Hiring Mistakes 3 – Limited Buy-In

Hiring Mistakes … Selection By Committee

The third installment in a series of short articles addressing common mistakes in executive hiring.  Click this link: Forgetting The “Why” for part 1.

The list below contains the common hiring mistakes that I will be addressing.  Do you recognise any of these in some of your previous selections?

1. Forgetting The “Why”
   1. Hiring For The Wrong Reason
   2. Seduced By Beauty
2. Selection By Committee
3. Limited Buy-In
4. Disrespect Candidates
5. Dishonesty: Half-Truths & Blatant Lies
6. Money, Money, Money
7. Failing to Prepare For Smooth On-boarding

Limited Buy-In

The preceding articles have addressed mistakes that occur in the choosing of the candidate for hire. Here, I address a mistake that affects the chosen candidate’s ability to deliver once on board. Getting the buy-in of the internal counterparts of an impending executive hire is a vital factor in whether the new exec succeeds or fails.

While a business leader is, by definition, a visionary who anticipates and prepares for the challenges a company will face, her peers and subordinates often aren’t and can thus, be resistant to what they see as unnecessary change to the status quo.  Because a new executive hire is usually a harbinger of change (and nobody likes change, right?), there are any number of reasons for the incumbents to react negatively to this ‘interloper’ coming in to upset the apple cart. Here are a few examples:

1. They may feel threatened because the newcomer assumes responsibility for a part of the business that they currently oversee;
2. The interloper is seen as additional and unwanted competition for promotion to the next rung on the corporate ladder
3. A new hire replacing a popular executive who was jettisoned to make room could well find himself persona non grata through no fault of his own
4. A game-changing hire might be seen as a waste of resources by those who don’t see the big picture the same way the business or unit head does
5. A new executive with a mandate to effect radical change to an organisational or departmental culture will be a genuine threat to established loyalties.

As you might imagine, the above (non-exhaustive) examples provide ample motivation for worried / disapproving employees to deliberately – and subconsciously – obstruct the efforts of the new hire.

Several years ago, I worked a search project for a major international bank whose Head of Distribution for the Africa region was keen to develop a new product line for the bank’s largest corporate clients in Nigeria. If successfully implemented, this would provide tremendous added value to clients and eventually grow into a significant new revenue stream for the bank.  As no local expertise then existed, the solution was to bring in a new hire from a rival bank in London.  The Head of Distribution in Nigeria had not bought into this project and was extremely peeved to have an individual foisted on him, eating into finite budgetary resources.  Given that this expensive newcomer was not expected to generate significant revenues for a good year or two, this was a particularly vexatious situation for a sales head pursuing aggressive year-on-year growth targets. The new hire faced open hostility in a team where colleagues – at best – questioned the wisdom of his mandate and – at worst – hoped for him to fail. He lasted 18 months before leaving to join a more receptive organisation though he did make significant inroads before his departure: his successor capitalised on the ground he had broken to deliver the revenue streams envisioned by the Africa Head. While the original objective for the hire (the “why”) was achieved, the firm lost an excellent executive to a rival bank.

 

When you are bringing in a new executive in a role of strategic importance to the future of an organisation or one of its divisions, taking the time to ensure key personnel buy-in to the narrative for the hire is crucial.  If you read Part 1 of this series, Forgetting The “Why”, you may recall that one of my concluding pieces of advice was to Communicate the “why”.  I’ll take it one step further here and advise you to Sell the “why” and sell it well – make sure that the relevant colleagues understand why this hire is of benefit not just to you, but to them as well.  And don’t leave this till the end of the process, or worse, the new hire’s start date! You should start working to get your colleagues on board as soon as you commit to making a hire.  As a matter of fact, I would add this as a key stage in the typical hiring process I wrote about in Part 1:

1. Identify & Define Hiring Need
2. Get Head-count Approval from HR / Management Board
3. Define the Candidate Criteria
4. Get Buy-in
5. Advertise the Role / Appoint External Recruiters
6. Review Candidate CVs
7. Conduct Interviews with Shortlisted Candidates
8. Choose Most Suitable Candidate
9. Prepare & Present Offer of Employment to Chosen Candidate
10. Offer Accepted.

It is that important.  You should also note that the exercise of getting colleagues to buy-in to the merits of a new hire provides an excellent platform to share your plans for the business with them, discuss the challenges faced and elicit their feedback on your plans as well as the challenges they face.  It is an additional opportunity to engage with key members of the business and ensure everyone is pulling in the same direction.

In summary, to give your new hire the best chance of solving the problem you hired him to solve:

Sell the “why”

Next time, I’ll discuss Disrespect Candidates