Gardeners constantly do three things: pick the best quality seeds, prune regularly to keep the plants shapely and healthy, and spend hours preventing pests and then treating the plants for any damage sustained. Those same three things should dominate any leader’s approach to people management and staffing, whether on the small scale of a team or through a worldwide performance management system.

Seeding the Staff

In organizational leadership, the equivalent of seed for your garden is the behaviors and values of your people. That vision must be clear and ultimately linked to strongly held values and specific behaviors. If you have a fuzzy vision or weakly held values, your organization can grow?but it will not have the health and productivity you intend.

Vision starts at the very beginning of the hiring process. Ask yourself the question, Can this person become a leader in the organization? It doesn’t matter whether you’re hiring functional specialists or line employees. At McKinsey & Co., where I was involved in recruiting and hiring for several years, we always asked the question?even about the youngest associates?Can we envision him as a partner? More often than not, it was that question that either distinguished a candidate or sunk him.

If you can find and bring in the best, then use consistent principles in developing them. At my current employer, the federal General Accounting Office, the leadership team has three core values: accountability, integrity and reliability. They are so deeply held within the organization that, one way or another, they influence key hiring decisions.

Be sure to concentrate on specific behaviors that you want to encourage. Specificity and consistency inspire hope, investment in self-development and healthy expectations. In contrast, there is nothing more damaging than an attempt to create leaders that is vague and inconsistently applied. It breeds cynicism, miscommunication and destructive competition. I have worked in organizations where this consistency exists and others where it is absent. The difference is like night and day.

Prune for Shape

You need not only a vision of your ideal employee but also of your ideal organization. Specify the right skill and knowledge mixes that will add up to a well-shaped company. Then make sure other leaders in the organization understand the shape as well, because more than one person will be pruning at once. Above all, know how the target shape relates to your overall strategy. I’ve seen countless staff development systems that seem completely disconnected from business purpose.