Hire P’s Not A’s – Hiring on Passion

Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of General Electric, told us that the way to run a top-notch company was to rank our employees A, B or C. Since the “A” players had the highest potential as performers, Welch directed his executives to focus their efforts on finding and keeping the A’s – and moving the low-performing C’s out of the way.

Soon, organizations began to follow the “GE Way.” The A players were excelling, the C players were expendable, and the B players found themselves stuck in limbo. While the A’s were being mentored and rewarded, and the C’s were looking for employment elsewhere, the B’s were quietly doing what they’d always been doing – the majority of the work.

The B players are the “heart and soul” of the every company, cautions Harvard Business School professor Thomas J. DeLong, and to ignore them can be perilous to the long-term success of the business. Under Welch’s model, the critical B’s were not becoming engaged and aligned around the corporate mission. As companies began to grow and change, the need to respond quickly to the marketplace became essential. The B’s simply hadn’t been groomed to be nimble. And those companies who had failed to focus on B’s found themselves with disenfranchised employees.

Those companies that were succeeding, were doing so by hiring not A’s or B’s, but P’s – people who were passionate about their work and their lives, who wanted a sense of purpose. “People don’t come to work to be No. 1 or No. 2 or get a 20 percent return on their assets,” said Christopher Bartlett of Harvard Business School. “They come to work to get meaning from their lives.”

So how do you prepare passionate players to reach their potential?

Start with the hiring process. Ask them questions about why they want to work for the company. Ask them how they spend their time outside of work. Be cautious about those who ask too many questions about titles and benefits. Look for those who are driven to helping the greater mission of the company, their community or their world.