Consensus Building and Hiring Sales Leadership
Things aren’t broken, but the company needs to grow. You know you should be getting more market share because your solutions, products, services and people are superior to your competitors. You want to double revenues and it has become apparent that getting the right sales leadership in place is imperative. The stakes are high and the costs are enormous, but you know you have to do something.
You formulate a tightly woven job description and pull together your must have requirements. You put on your best interviewing game face and hit the market looking for a few good sales managers. After months of careful interviewing you find what appears to be a great candidate. This is where the real trouble begins….because you believe you need consensus.
The dangers of consensus building as a requisite for hiring sales leadership…
Danger #1: More of the same. It’s difficult to get six people to agree on a new sales management hire. It is inevitable that someone will find something not to like. The irony is if everyone involved in the hiring process needed to re-interview for their current jobs today, odds are that 50% or less of the current hiring committee would be receiving an offer. Yet today their opinion weighs equally when advancing the company forward.
Danger #2: Mediocrity. Marketing may want to hire a less aggressive sales manager because they are easier to work with, operations may want to over scrutinize the sales manager’s background because they are risk adverse. IT may have strong concerns about the applicant not being “technical enough” for your company’s solutions. These points are valid and should be considered throughout the process. If achieving consensus when hiring for sales leadership is required however, your new hire’s ability to bring about the desired changes will ultimately be diluted. Instead of hiring Mr. /Mrs. Perfect Sales Manager, you will wind up with a “nice guy” that everyone likes, but yet fails to deliver the expected improvements.
Danger #3: Who runs this place anyway? Someone has to make the decisions. Over time, requiring consensus starts to give the impression that real leadership is nonexistent. It’s hard to attract a high performer with an indecisive culture. Leaders make decisions and high performers don’t wait around for things to happen. They go where the action is. If you stall, you will attract others who fail to act and are uncertain. This methodology may make little difference for other functions, but it will produce lackluster results when hiring for sales leadership positions.
Danger #4: Encourage playing it safe. Why do you need consensus? Is your company creating a culture where mistakes aren’t OK to make? Does accountability go out the window because consensus hides the ownership that comes with decision making? How can you empower people if they need consensus? Mediocre people are ok with this type of environment; A-players simply won’t stick around.
Ultimately, people resort to consensus hiring because it serves a purpose. It deflects blame like Teflon. This may serve individual objectives, but it’s rarely in the best interest of the company. If you remove the fear of blame, you remove the fear of risk, and you can focus on creating an environment of empowerment and accountability. Consensus tends to squander resources by fostering an internally focused environment when resources could be allocated to external causes--serving clients and winning new customers. In some scenarios, consensus building is necessary, in others, especially when expecting different results, consensus can be downright counterproductive.
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