Good person, wrong role?

A friend of mine recently lamented to me about the difficulties of hiring. "These guys come with beautiful resumes and rock solid recommendations, and then they come and are so disappointing." I'm sure anyone involved in hiring knows exactly what my friend is talking about.
To some degree, just chalk it up to the intrinstic difficulties of hiring. Even legendarily thorough and expensive processes employed at places like Google and Goldman, Sachs let in a fair share of low performers.

However, a book I read lately brought another cause to mind. David Sedaris's Holidays on Ice is, like all of his books, a collection of funny short stories. The stories are always personal vignettes involving his family or some trip he took. His new books always get to the top levels of the sales charts. I have read several, and they never fail to make me laugh.

Holidays on Ice is unique in that it also contains a few purely fictional stories.

His fictional stories stunk. I can't think of any real clunkers from among the dozens of his personal stories spanning multiple books, but I found every one of the fiction stories to be unamusing and uninteresting.

If you were evaluating his writing, and happened to read only his fiction, you'd walk away thinking, "Everyone talks so highly of this guy, but he can't write!"

I think this points to a simple truth: people can be hugely talented and accomplished, but it still requires getting them into the right role. The right role is not a title. The Vice-President role under John McCain would have been vastly different than it will be under Barack Obama. Same title, different role.

Getting someone into the right role can be very difficult. Sometimes there's a mismatch with the company culture. Some people are highly accomplished but not good team players. Or, vice versa, they are solid team players, but that makes them ineffective on a team of stars. A personal narrative writer assigned to fiction.

A good manager should be evaluating and searching for the right roles and responsibilities for each team member. This is the first step in empowering and motivating your employees. It is also never-ending. If that sounds like a lot of work, it is, which is why a rigorous hiring process can pay for itself.

But hiring will only get you so far, and then it's time to manage.