Slaying the "Central Control" Zombie - Part 1: Hiring Tips for New People Leaders

So you’re a new-ish people leader on the journey of building teams beyond the one you’ve been managing until now. You want these teams to be autonomous, because you won’t have time to babysit every decision like you used to, but also because you’ve heard that delegating control will make the team perform better. I’m going to share a little below about how to hire for traits connected to stronger decision-making skills.

The central control zombie

I often see up-close (and in studies) how individuals and teams need autonomy and control to make decisions for themselves to reach higher levels of performance. Sadly, more often than the expected sustained benefits, I instead see this loop play out:

…and the zombie of centralised control shudders, groans, then shambles back into the decision making process (with everyone back where we started, but slightly more demoralised). Today our weapon of choice for a more … permanent solution to this zombie will be interview technique.

Note: There are plenty of other weapons for slaying this zombie (a culture where you can ask for help, a culture of learning from mistakes, educating leadership on the opportunity cost of centralised control, embedding risk management within key team ceremonies etc), but I’ll cover these in other posts.

Traits you’re looking for

An overconfident or uncurious team member engaging with something they’ve not done before might roll with their best guess, or the quickest, easiest solution to their problem they can find on their own (often the first solution they find). A team member more aware of their limits will go hunting for information, and a curious person will explore multiple of the paths discovered (weighing pros and cons before making a decision or even coming back to you with options). The ability to communicate with people across levels or disciplines allows discovery of information beyond the people they work with day-to-day.

Trait question examples

1. Humility: What is something you recently had to research before starting?
2. Curiosity: What is a recent personal project you enjoyed?
3. Self awareness: What’s an interesting mistake you’ve made recently?
4. Communication: What is a project where you worked with people outside Product/Engineering?

Whether or not the interviewee answers using an interview answer framework (like the STAR method), the typical response covers only what they’re most comfortable with. This means a lot of the real value comes from open-ended follow up questions that peer behind the curtain of their thought processes:

1. What was the problem you were solving?
2. Why did you pick that solution?
3. What did you learn?
4. Would you approach it differently next time?
5. What other solutions did you consider?
6. What was improved after this was done?

Zombies that stay dead more often

As a people leader, you’ll only successfully improve performance when your people and teams are ready to make the decisions you’re empowering them to make. Hiring candidates with core specialist skills in engineering or product alone is not enough to create teams that perform the way you hope and expect when delegating control.

Selecting for strong decision-making traits like humility, curiosity and self-awareness during interviews by asking example-based openers then open ended follow-up questions can help reveal thought processes and provide insight to decision-making skills. Interview technique shouldn’t be the only arrow in your quiver, but get this right and it will reduce the number of times you have to fight this particular zombie, or perhaps even slay it once and for all.

About Lee

20 years in tech with 15 in Startups and Scale-ups, I’m generally helping between 3 and 5 tech startups at any point in time with Architecture, Team Design, Role Design, Agile Delivery and Engineering Leadership Coaching.

You can reach me via LinkedIn message or at goldsworthy.com.au/contact