Page 139 - Executive Warfare

The Team You Assemble

cion. There’s an automatic resentment of your outsider because he or she
obviously took the job away from someone on the inside. People will
inevitably question what level of knowledge your person really has.
In one of my first senior management jobs, I hired a woman who had
an impeccable résumé, just impeccable. She appeared to be a top-notch
manager, and I needed her to manage a lot of people. She came from an
Ivy League school. I interviewed her
twice, a bit of a straight-laced personal-
ity, but she seemed very competent. Her EVERY PERSONNEL
references were great, too, and she’d CHOICE YOU MAKE
come from a highly reputable company. IN UPPER
Of course, the reason nobody there MANAGEMENT IS
would say anything bad about her was RISKY, BUT
because they were so desperate to get rid ESPECIALLY RISKY
of her. IS BRINGING IN A
Not only was her work remarkably SENIOR PERSON
shabby and inaccurate, her behavior was FROM OUTSIDE.
so bizarre that she soon lost all credibil-
ity with the people who worked for her.
Here is just one example among many: She had this strange relationship
with M&Ms. She would buy a giant bag of M&Ms, and instead of having
lunch, she would take them into a conference room and lay them all out,
by color, battalions of M&Ms, all with the letter “M”facing her. Never mind
the sanitary issues of eating them right off the conference table, she’d talk
to her candies before she ate them: “Okay, yellow battalion, your turn!”
So I had to go to my superiors and say, “She’s really not working out.”
I talked about her bad performance. Then, to prove the need to fire her
quickly, I made the mistake of telling them the M&M story.
Their first question was, “Where did you find somebody like that?”
It was not about her—it was about me! Very embarrassing. That is why
a lot of executives prefer to find a team by promoting from within an
organization. It’s often safer to choose the devil you know.

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