Free Winning by Jack Welch, Suzy Welch Page B

harped on the importance of celebrating for twenty years. But during my last trip as CEO to our training center in Crotonville, I asked the hundred or so managers in the class, “Do you celebrate enough in your units?” Even knowing what I wanted them to say, less than half answered yes. *
    What a lost opportunity. Celebrating makes people feel like winners and creates an atmosphere of recognition and positive energy. Imagine a team winning the World Series without champagne spraying everywhere. You just can’t! And yet companies win all the time and let it go without so much as a high five.
    Work is too much a part of life not to recognize moments of achievement. Grab as many as you can. Make a big deal out of them. If you don’t, no one will.
     
     
     
    There is no easy formula for being a leader. If only!
    Leadership is challenging—all those balancing acts, all the responsibility, all that pressure.
    And yet, good leadership happens—and it comes in all kinds of packages. There are quiet leaders and bombastic ones. There are analytical leaders and more impulsive ones. Some are tough as nails with their teams, others more nurturing. On the surface, you would be hard-pressed to say what qualities these leaders share.
    Underneath, you would surely see that the best care passionately about their people—about their growth and success. And you would see that they themselves are comfortable in their own skins. They’re real, filled with candor and integrity, optimism and humanity.
    I am often asked if leaders are born or made. The answer, of course, is both. Some characteristics, like IQ and energy, seem to come with the package. On the other hand, you learn some leadership skills, like self-confidence, at your mother’s knee, and at school, in academics and sports. And you learn others at work through iterative experience—trying something, getting it wrong and learning from it, or getting it right and gaining the self-confidence to do it again, only better.
    For most of us, leadership happens one day when you become a boss and the rules change.
    Before, your job was about yourself.
    Now, it’s about them.

Hiring
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    WHAT WINNERS ARE MADE OF
     
     
    S OMETIMES WHEN I APPEAR before business audiences, I get a question that totally stumps me, as in: I have no clue about the right answer. A couple of years ago at a convention of insurance executives in San Diego, for instance, a woman stood up and said, “What is the one thing you should ask in an interview to help you decide whom to hire?”
    I shook my head. “The one thing?” I said. “I can’t come up with one. What do you think?”
    “That’s why I’m asking you!” she replied.
    The audience roared, certainly because I was so floored, but also because they could probably relate.
    Hiring good people is hard.
    Hiring great people is brutally hard.
    And yet nothing matters more in winning than getting the right people on the field. All the clever strategies and advanced technologies in the world are nowhere near as effective without great people to put them to work.
    Because hiring right is so important—and so challenging—there is a lot of territory to cover in this chapter.
 
First, we’ll take a short look at three acid tests you need to conduct before you even think about hiring someone.
     
Next we’ll lay out the 4-E (and 1-P) framework for hiring that I have used for many years. It’s named after the four characteristics it contains, which all begin with E, a nice coincidence. There’s a P (for passion) in there too.
     
After that, we’ll explore the four special characteristics you look for when hiring leaders . The previous chapter was about what you do when you are a leader—the rules of leadership, as it were. This section is about how to hire leaders in the first place.
     
Finally, I’ll answer six FAQs (frequently asked questions) about hiring that I get during my travels—plus that “impossible” one from that insurance