Here’s a question I’d love to have some hiring managers answer: Would you hire (or even consider hiring) an individual with superior talent but a troubled past who might be a game-changer for your organization? Yes, he’s a convicted felon, but he has served his time, expressed remorse on numerous occasions, and seems generally contrite for his past actions.
Would you give this person a chance? Does talent outweigh the negative baggage, especially if the person in question has the ability to really, really help your business?
In other words, would you take a chance and hire former star pro quarterback Michael Vick?
“For Michael Vick to have any prayer of resuming his NFL career, he has to show true remorse for dogfighting, something he now admits doing as young as 8 years old,” writes Sam Farmer in the Los Angeles Times. “He made that confession recently to Wayne Pacelle, chief executive and president of the Humane Society of the United States, when Pacelle visited him at his home in Hampton, Va.”
The details of Michael Vick’s involvement in dogfighting are well-documented and abhorrent to just about anyone. And, Vick has paid a heavy price for his actions: “Although he remains on probation, Vick on Monday completed his federal dogfighting sentence, which included 18 months in prison and two more under home confinement,” the Times story points out.
“He [also] forfeited an estimated $70 million when the Atlanta Falcons released him from his 10-year, $130-million contract, [and] Vick filed for bankruptcy protection a year ago, listing $16 million in assets and $20 million in debt.”
Yes, Vick has paid the price, but his crimes clearly warranted the penalty. Ed Sayres, president and chief executive of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said it was Vick’s “barbarism that sets the crime apart,” and that Vick admitted he electrocuted and beat dogs to death after they lost fights. “This was not a one-time transgression or crime of passion—this was a multi-year pattern of behavior that demonstrates a startling lack of moral character and judgment,” Sayres said.
But whether you decide to hire Vick also comes down to something else—do you believe in redemption? Can people atone and make up for their actions? Do the Michael Vicks of the world deserve a second chance?
I believe Vick deserves another chance, and I think that NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell—the guy who ultimately will make the decision—will eventually come to that conclusion too.
However, I also believe the discussion over whether Vick should get another chance is one we wouldn’t be having if he wasn’t a big-time, highly talented athlete. Is there any profession in America other than the performance-driven world of professional athletics that would consider hiring someone who served time for torturing animals?
Although I believe in the power of redemption, of serving your debt to society, and of getting another chance, I also don’t believe there is a hiring manager outside the NFL who would take a chance on a convicted felon like Vick no matter how talented or game-changing he might be.
Pro football writers are split on this.
John DeShazier in the New Orleans Times-Picayune feels that “Vick has paid enough to regain admission to the league if a team will have him,” while Mike Lopresti in USA Todaysays that “the thinking here is [that Vick] probably merits one more year of sanctions, for wanton cruelty, but I could be talked into ending his suspension now. He’s been gone two seasons. That’s forever to a professional athlete.”
For hiring managers and recruiters who like to crow that it’s all about hiring superior talent, that’s only true up to a point, because I don’t believe there is a talent manager outside of the Oakland Raiders willing to go to the boss and make a pitch for hiring a game-changing individual with off-the-board talent who also happens to have a rap sheet that includes torturing animals.
So I ask again: Would you give Michael Vick a second chance?
I normally might have gone right by this article, but it was the headline that gave me pause and pulled me in. It said, simply, “Charisma? To Her, It’s Overrated.”
Wendy Kopp was talking about hiring teachers, but her quote about charisma was particularly insightful. When asked “What are you looking for in the teachers you recruit?” she said that she looked for: “The ability to influence and motivate others in a sophisticated way—but not necessarily charisma. And that’s an interesting one, right? Because people think of teachers who are born to teach, and you think of all these charismatic folks. Some of the most successful teachers are some of the least charismatic, interestingly. But they have a gift of figuring out what motivates people.”
Kopp’s comments snagged me on two levels: One, as a part-time educator who teaches writing to college seniors at night, I’m interested in what it takes to be a good teacher. But her thoughts also grabbed me in my primary career role as a longtime manager, editor and executive who frequently grapples with the issue of leadership and how much charisma or presence plays into the ability to lead people and get them to perform better.
And, Kopp’s insight into hiring teachers holds just as true for managers and executives, because in my experience charisma in leadership is just as overrated as it is in teaching.
This is an issue I’ve battled over my entire career.
I’ve had to fight the perception that just because I wasn’t a jump-on-the-desk-and-shout-at-the-troops type of person that I really wasn’t a leader. In fact, I remember telling one boss of mine that he was wrong because yes, I was a leader, but just not the type he was familiar with.
It hired a lot of executives and managers based on these qualities, but usually, what they ended up getting were people who were glib and good at talking to a crowd, but terribly shallow, shortsighted and unaccomplished when it came to actually leading anyone.
The late, great management guru Peter Drucker knew this, and that’s why the father of modern management didn’t say anything about charisma when he was discussing what it takes to be a leader. “Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations,” Drucker wrote. “[In short,] management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
Yes, Wendy Kopp is right; charisma IS overrated, because it is a surface quality in most people that has little to do with teaching, leadership or actually getting people to perform. I hope we’ll finally get people to realize this, but I fear we won’t, because it is far easier to get mesmerized by charisma than it is to dig into what it REALLY takes to lead people to another level.
When did stealing employees from your competitors—a longstanding and honorable tradition about as old as business itself—become a bad thing?
I used to work in the newspaper business way back when a) the newspaper business was still healthy; and, b) there were still cities in this country that actually had honest-to-God competition between daily newspapers. I know that makes me a dinosaur, but I can remember a time when the best part of my job was figuring out how to poach some up-and-coming star away from the other paper in town.
That’s why I am surprised at what’s going on in California’s Silicon Valley, where “the U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether Google, Yahoo, Apple, Genentech and other tech companies conspired to keep others from stealing their top talent,” according to a story in the San Jose Mercury News.
According to the newspaper, “few details have been disclosed so far about the hiring-practice probe, which The Washington Post first reported in a story on its Web site late Tuesday. Citing two unnamed sources, [the Post] said the Justice Department was examining the possibility that the four companies and other unnamed firms may have violated antitrust laws by ‘negotiating the recruiting and hiring of one another’s employees.’ ”
My surprise at this story flows out of my experience working at a San Francisco dot-com during the boom years from 1998 to 2001. Back then, poaching talent from a competitor (and we viewed just about ALL companies battling for technology workers as such) was a mark of both a strong company brand as well as a crackerjack recruiting operation. Luring talent away from someone else was as common as fighting traffic on the Bay Bridge—and, a helluva lot more fun.
So, having some sort of agreement among tech firms to not recruit talent away from one another, if true, would be a huge change in how Silicon Valley tech companies traditionally operate. Plus, it flies in the face of California’s “tough rules barring companies from restricting their employees’ job hunting,” the Mercury News noted.
“Many companies across the country require employees to sign so-called noncompete agreements, in which the worker agrees not to be hired by a competitor within a certain period of time,” the newspaper said. “But California law generally regards such pacts as unenforceable, said Bob Taylor, a Palo Alto attorney who specializes in antitrust law. … As a result, Taylor said, California ‘is one of, if not the most, difficult states for employers to prevent employees from taking jobs with competitors.’ ”
Maybe I just see things differently out here on the Left Coast, but a deal among big tech companies to pull their punches and not recruit talent from one another is akin to thieves agreeing not to steal from each other. What’s the point? And, can you really trust anyone to hold up their end of such an unholy agreement?
I follow the philosophy that all’s fair in business, love and war. Isn’t this what the whole notion of “passive” recruiting—an oxymoron if there ever was one—is all about? I’d love to hear what recruiters have to say about this, because if deals like this to not hire from competitors make sense, we might as well kiss the whole notion of recruiting goodbye.
In fact, a lot of baby boomers want to stay on the job longer these days given what the recession and economic downturn have done to their IRAs, 401(k)s and other retirement accounts. These are people are a lot like me—boomers who want to work as long as they can, or at least until age 70 so they can maximize their Social Security payout.
But in an odd twist, a lot of boomers are now retiring unexpectedly, and “Instead of seeing older workers staying on the job longer as the economy has worsened, the Social Security system is reporting a major surge in early retirement claims that could have implications for the financial security of millions of baby boomers,” according to a story in the Los Angeles Times.
“Since the current federal fiscal year began Oct. 1, [Social Security retirement] claims have been running 25 percent ahead of last year,” the Times story adds, and “that compares with the 15 percent increase that had been projected as the post-World War II generation reaches eligibility for early retirement, according to Stephen C. Goss, chief actuary for the Social Security Administration.”
This shows you just how hard it is getting a fix on where workers’ heads are and what they might do, and it makes long-range workforce planning extremely difficult. In fact, just last December, a CareerBuilder survey found that 60 percent of workers older than 60 said they planned to postpone retirement and stay on the job.
What has changed, of course, is the economy. While I believe the CareerBuilder survey accurately captured the mood of boomers wanting to continue working back in December, it clearly didn’t anticipate the huge plunge in the economy and job losses in the first quarter of 2009. Yes, a lot of older workers want to keep working, but what do you do if you lose your job, can’t find a new one, and have the Social Security retirement option available?
If you are in that kind of fix, you do what most people would do: You take the retirement money and run, even if that’s not what you planned or wanted to do.
Here’s what is going on, the Times story indicates: “Many of the additional retirements are probably laid-off workers who are claiming Social Security early, despite reduced benefits, because they are under immediate financial pressure, Goss and other analysts believe.” And, the story adds, “The ramifications of the trend are profound for the new retirees, their families, the government and other social institutions that may be called upon to help support them. On top of savings ravaged by the stock market decline and the loss of home equity, many retirees now must make do with Social Security benefits reduced by as much as 25 percent if they retire at age 62 instead of 66.”
This just goes to show you how ridiculous it is trying to make broad-brush assumptions—like baby boomers retiring in a huge wave—given how unpredictable the economy can be. And it just shows again that no matter what part you play in the workforce—employer, manager or down-in the-trenches employee—the smart thinking in this economy continues to be pretty simple: Always hope for the best, but make certain that you prepare for the worst.
I’ve worked in businesses that were building up and I’ve worked in businesses that were paring down, but the worst of all was working at a business that was desperately trying to hang on and keep going even though the management team could see the writing on the wall.
Yes, it sucks when you work for a company that you know is dying, but as bad as that is, there’s something a whole lot worse: recruiting and hiring new people to come work at the dying company without letting them clearly know what’s going on.
I was thinking about this while reading about the closing of Conde Nast’s Portfolio, a $100 million-plus investment in a new glossy business magazine that has now gone down the tubes. Sad as it may be when a business gets closed down—and it really bothers a longtime journalist like me seeing so many media properties dropping dead at a faster and faster clip—it’s even sadder to see that Portfolio was still hiring new employees and bringing them on board as recently as two weeks ago.
What’s wrong with this picture? One Planet Money reader hit it squarely on the head: “[This] doesn’t sound like ‘bad luck’ so much as a corporation recruiting someone while not caring that they’re possibly going to damage his career. Conde Nast should have known better than to let Portfolio bring people on while they were working on shutting the magazine down.”
Amen to that, I say. As someone who toiled as an executive trying to keep things going while the company I was working for was slowly closing down, I know just how hard it is to keep up appearances that all is well with the organization even though you know that the day of reckoning is fast approaching. It’s a tough job, and I’m sure it wasn’t easy for the people at Conde Nast.
But I also know this: No one in their right mind continues to recruit and hire new staff and bring them on board into such an uncertain environment. I’m sure I’ll get a boatload of BS from some recruiting professionals who believe you need to continue the hiring process no matter what shape the company is in, but in my mind, doing that is just wrong, pure and simple.
In this situation, Conde Nast must clearly have known that time was running short for Portfolio. There were rumbles about the publication going under in the relative good times of last fall, when the magazine cut back to 10 issues a year and gutted its online staff. Anyone who follows media with half a brain knew that Portfolio’s financial situation was dire, so why was the company still hiring new editorial staffers and encouraging them to give up good jobs somewhere else to come on board the ship right before it went down?
In other words, why would you ever want to hire people away from a stable job situation into one as precarious as that at Portfolio? Some will argue that blogger Avent was a big boy who made his own decision and should have known better, but I don’t buy it.
Conde Nast is one of those companies that people in the magazine and journalism profession long to work for, and it is very possible that blogger Avent was blinded by Conde Nast’s past success and blue-chip persona.
In my book, departing managers don’t hire people when they know they’re leaving without clearly disclosing to the potential employee EXACTLY what the situation is, and companies that clearly have one foot in the grave don’t lure new employees away from good jobs to board the Titanic for a short, scenic cruise.
I’d love to hear what recruiters have to say about this, but I fear that I’ll get the predictable response—that you must keep recruiting and hiring until the day a company closes its doors, blah, blah, blah. Anybody who believes that may find they succeed at recruiting, but in my book, they ultimately fail in the larger, and much more important, game of life.
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