After experiencing the haughty and unfeeling behaviour of the ICS in colonial times, post-independence India was keen to have the best civil service in the world. Realising its dream of a prosperous, happy and well-administered India demanded civil servants who were honest, eager to learn and had the interests of the most deprived at heart. Unfortunately, it wasn’t clear how to judge these essentials. So, it continued to test for a smorgasbord of subjects that was expanded to include Sanskrit, Santhali and Sindhi. Apologies for my alliterative affinity – they could also choose others like Botany, Bengali and Bodo.
These remarks are not intended to denigrate India’s civil servants, who are indeed some of the brightest and bravest in the world, but to point out that their quality is in spite of and not because of the selection they go through. It is not surprising that this is a legacy of the British. As C P Snow points out: "The English have always had more faith in competitive examinations than any other people (except perhaps the Imperial Chinese): they have conducted these examinations with traditional justice: but they have often shown remarkable woodenness in deciding what the examinations should be like. That is, incidentally, true to this day." 1
Treating this as criticism only of civil service selection would be doubly misplaced since this column is directed at reforming all futuristically oriented selection, where people are chosen in the present, with the hope that their leadership capabilities will bloom in the distant future. The myriad management and other trainee schemes in the private sector are often no better than our civil service selections and, often, a great deal worse. The greatest beneficiaries of the ideas contained in this column should be students of the so-called second and third tier colleges (which are the vast majority) who are currently excluded from the private sector placements with the choicest employers. For the first time, equally talented candidates from less storied schools will be able to compete for the best jobs in the country.
Selection by Streetlamp or Trying a Powerful New Torch
"Ultimately this must remind us of the famous drunk who looked for his wallet, not where he had lost it, but under the street lamp, 'because the light is better there,' or of the doctor who gave all his patients fits because that was the only sickness he knew how to cure." 2 Trying to identify future leadership talent with a dimmer torch that can show at least the outlines of what we need is far better than the glare of a streetlamp which displays, in great detail, what is irrelevant to our quest.
The process proposed here for Prediction of Latent Leadership will operate through four filters. Almost all the cramming and preparation work on the part of hopeful candidates will be eliminated – itself a major saving in time as well as monetary and mental health costs for hopeful candidates. For the selectors too there should not be a significantly higher burden since each (progressively more time and resource hungry) filtration process would be preceded by eliminations. In the private sector the ideal would be for an industry association to run the process. Thus, there need be just one platform for the public administrative services, another for business and industrial organisations and a third for non-profits. Each platform-using organisation would be free to specify its own profile weightages and cut-offs and have its own people present for the culminating interviews.
The process would utilise four filters. Filter 1 would be a fairly conventional shortlisting for functional expertise and immediately usable technical skills. The other three filters would evaluate the actual leadership predictors through a written test (Filter 2), interactive situations (Filter 3) and an intensive onsite learning capability / energy checker and interview (Filter 4). Each of these latter filters would focus on three 'Demandments' from future leaders.
Readers are, of course, free to debate, disagree and demand different capacities from the leaders they wish to nurture. I suspect a changed list will pose similar challenges of prediction and the effort and methodologies of choosing are unlikely to be too different from those explained in the following sections.
Filter 1: Immediately Usable Functional Expertise and Aptitude
The maximum desilting would take place at this stage which, because it wouldn’t be the final arbiter of choice, could be kept robust, inexpensive and simple. Filter 1 itself would operate in three elimination sub-stages, each progressively reducing load on the next. The first two sub-stages would be industry / cadre specific.
Functional Expertise:
Almost every educational institute or certifying body dedicates a substantial part of the energy and ingenuity at its disposal in evaluating how well its students have acquired the subject and practical knowledge it set out to impart. It is a futile and self-defeating waste for job selectors to attempt to replicate this elaborate mechanism. Of course, all institutions do not use the same yardstick. The answer would be for our selecting platforms to build up a constantly updated set of equivalences between gradings of various institutes. Slight coefficient errors would not be fatal since this would only be the first in a series of sieves for prospective candidates before selection.
Usable Skills and Aptitude:
There are many established tests for immediately needed skills, like coding, which might not be rated separately in college evaluations. These would prove useful in limiting the selection pool to candidates that can be up and running quickly.
Sortition:
Stringent as we might make the previous two stages and however much we might add over the years to the flow-handling capacity of subsequent filters, there will always be a huge mismatch between the flood of aspirants we start with and the numbers that can be examined with care downstream. This is the point where our old friend sortition (selection through lottery) would come into the picture and thin the ranks.
Filter 2: Self Awareness and WICS
Filter 2 will be a self-assessment questionnaire designed to differentiate people on the first three 'Demandments'. 1. Fairness and integrity 3
2. Care and empathy for the weak without bias against 'others' and 'unders'4
3. Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesised (WICS) 5
Psychometric instruments (particularly intelligence and even personality tests) have a hoary history in all kinds of selection. Hence, familiarity with these instruments and availability of experts to design and administer them should not be a constraint. The other 'Demandments' we have allocated to this filter may, however, pose some specific challenges:
Self-declared Positives: There are several instruments that attempt to evaluate 'moral' categories (our first two items). For instance, Fairness and Care are part of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. 6 Similarly, Empathy can be measured with items like those in Empathy Assessment Index. 7 The problem with all of these self-declared positive attributes is the temptation to fake and inflate one’s profile. The efficacy of this filter will, therefore, depend on checking and minimising fakery. 8 Among the practical suggestions made by Dunlop et al in this regard are:
i. Forced-choice responses can restrict faking by constraining choices between seemingly equally palatable alternatives.
ii. Item neutralisation can avoid using items that have differentially desirable options.
iii. Game mechanics can provide an immersive experience increasing cognitive load and reducing item transparency.
iv. Implicit measures can reduce test content transparency.
v. Warnings can discourage faking though communications with test-takers that lie-detection and electronic checks has been built in. They can also be informed that ranges of optimal responses vary for different job requirements.
vi. Response-pattern based detection can use AI to identify traces of faking from patterns of responses
vii. Trace data based faking detection can actually identify fakers through behaviour such as eye movements, mouse movements, or response latencies.
Creativity check:
The evaluation of creativity poses another challenge and many doubt whether a written test can be of any use in measuring this hard-to-pin trait. To such doubters I would like to adduce the success of the selection battery we designed for the first (as far as my knowledge goes) large-scale scheme for fast-tracking internal leaders in India. It was particularly challenging to design and evaluate the creativity component, but the results continued to predict creativity differentials years later, by which time the candidates had occupied senior leadership roles.
Validity:
We cannot hope to have very rigorous validity checks from the word go. At the same time, we cannot rely on face validity alone. It is suggested that actual implementation be preceded by administration of Filter 2 tests to existing leaders. The results should be correlated with a 360º and other assessments.
Filter 3: Observed Interaction
The core of this filter will be a day-long interaction within groups of 8-10 aspirants having hour-long discussions covering carefully designed but randomly assigned caselets. The 'Demandments' to be evaluated in this filter would be:
4. Ability to lead without formal authority and judge others
5. Courage to stand up for beliefs and political savvy to make change happen 9
6. Team working
Scale, standardisation and impartial administration of this filter will require:
Quality Caselets: The launch will have to be preceded by a massive exercise of caselet writing. Caselets will have to be checked, for meeting specifications and avoiding preconceptions and extraneous stereotypes from creeping in, and then banked. The bank will be randomly accessed and be topped up regularly.
Trained Assessors:Process observers will have to be trained through a uniform method to yield reasonably reliable and valid observations. Their training will include interventions to insert unanticipated factors into the discussion for exploring and confirming or eliminating their initial observational hypotheses.
Impartiality:Observer allocation will be randomised. Well before the actual discussion session, observers will be provided lists of candidates for the centres they are assigned. They will be expected to recuse themselves from observing any person they know.
Filter 4: Demonstrated Promise
The single most important substitute for all those rote-reliant, knowledge-reconfirming checks in current use will be the trait of lifelong learning. According to Pearse and Dunwoody, lifelong learners are tenacious, reflective, metacognitive, divergent thinkers who value learning and are self-efficacious. 10 Hence, it’s part of our culminating selection filter, when numbers have thinned out enough to permit individualised task assignment and scrutiny. Filter 4 will be contained in a week-long residential stay for the remaining few, in groups of 15-20 individuals. The grouping of candidates would depend on their score profiles in previous filters so that the final interviewers (from the recruiting organisations) can be optimally utilised. The 'Demandments' for evaluation will be:
7. Systematic hard work (even at distasteful tasks)
8. Ambition, energy and resilience
9. Eagerness to learn and curiosity 11Most of the time candidates spend in Filter 4 will be dedicated to a project. There will be an interview at the end of the week.
Project: The core of Filter 4 will be the construction of a physical or virtual project in a discipline with which the candidate is unfamiliar. The individualisation will start with determining precisely where liking or previous exposure have not taken the candidate and lay out domain limits within which the candidate may create an improvement or problem-solving project. It will be for the candidate to decide on the level of complexity and the learning required in a relatively unknown domain. Each selection centre will be equipped with a library, net access and other office supplies. Outside communication will, however, be monitored to prevent any guidance or personalised tutelage. While projects will be individual, candidates will be free to take advice from (previously unknown) fellow-candidates who will themselves be under pressure to deliver their projects. Projects will be evaluated on the following criteria:
i. Ambition (of problem and proposal / package)
ii. Ingenuity (of solution and learning methodology) – an important reconfirmation of the creativity evaluation in Filter 2
iii. New learning (onus on candidate / proposal to demonstrate novelty)
iv. Practicality (proof of concept)
v. Effort expended (and efficiency)
vi. Ease of perusal / use (if software) and attractiveness of presentation
vii. Ability to transpose learnings to other situations (evaluated in interview)
Interview:
The interview will probe the Filter 4 project as well as queries arising from previous filters. Part of the interview will be conducted by selection experts. As in the case of observers involved in the previous filter, these interviewers will be rigorously trained in following a standardized procedure and checked out for unfamiliarity with candidates. The interviews will also have representatives from the receiving organisations who will focus on cultural fit and any unique requirements they may have.
Candidate Preference:Organisation preferences by candidates will be indicated in advance after they see (apart from the organisation’s promotional materials) standardized scores for each recruiter along a variety of dimensions which must include:
i. Careers (% of internal talent at CXO levels and – for those who started as freshers – after how long)
ii. Cheer (aggregate happiness scores over 3-5 years)
iii. Compensation (and its likely progression)
But…
Apart from the aversion to trying anything new or to changing a process which has stamped the beginning of one’s own career, there are three plausible objections to what this column suggests. The objections can be:
This is a Time-consuming Process for Which People Will Prepare Anyway: While the process will doubtless demand complex preparation and planning, the bulk of the burden will fall to on the selecting organisations rather than the individual candidates. Even for those who enter the week-long Filter 4, the total time commitment will be far less than civil service exam preparation or the frenetic pressures that precede campus placements by the private sector. As Guy Standing puts it, presently "…. the cost of a complex process is borne almost entirely by the job applicants, in their time, morale and energy." 12 The locus of effort will shift, where it should belong, to the recruiter.
Of course, people will seek to double-guess even the attitudinal expectations. The previous sections should have made it clear why this may not be too easy. The greatest advantage of the 'Demandments' is, however, that preparation will make those attempting it actually fitter for future leadership e.g. by acquiring a bent for learning or empathy.
Organisations Don’t Need Only Leaders and They Can Pick Them Laterally:Not every person is (or need be) interested in becoming a live-wire, lifelong-learning leader. Nor do most organisations require their entire talent intake to be such pure protein predators. Other temperaments and requirements can be tapped out at each pre-filtration stage, with consequential reduction in time and cost.
Painstakingly conducted Competency Based Interviewing can be an excellent tool for discriminating between seemingly equally experienced veterans. However, relying solely on lateral intakes would be a grave mistake because it would deprive organisations of young talent that:
-can be moulded to its culture from the start
-has the energy and fresh thinking of youth
-is far more cost-effective
The Quarterback Problem Makes All This Pointless:Perhaps the least answerable criticism, if we confine ourselves to the selection system, is delivered by Gladwell, who writes: "But there is nothing like being an N.F.L. quarterback except being an N.F.L. quarterback. A prediction, in a field where prediction is not possible, is no more than a prejudice." 13 His solution is "… for a team to give up trying to figure out who the 'best' college quarterback is, and, instead, try out three or four 'good' candidates." 14 To overcome the Quarterback Problem we need to look a few years down the road from the first selection and fast-track those who have displayed the 'Demandments' on the job. Filter 5 is, therefore, best applied through an internal fast track scheme 15
Five filters for identifying leaders? Once we realise the untold damage and opportunity loss that accompany poor leaders and imagine the gains from leadership talent currently going waste we shouldn’t mind twice as many checks. The system is broken. Let’s fix it!
Notes: