Most CEOs honestly don’t care about employees or take an interest in human resources.  Since CEOs don’t care, they put little to no pressure on their HR departments to get their cultures right, which allows HR to unwittingly implement all kinds of development and succession strategies that don’t work.  ~Jim Clifton, Gallup Chairman and CEO

I’ll continue where I left off last week with Gallup’s research, State of the American Manager.  They say that “when hiring managers, most organizations focus on previous non-managerial success or tenure.  Although these factors are important, they are secondary to talent.”

I’ve seen this happen many times.  People are promoted into managerial or leadership positions because they have been at the organization longer than anyone else and/or they were successful in their previous position.  Neither of those are good predictors for success as a manager or a leader.

Part of the problem is that in typical hierarchical structures in order for someone to receive a pay increase, they must move up the hierarchy and that usual means into a management or leadership position.  While they are being recognized for their previous success, they may be promoted into a position where they are not set up to succeed, but to fail.

Here’s a scenario I experienced firsthand.  A college was searching for its next president and the board decided to look internally.  They offered the position to their best (most published and well-liked by students) professor.  He had no leadership or management experience, but had been teaching at the college for decades.  His tenure as president was short-lived and he soon returned to the classroom.  He was a talented professor but he wasn’t a talented leader.

I’ve worked with a number of counseling/mental health organizations where the best therapist has been promoted into a management position.  They too fail at managing and somehow everyone is surprised?!

I’m going to repeat one of Gallup’s most staggering findings.  “Organizations fail to choose the candidate with the right talent for the manager job a whopping 82% of the time.”

What if the most talented sales manager is actually the person with the lowest sales?  What if the person with the most talent to be a manager in a counseling organization is actually the poorest counselor?  What if the most talented individual to be the next principal at a school is not the best teacher?  Can we shift our paradigm for how we think about moving (note that I intentionally did not use the word promoting) people into management and leadership positions?

Maybe this is where organizational leaders could take a lesson from the world of professional sports.  How many head coaches were one of the best players on their college athletic team?  Were they ever even professional athletes?  Are head coaches’ salaries higher than their star athletes?  Maybe it’s because they “select and promote” athletes and coaches based upon talent.  And they reward (compensate) the talent that most directly enables the team to succeed (win), which isn’t necessarily the head coach.

Can leaders make the shift and begin to recognize talent, rethink hierarchies, and promote individuals into positions where they can not only succeed, but thrive?