🤔 Let the Team Choose the Boss? Think Again

Scenario: The team lead is leaving the company. Management fears that the team will scatter without the appropriate leader. Therefore, the hiring managers want the employees to choose their future leader themselves.

Typical pros:

🤔 “We want the team to be comfortable. So the decision will be theirs.”

🤔 “The team will interview so that there is a common cultural code with the lead.”

🤔 “No one in the company has the competence to hire a lead — only in this team.”

It might go like this. A recruiter finds candidates and pre-interviews them. Then the whole team communicates with the candidates and chooses a finalist.

It seems like everything is great, but in the end, such a hire can become a headache.

Risks:

☝️ Employees will choose a person with whom they will be comfortable. The team lead may be too loyal to the team and be afraid of unpopular decisions. Such decisions are often necessary for business development.

☝️ The team will only assess the manager based on hard skills, not management skills. And those are definitely needed for a leader!

☝️ Jealousy. People on the team may have been expecting someone from among them to be put in charge: “Why not one of us? Why are you looking outside?”. Internal conflict will prevent them from calmly evaluating candidates.

Case study: A recruitment agency was looking for candidates for the role of CTO, and the team interviewed them. The team’s main interest was that the technical solutions in the product were “cool”.

Employees bombarded candidates with irrelevant technical questions and rejected many who were more about business, recalls NEWHR executive search consultant Olga Makarova.

Meanwhile, it was important for the company that the CTO connected business and technology, and was not the coolest techie.

“The leader may be weaker than the team regarding hard skills. It’s normal. After all, the manager is responsible for higher-level tasks”, says Ekaterina Veselkina, IT recruitment leader at NEWHR.

What to do?

🔺 Do not give the team the right to choose their leader. To check hard skills, you can involve an expert from outside or from another project in the company.

🔺 It is better to hold a meeting between the future team lead and the team in the format of an acquaintance. For example, at the final stage of hiring. Let the team and the candidate ask each other questions on equal terms.

🔺 To prevent such a meeting from turning into an “interrogation” of the new leader, it is better for someone from HR or management to be present.

💙 NEWHR Recruiting will help you find IT specialists of any level for your company. Fill out the form on the website or write to contact@new.hr