Yesterday, over a virtual coffee, Nadine asked me a question I have never managed to answer neatly.
Whose judgement do you trust?
It took me back to an executive search from years ago, when a colleague and I disagreed completely about a candidate.
Brian and I were building a shortlist for the top job at a mid-sized international producer. One candidate divided us: a South African executive with an impressive record, but not the profile the client would normally have considered. Brian thought he was exceptional. I was not convinced.
But I was also questioning my own reaction for another reason. I had lived and worked in South Africa and retain an enormous affinity for the country and its people. If anything, I expected myself to be positively disposed towards him. Was that influencing my judgement? Or was I compensating for a bias I knew I had, and becoming too cautious as a result?
There were practical questions too. Did we really want to ask the client to accept the complexity and cost of moving this executive and his family to Europe for someone who did not obviously fit the brief?
Neither of us lacked experience. We had both held comparable roles earlier in our industry careers, and we had both interviewed him at length. And both of us were certain.
That was the problem.
We talk about judgement constantly in business. We look for it in CEOs and rely on it around boardroom tables, particularly when the numbers cannot provide the answer. But how do we know good judgement when we see it?
It is not intelligence. It is not experience. It is not confidence. And it certainly does not mean always being right.
Good judgement matters most when the information is incomplete, several choices appear reasonable and the consequences of getting it wrong matter. The further someone rises in an organisation, the more decisions look like that. Yet we readily question someone else’s judgement while placing considerable confidence in our own. Brian and I were doing exactly that.
Our experience was similar. Our information was the same. Our conclusion was different. And I had introduced another complication. I knew I had a bias and was trying to correct for it. That sounds sensible. But how do you know when you have corrected enough? At what point does compensating for one bias create another?
Perhaps that is part of the problem with the idea that important decisions can somehow be made free of bias. They cannot.
We respond to people who communicate in ways we recognise. Familiar career paths reassure us. Confidence can resemble competence. Shared experience creates connection. Even our attempts to compensate for these influences become part of the judgement we make.
That is why, at Borderless, two experienced people interview every candidate. Not because two people will agree. Quite the opposite: we compare notes precisely because we sometimes see different things.
A colleague may have noticed hesitation where I heard reflection. I may see unnecessary risk where someone else sees an executive prepared to challenge convention. One of us may be influenced by experience that is highly relevant. Another by experience that merely feels relevant. The disagreement forces us to examine why.
In the case of the South African executive, Brian persuaded me that I was placing too much weight on the conventional profile, and not enough on the person in front of us. We put him forward.
Brian was right. I was wrong.
The candidate joined as a highly successful number two and, two years later, took the top job.
I have remembered that search ever since, not because Brian made the better call, but because our disagreement produced a better decision than either of our certainties could have produced alone. That matters well beyond executive search. The more consequential a decision, the less comfortable I am relying on one person’s certainty, my own included.
Important decisions benefit from genuinely different perspectives. Not a room full of people assembled to agree, but people who have earned the right to disagree: someone who understands the business, someone who understands the market, someone who has carried comparable responsibility, and sometimes someone from outside the organisation who is not invested in its assumptions, history or internal politics.
Their job is not to eliminate bias, which is impossible, nor is it necessarily to reach consensus. Too much consensus can produce what I sometimes call ‘consenseless’: a conclusion sufficiently diluted for everyone to accept and no one particularly to believe.
Good collective judgement does something different. It makes disagreement useful.
Why did you see something I did not? What are we assuming? What evidence would change your mind? What would have to be true for the opposite conclusion to be right? Those questions make judgement examinable.
So Nadine’s question remains difficult. Whose judgement do you trust?
Perhaps I trust experienced judgement most when it is confident enough to reach a decision but open enough to be challenged on the way there.
Brian changed my mind.
Fortunately.
by Andrew Kris, Founding Partner of Borderless Executive Search
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