The Corner Office: How Top CEOs Made It and How You Can Too. Adam Bryant
Читать онлайн книгу.
you to progress faster.”
He elaborated on this quality, and discussed how he tries to learn in interviews whether a job candidate has it.
“You learn a lot very quickly about managing in difficult situations,” he said. “One of the things that makes you see the world differently and forms you as an individual is if you’ve had to rely on your own wit and resources. If you’ve had a challenging upbringing, I think that’s part of it. I think rugby is another one because there’s no hiding place. It’s a physical confrontation, and there’s a moment of truth where you’re going to be tested in a game. Everybody sees you, even though it’s being done at high speed, and everybody knows whether you’re the type to back down or stand up. It’s never talked about, but everybody knows. And more than anything you know whether you’re that type or the other type.
“If I’m recruiting people for very senior positions, I will delve quite extensively into their personal lives. I will look into how many times in their life they’ve been seriously tested emotionally, physically—where they’ve had to stand on their own feet and deal with something that they couldn’t be prepared for. That could be in the business context. It could be in the family context, social context. And the ones who are the best, I’ve found, are the people who have had to confront something very difficult, and they’re the people you can rely on when the going gets really tough because they’ve been there, and they know what they can do.”
For some companies and organizations, this quality is so important that they build their hiring pro cess around it.
Every year, Teach for America sends its new recruits into often difficult school and classroom situations. The organization, founded in 1990 by Wendy Kopp, has learned how to screen for people who are likely to succeed in settings where the odds are stacked against them.
“We’ve done a lot of research to look at the personal characteristics that differentiate the people among our teachers who are the most successful,” said Kopp. “And the most predictive trait is still demonstrated achievement. But then there are a set of personal characteristics, and the number one most predictive trait is perseverance, or what we would call internal locus of control. People who, in the context of a challenge—and you can’t see it unless you’re in the context of a challenge—have the instinct to figure out what they can control, and to own it, rather than to blame everyone else in the system. And you can see why in this case. Kids, kids’ families, the system—there are so many people to blame. And yet you’ll go into the schools and you’ll see people teaching in the same hallway, some of whom have that mentality of ‘it’s not possible to succeed here,’ and others who are just prevailing against it all. And it’s so much about that mindset—the internal locus of control, and the instinct to stay optimistic in the face of a challenge.”
Accenture, the giant consulting firm, has made a science of trying to assess whether candidates have this quality. William D. Green, the CEO of Accenture, said the company considers screening job candidates a core competency, and has developed a system called “critical behavior interviewing” to find the right people. Accenture gets roughly two million résumés a year, and hires between 40,000 and 60,000 people. If it hires well, that gives it a huge competitive advantage. Here’s Green explaining Accenture’s critical behavior interviewing pro cess:
“It’s based on the premise that past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior. Essentially what we’re looking for is, have you faced any adversity and what did you do about it? We also know the profile of successful Accenture people, and how do we learn from the people we have who have stayed, learned, grown, and become great leaders, and how do we push that back into the recruiting pro cess to find the best matches for Accenture?
“If you get down to it, it’s what have you learned, what have you demonstrated, what behaviors do you have? Have you shown intuition? Have you shown the ability to synthesize and act? Have you shown the ability to step up and make a choice? How have you dealt with the hand in front of you, played it out?”
Green told a story of how one job candidate stood out from the crowd for him.
“I was recruiting at Babson College,” he said. “This was in 1991. The last recruit of the day—I get this résumé. I get the blue sheet attached to it, which is the form I’m supposed to fill out with all this stuff. His résumé is very light—no clubs, no sports, no nothing. Babson, 3.2. Studied finance. Work experience: Sam’s Diner, references on request. It’s the last one of the day, and I’ve seen all these people come through strutting their stuff and they’ve got their portfolios and semester studying abroad. Here comes this guy. He sits. His name is Sam, and I say: ‘Sam, let me just ask you. What else were you doing while you were here?’ He says: ‘Well, Sam’s Diner. That’s our family business, and I leave on Friday after classes, and I go and work till closing. I work all day Saturday till closing, and then I work Sunday until I close, and then I drive back to Babson.’ I wrote, ‘Hire him,’ on the blue sheet. He’s still with us, because he had character. He faced a set of challenges. He figured out how to do both. It’s work ethic. You could see the guy had charted a path for himself to make it work with the situation he had. He didn’t ask for any help. He wasn’t victimized by the thing. He just said, ‘That’s my dad’s business, and I work there.’ Confident. Proud.
“What critical behavior interviewing does,” said Green, “is get at people’s character, and you get to see where work fits in their value system, where pride fits in their value system, where making hard decisions or sacrificing fits in their value system. I mean, you sacrifice and you’re a victim, or you sacrifice because it’s the right thing to do and you have pride in it. Huge difference. Simple thing. Huge difference.”
People don’t have to climb Mount Everest or run the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon through Death Valley to develop battle-hardened confidence. Nor do they need to wish that they had faced more challenges growing up. Battle-hardened confidence starts with the right attitude. And attitude is the one thing that anyone can control, even if it seems like everything else is outside of their control. If you tackle challenges, building a track record of success, then battle-hardened confidence will follow.
A first step, though, requires developing a healthy relationship with failure. Many CEOs recognize that failure is part of success—particularly for people pursuing an ambitious goal—and they embrace failure and value it and learn from it. It can be a hard lesson to learn, particularly for teenagers shifting from high school, where they perhaps grew accustomed to acing exams, to college, and then into their careers.
John Donahoe, the CEO of eBay, said he learned from a mentor how to be more accepting of failure.
“A really valuable piece of advice early in my career was from a guy named Kent Thiry, who was another of my early bosses and is now CEO at DaVita,” Donahoe said. “I didn’t know it at the time, but I was suffering from a real fear of failure. Kent said, ‘You know, John, your challenge is you’re trying to bat .900.’ And he said, ‘When you were in college, you got a lot of A’s. You could get 90, 95 percent right. When you took your first job as an analyst, you were really successful and felt like you were batting .900.’
“But he said, and this is probably five years into my career, ‘Now you’ve moved from the minor leagues. You’re playing in the major leagues, and if you expect to bat .900, either you come up at bat and freeze because you’re so afraid of swinging and missing, or you’re a little afraid to step into the batter’s box. The best hitters in Major League Baseball, world class, they can strike out six times out of ten and still be the greatest hitters of all time.’ That’s my philosophy—the key is to get up in that batter’s box and take a swing. And all you have to do is hit one single, a couple of doubles, and an occasional home run out of every ten at-bats, and you’re going to be the best hitter or the best business leader around. You can’t play in the major leagues without having a lot of failures.”
Video games have been criticized in some quarters for creating slothful kids. But Jen-Hsun Huang of Nvidia said they taught him a valuable lesson about failure.
“I’ve never beaten myself up about mistakes,” he said. “When I try