It's all about the right people.

The 1990's ended with hiring authorities preaching that it's all about the people. And we believed them. Little did we know at the time that this approach was to change in a subtle but significant way.

From Human Resource Managers at Fortune 500 companies, to sole practitioners looking for their first member of staff as their firm grew, everyone placed the focus on the people, not the job.

At first, this swing seemed to work, particularly during the 'dot-com boom', but those 'in the know' have come to learn that this wasn't going far enough.

We have learned from this, and today, most of us accept that it's not simply about the people, but about the right people.

In his excellent book, Good To Great, Jim Collins explains the concept better than most with his 'first who, then what' approach to team member selection. This concept simply compares the business to a bus - get the right people on the bus and together they'll decide where the bus should go.

This means not just getting the right people into the business, but also putting them in the right place - the right seat on the bus.

And that brings me to the next point.

How do you select the right people?

For many it is a case of looking at the core competencies that candidates have displayed in previous positions, coupled with some respectable career progress to date as a sign of future potential.

But here we hit another potential pitfall.

Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman hit another critical fault with the 'up or out' promotion system described in professional service firms by David Maister, when they published First Break All The Rules. If an employee's success is measured simply by their career progress and promotions, then it follows that eventually, taking the concept to it's natural conclusion, everyone will eventually be promoted to their level of incompetence!

By this they mean that as someone moves up an organization they are expected to acquire new skills. The new position might take them away from an area that they are naturally talented at, and into an area where they are significantly weaker than the new job requires.

Because the natural career progress demands that they relinquish some of their old duties in their new job, and often acquire new responsibilities - such as staff management - the newly promoted manager may be an accident looking for a place to happen.

Let's take an example of Colin. Colin is a CGA who works in public accounting as a Manager, and the clients that he looked after loved him.

He loved the job too, he particularly enjoyed the involvement and interaction with clients, having a great deal of day-to-day involvement with a wide variety of different clients' businesses.

In order to keep Colin motivated and as he grew in capabilities, the CA firm he worked for promoted him to Senior Manager, where he had a great deal less direct involvement in putting the numbers together and explaining them to clients.

Instead, he was responsible for managing staffing levels on the assignments on the go, managing people, matching the firm's resources to the demands of the workload and was generally far removed form the personal contact he had with clients in his previous role and enjoyed so much.

To make matters worse, Colin's managerial skills simply hadn't been developed yet - he was nowhere near ready to start managing people and resolving staffing problems with Managers in the firm.

Colin struggled in his new role and within 15 months, he had found a new position elsewhere - at another accounting firm - where he would retain his Senior Manager status, but would be 'back in the thick of it' dealing with clients again.

What lessons should his old firm learn from this?

Right person, right job.

It's one of the key lessons from three books that are essential reading for anyone who hires or manages others; 'First break all the rules', 'Good to great' and 'The war for talent' - get the right people in the right job.

So what criteria can we use to do this?

There are three distinctive attributes to look for in future employees as well as your present staff:

· Knowledge
· Skills
· Talent

Knowledge

This is usually attained during a formal educational program (such as the CA, CGA or CMA programs) and testifies to a certain level of understanding of specific subject matter, such as GAAP, taxation and so on.

Knowledge can be acquired with educational courses. Assess what knowledge your people have and is this relevant for the role they are in right now?

Skills

This comes through practice. One might have all the knowledge necessary to prepare a tax return, but might not be skilled at doing it. This is the second level of assessment, not to be confused with competencies.

Talent

Talent is the real thing we, when hiring new people or assessing our existing personnel (maybe in an annual review) should be looking for.

This is a natural ability to combine the knowledge with a skill to do and perform it in an exceptionally good manner.

One such talent might be spotting business development opportunities and converting prospects into clients. That's a real talent and in most cases you can either do it or you can't, there's no half-way.

By using these three benchmarks to assess potential hires, and existing team members, you might find that you have inadvertently squeezed several square pegs into round holes in the past, which are lessons to learn from for the future.