How not to Hire the ‘Accidental Manager’

Melissa Twigg’s article in The Telegraph, ‘Managers are everywhere and they’re mostly bad’, caught my attention. It captured both how much hiring matters and how easily it goes wrong. Meet the ‘Accidental Manager’.

The ‘Accidental Manager’ is handed a leadership role on the strength of a strong technical skill set, rather than the softer, harder-to-judge leadership skills the job actually needs.

This is a well-documented idea, close to ‘the Peter Principle’, from the 1969 book by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull, which holds that ‘in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence’. Someone good at their job earns a promotion into a different one that calls for different skills, often management, and in time reaches a role they cannot do well.

Hiring the wrong manager is especially damaging, because the cost runs well beyond one team member’s productivity. Leaders set the vision and the tone, support the people who need it, and reward those who earn it; they work out what the business needs and how to get there, while keeping a motivated team that wants to stay. It is not an easy task, and not everyone can do it.

The Telegraph piece notes that in Britain only 27% of employees consider their managers highly effective, drawing on research by the Chartered Management Institute, whose study links bad managers and poor workplace culture to one in three staff leaving.

Many ‘Accidental Managers’, the article says, are internal promotions. Promoting from within makes sense: cultural fit is proven, and good performance is rewarded. But it does not follow that the person has the soft skills to lead. External hiring falls into a related trap, weighing technical skill over the behavioural competencies leadership needs, mainly because technical skill is the easier thing to assess at interview.

Teams would do better, and more people would stay, if managers were hired for the right leadership skills in the first place. That is why our Best-Fit Search™ process weighs a candidate’s behaviours and personal style as heavily as their track record, and why most hires that fail do so on fit rather than competence.

We suggest several things to weigh when making a leadership hire.

• Look externally as well as internally. Comparing external candidates sharpens your sense of the skills available, even if you settle on the internal candidate in the end.
• Use personality profiling. Ask internal and external candidates alike to complete a profile against the skills you are hiring for. It is not a tool to rule people out, but a way to see where their strengths lie and where they will need support, and it adds objectivity to a process that is otherwise subjective. It also shows how natural a fit the role is for the individual, which affects how well, and how long, they are likely to do it. This sits at the heart of our Best-Fit Assessment.
• Reference early, not only at the end. Reference checks with former colleagues are the surest way to read how someone leads. Take informal references early and more formal ones later; there is little point running a long process only for a closing reference to surface a problem that ends it.
• Gather 360-degree feedback for internal candidates. Focus it on style, coachability, emotional intelligence and temperament.
• Define the profile and the culture first. Be clear about the professional skills and management style you want, and ask about them. Company culture dictates which leadership style works best, which in turn shapes the skills and behaviours to look for; a search firm can help you set the profile and get the most from an interview.
• If an ‘Accidental Manager’ is already in place, invest in them. Training, mentoring and coaching matter for anyone stepping up into a broader role, and good onboarding makes that step far more likely to succeed.

If you would like to discuss how our Best-Fit Search™ process could help you evaluate internal and external candidates for leadership roles, please contact us at hello@godliman.com.