When I think about some of the people I’ve worked with who were in more senior positions than me – especially management or executive positions – I recall asking myself “I wonder how they got that position over other people who might have been considered.” In other words, what was it about this person that made them more desirable over someone else?
The interesting thing is that in some cases after I’d worked with that person for awhile, got to see them in action, and heard other people at work talking about them around the water cooler, I often wondered “how the hell did they manage to convince someone they were qualified for this position!?” In other words, after getting to know them I still couldn’t figure out how they’d managed to get this job (and neither could anyone else) because it seemed they weren’t qualified for it.
In other cases, I could see why the person was in the senior position because they had skills and experience and a personality that seemed to fit what was required.
When companies talk about bringing “fresh blood” into a company and hiring someone from outside the firm, it seems that sometimes it’s because they are looking for someone who will bring in a new perspective that current staff don’t have.
The interesting thing about this belief is that in some respects you might end up hiring someone who you don’t realize has warts of their own, flaws that would be visible to someone who is currently working with this person but perhaps not (yet) visible to someone interviewing them for a new job in a different company.
I recall an executive I knew who I’d worked with at two different companies. This executive never got promoted at the first company we worked at together and some of us at work figured it was because the senior people in our company knew that this person didn’t have the personality required for a senior role. They’d worked with him long enough to realize his flaws. Instead, he got a job at a new company in an executive role with a firm that didn’t realize his personality flaws until long after they’d hired him. Pretty soon though, the same flaws that prevented him from getting a promotion in the first company made other executives in his new company realize the mistake they’d made by hiring him.
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