Not all groups are equal

I believe it was John Stuart Mill who wrote that the only way a human being can approach knowing the whole of a subject is by hearing what persons of every variety of opinion have to say about it, and by studying it through every character of mind. He strongly argued that there was no other way. No wise person ever became wise in any other way, he said.

I find this quote delightfully inconvenient for the way most hotel leadership teams hire. We obsess over the details of a candidate’s background: whether the properties they worked at have a good reputation, whether we know someone who knows someone over there. We read their CVs twice, call the references, and spend 40 minutes debating their interview performance and how they answered a specific question. Then the decision gets made by a handful of leaders with similar backgrounds, a shared calendar, and one very developed skill: agreeing with each other.

With time, I've come to realize that the hiring team, or the group of people who influence the hiring decision, is a far more important variable in a hiring decision than how well a candidate scores on the key search criteria.

Follow the truth! And create a hiring team that does so too. It surely has a compounding effect. A truthseeking team creates a virtuous loop: better hires, sharper debriefs, more accurate criteria for the next search, and a stronger team for the next hire.

1) A strong hiring team is the root (or the seed?) of success.

If you are a GM, a Director of Operations, or an Asset Manager, it is tempting to file all of this under “HR.” Please don’t.

The consequences of not paying attention to hiring are easy to anticipate. You just need to follow the chain of events and see how it affects your hotel. A leader is hired. That leader hires the next layer, sets the standards, and shapes how dozens or hundreds of associates treat guests every day. That behavior becomes guest satisfaction, guest satisfaction becomes reputation, and reputation eventually shows up in RevPAR, in how you perform against the competitive set, and in what the asset is worth.

Nobody puts “quality of the hiring decision” on the P&L. It is invisible until it is very visible.

I always like to draw a line between hiring and asset valuation. In that sense, a leadership hire can be a plus or a minus, a driver of asset value or a source of depreciation, a source of revenue or a cost. This cash flow is paid back or charged back every day for years, and most of the time nobody traces the bill to its source.

In my post about a framework for choosing your next hotel (Read it here): , I argued that labor, meaning the team and the leadership, is the factor people underweight. Owners and asset managers underweight it too. Someone chose that labor, and how they chose it matters more than almost any line in the operating plan.

2) In groups, more (or less) is not automatically better.

We tend to assume that putting experienced leaders in a room will produce a better decision than one leader alone. Sometimes it does. A group can be better than the sum of its individuals, but it doesn’t turn out that way automatically.

Researchers who study group decisions, Philip Tetlock and Jennifer Lerner among them, describe two styles of group thinking:

• Confirmatory thought is a one sided attempt to rationalize a point of view the group already holds. 
• Exploratory thought is an even handed look at alternative views, with real tolerance for dissent. Same group, same information, opposite outcomes.

Guess which one is the default setting? You are right! 😸 The one that requires less effort!

We have all been in one of those hiring debriefs where the first strong opinion sets the tone and everyone adds a supportive comment. The hiring echo chamber sounds like this: "I worked with her 7 years ago and I don't think they'll make it here", “He just don't have great energy”, “My friend knows her and she is strong culture fit.” Heads nod. The group stops processing information and starts celebrating its own beliefs.

A great hiring team is not a group of people who agree. It is a group designed to disagree well.

In groups were confirmatory though reigns, everyone leaves feeling a little better and knowing nothing new.

3) FEAR ME NOT

Usually I see two patterns where good hiring breaks down on a property, and they are early signals of confirmatory thought.

• Solo hiring. The Director of Finance, HR, Operations, or F&B runs the whole process alone and presents one finalist to the GM or to HR for approval. The group that signs off on the hire is rarely the group that tested the candidate. It is a signature, not a decision. There is zero (cero, none) “help me see what I’m not seeing.”
• Hierarchy and fear. Nobody wants to say no to the GM, the Director of Operations, or the talent leader. If you are the GM, your opinion is the loudest in the room, which is not always a compliment to the room. Exploratory thought is killed by an unchecked veto. People keep their doubts to themselves because dissent costs more than agreement.

None of this is malicious. These are busy, experienced people who trust their judgment, and that is precisely the problem. Experience makes us more confident, not necessarily more accurate.

A simple test if you are wondering if this happens at your property: Who tested your last finalist besides the person who found them? When did someone last change your mind in a debrief? Did a no for a peer led to more conversation on why or ust a simple yes/no vote? Could they keep pushing no confortably creating conflict?

A hiring team needs a charter, an explicit agreement, not an assumed culture. It has three parts:

• Accuracy over confirmation. Reward whoever finds the hole in the favorite candidate.
• Accountability with advance notice. Tell people before they form an opinion that they will have to explain it to an audience that is informed, interested in accuracy, and unknown in its views.
• Openness to a diversity of ideas. Invite people who will safely challenge each other.

The timing of the second part is where most teams slip. Accountability works best before the decision, and asking “how do you know?” (Read it here) is the accountability part. After the opinion exists, we are no longer thinking, we are defending. If your team reviews a hire only once the offer is out, the review is a ceremony. It also helps to imagine the debrief in advance. If you know you will be asked how you know, you start catching your own errors earlier.

4) We already know why we're right.

On our own we have one viewpoint, built from our experiences, our information, and the hypotheses we can imagine. We already know why we’re right. What we need help with is why we might be wrong.

That is why diversity of viewpoints is a working tool and not a political slogan. By diversity I mean real differences in function and perspective: Finance, Operations, F&B, HR, a peer from a sister property, a leader who worked at that property before being promoted, the regional team, or the asset manager who understands the owner and the history. People who are not wrapped up in protecting our narrative can do some of the heavy lifting of removing bias for us, and they hold information we don’t know we’re missing.

Three questions for the next debrief: Why might my read on this candidate be wrong? What evidence am I missing? What reasons could someone else have for a completely different read, and why might they be right instead of me?

To promote that true diversity, celebrate the leader who is the best mistake admitter on a bad hire, and the best finder of mistakes on a good one. This is my favorite part of the whole idea, because it is so human. We crave approval, even from strangers. So a good team uses that on purpose, rewarding accuracy and honesty with real recognition.

Conclusion

Your property’s competitive advantage is not only the candidates you hire. It is the hiring team that selects them. The best operating plan, the best brand, and the best asset can all be slowed down by a leadership team chosen by instinct and applause.

Nobody gets wise alone. So build the hiring team the way you build any critical system: define the standard, assign accountability, and make disagreement safe. Because a great hire is not only about finding the right person. It is about having the right team to recognize them.

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