On Paper

Have I ever told you that I have a medical degree I have never used?

There is an art degree as well, and that one I use every morning without noticing I am doing it.

Neither certificate has anything to do with building a company, which is what my working life has actually been. If my own application had landed on my desk when I was starting out, I am not sure I would have called myself in for a conversation.

Years ago I hired somebody whose education matched the job exactly.

The right subject, and every step after it pointing at the position she was sitting in front of me to discuss. She had an answer ready for every question. What I remember about that day is the relief. Hiring is the hardest part of this job, and here was a decision that did not seem to need any courage.

For a long time it looked like luck. Reports came in on time, and that part of the business never gave me a single difficult afternoon. A complaint came in about one of the teams once and she had it resolved before it reached me, and told me afterwards in one sentence, as a thing that was already finished.

Then the months went on and I noticed it had not moved anywhere either. The two facts took a long time to meet.

Always Right

Nothing ever arrived at the point where it had to be discussed. Problems were closed quietly, before they got to me, and I heard about them later as finished things.

Then there was a meeting about something that had gone wrong, and she said, “That was not in my part of it.”

She was right. She was always right. It took me longer than it should have to notice that she had not once said anything in that room that could be used against her later.

The Mistake

Mine.

She never promised anything beyond what was written on the paper, and the paper was accurate. I read it and decided it meant something it had never claimed to mean. A qualification tells you what somebody has been trained to do. I took it as a description of what she would do next.

A career that lines up neatly is built out of the same decision taken again and again, and the decision is always to stay on the road that is already open. That is a real skill, and there are jobs where it is the only thing you want. I needed somebody to build something, and building something is a long sequence of decisions that can go wrong.

I have written before about believing in somebody more than they believed in themselves. This is the same error running the other way: that time I built a future for a person who had never agreed to it, and this time I built one out of a document.

I also knew early. Long before there was anything worth writing down there was a feeling about it, and that feeling sat untouched for months, because acting on an instinct about somebody who is doing nothing wrong seemed like the wrong kind of leader to be. So the wait was for evidence, and while it went on, that part of the company quietly learned what pace it was going to run at. I had set that pace myself.

I still do not know whether that wait was fair or cowardly. Moving on to a feeling about somebody who has done nothing wrong is a serious thing to do to a person's career. Waiting cost the company a year. I have not found the line between those two, and I go looking for it every time somebody new starts.

The Rota

Some time later, interviewing for a different position, I met somebody whose education had almost nothing to do with the job, and whose working life had gaps in it that needed explaining.

My question is the same with everybody. Tell me about something at work you were proud of.

She told me about a café she had worked in. The shifts there were built badly, so the busiest two hours of the day were covered by whoever happened to be on, and it was more or less always the same people. She went back through the old rotas, worked out when the queue actually formed, and rebuilt the week around that. Then she took it to her manager.

Nobody had asked her to do it, and nothing about it appeared anywhere on paper. She was not telling the story to impress anybody. She told it because out of everything she had done, it was the piece of work she liked best.

What she had done was small. A café rota is not a strategy, and rebuilding one probably saved that place a few badly spent hours a week. She did it in her own time, for a manager who owed her nothing and had not asked. That was the part I kept turning over on the way home.

Hiring her was not an easy call. Somebody on my side of the table pointed out, correctly, that nothing in her background suggested she could do the job, and that if it went wrong it would go wrong in front of everybody. The entire argument for her was one story about a café.

I hired her. It is one of the hires I have never gone back and questioned.

Unasked

Almost everything on a qualification, and almost everything in a working background, was asked for by somebody else. A teacher set it, or an employer needed it done by Friday. Between them they tell you what a person does when they are told.

The rota was the only thing anybody described that day which had happened without instruction. It told me more than everything else in her paperwork.

Since then I ask for it directly. Tell me about something you did at work that was not part of your job and that nobody asked you to do.

It works better than asking about achievements, which produces a rehearsed answer. The people who have something ready produce it in seconds, and they are usually a little surprised that anybody wants to hear it, because that work never appeared on a document anywhere.

Then I ask what happened to it afterwards. Quite often the answer is nothing. It was ignored, or it was picked up by somebody else and presented upwards as theirs. The ones worth hiring tell that part without any bitterness in it, and then say they would do it again.

A difficult background is not a qualification either. Somebody who has left four jobs in three years is telling you something real, and it is usually the obvious thing. A person who moves around a lot is not automatically a person who starts things, and leaders will defend that hire for years rather than admit the mix-up.

Invisible

The nearest thing to a number is a list of things that never happened. A year of proposals nobody made because they might not have worked, and problems quietly absorbed instead of coming up the line while they were still small. There is no document anywhere in the company that records a single one of them, and the whole time I was congratulating myself on how little trouble that part of the business gave me.

That is the expensive kind of mistake, because there is nothing to react to. Somebody who breaks things announces themselves and gets dealt with inside a month. This was slower than that. Everyone around her adjusted a little, then a little more, and by the time it was visible the company had been built around the adjustment.

The safest choice on paper is often the most expensive person you'll ever bring in.

If you have made this hire, and most people who hire for a living have, I would like to know how long it took you to see it. Those replies become the next pieces.

This is UNTOLD. Where leadership sounds like a real voice.