Tips for companies: term limits
Monday, June 30th, 2008Here’s a tip for companies: give every official position term limits. Just like people can only be President of the U.S. for four years, renewable for another four years maximum, or Governor or Mayor of many states or towns for a limited amount of time, give the CEO, the President, and the department directors, executives or managers of your company, term limits.
Here are some of the benefits:
Every person brings different skills, strengths, vision, weaknesses and needs to the position. Different skills, strengths and vision will bring new life to official leadership of the company or department, as needed from time to time.
It’s hard for most officials to keep growing in the same position over many years, or to admit when they want to move on.
Passing along the job means officials need to train others about what they do, and pass along specific skills, relationships and knowledge needed to do their job well.
The group of people who choose the new official — ideally this is the people whom the official will be the official for — the people who work in that department or company, will choose the new person. This means:
- coworkers learn about what you do in your job — you become more appreciated.
- coworkers choose the new person — they feel responsible for who they work with.
[Other keywords: corporate term limits, corporation term limits]
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July 3rd, 2008 at 10:22 am
Wouldn’t they do a lot of pandering to coworkers in election years just like politicians do now?
July 6th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
I don’t think elections are the best way to choose people, but that’s a topic for another post. Let’s assume you do want to have elections to choose CEO’s and managers.
There’s mature campaigning, there’s immature campaiging, and there’s everything in the middle. Campaigning is a big word, so let’s call it what it is: sales. Specifically, a job application.
Probably you want to know why someone’s interested in and great for the job. Set some guidelines so you learn what you need from the job candidates.
Three of my favorite screening techniques for job hiring — and I’ve seen these used at companies where one person or 100 people are making the hiring decision — are:
#3) have the person interviewed by four to six interviewers asking questions, so the interviewers both share their sense of the person, and the interviewee gets a balanced sense of what the interviewers are looking for,
#2) ask the candidate questions to understand how they think and act, such as, ‘What’s a challenge you faced in a past job and what did you do to move forward?’,
#1) invite the candidate in to work for a day, paid to do real work that needs to be done, similar to their actual work when they take the job.