Josh, Lindsay, and Mackenzie

I was thinking last week about how ridiculous the voting process has become and the lack of qualified presidential candidates and decided to write my political manifesto on how I would improve the selection process to choose candidates in the first place. I submitted it to the Washington Post, but was unfortunately rejected. Lacking a medium from which to launch my underground coups, Josh suggested I post it on our blog. Enjoy!

Hiring the Best President

Corporate America is clamoring more and more for selection and hiring processes that will find the most highly qualified candidates for open positions. Organizations today are held to strict guidelines relating to adverse impact, disparate treatment, and a myriad of other tenets designed to provide the most structured, unbiased choice among candidates. In a time when we are faced with challenges both in our country and on the blood-stained ground of foreign lands, why are we not looking at our presidential election in a similar light? If you consider the President as the “CEO of America”, why don’t we apply the same principles when we select Presidential candidates? Think about it: we currently find the individuals with enough ambition and political clout to raise large sums of money, stand in front of the nation and skirt around the solutions to the issues, and then select the “lesser of the two evils” when we go to the polls in November. Then we spend the next four years complaining about the President and espousing how we would do things differently if “I were in his shoes”. Can we complain about the President? Sure, it’s our opinion and our right to share that opinion. But instead of complaining, why not take the time to prevent ourselves from setting that person up for failure? Why not remedy the actual problem: finding qualified candidates from which to choose when it comes time to vote. How do you find qualified candidates? You revamp the selection process altogether.

I’m sure we’re all familiar with the “Peter Principle” which asserts that every employee in an organization tends to be promoted to his/her level of incompetence. Now, this isn’t always the case of course, but we’ve all worked with individuals who were excellent performers in their role and were thus promoted to a larger role, with a larger scope and increased (or brand new) leadership responsibilities. If that individual does not succeed in their new role, do we blame the individual or those who promoted him/her? One could argue we have seen examples of the “Peter Principle” in politics as well. When you think about your own top ten list of “Worst Presidents”, how many of them would you have said ran their cities and/or states well, or executed their House or Senate post well, but once they were given the increased scope (the country) and responsibilities with which they were unfamiliar (e.g., military, foreign affairs, etc.) they failed. Was it their fault, or was it our fault for promoting him beyond his area of expertise?

When you think about Presidents and Presidential candidates of recent years, what qualities do they share? If I were to make a short list, I would say they have a great deal of ambition, are well networked, have high achievement orientation, and are to some extent charismatic. But are those the qualities we want in a President? Possibly, but I would argue we are missing out on some key, minimum qualifications: the ability to build a high-performing team, military experience (or at least some requisite amount of exposure), financial acumen, agility, creativity, communication skills, and problem solving. We have think-tanks and committees for almost every aspect of our government, but why not a power-house human resources team? I think it’s high time we got the best of the best together from HR and Industrial Psychology to develop a new Presidential selection process complete with job description, minimum qualifications, extensive screening interviews, and structured interviewing with behaviorally-based questions. Once those filters are in place, and we have candidates well qualified for the basic responsibilities of President, we could facilitate a debate in which candidates are expected to provide real answers to real questions and determine which candidates not only possess the minimum qualifications, but also demonstrate those qualities we would like to represent us as a country.

Notice that I have yet to mention party affiliation. Our country is ingrained in the bipartisan nature of the political machine. It’s pretty much the first thing we ask when someone is running for office; in fact we don’t even really ask it, we just expect candidates to tell us. Yet if an organization required you to label yourself in the interview process, you would feel limited, pigeon-holed, and possibly discriminated against. Instead of labeling individuals liberal, conservative, republican, democrat, or independent, why don’t we have candidates answer solid questions about the issues and have their responses determine which group supports which candidate. Instead of having the politicians pick a candidate to present to the American people, why don’t the American people pick a candidate to present to the politicians?