Getting the right people in the right seats on the bus

Jim Collins famously says that in order to become great, companies need to “first get the right people on the bus, in the right seats...and then figure out where to drive it.”

Rather than deciding the destination and hiring the right person to take us there, we find great people and ask them to help us decide.

Please indulge me while I torture this metaphor into agency shape (err, I mean celebrate the 25th anniversary of Good to Great this year) and tell you exactly what I think you should do about it.

You own the bus

As the agency owner, you have personally put up the capital to purchase a bus.

You (should) have an expectation that this venture will generate enough revenue to cover the cost of the bus - along with all the salaries of the people you choose to put on the bus, including yourself - and, ideally, leave you with some money leftover.

For Good to Great (and his other works, all of which are worth reading, in my opinion), Collins and his team had to analyse data from publicly listed companies; otherwise there wouldn’t be comparable information over a long enough time period. You, however, own your own bus by yourself (or maybe with one or two others), so it’s you (and the potential customers along the underserved routes) that suffer if the bus isn’t going to the right places. Your “right people” will hopefully help you to plot the right route, but it’s your responsibility to remind them to stop at the stops and collect the fares. It has to work for you and, if it doesn’t, you need to be strong enough to stand up to some of your backseat drivers and change the direction.

You know what a bus looks like

You knew the bus had seats when you bought it and you need to know how those seats are arranged.

It’s your responsibility to decide what the right seats are and, as the owner, you’re usually the most qualified (if there is such a thing as a qualification for owning an agency) to determine if the right person sits in that seat.

When I’m working with an agency as a non-executive director, an exercise we do early is to cast our minds forwards to where we might be in 1, 3 or 5 years…and what the key seats we might need to fill by then might look like. We’ll then work backwards to what seats we should have today and decide whether the right person is in that seat or not.

With or without me (though it is helpful to speak to someone who’s driven down the road you’re heading down), that’s an exercise worth doing…and something worth tracking. The percentage of key seats currently filled with the right people is something that should be on your top level dashboard. When it’s monitored, it reminds you to go have that coffee with that person down the road who looks great on LinkedIn or has a great rep…and it reminds you to keep developing that staff member who you think is one to watch.

Not everyone gets to drive the bus

A key seat is one where:

• The person in the seat has the authority to make significant decisions (bearing in mind that “significant” in a small agency might impact only a handful of people)
• The wrong person in that seat can expose the business to catastrophe
• The right person in the seat can bring significant upside.

An error I’ve made at my previous agencies is allowing the top management to obsess over performance in non-key seats and ignore performance in key-seats.

Sometimes, the whole leadership team discusses in minute detail the individual KPIs at junior and mid-levels…

…without real measurement of executive performance.

I’ve come to learn how backwards this is: the leadership team should obsess over performance in key seats and let the people in those seats obsess over the junior-mid levels. Those people don’t get a turn in the driver’s seat yet anyway.

Again, part of a non-executive director’s role is to help an agency owner to understand what good looks like within their top management team - and to help them hold those leaders to account.

Know when someone is in the wrong seat

We might default to developing people who have found themselves in a key seat. If that’s you; and you have someone in a seat you’ve now decided is a key seat; and who isn’t currently the right person but you believe has potential to be; you should ask yourself these questions:

1. Do both of us understand what development is needed in order for the person in the seat to properly fill it (see above: what is the key seat and what does it need to do)?
2. Do both of us understand how much longer the bus is willing to carry the person in the wrong seat?
3. Do I have the resources (time, knowledge, patience) to develop this wrong person into the right one (bearing in mind that telling someone to sort it out by themselves fails 90% of the time)?

If the answer to any of these questions is “no” then it’s probably a good idea to get some external help for this person. Remember, a key seat is one where having the wrong person can expose the agency to real issues and the right person can bring a huge upside, so it’s worth giving the situation a proper assessment.

Knowing when it’s time to move someone out of their seat

If you’re approaching the point where you feel like you might need to replace this person, you should first remind yourself that “replacing” doesn’t always mean kicking someone off the bus entirely: it could just be a change in the seating arrangement…then, secondly, ask yourself these questions:

1. Are you beginning to lose other people by keeping this person in this seat? Is their poor performance or failure to live up to the agency’s values frustrating their colleagues? Bearing in mind that the best thing you do to keep talent is give them talented coworkers…
2. Do you have a values problem; a will problem; or a skills problem (or “get it, want it, capacity to do it”, as Gino Wickman says? The solution to each of these things is different
3. What is this person’s relationship with the window and the mirror (another Jim Collins-ism…when something is going wrong, do they see the problem as something outside, or something they can fix themselves)?
4. Does this person see their role as a job or a responsibility? Responsibilities are what they need to do to keep the bus moving (and moving faster)…not a list of tasks to tick off and keep a clean desk
5. Has your confidence in this person gone up or down in the last year? When you’ve given this person a task, do you feel better about the likelihood of that getting done, or do you increasingly feel like you have to chase them?
6. Do you have a bus problem or a seat problem? Has the seat changed as the agency has grown, and this once-right person is no longer filling the seat properly?
7. How would you feel if this person handed in their notice first thing tomorrow? If you’d feel secretly relieved then you’ve already made the decision.

“No one gets off!”

Finally, let’s imagine that you’re old enough to remember the film Speed (which of course, none of you are) and the same thing is happening to your agency: the doors are locked and the bus can’t drop below 50 mph or it’ll blow up.

Is there someone you wish you’d have kicked off before this happened? Have you found your Keanu Reeves and made sure he knows he has your blessing to save the day?