Mike was an excellent candidate for our client… a small, $150 million company that is poised to grow…Mike had been interviewing for a vice president position and doing well in the process…
However, as he gets closer to an offer and what has been a fairly long process, he proposes to our client’s executive committee that when he comes on board he brings with him two managers from his present firm as well as two subordinates… Mike made a very simple process much more complicated and he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory… in short, he made everything way too complicated and lost the opportunity…
At first, this suggestion got our client executives excited…suddenly, they started thinking how far along they could be within a short period of time with Mike and his “team”… but then, they got to thinking that they ought to interview all of the members of Mike’s team… now, Mike had to share with some of the people he was working with where he was trying to go to work, the kind of job, etc… now Mike’s company had been sold and everyone who worked with and for him was looking for a job, so the fact that Mike might be going to a different company was no big deal and, at first, the prospect of everybody working together as they had done before was quite exciting…but it started getting really awkward…one of Mike’s subordinates started thinking he could do as well at Mike’s job as Mike could do…
I advised Mike that this whole thing was a bad idea… I had seen this before, and it rarely works out… Mike assured me that this was a brilliant idea and it would catapult my client to the next level and Mike could be a real hero…however, Mike was looking for a new job and should have left it simply at that.
After the initial euphoria of this idea, the management team of our client, among other things, started wondering about how it would work… they started interviewing the two managers who worked with and for Mike… not only did that get more complicated but some of the client’s management team started pushing back on the idea because they didn’t care for one of the managers…and one of Mike’s subordinates intimated during the interview that he felt he was as good as Mike was and maybe they should consider him for the VP job…the one Mike was interviewing for..(..some kinda loyalty, huh?)
Mike’s idea eventually created a monster… the client wanted to hire Mike but now worried that if the rest of the “team” didn’t come, maybe Mike wouldn’t… the management team of our client felt that especially one of the individuals on Mike’s “team” really wasn’t what they wanted and then became afraid of hiring some and not others… the process went on for another two months and, needless to say, it got way too complicated and our client, as much as they liked him, decided not to hire Mike or any of his team…
The lesson is that, no matter what level of manager you are, don’t try to sell yourself along with a group of others to a new company… now, if you want to go to work for an organization and then over a period of time bring on people who have worked with you before, that may work… but trying to secure a new position yourself and bring other people with you at the same time makes things way too complicated and it will likely lead to disaster…
Don’t snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
