Hiring Skills, Not Bodies:
Constraining Organization Success

Your business is growing. The tasks that need to be done are outpacing the number of people you have to do them. You need more people in your organization. The question you may ask yourself is this: Do I really need more people, do I need different people with different skill sets, or both? If I need more people, how many more people do I need?

To answer the previous questions requires a better understanding of your organization's needs. Answering additional questions like the following ones will clarify those needs.

It is common for businesses to equate adding another person to the organization to increasing productivity and capacity. This is not necessarily so; the person added may not be able to alleviate the organization's constraint.

What constitutes a constraint? A constraint is ANYTHING that keeps your productivity, your ability to generate revenues and profits, from maximum effect. It can be a policy or procedure, a piece of equipment or a computer system. It can be a market assumption. Until you identify the true constraints on your business, performance improvement is at best going to be incremental within the constraint boundaries, the current inefficiencies that waste existing capacity.

If your business needs additional capability and capacity, focus on determining just what is needed and where your organization is constrained:

These are some of the areas many businesses view as activities that anyone can perform. Perhaps anyone can do them, but are they done correctly, efficiently, and to the benefit of the company overall? If we take the example of adding a skilled, experienced procurement (purchasing) agent, many businesses allow the purchasing activity to take place by anyone in the company at any time. This usually translates to many small buys which, if consolidated, could result in reduced cost—the price of merchandise as well as shipping and handling charges. Furthermore, on larger-ticket items like computers and equipment (manufacturing or otherwise), a trained procurement expert understands how to negotiate reduced price, early payment discounts, extended terms, and other protections for your company; they also tend to know how to make sure you don't pay unnecessary sales and use taxes by understanding the rules and regulations.

The challenge for your business is to identify the constraints holding your organization back. Adding resources, skilled or unskilled, to your organization in an area that isn’t constrained will have little to no impact on your bottom line.

How do you identify the constraint? First look at the results you are generating and the resources being used to generate those results. Make the connection between the activities and processes of your business and the financials.

Second, understand what isn’t taking place. What returns have you gotten from investments in the business? If you’ve added more sales people, but haven’t seen a commensurate increase in sales: why? If you’ve had an increase in sales volume, have you been able to maintain per unit pricing? Have costs increased at the same rate as sales? Have you hit a ceiling on sales, and can’t get to the next level of growth?

Third, understand how you are measuring performance and rewarding the organization. For instance, if you are rewarding increased sales volumes, but not tying it to other financial metrics like gross margin, revenues, and profitability, then you may increase the number of units being sold and actually see a decrease in profitability.

Fourth, analyze the operations and administrative processes. Many organizations find the largest constraint is in the procedural requirements, culture, and management “style” of the organization. The business owners, managers, and “leaders” get in the way of success by not enabling the organization to take full advantage of the skills, talents, experience, and abilities of the employee team.

Fifth, compare the organization’s perception of its business with the market’s perception of the business. Are you running the company and positioning it in the market place consistently and in the manner your target customer base is receptive to?

There are many more elements to understanding what constrains an organization. Ultimately an organization succeeds or fails on the “how business is done” aspect. This means that the people that make of the organization are the ultimate determinant of success. Are you hiring the right skills, experience, expertise, abilities, and talents or are you simply hiring bodies you like, know, or are comfortable with?