How many of us really know what we are looking for when we hire a manager? How many of can boil the crucial points of the interview down to a few questions: What problems do you see in the organization? If you get the job, what are you going to do? How are you going to do it? What evidence is there that you can do it? I suppose very few of us can, or do, take such a direct approach when considering whom to hire.

The dangers of not doing this were brought home to me in the context of the upcoming election. A friend of mine was talking with a person who had recently retired from an important but not very large state agency, the head of which is an elected official.

My friend asked this retiree how often people standing for election came in and talked to the employees about the problems the agency faced, what changes they thought needed to be made, which problems should have priority, and so on. The retiree was perplexed by the question. It had never happened before.

That struck me as a bit nutty and somewhat dangerous. Politicians are often anxious to promise us what a great job he or she will do if elected, all the programs they will create (or, on very rare occasions, dismantle), but the real day-to-day problems within the organization are completely ignored by the people who will be elected to head the organization.

What’s worse, while agency heads have a lot of latitude in how they manage — or, occasionally, lead — the organization, significant changes to the activities of the agency require legislative authorization and funding. It appears that many of these people run for office because they are living in an ideological fantasy land.

Unfortunately, government agencies aren’t the only organizations afflicted with this problem. I’ve seen far too many organizations in the private sector with this same problem — the real problems in the organization are ignored, while the organization is expected to bend to the will of the manager regardless of the facts on the ground or the needs of customers.

I once worked in a business where a number of the middle managers were simply bullies with, strange as it seems, no apparent qualification for the positions they were in. We had an engineering manager who had to have one of his subordinates teach him how to turn on the computer and use Microsoft Excel. In an engineering operation. That’s crazy.

It was obvious that two of the strategic priorities of the business were to significantly increase production capacity and simultaneously reduce costs. Using Lean principles we were able to do both, though not to the degree would could have achieved if not constrained by this horrible management situation. We had learned not to tell management about these successes because some of them had this strange need to lash out at subordinates. Because of management’s bullying these successful Lean methods weren’t institutionalized as standard work or through teaching the methods to others. When these managers finally succeeded in driving out the people who had contributed to these successes, many of the Lean savings mechanisms necessarily collapsed, costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

To take this back to my original point, I have to wonder how these people ever got into these positions. It was obvious they had no idea what sort of problems the engineering operations actually faced. Given that they didn’t know the challenges in the organization, what exactly did they intend to do when they were hired? How did they intend to do it? Did they even have the ability to do what they intended to do? Clearly nobody had considered these questions.
In fairness, these are often very difficult questions to answer. If somebody is coming for an interview, unless they already work someplace in the organization, it’s very difficult to know the challenges facing the organization. In my experience, the most effective Lean improvements are made to relatively obscure and seemingly minor practices and processes — practices and processes to which little thought is given by management, and which are rarely, if ever, measured. After all, in most cases, if management was aware of the specific problems, they would have been long since addressed and they would no longer be considered problems.

The point is that both interviewers and interviewee must be prepared to address these questions: What problems do you see in the organization? If you get the job, what are you going to do? How are you going to do it? What evidence is there that you can do it?

In most cases it’s going to be very difficult to answer the first two questions with much specificity. However, they can be answered inductively — that is, we can say “In most cases, when we see this situation, these are the sorts of thing that underlie such problems. However, that isn’t always true, so we must keep an open mind.”

Both interviewer and interviewee have a part to play in insuring that the right people end up management positions. There isn’t much we can do to insure that people who run for public office are conversant in the issues facing their organizations, but we in the private sector can do a lot to insure that we hire an engineering manager knows how to turn on a computer.