysfunctional operation around, he must identify and make use of leverage points. Certain leverage points are consistent across all business types. I’ll be writing about a series of leverage points that I believe are consistent and common across all forms of home care businesses. The first, and arguably the most important - is people.
Jim Collins is the author of “Good to Great,” in which he and his team of analysts studied the eleven companies that had shown 15 years of cumulative stock returns at or below the general stock market, marked by a transition period, followed by 15 years of cumulative returns at least 3 times the market. He found that a common thread in the transition of all of the great companies was assembling the right people. He referred to the recruiting process as, “Getting the right people on the bus, and the wrong people off the bus.” He made the point that in the great companies, it was more important to get the right people on the bus and in the “right seat” than it was to even know the destination of the bus.
Stop and think about your own operation, and ask yourself if you have all the right people sitting in all the right seats. There is a heavy price to pay for having people on your bus who aren’t pulling their weight. Every person who hasn’t learned their job, or who isn’t trying to do what’s needed to reach the goal is a source of rework for you and demoralization of the rest of your team. Jack Welch in “Winning,” made the point that good recruiting is only half the battle – the other half is ridding yourself of the whiners, malingerers, back-biters and underperformers. When you consciously undertake to do both – hire the best and get rid of the worst – that is when your team improves by leaps and bounds. And that’s when you have a chance to have a GREAT home care company – not just a good one.