It is ten past six on a July morning. The roll-up door is open and three trucks are warm. Two of the four people you hired last month did not show, and neither sent a text. You have posted the job a fourth time and raised the starting rate twice.
You told your office manager what a lot of owners say at this point: people don’t want to work anymore.
More pay and another posting have not fixed it because they answer a question your applicants are not asking. A person deciding whether to give you their mornings is asking what they are working toward. A rate and a shift do not answer that.
Where did the drive go?
It did not go anywhere. I read labor the way I read any other part of the market. People trade their time, their bodies and their attention for something, and what they trade for is not only pay.
Here is how I tie it to your empty bays. On your drive in, you passed the high school. At 5:30 on a summer morning the band is on the field in the dark running drill, and the football staff has the weight room open. No pay, seven days a week, all summer. Many of those students go to class all day, then to a job, then back to practice. What drives that sacrifice is a championship they can see: a season, a scoreboard, a role, teammates, an identity.
Then they enter what I call thirteenth grade, the job market, and the people who hired them handed over a shift. A set of tasks inside a system, with no championship attached. The drive is still there. The reason to use it is what disappeared. Many of those students had coaches who did not know the sport and still showed up, because a championship they could see survived bad leadership. Your business has to offer at least that much. You own the environment, so when the drive is missing, the variable that changed is usually the room they walked into.
What is the League, and why build it before you post the job?
The League is the answer to which game your people are playing.
It is the same structure every team you ever played on already had. Start with the sport, meaning the industry and the customers, suppliers and employees you serve. Then the level, which is how much sophistication the work demands. Then the league and conference, the peers you compete against and alongside. Then the championship, what winning looks like for your company. Then the playbook, and what counts as a game.
When I ask an owner for the championship, I usually get a revenue number. A number in your head is not a championship someone else can see. A plumbing company I worked with chose this one: the fastest response in the county on the hospital district’s buildings, and a board in the shop that showed it every day. Each role could point at it. The dispatcher, the apprentices and the lead tech each had a piece of that number, and each could tell you which piece was theirs.
I did not suggest a better job ad.
What does hiring for will look like?
You interview for willingness first, ability second and readiness last.
Look at how most of us hire. We start with readiness: is the person available, will they show up, will they stay. Then we test ability, whether they can apply what they know. Will gets skipped. We ask a couple of questions that circle back to availability and assume a fit. Those are the hires who look perfect on paper and fade under pressure.
I call the screen WAR: Willing, Able, Ready. I learned it as a quarterback and team captain. A player without enough willingness was not going to move into a leadership mindset, no matter the talent. Picture the willing scale as a line. At one end is “I don’t care.” At the other end is “I would die to get this done.” You are looking for people near the second end, and for a channel to point that will at. Ability you can build with a ramp-up and some time. Readiness is timing and expectations, theirs and the market’s. Will is the one thing you cannot install in another person. You can build the conditions where it shows up.
Run this at the next interview. Open with two questions about will:
- Tell me about something you finished that you were not required to finish.
- What have you kept doing after it stopped being rewarded?
Then give a work sample from your real workflow, not a hypothetical. Ask about start date and logistics last. Score the three separately, one to five, and write down what you heard. A 5-5-2 is a coaching project. A 2-5-5 reads as ready and able with the will missing, so ask more before you decide. Before any score decides a hire, have your HR professional or counsel look at the questions and the scoring against the job.
What do I do this week?
Rewrite one interview in WAR order, with the will questions first and the logistics at the end.
Then write your championship in one sentence a stranger could understand, and read it to your best employee. If they can say it back, the next ad has a chance to do what the last four did not.
The people are out there at five in the morning. Give them something to show up for.
Chapter 43. Build the Team on Will: WAR of The Method Trap, by John “Jonyprofit” Whaley. One idea, one story, one assignment. About the book
The people in this story are composites drawn from nearly forty years across the table from owners, executives and professionals. Names, industries and numbers are changed.