Recruiting ‘Dominant’ Types—a Guide [Part I]
It also tends to conjure up the idea that if you hire someone who is dominant, [s]he will dominate others and thereby help your organization achieve dominance and dominate the market.
The Conventional Take on Dominance
So, presumably hiring a dominant alpha-candidate is to going to help you get the other two forms of dominance, in that person and in the market—right?
Conventional wisdom postulates and assumes that alpha-organizations require alpha-males and females and that their personal dominance—as opposed to merely being domineering—will make your organization dominant in the same or equally positive sense.
After all, victory, like evolution itself belongs to the “strong” and the bold, does it not? Distilled to its essence, isn’t being dominant nothing more than being able to “get your way” without having to give as much as you get, or in terms of struggle, giving better than you get? Even if it is, it has some apparently tough competition from other ideas about dominance.
The Hazards of Misjudging Dominance
If “dominance” is at all on your hiring screen—as a plus, a minus or simply a flag to be hoisted for closer inspection later, it’s critical that you be clear-headed about it, e.g., that you have a consistent, clear and organizationally relevant concept of it.
In particular, the concept of dominance adopted should be the same and applied the same way, from candidate to candidate, occasion to occasion, and among your HR team and management. That means it should have “concept validity” and “concept reliability ”.
Failure to meet these standards is likely to result in confusion, a bad hiring decision and mischaracterization of job requirements and job candidate alike.
Choosing any of the following as a definition of “dominance” can result in the wrong hiring decision because of a concept validity or reliability issue:
1. Aggressiveness: A child throwing a tantrum and being ignored or a prisoner fruitlessly banging on his cell bars is acting aggressively, but is anything but dominant in that situation. Indeed, aggressiveness can be displayed as compensation for helplessness and a lack of any real power or influence.
The temptation to confuse aggressiveness with dominance is probably due to the phenomenon and images of a “dominant” mandrill baboon aggressively putting a juvenile upstart or adult rival in its place.
On the other hand, we intuitively understand the “quiet dominance” of a powerful Godfather or corporate CEO who never has to display overt aggressiveness, because of his intimidating presence, even when utterly still and silent.
Associated hiring mistake: Confusing aggressiveness with dominance is likely to result in hiring someone who, initially because of and subsequently despite his or her aggression, make enemies that cannot be controlled.
Hiring someone for “assertiveness” mistaken for dominance can carry the same consequences, since the risk of being stuck with a pushy, but ineffective employee is very real, unless some better measure or concept of dominance is also adopted as a criterion of it.
2. Intimidation:So, is mafia boss quiet intimidation the or a hallmark of dominance?Again, the answer is “no”.
The same intuition that tells us that intimidation is a better marker of dominance than aggressiveness also tells us that intimidation, if understood as the [successful] attempt to get results by instilling fear, is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve or display dominance.
Leadership by a dominant figure can succeed purely by inspiration of those who follow and by logical or evidential persuasion of those who resist, without any recourse to intimidation as threat—unless anything that causes resistance is unjustifiably considered to be intimidation.
As far as being sufficient to achieve dominance, intimidation may result in nothing more than retaliation and defeat—unless intimidation is arbitrarily redefined to include successful deterrence.
Associated hiring mistake:Although frequently less overt than aggression, intimidation suffers from the same deficiency—It can easily accomplish nothing more than to antagonize, mobilize and otherwise perpetuate opposition and conflict. So, to be taken with how “intimidating” a prospective manager seems because of some association with dominance is to set up the hire for failure.
3. Getting one’s way:Because there are lots of ways to get what you want without having to give, it is important to skim off those that are unlikely to have anything to do with organizationally useful dominance, however it is to ultimately be conceived.
In particular, we must note instances in which getting one’s way or whatever one wants happens only precisely because one is not dominant. For example, a successful panhandler, low on the socioeconomic and other status totem poles is all the more successful the less dominant—in some intuitive sense—he seems.
In fact, he’s proof of the perverse truth of “survival of the fittest”—where “fit” has to allow helplessness and the capacity to arouse pity as key fitness-enhancing traits.
Hence, the less socially “dominant” and more helpless or submissive he appears, the more he’ll be able to “get his way”. So, are we to say that because he is able to get without giving, to get his own way, that he, behaving submissively, is dominant over those among his benefactors who almost never accomplish that?
Then there are those who can “get their way” because they ride on the coat tails of someone who actually is more dominant in that or other more germane respects. Nepotism immediately comes to mind as an example: The boss’s nephew gets hired only for that reason—he’s being advanced by someone who is dominant in some different or additional way.
Otherwise, there are those who get what they want by being seductive, or persuasive, e.g., by force of their ideas, rather than of their seductive personality, charms or character.
Imagine a beautiful lawyer who really wins cases only because she researches and argues more effectively than her opposition, but whose good looks don’t hurt. Does that make her charms, or, instead, the arguments and evidence she presents, the true source of the power to dominate legal proceedings?
Translated into hiring, this warrants taking care to distinguish a dominant personality from a dominant resource or methodology.
For example, if a prospective in-house translator seems to dominate the competition, but only because of the advanced translation software he uses, would it not make sense to forget about his seeming dominance and evident higher salary expectations, and to instead try to get the software and a less expensive candidate?
In simplest terms, is organizational history, dominance and success created by a dominant Gandhi or by the dominance of his ideas? Even when that question cannot be answered, it is important to understand it and the difference it captures.
Associated hiring mistake: Hiring a high-priced disciple and exponent of a dominant business methodology, e.g., “just-in-time-delivery” that will help your organization “get its way”, rather than adopting the methodology itself, at much lower cost.
Second associated hiring mistake: Hiring the boss’s nephew from dominance considerations, when it should be clear that he himself will contribute nothing to organizational and market dominance.
If a candidate is seen as a dominant and hired because of the connections he has—including connections to powerful others who can help or hurt the organization if they so choose, as either prospective or existing clients, associates or nepotistic sponsors, his dominance is only pseudo-dominance and only as durable and relevant as those connections.
Otherwise, hiring him on the basis of confusing their dominance with his may make as much sense as striking an alliance with a king’s courier, instead of with the king.
[Continued in Part II ]