Politicians Need not Apply

Imagine that you are responsible for hiring the most important person in the world.  This individual will have the world’s largest budget and supervise a workforce that serves over 300 million customers.  This position is responsible for all the relationships your organization has with every other organization in the world.  This individual will also have at their command tremendous powers of destruction that could end life on Planet Earth in minutes.

I am assuming that you would not stop until you found the best possible person for this incredibly important position.  To start with you are going to need some screening criteria.

This person has to be an excellent manager – this is an astronomical amount of resources to oversee and we need a master manager to keep everything in order.  Next this person needs to be a visionary capable of envisioning the future and seeing what needs to be done to make sure we are heading where we wish to go.

Since this position is responsible for so many critical relationships we need a seasoned and effective diplomat.  After all diplomatic solutions are almost always cheaper and healthier than using power or force.

We also need someone who is very intelligent and knowledgeable.  This job requires an unusually good understanding of the world’s cultures and an ability to critically evaluate technical and scientific concepts in order to make complex decisions.

Maturity is another key consideration.  This person must be able to put their feelings and ego aside and focus on their objectives and the needs of their customers.  They also need to be thoughtful and patient so they can make wise decisions and avoid letting their reactions get in the way.

Finally, we need someone with enlightened leadership skills.  This means someone who has a strong sense of direction and knows how to get others on board without coercion.  It also means that this person is very careful about who they hire.  Our winning candidate needs to have the very best staff available because this job is so big that many responsibilities will be delegated.  We need our candidate to put skills and experience in front of personal loyalties and political considerations when selecting their management team.

This criteria pretty much covers the skills and experience our candidate needs.  What about character?  This is where things get a bit dicey.

Evaluating a person’s morals is impossible unless you know that person extremely well.  The other limitation with morals is that we do not seem to be able to agree on what morals are most important.  The same goes for values.  Then there is the other problem; what a person says are their values and morals may not be matched by their actual behavior.  Perhaps a person’s statements about their morals and values are not reliable criteria to evaluate character…

What about ethics? Ethics can be evaluated by looking at an individual’s track record.  Principles like fairness, trustworthiness, and consistency are often reflected in a person’s previous job performance.

Ethical people are far more concerned with what actually happens Vs what kind of a story can they tell about it.  When an individual hides behind marketing terms, sound bites and photo opportunities one might be wise to question their ethics.  A truly ethical person does not need these window dressings and is much more concerned with getting the job done than they are about looking like they are getting the job done.  When it really comes down to it ethics beats values and morality hands down as criteria for evaluating a candidate’s character.

Now imagine something else. Imagine that for some reason the only criteria we have for evaluating our candidates is popularity.  In this case we are no longer in hiring mode, but instead are conducting a popularity contest.  What do you think the chances are that the best person for the job would get it?

Unfortunately, this is not just your imagination.  The Presidential and Congressional races are looking more and more like popularity contests every year.  It is no wonder that most Americans are not satisfied with the performance of our elected officials.

To change this we need to change our perspective and how we evaluate candidates.  First, it helps to remember that our elected officials are public servants that we pay with our tax dollars.  This means they work for us.  When we keep this in mind we can use the exercise above to evaluate our candidates on the basis of their suitability for office and refuse to participate in a popularity contest.

When we decide that we are unwilling to vote for the candidate in our party who seems to have the best chance of being elected, and instead vote for the candidate best suited for the job regardless of party affiliation; then we will have a much better chance of ending up with the best person for the job.