The Right People In The Right Places

There’s this phrase that almost everyone in HR and a lot of professional people in general have heard for years: ‘Get the right people on the bus.’

Because it has been around for a long time, it has become kind of a hackneyed phrase that everybody uses. It’s not a bad phrase at all, almost everyone knows it for a reason, of course you want to get the right people on the bus. I’ve seen, more often than not, people have the right people on the bus, but they just have them in the wrong seat.

I think we, in our hurry to get things done and to get them executed, we tend to exit people off the bus and try new people. It becomes this rotating door, if you can picture that on a bus, instead of saying, ‘wait a minute, we’ve got a talented individual here, they’re not working out in this role, but what are their strengths? What do we need? Could we maybe re-align and position that person in a different place on the bus?’

I’ve seen this happen many times, not always, but many times. All of a sudden, someone who was maybe a B or C player becomes an A player because now we are really fully utilizing their strengths and talents, and now they are really loving it too because now they are feeling like they are really contributing something that they are great at.

So let’s not just say ‘get the right people on the bus’, but let’s also be sure that we have people in the right seats on the bus before we decide if they are not the right person for our organization.