There’s the old adage that first class people hire other first class people; but second class people only hire third class people.
The immediate interpretation of this colloquial saying is all about confidence. In other words, all successful managers and leaders are looking for people who will challenge them with refreshing ideas and new perspectives.
I say, ‘dream on!’
How often have you really seen that happening?
If you’ve been around the block a few times, most of us would observe that many senior marketing managers climbing the greasy pole – especially, but not exclusively in larger corporations – are constantly looking over their shoulder, are highly protective of their ‘patch’, and certainly are not falling over themselves to hire people who might challenge their hard-won position.
Not that good marketing managers and directors are absent. I know many… and enjoy working with them. They are experienced, thoughtful, open-minded, team-spirited, clear-thinking, results oriented, strategically talented and fair.
But for every good manager, there are two duds.
The duds know their lack of competence and spend their lives trying to cover it up. When they hire talent, they do so to fill their own competence gaps, all the time putting an insidious lid on their staff’s progress and promotion. And their talent is to obfuscate, distract and think up a thousand excuses why they cannot sign up to sensible, meaningful performance targets.
Sadly, many are rather good at this cover-up, and con their organization into thinking they are doing a good job.
Ultimately, the responsibility for weeding out such incompetence lies with senior management and the board of directors. Sadly, incompetence is often accompanied by masterful sycophancy. The best directors can spot this, not let it fuel their own ego, and (gently and kindly) cut such dead wood out of their organization.
After all, it’s only practical. If they don’t weed out incompetence, commercial performance suffers, and the resulting problems come winging back to the directors’ doorstep.
