In the last essay I argued that a certificate records the completion of a process and says nothing about whether judgement was formed. I left the story at the point where the file has been tidied and somebody has been given the job.
How they arrived matters less than we assume. They may have been promoted. They may have moved sideways during a restructure, into a role nobody quite remembers deciding to create. They may have been hired from outside entirely, on the strength of a document. All three are appointments, and all three fail in the same way, because two errors are compounding.
The first is that the appointment was made on a signal that does not predict performance in the role. The second is that, the gap being obvious to everyone within a quarter, a course is bought to close it, and the course cannot. Each error is survivable alone. Together they produce the manager everyone in the organisation can identify and nobody can explain.
The Best Salesperson
Let’s start with promotion, because that is where the evidence is cleanest, and because almost nobody in management seems to have read it.
Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue examined the personnel records of sales workers across 131 firms, tracking who got promoted into management and what happened to their teams afterwards (Benson et al., 2019). Sales performance turned out to be a powerful predictor of promotion. It was also a predictor of decline in the subsequent performance of the people they went on to manage. The better someone was at selling, the more likely they were to be made a manager, and the worse their team tended to do once they were promoted.
The firms were choosing a manager based on the signal that was sitting in front of them. Sales figures are exact, current, and available on a Tuesday. Whether someone can develop another person is none of those things, and the promotion committee meets on Tuesday. In short, the appointment committee was making a category error and promoting based on ‘doer’ signalling rather than the judgement required to lead a team.
