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Program Note

You've not seen anything from me recently since our tech gurus here at IVP were migrating our blogs to a new hosting service. But I'm back now and bad as ever. . . well, at least I'm back.

Andy

Unedited at 100

Just over a year ago I posted my first blog on Andy Unedited, stating that “to write a blog, you need to have an interesting personality or provocative opinions. I have neither.” I’m still not sure I have either, but in this, my one hundredth posting, I do know I’m having fun.

Here are some highlights from the first 100:

Mistiest Watercolored Memory: Vice President of Looking Out of the Window. It brought back lots of found recollections about my dad.

Most Controversial: The Serial Comma and the Plagues of Egypt. Who would have thought the lowly comma could arouse such passions?

Most Whimsical: Dear Santa. Old St. Nick brings out the wish list in us all.

Title with the Cleverest Rhyme: Do You Itch for a Niche or Are You on the Leash of Your Niche? Actually, it was the only title with a rhyme.

Truest Confession: Trashing a Book. Guilt still hangs over me for this.

Most Opinionated: Grammar Was Made for People, Not People for Grammar. I guess I do have some opinions after all.

Biggest Grammatical Error: Publishing that Lasts. I'm afraid that first sentence was not a case of breaking the rules on purpose, as my loving wife gleefully pointed out.

Post That Made My Staff the Most Nervous: "I Love to Fire People." There was really no need to worry. I haven't fired anyone . . . yet!

Hiring Haste Makes Workplace Waste

It’s always a challenge when an employee leaves unexpectedly. She finds another job. He moves because his spouse took a position out of state. But when that employee was especially excellent or in a particularly critical role, it makes things even tougher. There’s work that needs to be done--important work, work with crucial deadlines looming and no one else to fill in. The pressure to hire and hire quickly works on you, gnaws at you, weighs on you. The temptation is to find the first warm body you can and throw that person at the work. I have one word for you: Resist.

One of the easiest and most common hiring mistakes is to hire a candidate you have doubts about just because you are desperate to fill a position. I don’t think I have ever seen this work. As a manager, you are trading a seemingly short-term fix for a long-term problem.

It’s hard, but the best thing you can do is wait until you have found the right person. It will be hard on you and the rest of the team to be short-handed for a while. But it will be easier on you and on the team if you find someone who is able to pull his or her own weight in the long run.

Otherwise you’ll have team members who resent having to pick up the pieces for the new employee who just can’t seem to get the job done or get it done right. And you will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get the new employee up to speed, correcting the deficiencies and working through tensions in the team. As a result, the work might even be done as slowly as if the position were still vacant.

Ultimately, you will probably have to work through a way to help this person move on to another job, voluntarily or not. That is never a happy prospect, nor is it quick. Once again, you’ve lost time and effort on the important work that needs to be done.

Take the time to hire well the first time, and save yourself time, money and grief.

Entitlement

Reading history is a favorite hobby. And I have happily returned to David McCullough's books time and again. His 1776 was not a disappointment. An informative, interesting read, as you would expect. One expectation I had that turned out not to be the case was that I thought it would have more on the Continental Congress and the writing of the Declaration of Independence. Instead it followed the less worn path of the military history of that year. Not a bad choice, I would say.

Perhaps the most surprising thing in the whole book however was the following statement:

Inflicting My Opinions

To write a blog, you need to have an interesting personality or provocative opinions. I have neither.

But as I wrote Heart. Soul. Mind. Strength. (IVP, 2006), the history of InterVarsity Press over its first 60 years, I began to realize, I do have opinions, opinions about publishing. They may not be interesting, but they are strong.