Hiring the CEO of Americorp — A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Story!

Imagine you’re hiring an employee. This is no average position, but a critically important executive one — let’s say it’s for a new CEO. It’s down to two applicants (neither of whom have had a job exactly like this before, but not many have), so you bring them both in for an interview.

• Applicant 1 has years of experience dealing with people in this exact position, both as a trusted advisor and as an agent for executing an important aspect of the position.
• Applicant 2 has years of experience in your field as well, but less directly with people in this position. They have worked in tandem with CEOs on occasion, but most of their previous work has been more in the trenches.

So far, Applicant 1 seems like the obvious choice. They’ll know their way around, who to call, and all that good stuff. But just knowing where the paper clips are isn’t everything. So you look deeper.

Both applicants are extremely intelligent, driven people. Both seem to agree with you on a lot of principles of management… but not all.

• Applicant 1 is on the record as saying publically they believed one popular thing, then privately pushing for the opposite thing to happen. When you look at their record, you see a lot of things they have changed their mind on over the years, some seeming like a natural evolution and others… well, you’re just not sure. It’s a pattern that looks like this person says the thing that people want them to say while privately doing whatever serves them best at that moment, for better and for worse.
• Applicant 2 is impressively consistent with their public and private actions.

But… okay, you say to yourself. Applicant 1 is only doing what other people in their position have done before. Who doesn’t say something they don’t really mean just to grease the wheels a little? So you look deeper — where do both of these candidates want to take your company in the future?

• Applicant 1 has modest goals, wishing only to improve upon the course your company has been taking in recent years.

This concerns you a little, as the forces aligned against you have almost entirely shut down the things you’ve tried to accomplish in recent years. When you ask how they plan to deal with that opposition (an opposition that is extremely biased against this applicant, btw), they reply “Hopefully… they’ll come to their senses.” That… does not seem likely.

• Applicant 2 has lofty goals, ones that certainly will not be acheivable in the near term, but they’re ones you agree with.

When you present Applicant 2 with the same question of how they plan to work with an opposition so dead-set on stopping these goals, they talk about using these lofty ideas as a way to inspire others to insist on changes in leadership, until the opposition is weakened and no longer standing in the way. This too sounds unlikely, but at least seems like a plan of action rather than a wish for civility.

OK, OK, this hiring thing is hard. You put the resumes down, stand up, step back from your desk, and try to take in a bigger picture.

How did your opposition get so nasty? How did they get so far off the reservation? Anything you’ve tried to do in the last few years has been so aggressively opposed that barely anything has been accomplished at all. Could it be that when your CEO years ago decided to sacrifice some of your company’s core beliefs in order to “get things done” that your opposition took that as a cue to move even to the even further extreme? After all, they couldn’t just share your CEO’s positions and still be the opposition.

You look back down at the resumes. Applicant 1 was that CEO’s most trusted advisor and they still hold those compromised beliefs, even though their use as “wheel grease” has long outlived its usefulness — those compromises will not bring your now-whackadoo opposition to the table anymore. Even if it does at some point, you’d be negotiating down from an already-compromised position, essentially landing exactly where the opposition wanted you to in the first place.

Applicant 2 represents all your core beliefs, carried through from long ago and evolved to fit the issues facing your company today. The opposition may not want to have any part of those beliefs, but this Applicant’s plan is to sell your beliefs, your real, core, populist, popular beliefs fearlessly and, with that, take back some of the gains the opposition has made and weaken their positions so that something, anything, might be accomplished again.

So, who do you hire?

• Applicant 1, with a sterling resume but a record of dishonesty and a lackluster plan of action that seems to have no likelihood of ever coming to pass against an opposition they have no plan to weaken?
• Or Applicant 2, with a great resume, trustworthy past, and a lofty plan of action that, while probably not having any chance of passing soon either, might inspire some desperately needed changes in your business?

To me, it’s pretty obvious.