It's Not the How or the What but the Who

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Hiring Batting Average

Perhaps you’ve made a few excellent people decisions in the past and know others who have done the same. But how do you know if you—and they—can repeat that performance? Are you and your fellow assessors really “vice-Gods,” who always get people right and can be trusted all the time? Or was your collective success a fluke? Discerning those answers can be challenging. Luckily, the world of baseball offers a solution.

The late Peter Drucker introduced the idea of a hiring batting average in the opening paragraph of his classic 1985 Harvard Business Review article, “How to Make People Decisions.”¹ “Executives make poor promotion and staffing decisions,” he wrote. “By all accounts, their batting average is no better than ...