The Gift that Keeps on Giving...

On September 8 the New York Times Sunday business section featured an article on Disney and the relationship between Bob Iger and Bob Chapek.? The article chronicles the breakdown of the relationship between Iger and Chapek (Chapek being Iger’s hand-picked successor to him as CEO).? While I have no desire no comment on the article and its assessment of Disney’s culture, I do want all of us to think about root cause of that unfortunate situation.

One of the issues underlying the situation at Disney was a less than optimal hiring decision.? This happens in all organizations at all levels.? The only difference here is that the CEO position at Disney is one of the most visible jobs in the world because they are so closely tied with the entertainment industry.? Regardless of position, when a less than desirable hiring decision is made... the effects are long lasting and can be painful.

You Aren’t a Judge of Good Talent

I have been an advisor to leaders at various levels over the entire course of my career.? While most of my counsel has been at least considered, the information most quickly discarded has been on how to hire people.? This phenomenon is particularly true at the most senior levels of an organization.? One vice president I worked with told me “Jim, this is all fine and good for my direct reports.? But I know how to pick my own talent.”

The reality is none of us are good at selecting talent.? We are seduced into hiring people we either like personally or are carbon copies of ourselves.? All of the research I have read on this topic is clear:? Our ability to select a person and match them to the right position are the same as chance.? This means you should just put the candidate names on strips of paper and pick one of them out of a hat.

There is a Better Way

Having some structure to your selection process is better than none.? And it can also prevent you from litigation if you document your work thoroughly.? The steps I’m outlining below are the cliff notes version of the process.? If you want to do this well, hire someone who has a background in Industrial Relations and/or Psychology background who specializes in structured interviewing processes.

1)???? Define the most critical tasks of the job:? This sounds so elementary that everyone must be doing it already, right??? I’m fairly certain that the majority of job descriptions for the majority of roles in any organization have not been updated (unless the person holding the job has left).? This is the kind of work that no one wants to do (thus the reason so many outside consultants are hired to do it).?

Start out with broad categories of work (“manages department budget” for example), and then add under each category specific tasks (“monitors actual revenue/spending, adjusts budget forecast as needed”).? Is it tedious?? Maybe, but do it right once and you usually don’t have to do it again for a long time.

2)???? Get down to the behavioral level:? In the situation between Mr. Iger and Mr. Chapek, one of the critical tasks of the CEO job was to be the public face of the company.? Mr. Iger was identified as having “charisma” and was a “natural communicator”.? If we listed charisma as a critical job task, it would be hard to select a person for that skill, since being charismatic is in the eyes of the beholder.? In my experience the other job requirement that no one can hire for is the ability to be “strategic”.? Again we’re dealing with a term that means many things to many people.

Let’s assume that public speaking skills are a component of being charismatic.? Mr. Iger started his career as a weatherman on a cable channel in upstate New York (per the NYT article).? It would be easy to understand why public speaking was a strength of his – he had to do it every day in front of a live TV camera.?? We need to break down a value laden term like “charisma” and actually spell out what that looks like in terms of observable behavior.

3)???? Write interview questions that ask candidates to share stories of prior behavior: ?Ask any I/O psychologist about hiring, and they will always tell you the same thing: “The greatest predictor of future performance is prior behavior”.? This means we need to ask candidates to share stories from their past that relate to the critical job skills/traits/behaviors that we’re looking for.? In the case of public speaking, we could simply ask “Tell me about a time where you had to speak in front of a group.”

4)???? Make rating scales for your interview questions: ?Interviewers need to know what the “right answer” is to the questions we developed in step 3.? Why?? If we don’t, we leave the interpretation of candidate answers up to the interviewer... and then we’re introducing bias into the situation.? Ultimately we’ll go back to hiring people that we either like or behave just like us.

Let’s try our public speaking question.? If our candidate says that they have recently given a speech in front of a group, we may need to probe and find out how big the audience was, or what they did to prepare.? Ultimately we want to know what the desired outcome was of their speaking engagement (and if they achieved that outcome).? In my line of work, we often auditioned potential trainers to see them present live.? We always had a criteria/rating sheet that evaluators used to determine if the candidate had the skills we were looking for.

I Don’t Hire People Jim.? Why Should I Care?

We’ve all been on a team where a coworker was a poor fit for the job.? We’ve all experienced the stress of watching that person not perform well (and in some cases exit the organization).? A bad hiring decision doesn’t just affect that individual – it effects the entire team.? The situation can be a distraction at best and a cancer on the team at its worst.

Here’s my ask:? Don’t let your boss off the hook.? I’ve seen too many times when a hiring manager resorted to an unstructured selection process because they were desperate to fill the position in the shortest time possible.? Doing the steps above does take time.? You can help your boss by helping document the job that is being hired for (i.e. the core job responsibilities and the behaviors associated with them).? I’m sure you don’t have time to do any of this, but which is worse:? some additional work up front, or the drawn out pain of a poor hiring decision?

A poor hiring decision is like throwing a rock into a pond:? the waves it creates travel in all directions.? It is truly the gift that keeps on giving, and it’s always a gift no one wants to receive.