Left unsaid: This is incredibly hard to do well.
Even if you base your hiring on solid evidence of past successes, you're never going to know for sure whether the person is going to be able to achieve the same sorts of successes within your organization, with its own unique culture, structure, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, etc.
It's made all the more difficult by the fact that you have to be able to distinguish between true leaders and those who have ascended the corporate ladder through Batesian mimicry (basically by superficially resembling true leaders). So it's really tricky to tell one from the other under the constrained environment of an job interview.
Previous employer bought this line and was drowning in an excess of leadership. Turns out you do actually need good managers.
Need both in a healthy team.
‘Hire leaders’ appeals to teams that lack direction. ‘Hire managers’ appeals to teams without discipline.
The common theme in both of the successful methods is that the candidate's leadership ability has already been observed. And if they already work for you, then they have a value adding position they can revert to if they turn out not to be a great leader.
The only thing to be said is that every company is unique at a unique point in time and space. Very little truly actionable feedback is to be learned from either successes or failures of the past.
You are on your own.
Maybe the scary truth surely is that we are always on our own, and our longing for security and familiarity draws us to a sort of pareidolia - seeing patterns where there are probably none. Add to that a survivorship bias of a few people who succeeded and possibly assign causation to the correlation of having succeeded after following the previously mentioned articulations.
It’s late here! I’ll read this comment once again in the morning and see if it makes any sense or if the HN pitchforks are out for me ;)
https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comments/1fgv248/fuck_founder_...
