A630.9.4.RB_DellElceCamila

A630.9.4.RB – Hiring and Recruiting

            Eric Schmidt description of the Google’s culture does indeed make sense to me. After reviewing the short video, Hiring and Recruiting, it is clear that the CEO at Google has a significant understanding on how companies should run. It has been demonstrated that companies, organizations, or any set of groups find themselves struggling against settings that do not permit them to express their capacity freely. As such, a variety of growing companies have come to the conclusion that failure or success can be managed by the way they empower their employees in the long run. Donald R. Brown, describes empowerment as, “the process of giving employees and work group members the ability to make decisions about their work, being held accountable for the outcomes of their decisions, accepting responsibility for the outcomes of their decisions, and solving problems on their own” (2011, p. 223).

            Is this a reasonable way to view the work that most people are doing in your workplace? I would like to believe that most of my coworkers and managers look forward to employ individuals with outstanding ethical manners in the sense that they will require little to no “babysitting” and produce the amount of work necessary to succeed. Nevertheless, in some occasions we find that some team members need to be pushed in order to be proactive and other times some team members lack the necessary motivation. The company’s CEO, Eric Schmidt suggested, “that as part of the recruiting, you need to look at whether they’re sort of compatible with the other people” (2011). To make an organization work, team compatibility needs to be present; otherwise, everyone will start pulling in different directions.

            As a leader, I completely coincide in making an organization implementation such as that of the CEO of Google, takes a great deal of courage. His innovative points of view bring dreamed possibilities to employees and most importantly, the gift of loving your job. The Journal of Organizational Behavior defines work passion as, “an individual's emotional and persistent state of desire on the basis of cognitive and affective work appraisals, which results in consistent work intentions and behaviors” (Perrewe et. al., 2014, para. 5). Having passion for what you do is the number one route to success. When passion is not present, then that individual is unfulfilled and disconnected from his or her job. Therefore, courage can be found on being fearless and willing to take chances and opportunities in things never done before. A leader with such capabilities is a courageous leader. The kind that sees beauty in uniqueness and is tempted to create new rules where followers want to follow.

            Needless to say, as reviving as this approach may sound, it could easily backfire if the rules are not set from the beginning. Eric Schmidt suggested for example, “Another thing we have is something called 20 percent time, where we tell people, especially in engineering, that they can spend 20 percent of their time on whatever they want” (2011). Although it would be great to be given with twenty percent of free recreational time at work, it could escalate to the point where employees take advantage. In other words, instead of having employees using those twenty minutes, they could potentially abuse their time and exceeded.

            A learning lesson I can take away and put into practice while at work is the fact of thinking of my company as a whole and trying to implement new ideas to reach success in a team level and not as an individual. Imagine if we all were to follow this CEO’s ideas and points of views? I believe our organizations would be standing firmer than ever before. Cultivating and demonstrating passion is the ultimate goal in my organization. Passion is a culture.

References

Brown, D. R. (2011). An experiential approach to organization development (8th edition.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Perrewé, P. L., Hochwarter, W. A., Ferris, G. R., McAllister, C. P. and Harris, J. N. (2014), Developing a passion for work passion: Future directions on an emerging construct. J. Organizational Behavior, 35: 145–150. doi: 10.1002/job.1902

Schmidt, E. (2011).  Eric Schmidt on business culture, technology, and social issues. McKinsey Quarterly. Retrieved from http://whispersandshouts.typepad.com/files/eric-schmidt.pdf