Move over, Team Anna: There's no need to recall leaders if you pick them right in the first place. Cheer up, Apple: Finding a replacement for Steve Jobs will be a cinch. RA (Recruitment Assessors) Two (Jeffrey Cohn and Jay Moran) will solve it all. Unfortunately, this book doesn’t provide “A Better Way to Evaluate Leadership Potential” that it promises.
Maybe the authors are personally good at picking good leaders and maybe they are not (we only have their claims to go by) but, if they have this skill, they lack either the intention or the ability to impart it to the readers of their book. Cohn and Moran rightly divide the problem of picking good leaders into “the what and the how”. They expend far too much effort in defending their own model of”the what” and provide very little usable advice on “the how”.
The book starts with the premise that the following seven attributes capture the essence of leadership: integrity, empathy, emotional intelligence, vision, judgment, courage and passion. The choice is neither particularly inspired nor controversial. As such, devoting a very substantial part of the book to explaining, defending and exemplifying these seven is a huge overkill with very little gain of conviction in the mind of the reader to show for it.
While we may accept the leadership attributes listed by Cohn and Moran — though not with the evangelical fervour they display (Exodus 20:3 providing obviously their favourite line in the Bible) — some of the definitions they use are not conventional. For example, they write: “Emotional intelligence basically refers to self-mastery”, which is much narrower than the conception people generally have of EI as being “the ability to identify, assess and control the emotions of oneself, of others and of groups”.
This leads Cohn and Moran to peculiar conclusions such as scoring Bill Clinton very low on EI (they make up by making him an exemplar of empathy). Speaking of examples, Cohn and Moran use a lot of word-count to provide character sketches and case-studies of one or two individuals who they think ideally demonstrate each of the attributes. These choices seem to have been dictated by the people to whom the authors had or could gain access. One would hope that no past, present or prospective clients of the authors were chosen for this hagiographic halo.
Having waded through the tediously tendentious defence and demonstration of each attribute, the reader can justifiably hope that the last part of each chapter — dedicated to assessing the attribute in question — will yield something which would justify the book’s claim and its $27.95 price tag. A hope as vain as finding pot-hole-free roads after a Mumbai monsoon. Less than a fifth of the length of each chapter contains the few specimen questions and standard assessment tools that the authors use to determine “whether a person possesses that particular attribute”.
The questions are sound but they should have occurred to any thoughtful interviewer. Moreover, neither the questions nor the generalities for interpreting them (e.g., “Rather than focus on the experience itself, we focus in our assessment role on the willingness and ability to learn from the experience and grow.”) address the fundamental challenges of senior level selection, which include:
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- Acquiring a large enough candidate-set with the requisite experience profile and interest / availability for the job in question to have the luxury of turning down candidates with one or more ‘attributional’ imperfections.
- Trading off between leadership attributes when no candidate has a ‘perfect 7’ (or 10).
The normal way to mitigate the last problem is to demand evidence for each claim from the executive’s past record. Cohn and Moran feel this can too easily be faked and prefer to seek responses to hypothetical scenarios which, they believe, candidates cannot possibly anticipate. Their argument is not convincing. While posing hypothetical situations has a valuable place in an interviewer’s armoury, it is even more susceptible to fudging.
As with the questions, the manner in which the authors use some of the assessment tools raise issues. Their way of gaining 360-degree feedback (“We invite a group of the candidate’s peers, subordinates, or former bosses into the same meeting … and ask open-ended questions …”) is fraught with hazard for participants providing feedback for internal selection and clearly infeasible for external candidates.
Neither the book nor this review will stop anyone from being bad at picking good leaders but at least the review should prevent readers from making a similar mistake with books.
— The reviewer is CEO, Banner Global Consulting
WHY ARE WE BAD AT PICKING GOOD LEADERS?
A Better Way to Evaluate Leadership Potential
Jeffrey Cohn and Jay Moran
Jossey-Bass 2011
279 pages; $27.95