How Danaher found success with recruiting for humility and transparency—and by having high expectations for leaders to develop talent.
by Scott Davis Rob Wertheimer Carter Copeland for Industry Week
Image: © Studiostockcreator | Dreamstime.com
The following is an excerpt from Lessons from the Titans: What Companies in the New Economy Can Learn from the Great Industrial Giants to Drive Sustainable Success by Scott Davis, Carter Copeland, and Rob Wertheimer p. 110-112 (McGraw Hill, July 14, 2020). This section, from a chapter devoted to Danaher’s history and best practices, looks at the company’s hiring priorities.
From a hiring perspective, Danaher screens for character traits as much as talent. The company favors humility, as humble people are more likely to adopt the entire cultural concept of continuous improvement. Transparency is also critical to Danaher, as well as team-oriented players. The focus on character traits helps HR increase its hit rate of recruiting excellent prospects, filter talent successfully, and compensate high achievers to remain motivated and drive up retention. To find the traits it favors, Danaher uses an outside consultant to administer a personality test as well as something similar to an IQ test. The consultant is entrusted to give a thumbs-up or -down opinion.
Which begs the question, does Danaher just hire process-driven people with less interest in creativity? The answer on a historical basis is yes. Sometimes art is lost when you focus on process, and you create robots instead of leaders. Danaher is well aware of that shortcoming, and today’s growth playbook tries to find balance. Having creative minds in R&D, for example, is now a higher priority. And DBS growth tools do require a more diverse, right brain–versus–left employee base. But for much of the rest of Danaher, process is too important for them to take the risk of swinging the pendulum too far away from the core process-driven culture.
HR at Danaher works on developing managers and pays just as much attention to the “how and why” as to outward performance. A manager who gets results but fails to develop a successor, for example, will be passed up for promotion. Talent development is mandatory, and a manager who scores poorly on employee engagement is on the way out. Danaher believes that people normally quit because of bad managers, not because of pay. If it sees unusually high turnover or some degradation in employee engagement, the manager is usually the root cause. In fact, Danaher sees high employee turnover as a lagging indicator, so the pressure to catch bad actors early is high. Performance reviews go beyond the core Danaher metrics to cover hard-to-measure aspects such as team building, leadership through DBS, and one’s success in “charting the course.”
