Will Kelly argues you should hire mowing employees for character, not skill. He says hiring exposes leadership weaknesses, and recommends clear scorecards, early check-ins, immediate feedback, and hard conversations to fix problems before they spiral.
Hiring exposes weak leadership. The reality is you are where you're at today because of your leadership, believe it or not. And so it is important for us to continue to cultivate, to grow and to learn and develop that skill set of being a good leader. What we want to do to fix this is we always hire for character, not skill. I can train anybody to mow a lawn and a tall grass short. I cannot hire somebody if they don't have a good character of always doing the right thing, making sure that the property is to standard before they leave. I cannot train somebody how to not cut corners. Can you create some clear scorecards, daily expectations? Do you have some kind of temperature check after their first day of work or second day of work of how well they're doing? Check in with them, tell them what they're doing well, tell them where you need, where you see that they can improve. What Most leaders and GMs, new GMs fail to do is hold the standard. And I oftentimes see this over and over that new GMs that come in when somebody's late, it's a couple minutes late, or maybe they get a couple of complaints that week, they kind of just let it slide. Why? I don't know. I mean, I used to be there too, right? Like I used to be like, ah, you know, I don't want to have that difficult conversation or uncomfortable conversation because I don't like making people uncomfortable. But what I found is if you don't have that conversation now, it only gets worse. And so do yourself a favor, avoid the stress, have the uncomfortable conversation, develop your leadership skills skill to address a problem when you see it immediately and not just sweep it under the rug because eventually that rug will get turned over and all of those problems will come to life.
