Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don't have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it's true. If you hire somebody without high integrity, you really want them to be dumb and lazy.” - Warren Buffett
Integrity, intelligence, and energy = a great hire
Putting all the pieces together, you have a great candidate. Moreover, while integrity may weigh heavier, the bar must be set equally high for each of the three traits. Writing for CBS Money Watch, Tom Searcy explains it like this:
- Hire someone with high energy, high intelligence, but low integrity, and you will get a smart, fast-moving thief.
- Hire someone with high intelligence, high integrity, but low energy, and you will get a shopkeeper, not an engine of growth.
- Hire someone with high energy, high integrity, but low intelligence, and you will get a reliable functionary, but not a great problem solver or visionary.
While Searcy is on the right track, it is more complicated. It is the combination of over 20 behavioral traits that are necessary to predict success in a given role. High performers in an assigned position share a standard set of traits. We have validated benchmarks for 550+ roles, including about 15 CEO roles, from startups to billion-dollar corporations.
The American Phycological Society certifies SuccessFinder, the testing instrument we use, at their highest level. We predict success with 85% reliability.
Stressed → Natural Behavioral Traits
Boards should feel confident in answer to the question when the prospective CEO faces a challenging situation, how will he or she respond, and how bad will it be? When we are under stress, we revert to our natural behavioral traits.
We have seen CEOs fired for lying on their resume to help their career, attempting to influence government officials to improve their competitiveness, and pushing employees to create false accounts to boost performance numbers. When these executives were faced with a challenging circumstance, they decided to do the wrong thing and were ultimately called to account for it.
Throughout history with all the great leaders in science, industry, government, and especially in social reform. You know who they are! When it comes to, be very wary of those who are so confident and eloquent that they seem to be too good to be true. That is because they are! I have made the mistake of hiring people who seemed to know everything but found out later they could not execute anything.
Dismissals for ethical lapses on the rise
According to a 2017 study by PricewaterhouseCoopers, CEO dismissals for ethical lapses rose from 4.6 percent of all successions in 2007–11 to 7.8 percent in 2012–16, a 68 percent increase. It is still a relatively small number of CEOs, but it is alarming that there are any at all—and that the number is growing.
What happened to high integrity?
When a Board searches for a CEO, they almost always explicitly mention wanting someone with high integrity. However, integrity is hard to evaluate in an interview. When people interview candidates, they are often heavily influenced by more observable personality traits, such as charisma, influence, and passion. This leads to a bias for people with relatively loud personalities who can cast big visions and persuade others to follow them. Here are 12 questions you may wish to ask.
Integrity and other behavioral traits are very hard to evaluate in an interview. We used advanced analytics to measure 85 behavioral traits. We predict the likelihood that the candidate will meet or exceed expectations. High performers in a given role share a standard set of traits.
When assisting Boards in CEO selection, we ensure that the selection committee considers integrity. I think organizations need to move away from hiring on credentials and experience and move to hiring based on the candidates’ full “talent stack” — skills, knowledge, accomplishments, and behavioral traits. When people interview candidates, they are often heavily influenced by credentials, experience, and charisma.
Our data shows that expressive individuals are far more likely to get hired. However, without the required traits, they are far more likely to fail.
The selection committee’s bias toward the best performing candidate in the interview can be subtle but is well-documented. Over the past twenty years, researchers have found significant correlations between being a friendly, attention-getting extrovert, and becoming a leader. It is a bias we often see firsthand. In an examination of recent global CEO position specifications, loud words like passion, inspire, influence, charisma, and energy were used about three times more often than those describing quieter characteristics, such as humility, authenticity and being a good listener.
Data-driven way to judge high integrity
You can’t have trust without being trustworthy.” – Stephen Covey
Recently, Clarke Murphy, CEO at Russell Reynolds Associates and Hogan Assessments undertook research that uncovered a data-driven way to judge integrity and the related issue of resilience, what they call “Leadership Span”.
Leadership Span has a loud side and a quiet side:
- The loud side includes the traits of being disruptive, risk-taking, heroic, and galvanizing.
- The quiet side is pragmatic, reluctant, vulnerable and connecting.
They used that framework to look at 1,000 executives and compared their loud and quiet trait results against data from their 360° evaluations.
As it turns out, there are some explicit relationships. Executives who are perceived to be high in integrity are also more likely to score high on three quiet factors: the ability to connect with others, the ability to be vulnerable and the ability to be reluctant when it comes to taking risks. At the same time, perceptions of integrity show almost no relationship to scores on three significant factors: the ability to galvanize troops into action, having a high propensity to take risks, and the ability to be disruptive.
Show integrity in everything you do, and the rewards will follow
You cannot talk your way out of a problem you behaved yourself into.” — Stephen Covey
Integrity is a shining light in a world of empty promises. Decide today to show integrity in everything you do, and the rewards will follow.
Four things you can do to make sure you demonstrate high integrity daily:
- Never make a promise you cannot
- Always under promise and over deliver (and not the other way around. Your team and customers will appreciate it).
- Be honest – with yourself and others around you.
- Be on time – it shows that you value someone else’s time.
Do you focus on integrity in an interview?
Think about the last time you interviewed a job candidate for an executive position. Did you want someone with integrity? Did you focus more on leadership and decisiveness or vulnerability and reluctance? I am willing to bet it was the former, but the latter is as essential.
Look at the recent issues at Uber, the ride-sharing company that has had to address numerous ethical failures in past years. When the board replaced the CEO to right the ship, they selected Dara Khosrowshahi, then-CEO of Expedia.
There is no doubt Khosrowshahi is a hard-charging leader. During his time at Expedia, revenue more than quadrupled, and profit doubled, and the company expanded into more than 60 countries, all while acquiring multiple competitors. However, Khosrowshahi is also comfortable displaying his vulnerability. Look at the email he sent to the Expedia workforce when he announced his departure:
I have to tell you I am scared. I've been here at Expedia for so long that I've forgotten what life is like outside this place. But the times of greatest learning for me have been when I've been through big changes, or taken on new roles—you have to move out of your comfort zone and develop muscles that you didn't know you had.” — Dara Khosrowshahi
The best leaders are always those that inspire employees to work hard and work well. Another way of expressing this same feeling is that employees want to believe in their leaders. Great leaders can both drive growth and say, “I have to tell you I am scared.” That is not a failing; it is a strength. If you want someone with high integrity, then vulnerability, reluctance, and other quiet traits are essential.
We urge you to consider the candidate’s full talent stack. While virtually everything may look great, there may be a fatal flaw. You should be delighted to discover it in the selection process rather than in a headline. A little investment upfront can save you many headaches later.
We are passionate about the power of behavioral DNA in the selection process. We provide our services worldwide. Send us an email.
