I’m always on the lookout for management tips and wisdom, even if what I find is just something that reinforces what I already knew.

So it is with the “Corner Office” column in the Business section of the Sunday New York Times, as I have noted before, because it seems to have a wide range of management thinking from the very good (Yahoo’s Carol Bartz making a case for ditching performance reviews) to the very bad (Carol Smith of the Elle Group claiming that women are inherently better managers than men) to the very silly and simplistic (a CEO with a Winnie the Pooh fetish who actually says that “you only hire Tiggers. You don’t hire Eeyores”).

If you care about management the way I do—and that means everything including the good, the bad, the wise and the breathtakingly silly and dumb—this column is a great addition to what you find in this blog and in my “Last Word” column.

So here’s the latest, and it is some great hiring advice from Jana Eggers, chief executive of Spreadshirt, a maker of personalized clothing. She listed two key things that she looks for in people she hires: passion, and how they treat the receptionist.

Passion is pretty much a no-brainer, although you would be surprised at how many people get hired for positions who don’t seem to have very much of it. Plus, passion is one of those emotions that can spin out of control if you have people who can’t keep it in proper proportion.

When The New York Times asked Eggers what qualities she looked for when hiring a person, her response was remarkably simple, focused and spot-on:

“I’m usually listening for passion,” she said. “I want that passion, because that passion is what’s going to get you through your failures. It’s when the tough things happen that a person’s real personality comes out. And I’m looking for whether someone’s aware that business is a team sport. You have to communicate. How do they describe the team, their role on the team? I always like to get their perspectives on the management too.”

That is good advice, both on hiring passionate workers and on the notion of teamwork, but it was one more thing she told the Times that really got my attention—it’s evaluating potential hires by how they treat others, especially the low-level people they come in touch with.

“I’m also going to see how they [potential hires] treat the receptionist,” Eggers told the newspaper. “I always get feedback from them. I’ll want to know if someone comes in and if they weren’t polite, if they didn’t say, ‘Hello,’ or ask them how they were. It’s really important to me.”

This is REALLY great advice, especially coming from the top executive of a company, because it’s clear that CEO Eggers believes that character is an important trait in a high-performing workforce. And character, in my book, can be defined simply “as doing the right thing when nobody’s looking.”

In other words, Eggers wants to hire people who have good manners. It’s great hearing that from a CEO, because way too many people—including one common-sense-challenged blogger I debated about this a couple of years ago—seem to believe that manners are something you can turn on and off as it suits you. And as I noted then, good manners never go out of style. Clearly, CEO Jana Eggers feels that way too.

Yes, passion is a great quality to have in your employees, but so are good manners. That’s why how someone treats the receptionist in an unguarded moment is an important thing to consider. It’s not the first thing I would look for when hiring, but it certainly has a place high up on the list. My guess is that it is a hiring quality that makes Jana Eggers a good manager—and Spreadshirt a great place to work.

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