Selker Leadership

Success is not a random event, according to Malcolm Gladwell author of the best seller Outliers: The Story of Success. In the opening pages of this excellent book, Malcolm Gladwell tells a story about Italian immigrants who settled in Pennsylvania. The culture and community they established, their values, their extended families and many other factors turned out to be the source of their longevity. This isolated community died almost exclusively of old age while neighboring towns had high death rates due to heart attacks and the long list of diseases in our modern society. The Italian community, with its habits of caring for each other, its 22 community organizations in a town of less than 2000, and it’s success in healthy living set them apart as outliers. Their success, as a medical study revealed, was not due to personal health habits (diet, exercise, yoga), or genes but rather from the community they had created. This community shielded them from the normal stresses and pressures of the greater society.

Gladwell has written a book about men and women who do extraordinary things. He has also discovered that there is something profoundly wrong about the ways we measure success. As he examines hockey players, pilots, lawyers, geniuses and many other highly successful outliers, he concludes that individual personal traits have little to do with grand success. Yet during the time it takes to read this, corporate executives are committing millions of dollars to executive recruiting projects where the primary focus of the assessments will be on the individual personal traits that has led people to success in business.

People are hiring, placing, promoting, and creating programs for development based on models of personal competency and personality traits. They then, through mysterious forms of success calculus, reach conclusions about a person and their success potential. However, hiring mistakes continue to plague companies. The wrong people get promoted, the right people leave unexpectedly. And everyone suspects, as Gladwell did, that there is something wrong with the way we make these decisions. A close reading of the Gladwell research will cause most of us to wonder how we ever get anything right when it comes to making these decisions.

As it turns out, it is more important where we came from, when we were born and the levels of parenting and patronage that we received along the way that leads us to success. The communities that surrounded us, with particular values and influences from our birth through the critical years of our development, shape how we see ourselves, others and the world. Ultimately, these factors play the biggest role in helping to determine the circumstances we find ourselves in and how we respond to them. They truly are the big predictors of success and potential.

Given Gladwell’s research into this area, it is useful to ask, how can it be applied to interviews to make certain the right hiring decisions a made? This might result in formulating the following questions:

• How would you describe the values, culture, influences, and experiences of your family and the community that surrounded you growing up, and how have these impacted your life?
• What are the most important lessons you learned from your parents and grandparents?
• Who are the most important people that influenced your life over many years and how have they impacted what you have attempted to do and accomplished?
• If you were to write a book with the aphorisms, philosophical statements and principles that are most important to you in your life, what would some of them be?

Engaging with a candidate by asking these questions will provide tremendous insight into the success potential of a person. However, you must know how to listen carefully, and then make sense of the answers to get to the right conclusions. Lastly, you then need to be able to ground your conclusions in details of a person’s behavior.

What we learn from Gladwell is that our approach to understanding the background factors that breed success should be a significant part of assessing leaders before we hire or promote them. Further, the assessment must also seek to discover how well people maintain their success and develop it to even higher levels. Those leaders, who are consistently successful, also thrive best in communities with strong values and representative behavior.

But, in Gladwell’s book, understanding real success is a never ending quest. Determining who is highly successful and who has the potential to sustain success at work and in life is not established in a one hour interview or by the recommendation of others. Success, once more, is not a random event. Finding successful people, getting them on your team and building a community of success is also not random or good luck. You must understand at a deep level what you are both looking for, and trying to build. And then you need to apply this understanding to your interviewing and selection processes.