Companies often fall into the trap of believing they can hire some external person to be their salvation – a shining knight who will lead them out of the darkness and into the promised land. There are times when this works, but in my experience those are overwhelmingly outnumbered by the failures. Why? And can we learn something from the failures to try and avoid them?
The idea is very appealing. If we as an organization are failing – maybe we are getting creamed by some competitor, or our formerly successful product is moldering into obsolescence and we can’t seem to get with the program on a modern reinvention of it. Shouldn’t we invigorate the tired old blood in the team with a turbo-shot of new thinking? Well, maybe. But if we do, we’d better think about the many ways that this tends to fail.
Internal Pathology
We might be failing because of a systemic problem within the company. This problem might be organizational (there is no team that cleanly owns the charter, so it keeps falling between groups), personal (somebody influential and passionate is preventing us from pursuing a workable strategy), failure of execution (the team that owns it isn’t healthy or effective), failure to focus (the team that owns the problem fundamentally doesn’t care about solving it), or strategic (the team gets pushed by company leaders into building overly general solutions that collapse of their own weight).
Fixing these problems can require a lot of organizational savvy and trust from the rest of the company; a newcomer is often much less capable of solving them than a seasoned employee. Add to that the burden of expectations, and you have a situation designed to create failure.
Teacher’s Pet
Many times, I’ve watched a senior person get frustrated with a team, so they stick in some new blood and hope for the best. The team can resent the newcomer as a teacher’s pet or “golden child” who hasn’t paid any dues. Who are they to come in and start shooting off their mouth, without knowing anything about the team or the product?
For example, a friend of mine was hired by the president of a division to come in and shake things up in a new direction. My friend gave an exciting pitch about the opportunities the team had and wasn’t taking advantage of. He was put inside a group that had no buy-in to those new ideas, and which took its cue from somebody who had helped create the division and been responsible for some of its great successes. Who also wasn’t bought in. How receptive do you think the team was to my friend’s ideas? Right, zero. It was a massively frustrating experience for him and a waste of energy for the team, which of course went on to do exactly as it had before.
Cultural Rejection
Teams can be a lot like the immune system, which “will try to destroy or neutralize any antigen that is recognized as a foreign and potentially harmful invader.” People coming into the team, especially people brought in because they think differently and aren’t bound by the dominant assumptions shared by everyone else, are just bristling with antigens. They use different language and terminology, they say things that seem off-key. Often the instinctive rejection is so strong that their ideas don’t get a fair hearing.
Missing Key Skills
Having worked at both startups and large companies, I know how deeply different the success factors can be in those two environments. People who flourish in a smaller community don’t always have (or value!) the skills to negotiate the internal landscape of a large company. A big company might hire somebody who was winning, and the big company hoped that this person can transform its efforts. If I’m that new person, why would I abandon my successful approach and adopt ideas from this team that has failed? What could they have to teach me?
The problem is that the way you run an independent team for success, and the way you run a team inside of a big company, is quite different. There is some overlap, but there is a lot of non-overlap. As the new person, I have a lot to learn. It’s very hard to figure out which traits I bring that are uniquely valuable and must be preserved, and which ones I have to supplement or replace in order to be effective in my new environment.
Wrap Up
I’m certainly not advocating that companies refuse to bring in new blood – it is crucial that they do. But those people, especially if they are brought in to turn around a failing situation, have to negotiate a minefield. The company needs to think hard about whether the problem it has is one that an outsider is really equipped to solve. And it can’t expect that outsider to solve it alone – he or she is likely to need seasoned partners who can help translate that new perspective into a form that others can understand and act on. Paladins seem like lone crusaders, but they wouldn’t have gotten very far without a host of supporters ranging from squires to armorers (not to mention the most important one – their horse!). Before you try to hire one, make sure it’s what you really need … and don’t leave them unmounted and unsupported, or you are likely to have a bruised and grumpy knight on your hands pretty soon.
Force Multiplier 
Leave a Reply