Geoff Younghusband, Residential Portfolio Manager at Ottawa-based Osgoode Properties, once had to let a disruptive employee go. That’s always difficult, but this time Younghusband started to wonder, “How did we hire this kind of personality in the first place?”

“We had higher turnover than we were comfortable with, and not just the problem people. You can lose good people too if you hire disruptive individuals, and everyone gets discouraged with upper management for poor hiring.”

Admitting they weren’t as good as they wanted to be at hiring was Younghusband’s first lesson. “Personality is hard to uncover in an interview, and like most of my peers in the industry, I haven’t had any training in how to identify those traits. Now we’ve created a much more precise and deliberate process. We know that for the right people, we can teach hard skills. But we can’t teach how to work with other people, or genuinely care about tenants.”

So now Osgoode’s hiring process has begun emphasizing strong personality traits that help candidates work well with their immediate colleagues. For a field rental agent, for example, phone interviews are held with the property and HR managers, but the final interviews are with the supervisor the new person will actually report to, held onsite at the building where they’ll actually work.

Osgoode also hired a full-time training manager, who doesn’t just do training. They’re involved in the hiring process right from the beginning, at the onsite interview, to observe interactions between supervisor and candidate. This way the training manager understands early what a new staff member needs and what they don’t need to help them succeed in their new job, “so the building manager doesn’t just throw them the manual and call it done,” as Younghusband describes it. After 90-days probation, the training manager is part of evaluating the new hire’s performance and providing any further training needed.

If a problem arises, the training manager is there to see if it’s the employee, or the supervisor. “Property managers are generalists. Managing people isn’t always their best skill. If there’s a problem with an employee, maybe the manager’s the one who needs some training,” says Younghusband.

This precise and deliberate, process-focused approach integrates hiring, training, evaluation and supervision in the service of every new employee’s success. It has paid off. “We now hire better people who accelerate faster and stay longer,” says Younghusband. “Our training manager is an internal hire who can project Osgoode values, and having them there from hiring through training, evaluation and more training means our employees have the best support they can get.”

The process costs time and money, Younghusband admits, but “it was costing us more being hasty, and having all that churn. Now good people see us favourably as a place to work. Ottawa isn’t Toronto. A good property manager isn’t so easy to find.”

An unexpected benefit comes from what looks like a problem: the longer time it takes to fill vacancies. “If someone gives two weeks’ notice, we still take 6-8 weeks to go through our process, but that’s better than getting the wrong person fast. During that time, people in different positions step in to fill different parts of the gap, whatever’s needed. Then everyone starts to understand and appreciate each other’s jobs better. People organically start to help each other out more, even after we hire someone. Management has to be flexible with short term performance as everyone tries to do their best in the gap, but in the long run people appreciate the reason for it, and it’s team-building.”

This is a generous approach that benefits everyone. “Clarity is generous,” Younghusband says. “Having a clear, precise and deliberate process for hiring and developing people, that’s a gift.” Osgoode now promotes more people from within, turnover is down, performance is improved, and Younghusband says he sleeps better knowing they’re doing the right thing by people.

What are the conditions that foster a culture of engagement? What kind of leadership do you need to create them?

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu summed this up more than 2,000 years ago when he wrote:

The bad leader is hated and feared.
The good leader is loved and praised.
The great leader, when their work is done,
The people say, “We did this ourselves.”

Here’s an example that inspired me at the time, and inspires me again in telling the story.

I once sailed with a young woman named Stephanie on the tall ship Corwith Cramer. The Cramer is a modern sailing research vessel that takes university students to sea for semesters of oceanographic science and seamanship training as part of their undergraduate degrees.

We sailed from Key West on a two-month voyage to the Dominican Republic, the Cayman Islands and back to Key West, taking scientific marine samples for the students’ experiments. We recorded the extent and condition of Sargasso seaweed (the Sargasso Sea is vanishing), the distribution of plastic debris, and so on. We anchored on Silver Bank, where the humpback whales come to breed, and lowered a hydrophone over the side with a speaker on deck to listen to the songs of the whales all night.

There were 18 student crew on the ship. At sea a third of the crew were on duty for four hours at a time, around the clock. Half were on duty in the lab with one of the scientists, while the other half, three students, were on deck, sailing and navigating the ship with the officer of the watch. If we needed more hands to handle sails or for some other maneuver we could call out the crew in the lab for a little while, but this 134- foot, 280-ton ship was operated most of the time by one professional and three students. People had to be pretty engaged.

As the weeks progressed the student crew became more and more proficient as sailors, and in the last month they started taking turns being officer of the watch in training themselves.

Late in the voyage Stephanie was the student officer of the watch off Miami, under my supervision. It was night and Captain Deborah Hayes had drawn a square on the chart away from the traffic lanes for big ships, told Stephanie to keep the Cramer within that square, and gone to bed. The organizational goal was set; stay inside the square. To meet the goal, the crew would have to do a good deal of tacking back and forth, maneuvering the ship.

One might have expected Stephanie, relishing her new competence and trying hard to fill the role of ship’s officer, to begin by undertaking some kind of engagement activity to ensure she got the performance she expected from her crew. She might have gathered us all for a pep talk, told us what kind of “buy-in” was needed from each of us to succeed in achieving the organizational goal, maybe even threatened us with consequences if we didn’t collectively meet that goal. This might have been followed by detailed instructions about what each person should do and what the timing would be and so on, to guarantee that our actions would be aligned with her intentions. She was under pressure to look good as officer of the watch, and she might have thought that her supervisor, me, standing right there listening, would want to see her demonstrate that kind of strong leadership potential.

This might be the way of Lao Tzu’s “good leader,” wanting to be praised for her “leadership.” But when it came time to tack, Stephanie called the other crew out of the lab, gathered us all together and said simply, with an excited smile, “Places, everyone.”

The delight of the rest of the crew was palpable. Everyone suddenly realized that they, a handful of university science students, knew exactly what to do to tack this massive ship and could be trusted completely to do it. Everyone headed off to handle a sail, with Stephanie’s excited smile shining on their faces too.

Stephanie didn’t make maneuvering the ship about her and her leadership. She didn’t make it about the organizational goal either. She made it about the crew. She made it personal. She recognized that the crew’s goal was not simply to follow Captain Deborah’s orders, or to be skilled sail handlers, or to work together as a high-functioning team. Those things did appeal to them and could be engagement points. But what they really wanted was to be Sailors; the kind of sailors that could tack the ship on their own, with nothing more said than, “Places everyone.”

Stephanie was obviously excited about being a Sailor herself, and understood her crew’s aspiration. She also understood that by trusting her crew to know their job, she made them want to be trustworthy. And she knew that when it comes to leadership, very often, less is more. We maneuvered beautifully and tirelessly inside our box through the night, and everyone brought their personal best to every tack.

When you hear this story, do you think, “Wow, we could do more of that?” Or are you thinking, “That would never work with our people?” If the latter, is competence lacking, or is clarity lacking, or something else? What would it take for people to say more often, “We did this ourselves?”