I’ve been advising business on avoiding “New hire failure” for over twelve years. Too often, however, I’m asked to advise on a business after they’ve experienced an expensive and very time consuming new hire disaster.

Causes
Despite a great CV (Resume), powerful past experience, great qualifications (MBA) the biggest cause for new hire failure is an inability of the individual to make the transition from one job to another (promotion or business change).

The reasons given by team members and colleagues for a leadership failure always include some of the following:

• Inability to solve specific business problems
• Troubled relationships with the team
• Intimidating or bullying management style 
• Failure to develop team or subordinates
• Unable to deal with conflict
• Failure to adapt to new boss’ managment style
• Failure to build team (recruitment isues)
• Overuse of one mentor or advisor
• Inability to think strategically

The question is why?

After a robust interview process how is it that so many senior new hires fail due to the above list?
Here are some, but by no means all, of the reasons I find so often:

• Friend being appointed (always a problem)
• He did a great job for his previous company (But are the circumstances the same?)
• Sloppy hiring process (Failure to follow up on information)
• No integration process (or ignored due to seniority of hire)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 8th, 2011 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Avoiding team failure.