Only two types of candidates

Gene Mage

“Somewhere between my ambition and my ideals, I lost my ethical compass.” Jeb Stuart Magruder, former Chairman, Committee to Re-elect the President

Many people look for intellectual shortcuts to distill the complex problem of hiring the right people into simplistic categories. The process of selecting the right people and putting them in the right jobs has been the subject of hundreds of how-to books outlining dozens of alternative approaches.

Behavioral interviewing, personality profiling, standardized testing, and exhaustive background checking are useful tools for gathering and analyzing information before hiring, but when you sort through the output of all those tools, there are really only two kinds of candidates: servants, and careerists.

1. Servants. Servants get their jollies by making a genuine difference in the lives of others. You can define the field of service as customers, patients, co-workers, or investors. But regardless of the work being done, servants are primarily interested in real accomplishment, not empty matriculation through some organization.
   
   While power, control, and achievement are all important to the servant, he or she sees those things merely as tools in the hand of the artist, wielded to accomplish something important, and never as ends in and of themselves. Servants often work with a drive and intensity that puts others to shame. Servant-minded employees are often fiercely competitive in their work, maybe more so than some careerists. But that competitive fire always serves a larger master.
   
   While it may sound as though I am lionizing those who place service over selfishness, hiring servant-minded candidates also involves unique challenges. Workers guided by a strong internal compass will, if pushed, take positions at odds with their leadership. Some leaders find strong-willed employees threatening. It is not enough to hire servant-minded candidates; excellent hires also express that mindset through effective interpersonal skills. Even well-intentioned employees will come across as troublemakers, mavericks, or “non team-players,” if they lack tact and grace.
   
   Still others, since they always say “yes” when asked to help, get taken advantage of by co-workers. Everybody loves the agreeable person until he or she burns out or blows up under the pressure.
   
   
2. Careerists. Careerists are all too human. And even the most servant-minded employees sometimes act as careerists. During the selection process we, as hiring managers, are challenged to identify which fundamental value system dominates the behavior of the candidate.
   
   Careerists can be people of tremendous impact and accomplishment. They are often skilled, well-spoken, even charming. Careerists also, at least on the surface, frequently “get things done”. All of these factors, combined with a willingness to “go along” with the leadership, make careerists popular with weak leaders, at least until the company gets profiled on “60 Minutes”.
   
   Unfortunately, the careerist has a dark-side. When push comes to shove they will make critical choices based upon meeting a compelling emotional need to win, even if winning means making choices not in the long-term best interest of the organization. Self-serving behaviors include negative politics, seeking credit for others’ accomplishments, investing organizational time and resources into self-aggrandizing “symbolic” projects that do not really help the stockholder, or transgressing ethical boundaries in the quest for results.

So should you avoid hiring a careerist? Should you only hire servant-minded candidates? Sorry, but here is where the rule of thumb falls short. While I concede that a candidate’s deeply-held values tend to show up in predictable behavior patterns, most employees are complex mixtures of servant-minded and career-minded motivations. They defy categorization. Whether employees behave in service-minded or career-minded ways depends largely upon the work environment created by leadership role models.

The best leaders appeal to the servant-mindset of every worker by modeling service in their own lives, and aligning career advancement with the long-term best interests of the organization. Over time, organizational cultures that promote servant-minded people tend to attract candidates of a similar bent. As someone once observed, you cannot always pick the winning dog, but you can definitely choose which dog to feed.

Syndicated Columnist Gene C. Mage is author of the book Managing for High Performance. For more information on creating a magnet culture, visit www.makingitwork.com.