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Why do talented leaders fail in one role and thrive in the next? Jason Baumgarten has led hundreds of Board, CEO and c-suite transitions at Spencer Stuart. He covers CEO succession, how boards hire a CEO, and shares leadership research alongside candid opinions about leadership and governance. His guests include CEOs, Board Directors, Researchers, Authors and unique executives who share their own observations about leadership but also their own lessons and life stories. Jason covers everything from the impact of technology and AI on leaders to the personal toll and stress of leadership. Every episode brings new lessons, fresh perspectives and a glimpse into a leader’s story.
Jason Baumgarten 00:00
I'm Jason Baumgarten and you're listening to Fit Happens, the podcast where top leaders, investors and board directors share the stories, surprises and hard earned lessons behind finding the right fit. Let's get into it.
Jason Baumgarten 00:18
I'm Jason Baumgarten and you're listening to Fit Happens, the podcast where top leaders, investors and board directors share the stories, surprises and hard earned lessons behind finding the right fit. Let's get into it.
Jason Baumgarten 00:35
You've sat in this room. The candidate has just walked out, the door clicked shut behind her, and for a second nobody says anything. There's a thick folder in front of every person at the table. There's scorecards, references. Somebody spent weeks and weeks pulling together detailed interview notes, psychometrics, and nobody's really dug into it yet.
Jason Baumgarten 01:02
And then someone, often one of the more senior people in the room, leans back and says, I just really liked her. Watch what happens next. Heads start to nod, chairs ease back from the table a bit, the temperature of the room shifts and it goes from an evaluation to a formality. Notice what hasn't happened. Nobody's compared evidence, nobody turned any pages. The verdict walked in first, and the evidence,
Jason Baumgarten 01:37
if we're going to get to it at all, we'll get in later, mostly in such a way as to figure out how to agree with that statement that I really just liked her. The offer went out inside a week and everybody felt good. And about a year later, the company was searching again. And we'll come back to that today. Why does the person who wins the room often turn out to be the wrong person for the job?
Jason Baumgarten 02:04
And what can you do about it before the offer goes out? I'm Jason Baumgarten and you're listening to Fit Happens. I want to talk to you about chemistry, that feeling in an interview when it just clicks. I've spent decades in executive search and leadership advisory, sitting in rooms like that one, with boards and CEOs helping them decide who the leader should be. So I'll be straight with you about the room I just described.
Jason Baumgarten 02:32
It's a composite. It's built from thousands of debriefs I've sat in with details changed so nobody can be identified. But the sentence is real, the sentiment. I've heard it more times than I can count, and so is what comes after it. By the end of this episode, you'll have a simple discipline you can use in every hiring debrief, whether you're hiring a CEO or a first time manager.
Jason Baumgarten 02:58
And I'll tell you about the time I was the one at the table nodding along. Before we get into it, ask yourself something. Think about the last hire you were a part of. Somewhere in that process, there was probably a moment when you or someone else said, they get it, or I like him. Hold on to that memory.
Jason Baumgarten 03:17
We're going to come back. Let me give you the one line I want you to remember from today. Chemistry feels like good judgment, but it works like a shortcut around it. That sentence, that statement in the debrief that I really just liked her, it sounds like a person's opinion, but it behaves like a framing, an anchor, a very important end of the shelf.
Jason Baumgarten 03:45
Once a senior voice in the room says it out loud, disagreeing with it is hard. And now you're the one who didn't feel it. You're the difficult one. So you wait to see if anyone else pushes back. And similarly, they're waiting for you.
Jason Baumgarten 04:01
So the room falls for chemistry in a sequence. That first voice breaks the seal and then the nods reinforce it. Now, imagine you're interviewing someone and without telling you, they've agreed to answer every one of your questions at random. The answers are fluent and confident and charming. They just don't really have much to do with what you asked.
Jason Baumgarten 04:24
Would you notice? Well, a researcher ran almost that exact test. They published it about 15 years ago. College students interviewed a fellow student and then predicted what that student's grades would be the following semester. Now, some of the interviewers got real answers.
Jason Baumgarten 04:42
Others got answers generated by a rule that worked pretty much like a coin flip with no connection at all to the questions. The interviewers who got random answers walked away feeling just as insightful as the ones who got the truth. And most of the people who got those randomized answers never realized it. Then the researchers checked the predictions.
Jason Baumgarten 05:05
Well, it turns out, not surprisingly, that past grades alone tracked the real results pretty closely, and in fact, twice as closely as the predictions people made after an interview. Not dissimilar to real life. Sitting down with that student literally made the prediction worse. And there's another piece. The researchers asked a new group of students whether, knowing in advance that an interview would be random noise, if they'd still want to do it.
Jason Baumgarten 05:33
And almost 60% said yes. More than half of them would take a conversation they knew was meaningless over no conversation at all. And that tells you something about why we interview the way we do. We want that feeling. The information's almost besides the point.
Jason Baumgarten 05:52
So this study, among many others, shows that a free flowing conversation, a pleasant, enjoyable conversation, produces confidence on its own whether or not the content actually earned the confidence, and that accuracy and confidence separate, but you don't feel it. That hiring room is allowed to feel confident, but the mistake is treating that like evidence. It's forcing you to go back. And other research points at the same problems. A psychologist, Paul Sackett, and his colleagues analyzed decades of hiring studies and structured interviews, where every candidate gets the same questions, scored against the same criteria, predicted job performance roughly twice as well as the loose conversational kind, twice as well, with the same people, the same hour.
Jason Baumgarten 06:48
And if that was the whole story, this would be a short episode about a tool that people aren't using well. But the noise doesn't land so evenly. In fact, a sociologist spent nine months inside an elite firm, interviewed hundreds of people who make hiring decisions. And more than half of them said that fit was the most important thing that they judged in an interview, above analytical skill or problem solving. So how did they judge fit?
Jason Baumgarten 07:16
Well, it turns out, by resemblance. Did this candidate come from a background like mine, talk about their life the way I talk about mine? Did they play the sports I play, like the hobbies I like, have an origin story that resonates? Did they describe that resemblance as evidence of ability? And one evaluator put it this way, you use yourself to measure fit because that's all you've got to go on.
Jason Baumgarten 07:44
Another expanded, it's kind of like a date. You just know it when there's a match. A lot of them used the famous airport test. If my flight got canceled in a snowstorm, would I want to be stuck with them in a terminal? One candidate did beautifully on an analytical case and still got marked down.
Jason Baumgarten 08:03
His interests were a little bespoke, 18th century literature and avant garde film. And as you can imagine, he didn't fit in. Now, in fairness, this study was not about an executive search, and her subjects were hiring entry level professionals. But the mechanism is consistent across a lot of hiring processes with annals and a lot of trust. And it's what a lot of senior hiring can look like in a boardroom.
Jason Baumgarten 08:32
Fit carries a lot of meaning, and it really often means simply, this person reminds me of me. So culture is often how an organization defines itself, but in this situation, it's really more about the evaluator, the person who is either literally making the decision or the person who might cast judgment in such a way as to make somebody question their decision. And economists have a thought experiment that they call the information cascade. Picture 100 people choosing between two restaurants on the same street. 99 of them have heard privately that Restaurant B is better.
Jason Baumgarten 09:10
One person has heard A is better, and he happens to arrive first. So he walks into A. The next person sees one diner in A and nobody in B and starts to question that comment that it was better. Maybe he knows something, so he goes into A too. Guess what happens?
Jason Baumgarten 09:29
Well, the person after her now sees two diners in A and none in B. And suddenly the 99 people who heard that B was better show up and sit down in A. That one voice in the first slot, first one to arrive, outweighed 99 people hearing something different. And that's what the debrief feels like after somebody important says, I just really liked her. So early in my career, I was in a final debrief.
Jason Baumgarten 09:57
Candidate was excellent, and I really mean that. And when the discussion opened, the client's chairman said some version of this refrain. I keep saying I just liked her. And I remember the feeling. It was kind of watching relief wash over the room.
Jason Baumgarten 10:14
Everyone agreed and their job was done. But the evidence was there that they weren't the best candidate, and this person didn't do that well. They weren't terrible, but they weren't the best. And I thought about those first 90 seconds of the debrief and those questions nobody asked. Now, I want to be fair. The search was good, the outcome was good, delivered a strong finalist, and the reality is that it was a good outcome, but it could have been better.
Jason Baumgarten 10:49
Now, years later, I read Irving Janis, the psychologist who coined the word groupthink, and two of his warning signs were uncomfortably familiar with that moment. Doubts that people keep to themselves and quiet being mistaken for an aligned room. Surprisingly, he made the point that warm, friendly groups are especially exposed. Those corporate environments where the CEO asks everyone's input and everyone gets along and it feels like a family, it's collegial.
Jason Baumgarten 11:19
It turns out that's a risk factor, because it needs rules that protect the disagreement. So let's take stock. That loose, unstructured conversation creates confidence that it hasn't really earned. And the room tends to spend that confidence on whoever spoke first and whoever reminds it of themselves. So now let's go back to that company from the top of the episode.
Jason Baumgarten 11:42
The candidate who lit up that room had a tough first couple of months. She struggled with the parts of the job that were unglamorous and structurally different from what the interview was testing for. And having a direct, uncomfortable conversation with a tough leader who wasn't charmed by that feeling of I just liked, had a tough time. And it turns out that nothing in that conversation, in that room, predicted these things, because the room was responding to that feeling of warmth. So what was the room really measuring?
Jason Baumgarten 12:16
Now, people have studied the first few minutes of an interview, that small talk, the what was great about your day moment. And it turns out that the impressions formed in that small talk predict how candidates are scored on the so called structural interview that follows. And it even predicts who's likely to get the offer. Now decades of research has suggested things like candidates' appearance, self presentation, they shape things. And it turns out that appearance can have nearly a four times higher impact on an interview than actual job performance.
Jason Baumgarten 12:53
You may not be seeing what you're getting, handshakes, how people look at you, what are you hiring for. And this happens all over. One consulting firm wrote about a mining company choosing its CEO from three divisional heads. And the division that had the best results, largely because external prices had risen, which the division had nothing to do with, got the job simply because the impression he made and the confidence of having the success.
Jason Baumgarten 13:25
But it turns out that he had nothing to do with it, and it was pretty obvious with a few questions, and a structured process could have helped, but only if you really follow it. So chemistry is important. Keep the chemistry, but make it vote last. Put it at the back of the counting.
Jason Baumgarten 13:45
The fact that a person is easy to be around and reads people well in a relaxed setting is valuable, but it shouldn't stand out for all the data you've collected in a structured evaluation. There's a large trove of research on extraversion at work that makes this well, across 165 different work outcomes, extraversion helped with 90% of them, and the effect was really small. It's just one little thing, but it's not worth the loudest voice. So here's a trick that you can use.
Jason Baumgarten 14:19
It's called the ledger for chemistry. It has two lines. One line is competency. So before anyone says a word in a debrief, everybody writes down as an independent score against the criteria you define for the role. Each score has to include the evidence, something the candidate disclosed, a reference disclosed, or was in the record of the candidate.
Jason Baumgarten 14:47
And then everyone submits that at the same time. Nobody reads it out loud. Nobody gets to be the first diner in restaurant A. And the second is chemistry. You record it separately, and you discuss it only after the competency scores are on the table.
Jason Baumgarten 15:06
And it's important that you decide how much chemistry counts before you do this debrief. Some roles, it's important the person might be the social glue of an office, planning parties and outings and making everyone feel good. Or they might be the person in the back room working out the actuarial tables, in which case may not be that important. Now, you still might want somebody that you enjoy to hang out with at the water cooler, but you really have to understand how important it is for the job.
Jason Baumgarten 15:38
And then you can give it the appropriate real weight. So whatever you do, you have to have that weighting before you do the debrief. Score that first and then reveal the chemistry scores. Now, if this sounds like some new idea, it turns out that well informed groups don't routinely start by having people write their conclusions down. And without that, the discussions tend to breed consensus. In 1907, the famous scientist Francis Galton collected hundreds of guesses of the weight of an ox at a country fair.
Jason Baumgarten 16:15
Butchers and farmers, along with plenty of people who've never weighed an ox or an animal of any kind in their lives. It turns out the median guess was off by nine pounds on an ox of nearly 1200. The explanation for why the crowd did so well was that their guess was made privately. But if the first person who guessed suggested 200 pounds, we know that it would have been off by a lot. Chemistry is like that public guess.
Jason Baumgarten 16:45
And in business, some companies have run versions of this. Amazon, famously since the late 90s, has run something called the bar raiser program. An interviewer from outside the hiring team sits in specifically to kind of hold the bar and make sure that the standard is concrete and that there's evidence, and that every new hire should be better in principle than half of the people already doing that level or kind of job at the company. Now, the objection from a lot of people I work with is this is going to be slow and tedious, and we might get it wrong. But the reality is that these little tricks, these little techniques, change steps you already are taking.
Jason Baumgarten 17:27
You're just spending time in the right way, having the right debrief. So instead of the group discussion, you write it down, but you write it down against the real job and with evidence. So there's also something important that won't surprise you if you've listened to any other episodes of Fit Happens, and it's how to tell real chemistry from interview chemistry. Would I still want this person in the room on a random Tuesday, six months in, when nobody's on performance day? Because interview chemistry is built for the spotlight.
Jason Baumgarten 18:03
It's built for the moment. Working chemistry has to survive bad days, boredom, stress, and everything else. Now there's a funny study I came across from Germany that followed singles doing speed dating. Now, what a great way to think about the instant chemistry of an interview. So they studied almost 400 single adults for a full year after three minute speed dates.
Jason Baumgarten 18:29
Now, not surprisingly, in those three minutes, people chose mostly on looks. But when they followed up 12 months later, it was a totally different story. And it's a very similar dynamic to what are you measuring in the interview versus what lasts well beyond it. So that simple ledger trick keeps the human part of the debrief. It just moves it around a little bit.
Jason Baumgarten 18:53
Warmth gets graded as an important element and then discussed as information after the evidence of competency, instead of arriving first like that diner at Restaurant A. And you know, the reality is you hire the person who should perform best for the job instead of the person best suited to the job. If you don't do that, you don't want to pass on a candidate who is stronger simply because they didn't sparkle and make you feel good. But we've all done it, we're all suspect.
Jason Baumgarten 19:22
Now, there was a field study of pizza delivery, and I always like this study. When employees were proactive, the stores run by more introverted managers earned higher profits. Now, I wouldn't run a hiring policy on pizza alone, but it's an interesting warning that the commanding presence we reward in an interview can be exactly the style that shuts down the people you want speaking up. And it turns out that employees in a pizza store can be a very important signal to what changes you should make. And if fairness isn't enough of an argument for you or your board or your next hiring decision, let's talk about a financial one.
Jason Baumgarten 20:02
There was a study of over a thousand major business decisions. These are big investment decisions. Organizations that have worked to take bias out of their decision process earned returns up to 7 percentage points higher. Now, that may not seem like a lot, but when you're talking about billions of dollars of investments, that's a big deal. And nobody had to be better to do it.
Jason Baumgarten 20:26
They just had to take bias out of the process. They had to fix the process. All we want is a good outcome. So same thing, warmth might still count, but put it in the right place and handicap it appropriately.
Jason Baumgarten 20:41
So in your next debrief, try this. Before anyone says whether they liked the candidate, whether they didn't like the candidate, have every person write down the evidence that they have for the most critical things for the role, in silence, make sure you've weighted what those things are, collect them all and read them out, and only then open the floor to talk about the feels, how people felt. Watch how different the conversation sounds. And here's a suggestion that you can do right now. Remember that moment I asked you to think about at the start?
Jason Baumgarten 21:17
Find the notes from your last hiring decision. Find that sentence somewhere in the debrief that sort of was, I just liked her. Whether it was a side comment or a note, and count how long between that and the decision. If it was quick, you found a very expensive habit hiding in your hiring process.
Jason Baumgarten 21:39
And typically it is the beginning of walking into that restaurant. The instant a room stops evaluating a candidate and starts to just enjoy one is the instant that a search becomes risky. And if you look back at a survey of managers looking back at hires that didn't work out, 82% said that the interview had given them signs, in the interview, in the referencing, in the data, that it wouldn't work out. They actually saw the failure. They just didn't write it down and catalog it and attribute enough weight to it.
Jason Baumgarten 22:16
So that chemistry ledger is two simple lines. Competency first, chemistry second. Everything weighted and with evidence. Chemistry is real. It just shouldn't get a vote until the evidence is spoken.
Jason Baumgarten 22:31
Thanks for listening. I'm Jason Baumgarten, and this is Fit Happens.