What Happens When You Hire Somebody You Shouldn't

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And let's continue to grow together.

Today, we're going to take a close look at what things look like when critical thinking is abandoned or rejected. acted.

But first, here's a caveat for what we're going to discuss today. We at Vantage Point take great pains to make sure our audience understands that we are not political, just critical.

We firmly maintain that position, but it's impossible to continue this podcast in today's environment without stepping onto politically charged grounds at some point or another.

We're not afraid to do that because we're doing it in a critical nature, not a political nature, in a purely critical and objective way.

That's always been our modus operandi and we maintain our promise to keep it so.

So let us begin with this premise.

If we will think about the consequences of our decisions before we make them, we will make better decisions. Let me repeat that. If we will think about the consequences of our decisions before we make them, we will make better decisions.

I once asked management and leadership teams in five different major corporations to assess that statement and to either dispute it or support it.

128 respondents were unanimous.

Not a difficult result to predict.

All 128 agreed If we would think about our decisions before we make them We will make better decisions Also in my long career I've hired several dozen Managers and managers and above Internally And as a consultant to a major corporate client Served on their executive search committee For their next CEO All this being said, why do we make decisions and continue to make decisions that range anywhere from silly and mildly embarrassing to klutzy and costly to dangerous and disastrous? Why do we continue to act against our own best interests?

Tantalizing enough question So let me give you an example I'm going to ask you to look at a candidate for a job And ask you if you would hire this candidate So suppose you're on the executive search committee To find and hire the next CEO and chairman Of your organization The largest organization in the world with the largest payroll, the largest budget, the largest infrastructure, the most locations, and the widest global reach.

You export your products to more markets in the world and buy from more markets in the world than any other.

Your success, both current and future, depends on excellent relations around the world.

Your multitude of suppliers, full-time employees, entities, contractors, will depend on this leader being a great face of the organization.

It would also be nice if your new leader were genteel, well-read, scholarly, creative, charismatic, and worldly, not to mention supportive of good causes, appreciative of multiculturalism, ethical, and always self-aware of setting a good example.

Oh, yeah, the criminal and background checks would be nice if they were clean, too.

Would you recommend that the search committee give the job to someone who is none of the above?

Someone who has absolutely no qualifications and no relevant experience for the job none in essence that's what the american people did not once but twice when acting as the hiring committee for the organization we elected someone as our ceo not once twice Now let me stop right here and remind you that it doesn't matter one hoot who the person is we're talking about, which side of the aisle he comes from, or where he wants to take us, this discussion wouldn't change one iota.

Politics aside this is a purely objective and factual picture and statement and what do we have to show for it a mess one gigantic mess our management team unqualified for the most part for the jobs they're in is fighting each other instead of our enemies our executive team is engaged in gluttonous self-aggrandizement, and the rest of us stand and watch in horror while, quote, the deconstruction of the administrative state, unquote, proceeds all around.

Alliances are being abandoned. Partnerships are being eroded. Major countries around the world have begun pulling their gold deposits and parking them elsewhere, a very troubling sign. Furthermore, there's a full-on betrayal of nearly two centuries worth of progress in science, medicine, research, industry, education, business, and a full-throated attack on the single most dear ideal of all, public education.

Which more than anything else Built this country A highly unpopular war is draining our economy To the tune of a billion dollars a day And it's not only costing us, it's weakening us But we voted for this, not once Twice While all of this has been going on There was a growing, insidious, creeping resentment and hatred toward the concept of being woke.

More on that later.

This is a good time for us to stop and ask, what is a leader?

If we're talking about and critiquing a leader, we should have some set of standards against which to measure this person.

In 2003, when I was appointed to teach the executive communication and leadership course in the MBA program at FDU, before I stepped in the classroom the first day, I thought it would be a very good idea to figure out how to measure this person, how to define this picture, how to envision this person.

Did a lot of research a lot of interviewing and here's what i came up with this definition which i offered to a couple of hundred people over the next couple years professors managers hr people other executives leaders, seem to receive round support.

A person is a leader who has and articulates a vision, creates change, inspires others to achieve mutual goals, and builds and maintains effective working relationships, all while setting the highest standards of ethical thought and behavior.

There are six elements to this. having a vision, articulating a vision, creating change, inspiring others to achieve mutual goals. Now let me stop right there for a second.

When I first wrote this, I wrote not inspiring others, but motivating others.

Then I realized that wasn't good enough.

If you need me to motivate you i don't want you working for me you need to motivate yourself what i'm going to try to do is inspire you so great leaders inspire think of john kennedy saying ask not what this country can do for you but what you can do for your country and so not only do we need to inspire others and follow our own model of leadership behavior.

Think about this for a second.

Once you achieve that, you have to maintain that.

Irving Berlin used to say, the trouble with success is you got to keep on being a success.

And if anybody knew about success, it was the composer of more than 1,500 songs, including God Bless America, White Christmas, and Alexander's Ragtime Band, and 1,497 more.

Interesting aside, that God Bless America was written by an immigrant, a Jewish immigrant no less, who also wrote White Christmas.

He had written those songs before he ever stepped foot in the United States.

Kind of cool, huh?

But in order to move ahead and be successful, we have to continue to step into the unknown. Success is charging into the unknown, wandering into the unknown, accepting being in the unknown, and making something out of it.

We have to be willing to continue to do it and we have to be able to deal with things that are vague and hard to understand at first this is known as the wilderness experience and is very difficult for most people to deal with well if we're going to reject that which is new then we made a choice between stepping forward into progress versus falling backward into safety which I will discuss in the coming weeks, we let ourselves fall back into comfort by criticizing it.

And that's how we got to the point where we criticize being woke.

If you notice, those people who criticize those of us who consider ourselves woke in one dimension or another are all rejecting newness, innovation, new values, attitudes and beliefs and letting themselves fall back into the comfort of what they know.

And so they criticize those of us who are not afraid to do that.

Otherwise the whole thing doesn't make political of psychological sense for two centuries this country was built from his intellectual founders like ralph waldo emerson literary geniuses like the fireside poets mark twain f scott fitzgerald ernest hemingway Robert Frost and Maya Angelou and the way those people who are opposed to being woke is to step backward and to stifle education the purpose of which according to Malcolm Forbes a century ago to turn an empty mind This serves a free state well and fights against the suppressive efforts of those who have other hidden and nefarious agendas.

If I can cut public education budgets, ban books, cut cultural and multicultural programs and foreign language instruction, If I can reduce or even eliminate Title IX equality, rewrite key sections of history books, not to mention the Constitution, exclude or even forbid the teaching of civics and civic responsibility as part of the curriculum, I can go a long way to preventing the progress that would be difficult to deal with if we had to.

Then I just plain won't have to deal with it, whether or not it cuts off anyone else's rights to achieve their own goals.

There it is.

Choke off the education and start in the early grades, fourth and fifth, even earlier if possible.

What are we doing at that point? We're killing critical thinking, which is where it begins to develop.

And when a significant plurality gets a hold of those issues, the battle is joined.

To support my point, I found it interesting and revealing statistic.

You know, we identify ourselves as red and blue states, which is something that came into practice in the 1976 presidential election.

Startlingly, According to data from the United States Census Bureau this year, can't get any more current than that.

The top 15 states today in educational achievement by degree are all what we recognize as reliably blue states.

Now, I don't intend to get into this battle back and forth between red and blue states because that absolutely does nobody any good, but it does help define the problem.

It gives us a point of reference.

Besides, this isn't about the politics of the person in power and the people in power, not for one second. This is about the skills and experience and capability of those people.

If the purpose of education is to help create an open mind, incumbent is the effort to build critical thinking, and we're doing just the opposite.

Now I could go on and on for pages and pages and pages for hours of discussing this, but I think the point is made, and made well, when we take a look at those education achievement levels.

The correlation is irrefutable.

All it takes is a little critical thinking.

Well i'm exhausted let's take a break be back in a half a minute before we go on i want to take a moment to thank the people who make this show possible vantage point is brought to you by single task the team that produces this show it is also brought to you by cardam consulting this show is also brought to you by my friend and a sponsor of this show from day one steven and bozer thank you all of you for your support and please support them the way they support us i am back well listed in the half a minute and a half if you will with a thought from a great mind first then i'll get to the aphorisms there's a woman that i became aware of 20 years ago who i would love to meet it's going to be one of the people I probably will wind up not meeting in my life.

Professor Anneli Kiel of the University of Bremen in Germany said, life is not a program. It seems to be an invitation, a challenge to take the next step into the darkness and uncertainty of creativity.

If you go into it knowing that it's uncertain, there's where your creativity begins.

Anna Lee Keel.

And for the three unrelated aphorisms today, doing what you needed to do yesterday is no reason to take the day off today.

Don't sit on your laurels.

Aphorism number two.

Here's how I know I'm getting old.

I used to get targeted ads from Viagra.

Now, it's no more of that. It's walk-in bathtubs and prepaid funerals.

And aphorism number three what you can make out of all of that is asking yourself this question isn't it amazing that there are more horses asses in the world than there are horses thanks for listening today we'll be back at you in a few days we're going to be talking more about the role of education in helping us make better decisions But remember, if we will think about the consequences of our decisions before we make them, we will make better decisions. Until then, keep questioning, keep learning, and keep thinking critically.