The Business Sensei

The paradox of perfection

This is an excerpt from my new book, Organizational Psychology for Managers

The trap of looking for the perfect candidate manifests in a few different ways.

The first manifestation is something I refer to as the Godot Effect, based on Estragon’s line in Waiting for Godot: “Personally, I wouldn’t even know him if I saw him.”

All too often, a prospective hire becomes the repository of every hope and every need of the hiring organization. The fact that the person does not yet exist in the organization only makes this worse. I’ve seen this particular phenomenon happen in front of me more than once. In particular, I was sitting in a product design meeting while the team discussed the next few hires it needed to make.

They started by observing that they needed someone who could handle some specific piece of technology. So far, so good. Then things went downhill.

“We don’t have anyone on the team who can handle […technology…] either.”
“That’ll be the next hire.”
“Wasn’t the next hire supposed to be […original problem…]?”
“We’ll need someone who can do both.”

From someone who could do “both,” it quickly morphed into someone who could do three things, then four. After a while, it did become clear that things were getting just a bit ridiculous, but that didn’t help. There still wasn’t a serious return to reality; by the time the people in the room were finished, the only person who could have met their needs was Doctor Who. In other words, they were looking for a fictional, centuries old, omni-competent Time Lord. Alternately, if he wasn’t available, they could have tried to hire the professor who teaches the most courses in a typical college catalog: a scholar known as Staff. Unfortunately, Professor Staff isn’t usually available either. The net result is that they were so busy looking for someone with a highly improbable set of skills that they couldn’t recognize a qualified person when they walked in the door.

Closely related to the Godot Effect is the idea that, to misquote the X-Files, the perfect person is Out There and is always the person who is Not Here.

In one training exercise I ran, participants were presented with a problem and were given the names of other people who might or might not be able to help them. The trick was that not everyone was present: some of the people listed weren’t available. While some of the participants made do with the contacts that were available, many of them fixated on the people who weren’t there. Just as Clint Eastwood, at the 2012 Republican Convention, imbued an empty chair with all the characteristics he disliked about President Barack Obama, participants in the exercise imbued the people who weren’t there with all the characteristics of the person they were looking for, including the belief that this person would be eager to help them. This idealized mythical individual prevented them from recognizing the imperfect, but physically present, individuals who could have actually helped them!

The next form of the perfection paradox is a little more subtle. Ask any hiring manager if they’d hire someone who never takes decisive action, refuses to consider alternatives, and has never challenged themselves, and the usual answer is, “Of course not!” Despite the vehemence of their response, however, that’s exactly what they are doing.

Naturally, it doesn’t look that way.

It looks like they are hiring people with strong track records and consistent employment: People who have a history of successes, not failures, and who have never been responsible for something going wrong. The problem, though, is that they rarely take the time to understand why those people have those perfect records. At best, I’ve seen managers attempt to break down someone’s record, in order to see if it was airbrushed.

While there is value to verifying that someone is being truthful on a resume, those managers are missing the point. The real problem is that the resume really is as perfect as it looks.

Basketball great Michael Jordan famously said, “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career; I’ve lost almost 300 games; 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot— and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

Michael Jordan is so good exactly because of his willingness to take chances, to push himself, and to act without a guarantee of success. All too often, that perfect resume is really showing you someone who carefully burnished his image or selectively chose projects which would not risk that beautiful façade. When you focus on perfect resumes, you are quite often weeding out the people who are willing to seek out challenges and push the envelope. In other words, you are screening out the people who are most likely to be out of the box thinkers! Far more important than someone who has never failed is the person who can fail and get back up again: as one of my jujitsu instructors once said, “The fight’s not over until you can’t get up.” The ability to fail and recover is a sign of optimism and resilience, critical attributes of developing a success driven mindset. Those attributes should be part of your definition of a qualified person.

The final aspect of the perfection paradox relates to the stages of team development that we discussed in chapter three.

Recall that teams in early developmental stages are very focused around conformity and appearances. There is a strong tendency toward a mentality of “what you see is what you get,” or, in this case, “what you see is what you look for.” A WYSIWYLF (pronounced wizzee wolf) may sound more dangerous than a WYSIWYG, and it is. Simply put, our image of the right person to hire is shaped by the people around us. We look for people who look like us or like our coworkers. A poor manager is unlikely to hire a good manager in large part because she doesn’t know what a good manager looks like! This part of the interplay between organizational culture and recruiting; we’ll go into that in more depth later in this chapter. Suffice it for the moment to say that even advanced teams can be trapped by what our organizational culture tells us is the image of the “right” person.

The net result of all these factors is a lack of faith that the hiring process will get the results we want.

Stephen Balzac is an expert on leadership and organizational development. A consultant, author, and professional speaker, he is president of 7 Steps Ahead, an organizational development firm focused on helping businesses get unstuck. Steve is the author of “The 36-Hour Course in Organizational Development,” published by McGraw-Hill, and a contributing author to volume one of “Ethics and Game Design: Teaching Values Through Play.” Steve’s latest book, “Organizational Psychology for Managers,” is due out from Springer in late 2013. For more information, or to sign up for Steve’s monthly newsletter, visit www.7stepsahead.com. You can also contact Steve at 978-298-5189 or steve@7stepsahead.com.

The Paradox of Perfection

This article was originally published in American Business Magazine.

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career; I’ve lost almost 300 games; 26 times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot— and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”– Michael Jordan

Ask practically any hiring manager if they’d hire someone who never considers alternatives, who refuses to take decisive action, who has never challenged themselves, and the answer will be, “No.”

The odd thing is, however, that those same managers are hiring exactly those people they said they’d never hire. Of course, they say they’re hiring people with strong track records, who don’t have a history of failure, who have never been responsible for something going wrong; the people, in short, with the perfect job histories.

But what they don’t do is take the time to understand just why that person looks so perfect. After all, isn’t it always better to hire someone who has never failed than to hire someone whose background includes unsuccessful projects?

Imagine if Michael Jordan’s coach had said, back when he first missed a game winning shot, “Hey Mikey, you missed that shot! You’re done.”

Far too often, the people who look so perfect are only perfect because they’ve never allowed themselves to attempt anything that would damage their image of perfection. They carefully choose their projects to make sure they’ll be successful, and they never challenge themselves or expose themselves to risk. Unfortunately, when something does go wrong, they also have no ability to cope.

Twelve years ago, I worked with someone who was telling me how he failed his black belt test in the martial art he studied. “It was the first test I’d ever failed,” he told me. “It was devastating.”

“How long ago did that happen?” I asked him.

“Two years.”

“So I assume you passed the second time.”

“What second time?” he asked.

After two years, his failure was still so overwhelming that he hadn’t gotten back on that metaphorical horse. As an engineer, he was not easy to work with because he had to be right all the time.

I was once called in to work with a manager who had a stellar track record, until something went wrong. He couldn’t cope. He kept telling me, “I’m not the sort of manager who allows something like that to happen.”

The resulting disconnect between his (mis)perception of himself and reality was overwhelming. The fellow was so stressed out that he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat and couldn’t think straight. The fact that he had never failed meant that he had no resilience. The mere possibility of failure was enough to send him into panic and make the odds of failure more likely. Yes, we did turn things around, and he’s a much more capable manager now than he ever was before.

When you want someone to embark on a risky project or take bold, decisive action, don’t look to the person with the perfect record who has never failed. If they haven’t taken risks or been bold before, why would they change just for you? Clearly what they’ve been doing worked for them—it got them praise, promotions and financial rewards.

Paradoxically, perhaps that person with the checkered past is exactly who you’re looking for. The person who misses that game-winning shot one day, improves their skills, and nails it the next time is the real winner. Success is about trying over and over and accepting the bobbles along the way. Unfortunately, the tendency on the part of many people is to view a mistake as total failure. This deprives them, and their managers, of the chance to improve and seek greater challenges.

Who would you rather trust when the stakes are high? The person with the perfect record, or the one who is the equivalent of Michael Jordan?