Twice recently I struggled too long to make a major decision. One involved a difficult HR situation, the other involved a significant financial decision. I went over and over the options logically in my head. I considered my advisers’ points of view. I thought about what the other people involved wanted. I thought about what my dad would say.

I realized I was going in circles, ruling out every option because I didn’t like something about it, and I knew somebody else wouldn’t like it.

I was being a pinball, letting myself be bounced from one obstacle to the next and settling nowhere. Pinballs don’t make choices, they just react to whatever pushes them.

Stating the obvious: that’s not leadership.

Here’s the thought process that helped me get a grip:

• I am being a pinball, and that’s not how I want to lead.
• I will be the decider in this situation. It is my place and I will take it.
• This is not a no-brainer situation. All options have downsides. I am willing to choose something less than ideal.
• My choice will be criticized by people around me. Those critics might even turn out to be right. I am willing to take those risks. I will still be the decider.

From there I moved on to normal strategic thinking about options, outcomes, and obstacles. I decided, and I like the results.

Choose from the options you have, not the options you wish you had. Include the options that will get you criticized. Be a decider.

Leaders step out in front, which is an ideal place to be criticized. Leaders take responsibility, which attracts people looking for someone to blame. Leaders make change, which makes a lot of people mad. Leaders announce “I’m starting this” which is often followed by “It didn’t work.” Leaders trust team members, some of whom will drop the ball, lie, steal, or worse.

Sometimes leaders are mistreated by the very people they took on all of the above for. Sometimes being a leader is no fun at all. Sometimes I question whether leadership is worth it.

If your goals are safety from criticism and freedom from responsibility, leadership will disappoint you.

If your goals are influence and opportunity to do things that matter, leadership will multiply your efforts like nothing else can.

If your goals are influence and opportunity and safety and freedom, it’s not gonna happen.

As for me, I want to live a life of influence and difference-making more than I want to live a comfortable life. So yes, I say leadership is worth it.

A few days after I wrote the previous post “On Hiring Well”, I made one of my least successful hires of all time. Within days of confidently selecting that candidate it became clear it wasn’t a fit, and we had to let the person go.

These hiring “fails” happen in every business, and more often than I’d like in mine. I think it’s worth drawing a few lessons from them.

When you realize you’ve made a hire that isn’t going to be a success, it’s really important to act quickly to correct the situation. Healthy organizational cultures quickly identify who fits and who doesn’t. Respectfully and appropriately send the person out the door and on the way to a job that will be a better fit for him or her.

Ask what did we miss, and how we could we see that in future candidates before we hire them? What else did we learn?

Don’t beat yourselves up. Examine your interviewing process, but remember sometimes you can ask all the right questions and still not know how a candidate will work out until you see them in action.

Realize you aren’t going to have a 100% success rate, and you don’t need to. Do-overs may not be ideal, but they are available, and they are way better than keeping someone who doesn’t fit in your organization long term.

Hiring well is vitally important to business success. It’s also a skill with a substantial learning curve. Here are a few things I and my managers have been learning about it lately.

See Hiring as a Major Project

It’s a lot of work to recruit and hire a great employee. In most small companies it’s an extra project on top of a manager’s regular workload. This can make it tempting to look at it as something to quickly take care of on the side. I’ve learned it’s more realistic to see it is a big project and give it serious time and attention.

Stack the Deck

Make it a tournament with many entrants and multiple rounds of elimination. We’ve found it’s much easier to compare candidates to each other and choose the best one, than it is to decide if any given candidate is good enough. Our goal is to get down to two finalists that are both excellent candidates for the job. Put yoruself in a position to choose the best of a great lot.

Don’t Give the Benefit of the Doubt

This is hard, because it’s not how we treat customers and existing employees. Hiring is not the time to give the benefit of the doubt. You must take the limited information you have at face value. If the candidate is late for the interview, don’t assume it’s a fluke. It may be, but more than likely it’s part of a pattern of behavior. If a candidate has a troubled history, look for objective evidence that lasting change has occurred. Past mistakes are not a deal-breaker, but a sincere story about turning over a new leaf is not enough.

Keep Digging Until The Story Unravels

There’s a point in the interview process when you’ve gained enough insight into a person to fairly reliably predict their answer to the next question. You’ve figure out their core motivations and seen common themes in how they respond to a variety of situations. I’ve learned if I haven’t gotten to that point, I haven’t interviewed that person well enough. If I can’t get to that point because a candidate is giving vague or inconsistent answers, that’s a red flag.

An incredibly clarifying post by Seth Godin on why we do what we do.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2012/03/three-masters.html