Why Can’t We Figure Out How to Select Leaders? was the question asked by Harvard’s Jim Heskett at the beginning of February.

It’s a pertinent question right now, since for more than a decade many of the people held up as examples of great leadership have fallen on their faces and even ended up in jail. Worse still, the companies they ran were destroyed or badly damaged—short term Wall Street numbers were met at the cost of long-term innovation and sustainability.

The Forum drew 88 comments that Heskett says fall in three categories,

• enumerating the qualities that we should look for in a leader without suggesting how we identify and select for them;
• the body of knowledge based on research and practice that can guide and improve the selection process and its outcomes; and
• why theory has had less impact on results than we might expect, essentially identifying reasons for a gap between theory and results achieved in practice.

Two quotes I found very pertinent from the original article,

“At most companies, people spend 2 percent of their time recruiting and 75 percent managing their recruiting mistakes.” — Richard Fairbank, CEO, Capital One

This is so true it’s depressing. I started my company to teach better hiring skills; it was funded by a retired CEO who believed that hiring was a manager’s most crucial task and that few managers were very good at it—boom or bust there was little interest. (Going forward, the information was folded into our overall coaching program.)

“There are certain jobs where almost nothing you can learn about candidates before they start predicts how they’ll do once they’re hired.” –Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers)

Also true. It’s the difference of asking customers what they want and conceiving a product that no one mentioned because it didn’t exist—think iPod. There are no questions to tell you if a candidate can see around corners.

Even hiring a person who has done it before doesn’t mean they can do it again; there are just too many variables in any given situation.

How could you have hired someone to deal with the current crisis when it was unimaginable just a few short months ago.

Perhaps it’s time for companies to stop looking for guarantees, perfection or a savior—no candidate walks on water.

I believe what is needed is to spread leadership throughout the company and avoid hiring imperial egos. What do you think?

I hope you’ll take the time to read both Heskett’s article (short) and comments (interesting and valuable) and then leave your thoughts here.

Your comments—priceless

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Image credit: flickr

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 5:30 am and is filed under About Leadership, Communication, Leadership Skills, management, What Leaders DO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: Harvard, Hiring, hiring mistakes, how to hire, jim heskett
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