{"id":3046,"date":"2017-06-06T23:20:48","date_gmt":"2017-06-06T23:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.owen.vanderbilt.edu\/deanjohnson\/?p=3046"},"modified":"2017-06-06T23:20:48","modified_gmt":"2017-06-06T23:20:48","slug":"do-you-study-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/mericjohnson\/2017\/06\/do-you-study-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Do you study people?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Many firms nurture corporate cultures through careful hiring practices. For startups and young growing firms, these practices represent a one-time opportunity to start with a clean slate and build a culture. For example, Google screens for \u201cGoogliness<\/a>\u201d \u2013 defined as \u201ca mashup of passion and drive that\u2019s hard to define but easy to spot.\u201d Zappos looks for \u201cweirdness<\/a>\u201d in its search for innovation and a culture of happy employees.<\/p>\n

Successful leaders in every organization are surrounded by great people.\u00a0Motivating them is critical. Leaders often propagate their culture by finding people like themselves, with similar values, goals, and incentives.<\/p>\n

Dave Brandon, CEO of Toys “R” Us, tells a different story. As a serial CEO who has made a career out of reenergizing mature organizations, he finds success in studying individuality. He notes that everyone on his team is a little different, and understanding those differences is critical to identifying their motivations to excel. He says his most important job as a leader is finding out how people want to be treated and treating them that way.<\/p>\n

Key to that observation is the recognition of uniqueness \u2013 managing people as individuals. Jack Welch noted the importance of understanding uniqueness in his book, Straight from the Gut<\/em>. \u201cIn manufacturing, we try to stamp out variance. With people, variance is everything<\/a>.\u201d He went on to say that \u201cGetting the right people<\/a> in the right jobs is a lot more important than developing a strategy.\u201d That focus on studying people and developing their talent accordingly was a key element of Welch\u2019s approach at GE, and one that has been incorporated by many successful leaders.<\/p>\n

Do you spend time studying the people on your team?<\/p>\n

For more of Dave Brandon\u2019s thoughts on leadership, challenges in the toy industry, and innovation in retailing watch my video interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Leadership Notes<\/strong> is a blog and video series on leadership.\u00a0 Through interviews with leaders from both the private and public sector, Johnson examines key leadership issues like empowerment, team development, and cultural dexterity.\u00a0 The blog also addresses topics such as learning from failure, the importance of friendship, and the role leaders play in developing organizational culture.<\/p>\n

You can access the entire library of entries on LinkedIn<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Many firms nurture corporate cultures through careful hiring practices. For startups and young growing firms, these practices represent a one-time opportunity to start with a clean slate and build a culture. For example, Google screens for \u201cGoogliness\u201d \u2013 defined as \u201ca mashup of passion and drive that\u2019s hard to define but easy to spot.\u201d Zappos…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9914,"featured_media":3048,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,28,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3046","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-leadership","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/mericjohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3046","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/mericjohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/mericjohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/mericjohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9914"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/mericjohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3046"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/mericjohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3046\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/mericjohnson\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/mericjohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3046"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/mericjohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3046"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.vanderbilt.edu\/mericjohnson\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3046"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}