How Much Does Experience Matter In Choosing Leaders?

Hmmm. Possibly good question. Any data?

There’s a whole culture in business / hiring around development vs. poaching. The idea is rooted in the belief that, if you have an open position and 3–4 internals who can fill it, you should still look elsewhere. Part of that is the overall compliance needs of the recruiting arc, and part of it is justified with “Well, an outside candidate might have a different perspective.” That’s undeniably true, but I’ve also seen a ton of my friends get burned on deals like this and ultimately become a bit disengaged as relates back to the company (“After all I did, they passed me over…”) It’s a tough situation. It’s made tougher by the fact that most people don’t tend to think about the ideas of “leadership” in the right way — if they did, these stats on effective managers would be much higher than they are.

One thing you almost always hear when discussing leadership is this notion of experience — almost as if you have to have been a leader in order to be a leader. That’s fundamentally impossible, because you can’t be something that no one will give you a chance to be unless you’ve already been it (“experience” as a whole is a boondoggle of a concept that typically makes it hard for certain people to get certain jobs, and it all comes back to those managers linked above not…