The Appointment and the Fortnight

In the last essay I argued that a certificate records the completion of a process and says nothing about whether judgement was formed. I left the story at the point where the file has been tidied and somebody has been given the job.How they arrived matters less than we assume. They may have been promoted. They may have moved sideways during a restructure, into a role nobody quite remembers deciding to create. They may have been hired from outside entirely, on the strength of a document. All three are appointments, and all three fail in the same way, because two errors are compounding.The first is that the appointment was made on a signal that does not predict performance in the role. The second is that, the gap being obvious to everyone within a quarter, a course is bought to close it, and the course cannot. Each error is survivable alone. Together they produce the manager everyone in the organisation can identify and nobody can explain.The Best SalespersonLet’s start with promotion,…