In Detail | Right People
Right People: It Starts With Understanding What ‘Right’ Looks Like
Right People, Right Place, Right Time — Part One
The old retail adage of right people, right place, right time sits somewhere between cliché and crucial doctrine. It is one of those phrases used so often that it risks becoming management wallpaper: familiar, broadly agreed with and rarely interrogated in much detail.
Taken seriously, however, it is a powerful operating principle. Getting the right people into an organisation, deploying them effectively and ensuring their capability is available when the business needs it has consequences for productivity, colleague engagement, customer experience, succession, retention and ultimately commercial performance. It is one of the fundamental building blocks of that frequently discussed, but considerably harder to create, high-performing team.
Taken at its most simplistic, though, “Right People” can amount to little more than being fully recruited. The vacancies are filled by people who interviewed enthusiastically, can perform at least some of the duties in their job description and generally turn up when the rota says they should. All useful things, certainly, but hardly the basis of exceptional performance.
The real value in Right People, Right Place, Right Time comes from unpacking what each part actually means. And the logical place to start is with the people.
Right People starts with understanding what right looks like
The first difficulty is that there is no universal definition of a “right person”. Right is subjective and, importantly, situational.
The right person for a flagship store may not be the right person for a small local branch. Someone capable of stabilising an experienced but underperforming team may require very different strengths from somebody tasked with building a new operation from scratch. Equally, the capabilities a growing organisation needs today may look substantially different from those it will need three years from now.
That does not mean the definition should be vague or left entirely to instinct. There are some universal principles. The right person should be capable of fulfilling the purpose and requirements of the role. They should exhibit the values and behaviours expected by the organisation. They should also either possess the capability required today or demonstrate the potential to develop the capability the business will need tomorrow.
The specifics of “right” will change according to circumstance. The principles used to identify it should not.
That starts with understanding the role properly. Too often, recruitment begins because somebody has left, an old job description is pulled from a folder and the organisation immediately starts looking for somebody who resembles the person who has just gone. A better starting point is to ask what the business actually requires from whoever occupies the role next.
What outcomes are they accountable for? Which behaviours matter most? What knowledge or technical capability is genuinely essential from day one, and what could reasonably be learnt? How does the role contribute to the wider team? What kind of customer experience is the individual expected to create? And, perhaps most importantly, how is that requirement likely to evolve?
You cannot consistently recruit, develop or retain the right people if you have never properly defined what “right” looks like.
Recruit for what is harder to teach
In my experience, recruitment processes can place too much value on what somebody already knows. Have they done this exact job before? Have they worked in the sector? Do they know the systems? How many years of experience do they have?
Those things have value. Some roles quite rightly demand specialist knowledge, qualifications or technical competence from day one. But in many positions, a significant proportion of the practical skills can be taught. What is much harder to teach are the behaviours that determine how somebody will use those skills.
I am therefore generally more interested in whether somebody has the capability and curiosity to learn than whether they already know every process. Will they take ownership rather than wait to be instructed? Will they act with integrity when nobody is watching? Are they curious enough to ask why something is done, rather than simply memorising how? Can they receive challenge constructively and challenge others appropriately in return? Do they want to improve? Will they remain focused on delivering what the business needs rather than simply completing the tasks immediately in front of them?
Previous experience tells you what somebody has done, but it does not necessarily tell you what they are capable of becoming. In many roles, potential, behaviours and values provide a better indication of long-term contribution than an impressive list of things somebody has already encountered.
This is also where organisational values need to become more than decoration. If integrity, curiosity, accountability, collaboration or customer focus appear in the company’s values, they should mean something when selecting the people expected to demonstrate them.
There is an important distinction here. Recruiting for values should never become shorthand for recruiting “people like us”. Diversity of thought, personality, background and experience can strengthen teams enormously. Values alignment should be concerned with behaviours and standards, not whether somebody feels culturally familiar to the hiring manager.
Subjective does not have to mean arbitrary
There will always be judgement involved in recruitment. People are not products with identical specifications, and pretending an appointment can be reduced to a purely objective calculation is unrealistic.
But accepting that judgement is subjective is an argument for stronger processes, not weaker ones.
If curiosity matters, define what evidence of curiosity looks like. If ownership is important, create interview questions or exercises that allow candidates to demonstrate it. If integrity is fundamental, agree what behaviours represent it. Structured interviews, consistent questions, clearly defined scoring criteria and more than one source of evidence can all help turn an instinctive impression into a more disciplined decision.
CIPD guidance similarly recommends structured interviews and pre-agreed evaluation criteria because they allow candidates to be compared more consistently and reduce the influence of personal bias.
The purpose is not to recruit by spreadsheet. It is to avoid “I just really liked them” becoming the entire selection methodology.
Good recruitment should still allow room for judgement, instinct and experience. The difference is that those judgements should sit alongside evidence and be connected to what the role actually requires.
Even then, recruitment merely provides the starting point. Finding the right person does not mean they will automatically remain the right person.
Keeping the right person right
Good performance management is crucial to keeping the right person right.
That means establishing clear expectations, providing ongoing challenge, coaching effectively, recognising contribution and addressing performance gaps before they become entrenched. It means having useful conversations throughout the year rather than storing everything up for an annual performance review that neither party is particularly looking forward to.
It also means understanding what progression looks like for the individual. Progression does not always mean promotion. For one person it may be the next role or greater responsibility. For another it might mean becoming a recognised expert, earning more, developing broader experience, gaining greater autonomy or flexibility, or simply becoming exceptionally good at something they value doing.
Good managers understand what motivates the individual and, where possible, find the overlap between that and what the organisation needs.
This matters because the definition of “right” does not stand still. Businesses evolve. Customer expectations change. Technology develops. Products and services change. Strategies move and roles expand, contract or specialise. The capability that made somebody highly effective yesterday may not automatically be enough to make them equally effective tomorrow.
The best solution cannot simply be to replace people whenever the business requirement moves. Ideally, the colleague and the organisation develop together. The organisation has a responsibility to explain how expectations are changing, provide appropriate development and create meaningful opportunities to build new capability. The colleague, in turn, has a responsibility to engage with that development, respond to challenge and continue adapting.
That is how the right person of yesterday remains the right person for tomorrow.
Engagement is part of performance
Colleague engagement belongs within this discussion because engaged people are more likely to apply their capability fully. But engagement should not be confused with happiness.
It is perfectly possible to have a happy team that enjoys working together, gets on well socially and still performs below its potential. High engagement requires more. People need to understand what is expected of them, have the tools and support required to achieve it, experience appropriate challenge, receive meaningful recognition and understand how their contribution matters.
The commercial evidence behind this is substantial. Gallup’s 2024 Q12 meta-analysis examined more than 183,000 business units involving over 3.35 million employees. When comparing top- and bottom-quartile engagement, it found median differences of 18% in sales productivity, 23% in profitability and 10% in customer loyalty or engagement, alongside meaningful differences in turnover and absenteeism.
That does not mean engagement alone causes every one of those outcomes, but the relationship between engagement and organisational performance is difficult to ignore.
It also raises an uncomfortable management question. Sometimes organisations recruit somebody with the right potential, give them unclear expectations, inconsistent feedback, limited development and little recognition, then conclude eighteen months later that they hired the wrong person.
Sometimes they did.
Sometimes management needs to look a little closer to home.
When the right person stops being right
There is, however, another side to this argument. Not every capability gap can or should be developed indefinitely.
The requirements of the business may change significantly. The ambitions of the individual may change. Sometimes somebody no longer wants what the role requires. Sometimes behaviours that appeared manageable become increasingly problematic. Sometimes appropriate support, coaching, challenge and development have been provided and the required performance still does not follow.
Good management has to recognise that reality as well.
Right People should not mean retaining somebody indefinitely because they were once the right appointment. Nor should it mean casually replacing people every time the business changes direction. The important question is whether there remains a credible path between the capability and motivation of the individual and what the organisation now requires.
Where that path exists, the sensible response is development.
Where it genuinely does not, acknowledging that somebody is no longer the right person for a particular role can ultimately be fairer to the individual, the wider team and the business than avoiding the issue indefinitely.
The commercial consequence
The commercial cost of getting Right People wrong is a little like asking how long a piece of string is. There is no useful universal figure because the consequence depends on the role, the individual, the team and the extent of their influence. What is much clearer is how quickly those costs can compound.
If an appointment ultimately fails, the business has to recruit again. There is recruitment spend, management time, onboarding and training, followed by another period during which the replacement is learning rather than performing at full capability.
Historical Oxford Economics research provides some indication of the scale. Its UK study estimated that, in 2014, replacing a retail employee earning £25,000 or more carried an average financial impact of £20,113. Around £3,874 related to recruitment and logistical costs; the much larger £16,240 represented lost productivity while the replacement reached the expected level of performance. It also found that employees joining from elsewhere in the same sector took around 15 weeks on average to reach optimum productivity, compared with around 32 weeks for somebody moving between sectors.
Those figures are now dated and should not be treated as the current cost of replacing an employee, but the underlying point remains important: the recruitment fee itself is often only a fraction of the commercial consequence.
More importantly, the cost of the wrong person starts long before they leave.
There may already be lower individual productivity. Their manager may spend disproportionate time supervising, correcting or compensating. Other colleagues may pick up work that is not being done. Where poor behaviours are involved, the impact can spread further into trust, cohesion and engagement across the team. Research into dysfunctional team-member behaviour has similarly found evidence that withholding effort and interpersonal deviance can influence the behaviours and performance of the people around them.
Then there is the customer.
In retail, this becomes particularly tangible. A colleague who lacks product knowledge, curiosity, ownership or engagement may provide a poorer customer interaction. Over time, those individual conversations have the potential to appear in conversion, ATV, attachment, customer satisfaction and retention.
The Institute of Customer Service’s January 2025 UK Customer Satisfaction Index found that 21% of customers said they had increased their spending with an organisation because of the service they received. The same research estimated that service problems and failures were costing UK organisations £7.3 billion every month.
This is why the cost of the wrong person cannot simply be recorded against the recruitment budget. It can be paid through lost productivity, management intervention, weaker team engagement, poorer customer experience, missed sales and reduced retention for a considerable period before anybody concludes that the appointment itself was wrong.
And then, of course, the business gets to pay to recruit all over again.
Right People — but not in isolation
Right People is therefore much more than a recruitment strategy. It is a continuous management discipline: define what right looks like, recruit against it, establish expectations, develop capability, challenge performance, engage the individual and keep reassessing all of those things as the needs of the business evolve.
Get that right and the organisation gains something considerably more valuable than a fully recruited establishment.
It gains capability.
But even that is only one part of the equation. You can recruit and develop an exceptional person, with precisely the right behaviours and potential, and still fail to get the best from them if they are placed in the wrong role, the wrong team, the wrong environment or the wrong location.
Which brings us to the next part of the equation: Right Place.
