Does your team's body odor smell of perfume?
I originally read this on Amazon’s leadership principles and both the concept stuck with me, and the phrasing of it made it memorable.
Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.
In time, as I’ve interviewed more senior leaders this concept has come up again and again. Things these candidates say include:
“I’ve been pretty good at selecting for [some positive trait]”
“I can’t really remember a time I’ve made a hiring mistake”
“My team was one of the best at the company”
Now these things might all be true (and that’d be great). Some of these people have an inability to engage with questions like…
How did you select so successfully for [this trait]?
What out of your interview process is most dispositive[1]?
What is it that you do that prevents hiring mistakes so definitively?
What are you doing that your peers aren’t, that led you to build the best team?
How have you improved your ability to select for [this positive trait] as you’ve grown as a leader?
If they don’t know what makes their machine work it’s a pretty strong sign that they think their team smells like perfume.
Leaders who have really interesting things to say about questions such as #1 through #5 above, are thoughtful and self critical, intellectually honest in saying things like “[aspect one] was luck, [aspect two] we didn’t fully understand until later, we first tried [tactic A] in interviews then moved to [tactic B] because of [reason x]”. These patterns of thinking are more like scientist leaders - they know why things have failed or worked. whom we hope to attract. But unfortunately most candidates end up giving you some hand-wavy word salad that doesn’t really survive scrutiny. That’s when you’re pretty sure they just think their team’s body odor smells of perfume - and those are the folks that we need to avoid bringing into our team.
-Bo
[1] Some folks have asked what I mean by dispositive, and via Merriam Webster a good example usage I’ve seen of this word is:
Yet Lemoine insisted, first to his Google colleagues and then to the world at large, that his ability to feel an emotional attachment to a chatbot was itself dispositive of the chatbot’s sentience.—Ian Bogost, The Atlantic, 14 June 2022