Bluffer Syndrome – How do unqualified people get into technology leadership positions?

When I left a previous role I was able to meet my successor on the way out. I knew in 5 minutes that this guy wasn’t going to make it. How did I know but those that chose him didn’t?

The answer is very simple. There’s a salesman mindset at play here. Whether conscious or unconscious on the part of the new person. There’s the famous adage coined by Robert Collier “Always enter the conversation already taking place in the customer’s mind.”

Those who are choosing the candidate have a specific set of goals in mind during their selection process. Perhaps they want to see dashboards. Perhaps they want to improve something specific about the current operation. This is not dissimilar to looking for specific things during candidate screening. Maybe you need someone with at least ITIL Foundation – if that is the case you will toss every CV that doesn’t mention it – even though it is quite possible one of those in the no further action pile does have ITIL Foundation.

So, a smart candidate during a face to face interview will have worked out through job descriptions and scenarios provided that dashboards are really important to the hiring decision maker. If they are able to control the dialogue they can bring it up themselves “oh I’ve done tons of dashboards that have enabled management to make strategic knowledge and data based decisions”

That sounds great doesn’t it? But what if those dashboards were just a visualisation of a few tables in Excel? A CEO or a CFO will have no idea how data analytics or data science works, and will not ask the right questions about collection and normalisation of data and how the end product is entirely dependent upon the data collected at source before it is transformed into something meaningful.

Thus, the decision makers in the hiring process are unqualified to judge those that they are hiring – because they are unable to take the comment “oh I’ve done tons of dashboards that have enabled management to make strategic knowledge and data based decisions” and pick it apart.

As a result, one of the other candidates that probably knows far more about dashboards and analytics but wasn’t able to read between the lines, and get into the head of the decision maker was overlooked. And hey presto a bluffer finds themselves with a job offer, and an employer finds themselves with a mess in 12 to 24 months time.

In the scenario I referred to at the start of this post I could smell a trail of BS from the front door to the seat in front of me in my office that the person sat in. Sadly, those that were told what they wanted to hear were not able to smell it and they had to find out the hard way.

It is therefore extremely important to have the right people on an interview panel. Sometimes even that isn’t enough to smoke out a bluffer, but it certainly helps.

There are ways to suss out a bluffer early on if you’ve let them slip through into a position. Just like early warning signs before an earthquake. I don’t want to give away too many trade secrets, but someone who doesn’t hit the ground running and is spending a lot of time learning about their new surroundings is almost a dead-cert for bluffer status.