Selection Decisions
I found myself in a rather sensitive situation recently.
In 2021, I joined the board of a writer’s organization at the invitation of its president. When I asked her, “Why me?” she explained that my business background and know how would compliment the creative minds of other board members who come from different careers and experiences. “Fair enough,” I said. “But I want to make a contribution.”
That gets me to my current dilemma. I guess I made a significant contribution since I now find myself in the position of being a nominee, along with two other individuals, for an award that recognizes contribution. Since the board decides on which nominee will receive the award, I removed myself from the process and advised a fellow board member that I will abstain from voting.
But an interesting question came up from another board member. Very often there are not multiple nominees among which to choose, so he asked if the three criteria for judging would be weighted in any way. Excellent question! I immediately thought of another award selection in which I was asked to judge. There was a rubric that assigned weights to the criteria, and the person with the highest collective score was the winner.
Ironically, the writing organization is in the midst of a writing competition and many of the board members are judges. The process for judging the entries is the same—assigned points to different criteria, etc….
In the interest of not sounding self-serving, and not biasing any fellow board members, I didn’t say anything during the meeting. But this got me, and my business-oriented brain, thinking about the selection decisions we make in organizations all the time—selecting among a pool of applicants for hire; selecting among a pool of employees for promotion; selecting among a pool of providers for goods and services.
Managers, or members of selection committees, are often tempted to compare one individual or organization against the others. It’s human nature. Even in judging writing contest entries, I found myself thinking how does this one compare to the one I read last week? Wrong. Go back to the rubric.
As we point out so many times in The Big Book of HR, selection decisions, of any type, are not personality contests. That’s why objective, and not subjective, criteria are used. We evaluate applicants against the requirements of the job in making hiring decisions. We evaluate employees for promotions using job requirements and their performance history. And we assess employees’ performance by evaluating the employee against position requirements using measurable, job-related criteria. When layoffs are necessary, objective criteria is used to select which positions, not people, should be eliminated. The same is true for selecting goods and service providers.
Yes, fit factor can play a role—like the time during a competitive process for a service provider a colleague on the selection team asked my boss and I who we would be comfortable working with. In other words, how did the provider organizations’ values align with ours, not how we felt about their individual representatives. Don’t forget that fit factor is a credible selection criterium. In fact, turning down partners who don’t align with the organizations values is a sign of ethical leadership.