Golden Oldies: The Past is Not the Future
by Miki Saxon
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
How do you hire? What do you focus on? What carries the most weight with you? How do you decide what is most relevant to your situation? Do you look hardest at what they’ve done or concentrate on what they could do in the future. And the key question, is your approach successful?
We’ll explore these ideas further this week.
Read other Golden Oldies here.
Dan McCarthy had a terrific post on why choosing leaders is a gamble—be sure to read the comments.
We see the idiocy of assuming that past performance is always a good predictor of the future all the time, but it seems especially true at senior levels.
First, there is the penchant for identifying ‘high potential’ starting in kindergarten and providing lots of extra training and coaching, while ignoring those who may be late bloomers or less obvious (read quieter).
Then there’s the Peter Principle, which is not only alive and well, but functioning even more efficiently today than it was when Laurence J. Peter first described it back in 1970.
We relish looking at the past to predict the future, thus choosing to ignore all extenuating circumstances and surrounding factors that played a role in the person’s performance.
We forget, or ignore, that
- one manager’s star is another manager’s bomb;
- the skills needed to take advantage of an economic expansion are very different from those needed in a downturn; and
- turmoil or an ongoing crisis in a person’s personal life often impacts their performance at work.
Last, but not least, we need to get over our love affair with the idea of the hero-leader who, with a wave of the hand, can part the seas and eliminate obstacles.
Image credit: Valerie Everett on flickr
September 18th, 2018 at 1:15 am
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