Walk Fast

While attending a roundtable-meeting of executives from across the United States, the topic of finding quality people, especially sales people arose. Truly, finding quality people is one of the most perplexing  and challenging endeavors any management person faces, especially when the manager is endeavoring to find quality sales people. Leaders are only as good as the people they surround themselves with, so attracting, hiring, training and motivating high-quality people is critically important to the success of every organization.

One of the attendees offered their method: In addition to exhaustive interviews and testing, he also uses a less sophisticated tool to measures the quality-potential of a candidate. He watches to see how fast the candidate walks to their car when they leave the interview. If the candidate walks briskly they get further consideration, if not they are scratched off the list.

A real sense of urgency is absolutely necessary in order to achieve high levels of production. In the book: The Art of War, one of the statements made is: " Though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been associated with long delays." Surely, you can move too fast and perhaps, in doing so, become a bit reckless, but I assure you that any leader aspiring to more quickly reach higher levels of production, would much prefer to be in a position of having to slow someone down, as opposed to having to speed someone up. The sooner you get moving and increasing your speed the sooner you will see the positive benefits of walking fast. Your job is to accelerate the process and learn how to do things more effectively and efficiently as you pick up speed. Walk fast!