Here is a post entitled Hire People for Their Strengths (You Can’t Fix Their Weaknesses).  It’s from my brothers business blog.  You can check out his blog here.  Randomly, this post of his relates to our last post.  Enjoy.

Marc Hedlund found a great quote about hiring people for their strengths:

Russian clown Yuri Kuklachev has a troupe of cats who do
handstands, crawl along high wires and balance on balls and he says the
secret to training them is realizing that you can’t force cats to do
anything.

[…]

“Each cat likes to do her own trick,” said Kuklachev […].
“Maruska is the only one who does the handstand. I find the cat and see
what they like to do and use that in the show.”

The hypothesis here is that you should hire people for their
strengths (even if they are drunks) and you shouldn’t try to fix their
weaknesses (there is no time and it won’t work anyway). Part of the
purpose of organizing people into organizations is to make weaknesses
irrelevant and combine strengths into more than the sum of their parts.

As usual, Peter Drucker discovered this principle about 40 years ago in The Effective Executive:

“The effective executive fills positions and promotes on
the basis of what a man can do. He does not make staffing decisions to
minimize weakness but to maximize strength.

President Lincoln when told that General Grant, he new
commander-in-chief, was fond of the bottle said: “If I knew his brand,
I’d send a barrel or so to some other generals”… Of all the Union
generals, Grant alone had proven consistently capable of planning and
leading winning campaigns. Grant’s appointment was the turning point of
the Civil War. It was an effective appointment because Lincoln choose
his general for his tested ability to win battles and not for his
sobriety, that is, for the absence of a weakness.

Lincoln learned this the hard way however. Before he chose
Grant, he had appointed in succession three or four Generals whose main
qualifications were their lack of major weaknesses. As a result, the
north, despite its tremendous superiority in men and materiel, had not
made any headway for three long years from 1861 to 1864. In sharp
contrast, Lee, in command of the confederate forces, had staffed from
strength. Every one of Lee’s generals, from Stonewall Jackson on, was a
man of obvious and monumental weaknesses. But these failings Lee
considered — rightly — to be irrelevant. Each of them had, however, one
area of real strength — and it was this strength, and only this
strength, that Lee utilized and made effective. As a result, the
“well-rounded men” Lincoln had appointed were beaten time and again by
Lee’s “single-purpose tools,” the men of narrow but very great
strength.”

I hope you enjoyed that.  We’ll be posting more selections from his blog but you should probably sign up for his blog’s feed.