Stealing the Corner Office

The Winning Career Strategies They'll Never Teach You in Business School

Brendan Reid

• Publisher: Career Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781601634412
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Stealing the Corner Office is mandatory reading for smart, hardworking managers who always wonder why their seemingly incompetent superiors are so successful. It is a unique collection of controversial but highly effective tactics for middle managers and aspiring executives who want to learn the real secrets for moving up the corporate ladder. Unlike virtually all other business books—which are based on the assumption that corporations are logical and fair— Stealing the Corner Office explores the unconventional tactics people less competent than you use to get ahead and stay ahead. It is your proven playbook to thrive and win in an imperfect corporate world. Stealing the Corner Office will teach you:

• How incompetent people so often get ahead, and what you can learn from them.
  
• How to make universally flawed corporate policies work in your favor.
  
• Why showing too much passion for your ideas can be career suicide.
  
• Why delivering results should never be your highest priority.These and many more controversial tactics will change the way you look at your career and how you manage projects, people, and priorities. Apply the 10 principles in Stealing the Corner Office and watch your career take off!

Chapter 1

Your Playing Field: Dispelling the Myth of Meritocracy

The biggest reason talented managers don’t advance as quickly as they should is that they don’t fully understand the playing field. We make false assumptions about corporate dynamics, causing us to build suboptimal strategies for our advancement.

A good starting point is some clarity on how corporations really operate and what really drives decision-making in a company. We all want to believe companies act with logic and fairness. We want to believe they identify and reward hard work, talent, and passion with career advancement. We build our career strategies based upon these assumptions. Unfortunately, that is not how corporations work in reality.

The Corporation I Know

In this first chapter, we’re going to look at a set of little known, albeit universal, corporate dynamics that stand in stark contrast to the widely held perceptions of how companies operate. These dynamics conspire to make conventional career tactics ineffective. They are the reason hard work, reliability, and talent do not, in and of themselves, form a winning strategy in the corporate world I know. In actual fact, most corporations function in a manner that actually favors the Incompetent Executive. Let’s examine the playing field more closely so we can build a career strategy designed to win in the real environment we’re playing in.

We speak about companies with a certain assumed respect for operational integrity and logic. The media reports on corporate strategy and execution as though they’re mechanical and well-conceived. But it doesn’t take more than about six months working in middle management inside a typical corporation to realize that all companies are badly flawed from top to bottom. On the inside we see just how bad things really are. Companies I’ve worked with almost universally operate with no logic or memory whatsoever. Let me give you some classic examples:

Every couple of years, we need to retrain the sales force on some new selling methodology so we don’t have to admit we have hired weak talent.

Every three years, it’s mandatory to re-launch the partner program to let the world know you’re a partner-friendly company—that will make all the difference.

And at least once every five years, we need to bring all the regional teams under one global umbrella under the guise of building international go-to-market consistency.

It’s a ridiculous cycle, ostensibly about building excellence, but in reality about saving face and distributing blame. Launching the new sales partner program is not about improving distribution or market share. It’s about deflecting failure toward some faceless program instead of at ourselves. Retraining the sales force is not about making them more effective. It’s about buying a few more quarters before we get fired. Juggling reporting structures has nothing to do with globalization or brand consistency. It’s about demonstrating a reason other than incompetence for our failure. We make these decisions because we are human. Logic and merit are not the driving forces.

Corporations, after all, are comprised of people, and people care about personal security over everything else—just ask Maslow.¹ People are also not logical by nature; they’re instinctive. They opt for self-preservation over and above any notion of corporate allegiance. This is why companies execute completely in spite of themselves. They make bad decision after bad decision at a micro level, and then launch big changes and programs to simultaneously excuse and correct them. Although this reality can be disturbing, it has major implications on your strategy for career success.

Early on in our careers, we assume a certain logical order of things in business. We use terms like meritocracy² to describe how things should work. Should? Yes. Do? No. If a widespread corporate meritocracy exists, then the scoring system it uses runs counter to any rational definition of merit. With this backdrop in mind, you can see why an unconventional approach to your career might begin to make sense.

We all have examples of half-witted executives who reap all the trimmings of success with seemingly no perceivable talent or passion. We tell ourselves it’s unfair or that it’s an aberration, or that one day our hard work will pay off. But that’s the wrong way to look at the phenomenon. Instead of dismissing the Incompetent Executive, and blindly continuing with the same formula that got us to where we are, we need to look a little deeper at their behaviors. We need to steal their secrets for our own career playbooks.

How They Get In

When your company first started, it probably wasn’t full of Incompetent Executives. More than likely, it was started by a few very smart, savvy, and energetic professionals with a great vision. So then, why now, when you look around, do you see so many executives who seem to have magically risen to the top without much in the way of expertise or enthusiasm?

It starts with the way companies hire and manage people through the corporate hierarchy. After all, if companies didn’t hire and promote Incompetent Executives, this phenomenon wouldn’t exist. At the risk of oversimplifying, the basic human need for self-preservation is the catalyst for a set of illogical human resource practices that create an entry point and incubator for Incompetent Executives. Let me walk you through a few of our most important and flawed hiring principles.

“Fit With the Team”

When it comes to hiring, “fit” is a farcical rationale that benefits Incompetent Executives at the expense of Smart-but-Stationary Managers. If you see an Incompetent Executive in your company, it’s highly likely they were hired or promoted because they were a good fit. This is a common line of misguided thinking we use to make hiring people we like on a personal level seem like sound business logic. Every day, we see companies hire and fire for fit. We read stories about Google and Facebook, and half pipes and graffiti artists, and we use these images of cultural harmony to justify suboptimal hiring choices.

When we hire, we instinctively want to avoid people who are smarter than we are and who could threaten our success. That is a very human aspect of human resources we too often ignore. We gravitate toward people who will make us happier and make our existence more enriching. So we hire people like us. The result is companies make bad hiring decisions over and over again, applying the same flawed logic. Making matters worse, this so-called logic also assumes “fit with our culture” is actually a good thing. That philosophy is based on the farfetched assumption that the current culture is actually positive and one we want to reproduce. As it happens, I’ve worked at two truly toxic companies that spouted the principle of “maintaining our culture” like a religion, even though it was obvious that the culture being fought so hard to preserve was inherently dysfunctional.

“Fit with the team” is a never-ending cycle, as you can surmise. We hire incompetent people because they will be a great fit. Then we repeat over and over and over again, as fitting with incompetence begets more incompetence. The culture inevitably becomes one designed to feed mediocrity instead of meritocracy.

“The Consensus Choice”

Consensus hiring can kill a company, but it’s great if you’re an Incompetent Executive. I don’t know exactly when it began, but these days you can’t bring anyone on board without four or five additional people interviewing the candidate and ultimately signing off.

It is always easy to find a reason why one more person should have input into a hiring decision. Some companies, who oversubscribe to dotcom human resources best practices, go to extremes in support of consensus hiring. A friend of mine recently had to interview in front of a 25-person panel to get a check-in job at WestJet Airlines. This is the epitome of misguided consensus hiring. What are the chances 25 people could ever agree on a truly transformative candidate? In practice, large group hiring always favors the most likeable candidate or the candidate least likely to create discomfort or change.

Somewhere along the way, we’ve distorted much of the great thinking by Patrick Lencioni³ and other organizational behavior leaders who espouse the value of maintaining controls over who comes into the company. We tell ourselves that having more people comfortable with a candidate means they are more likely to be a positive addition to the culture. But this is flawed logic. In practice, hiring by consensus accomplishes precisely the opposite of what it’s attempting to emulate.

Ask yourself honestly: When did group consensus ever deliver real greatness? And let me make an important distinction: I’m speaking about consensus not collaboration; they’re very different animals.

We’ve all seen the Asch research studies⁴ where a group of five people is sent into a room. They are presented several line segments; they are obviously different lengths. Prior to entering the room, the moderator tells four of the individuals to lie about which line is longer. When the four confederates shockingly point to the shorter line, the unknowing fifth guy reluctantly agrees. Nearly 35 percent of candidates tested conformed at least once with an obviously incorrect answer. Groups don’t make good choices. Groups for collaboration—yes, groups for decision making—no.

By the same logic it stands to reason if five people interview a group of candidates you’re going to see conformity in action. You will get a decision that is the least disruptive to the current team and the most serving to the interests of the voters’ own careers. With consensus hiring you’ll rarely get a candidate who will push the team to the next level or cause healthy conflict. You will rarely get what’s best for the company. All we accomplish through consensus hiring is to multiply the human self-preservation dynamic—favoring the Incompetent Executive once again.

“More Experienced”

Experience is a word we too often misuse to justify hiring weak talent to protect us when they inevitably fail. We fall back on experience because identifying real talent in people is too hard. In practice, however, the most experienced candidate is almost never the best candidate. In fact, one of the most common characteristics I see in Incompetent Executives is over-qualification. Too much experience should be a hiring red flag, but in most cases it serves as a trap for hiring committees and managers. Most Incompetent Executives have a lot of experience, but not the good kind, I can assure you. It’s the kind of experience companies mistakenly over-value, over and over again. Let me give you an example.

I’ll post a job opening for a mid-level marketing coordinator and gather a variety of candidates for consideration. Each person involved in the hiring decision will review resumes and perform a basic level of due diligence. Without fail, everyone will point to the candidate with 15 years’ experience as the obvious choice. I want nothing to do with this candidate. More often than not, the most significant thing this candidate will bring to the table is rigidity. Clearly they have not demonstrated the flexibility, leadership, or talent to advance beyond this level. But as clear as this is to me, nobody else thinks this way. Nine times out of 10, the inept (albeit experienced) candidate gets the job.

Overvaluing experience in hiring very much follows the old purchasing axiom: “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” Hiring the most experienced candidate is the safe play. And people make defensive hiring decisions. You can’t get faulted for choosing the candidate everybody knew was most experienced—so you do it. You tell yourself the less experienced but more talented candidate was a little green or would require too much hand-holding. In our hearts, we know this is untrue but we do it anyway. And so, the perpetual cycle favoring the Incompetent Executive continues.

How They Get to the Top

Our first three examples focused on hiring practices because that is what kick-starts the flow of people through the corporate food chain. These examples showed how Incompetent Executives get into the organization in the first place. Let me give you a few more examples. This time, we’ll dig into how promotions occur and how vacancies are filled. Again we will see some very human corporate dynamics at play that favor the Incompetent Executive.

“Promote from Within”

“Promoting from within” is a policy disguised as employee loyalty but is really about cost and conflict avoidance. It is most widespread at the executive level where recruitment costs and scrutiny are highest. It is very common to see companies promote an internal employee without conducting a serious external candidate search when vacancies exist. I would go so far as to say it’s the predominant behavior in practice. If you’ve ever interviewed for a job but couldn’t shake the feeling they already had an internal candidate selected, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

On the one hand, “promote from within” can have some clear benefits for staff morale and motivation. It’s good for the company to demonstrate feasible career mobility for employees. On the other hand, much of the time when we opt for internal promotion without a serious external search, we favor the Incompetent Executive once again.

Though the “promote from within” policy masquerades as beneficial for employees, the question is, Which employees does it actually benefit? In my experience “promote from within” only perpetuates the very same hiring mistakes that cause incompetent people to get into the organization in the first place. “Consensus,” “experience,” and “fit” are all equally misapplied in the promotion scenario as well. The result is the Incompetent Executive gets promoted, and the Smart-but-Stationary Manager gets left behind.

“Hit the Ground Running”

“Hit the ground running” is fundamentally flawed as a rationale for promotion. It takes a ridiculously short-term perspective on staffing. Ridiculous or not, we’ve all heard this line a thousand times, and if you’re honest with yourself, you’ve probably said it a few times, too. Against any logic I can muster, “hit the ground running” seemingly values the first 30 to 90 days over the balance of an entire career.

How many times have you heard managers justify promoting an inferior candidate based on how fast the person can “hit the ground running”? I’ve probably heard it three times in the last six months. We fool ourselves into thinking some magic is going to happen in the first 90 days. But have you ever seen that happen in practice? In reality, a candidate cannot create meaningful change within 90 days unless he or she is reckless and the change is negative.

“Hit the ground running” favors familiarity over effectiveness. But when has familiarity ever led to growth or evolution? The most familiar candidates are too often part of the problem in the first place. But as much as it baffles the mind, this is a ubiquitous practice that favors the Incompetent Executive once again. Rather than diligently search for the most talented candidate, we promote someone we’re comfortable with. And so the Incompetent Executive moves up another rung on the corporate ladder.

“Top Contributor to Manager”

Corporations have a natural predisposition to promote top individual contributors into management positions. This is the reason you can never figure out how the airhead from your high school is running your global sales organization. This practice is very common in sales and engineering, and I’ve seen it cripple more than one company.

For some reason, we always feel pressure to promote great individual stars. You know who they are: the coding wizard who knows every inch of your technology and spent most of last year living in his mom’s basement, the smooth-talking sales guy who crushes his quota every quarter and has bedded most of the strippers on the Eastern seaboard. Inevitably, we promote these people into management roles against our better judgment. We relegate them from valuable contributors into incapable managers. In some misguided sense of obligation, we “reward” great individual performers with management responsibilities—much of the time against their own wishes.

We must believe deep down inside that if a great individual contributor is leading a team, some amount of his or her mojo is bound to trickle down to the staff. But inevitably we see trickle-down mojo proven to be inherently flawed. Great individual contributors very often make poor managers. The personal mojo they possess rarely trickles down through the team. This is a case where the dynamics of a corporation actually work to transform competent contributors into Incompetent Executives.

Okay, Now What?

What we’ve seen so far is that the very human nature of companies creates the breeding ground for successful albeit Incompetent Executives. This is in stark contrast to how mechanical and logical the media portrays corporations to be. But it’s also no less true, as your own personal experienc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Author’s Note
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Your Playing Field: Dispelling the Myth of Meritocracy
• Chapter 2: Your Mindset: Why You Have All the Wrong Priorities
• Chapter 3: Your Competition: Who’s Really Getting Ahead in Your Company?
• Chapter 4: Your Playbook: 7 Lessons to Steal the Corner Office
• Chapter 5: Checkpoint: Your New Career Perspective
• Chapter 6: Action: What You Can Do Tomorrow to Get Ahead
• Conclusion: Your Wakeup Call: Now, Make It Happen
• Appendix: Your New Career Playbook
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author