The Hiring Habit

The most effective way to impact employee character, and therefore the ethics of your business, is on the way in. 

W. Michael Blumenthal, former Treasury Secretary, told Business Week he made the biggest hiring mistakes of his 36 year career when he "put intelligence and energy ahead of morality." He continued, "In choosing people, you have to try to make sure they have a clear sense of what is right and wrong, a willingness to be truthful, the courage to say what they think and to do what they think is right, even if the politics mitigate against that. This is the quality that really should be at the top. 

"I'm saying that I was too often impressed by the high intelligence and the substantive knowledge of an individual and did not always pay enough attention to the question of how honest, how courageous and how good a person the individual really was," Blumenthal concluded. 

If you use the selection ideas and tools discussed in this chapter to give yourself an organization full of people strong in the characteristics Blumenthal discusses, you'll do fine. Character counts.