What Companies Can Learn From the CIA
Talent management and leadership often forget that the first rule of battle is never reveal your position
In the Art of War, Sun Tzu stated that "Wisdom is not obvious." What every intelligence agency knows along with successful generals is that you don't announce your strategy ahead of time to your enemy and not expect him to counter. Unless that is part of your plan (but notice the actual strategy), when your enemy knows your strategy, he now has the upper hand. In other words, talent management and recruiting should learn silence is best practice in some cases and with some recruitment practices.
When I speak with people in the human capital and leadership industry at lunches I host or over social media, one question I get frequently is "How do we find who's Mr Verbose Victim when we're recruiting people?" While I appreciate the people who ask this, as they are practicing proactive thought, they are showing a lack of strategy here. First, let's consider why we should be extremely careful with poor strategy, especially in the case of Mr Verbose Victim.
Mr Verbose Victim Is Extremely Dangerous
While I post fictional stories of corporate creatures in the Meet Mr Series, one of the most dangerous corporate creatures of all of them is Mr Verbose Victim. I've seen companies go bankrupt due to a Mr Verbose Victim and companies almost go bankrupt because they had one. If this sounds bad, it gets worse. History shows example after example of Mr Verbose Victims killing millions of people. Both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin viewed themselves as victims (both served prison sentences, were oppressed early in their political careers, and had victim stories that people related to). The same is true for Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. Let me be very clear: Mr Verbose Victim is extremely dangerous - they have no concern for the damage they cause others because in their mind, they are a victim so they are justified in anything they do.
A wise person at this point recognizes the immediate danger these individuals pose. Talent management and recruitment must realize that they cannot be naïve here.
On the corporate level even before bankruptcy, I've seen situations in where executives were trying to negotiate with Mr Verbose Victim. The executives could not believe how an individual was willing to violate a law or set of laws for a crusade. They also couldn't believe that someone would willingly attempt to bankrupt a company leaving thousands of people without jobs. Nothing the executives said during negotiation worked. They also realized (too late) that this person felt easy to promote or directly hire into leadership, but this is also the person you never want anywhere near leadership. What many companies don't realize is that Mr Verbose Victim is your enemy from the time that you hire him; he'll never be on your side because he has a victim narrative that justifies his crusade. It's only a matter of time before your company is the target of his crusade.
Never Underestimate Your Enemy
The Mr Verbose Victims of the world strategize better than you and I do. Because achieving results doesn't excite them, they constantly study their opponent so they can better manipulate them. As I wrote earlier, many companies don't realize they're up against this corporate creature in the first place - they discover a Mr Verbose Victim after the fact, only to realize their mistake. But the Mr Verbose Victims of the world are the opposite of this: they study their opponents. They already know the techniques that talent management will use against them because they've researched the techniques in public discussions. In most cases, they are two or three steps ahead of leadership - this is why leadership is stunned when Mr Verbose Victim wreaks havoc on the company. In a sense, the Mr Verbose Victims of the world rely on you being overconfident and oversharing information with others.
This is the problem with poor strategy: when you reveal your position, your enemy can counter that position. I understand why talent management and recruitment can overlook this because this involves strategy. But remember that we are fundamentally hiring and working with people. How do people act and change when they're being measured? Let's look at a study that relates to this point and how we can apply this.
What the Research Shows
For a period in secondary education, I sold a variety of products. One re-occurring challenge in sales involved customers reporting that they wanted a product, yet not buying the product when presented with it. Many people in sales found this behavior odd: why would someone say they want a product, but then not buy the product? As I matured, I noted that this is how we all behave - we want many products in theory, but when we see the products in front of us, we don’t always act on this. What's more fascinating about focus groups and studies that look at this behavior is how people's answer shifts when you let them know how you're measuring them ahead of time. This shows us how people change based on how they’re being evaluated, even if that change isn’t sincere. In other words: when people think you're measuring them only by what they say, they give one answer. But when you tell them you're measuring them by what they do, they give another answer.
I first heard this in a sales discussion where two entrepreneurs were discussing what they had learned with product sales. One entrepreneur designed a study with two groups where one group was told that they were being measured by what they said (group 1). The other group was told that they were being measured by what they did (group 2). The entrepreneur then presented his product to both groups and asked if they would buy the product. Because group 2 knew that they would have to buy the product, most said no. Group 1 answered differently - most said "yes" because they only thought the question was theoretical. The entrepreneur then tried moving the sales transaction with group 1 forward - he tried closing the sale. Most of us can already predict what happened next - most of group 1 had a reason why they couldn't actually buy the product or even changed their answer about wanting the product. In other words, when people know how they're being measured ahead of time, they answer questions differently - notice how the entrepreneur was fundamentally measuring both groups the exact same way (what they would actually do), but told the group 1 that he was only measuring them by what they said.
What can talent management and recruitment learn from this study?
When people know how they're being measured, they will adjust their behavior to align with this measurement when there is an incentive to do so. Most of us think that this is good, as this is what we want. The problem here is that Mr Verbose Victim does not intend to be this change at all; it's a temporary change so that he can infiltrate our organization. In other words, all we've done by sharing how we measure people is tell Mr Verbose Victim how to fake who he is.
When people are being measured one way, but are actually being measured another way, we see what happens when the true measurement is revealed. Group 1 said they wanted the product because they thought the measurement was theoretical. Then the entrepreneur said, "Cool, you can buy it now" only for group 1 to have to explain why they weren't going to buy the product. This highlights one reason why we shouldn't publicly disclose how we identify underperformers like Mr Verbose Victim; we know he'll do more research to hide who he is, so we shouldn't disclose our measurements ahead of time.
One takeaway is that talent management and recruitment should never reveal how they're evaluating candidates ahead of time in some key areas. To see this in real time, I've altered a public post from someone in this industry on avoiding bad talent. Read the below altered post and then answer the question:
The best way to avoid a bad prospective candidate is see if they're on time or early. 100% of the people I've interviewed and recruited who were either on time or early turned out to be amazing employees. I've gotten to where I don't need to evaluate anything else; that alone is the only measurement you need!
Question: since we know that Mr Verbose Victim does his research, based on the above public advice from a recruiter, what will he do when he meets with recruitment in the future?
Answer: If you answered that he'll be early or show up on time, you are correct. Does this behavior change shift a change in him as a person? No. In fact, he knows that it's only a simple action to fake it for this recruiter, as being on time or early is the only action this recruiter evaluates. The same applies to any other advice that a recruiter may want to give. I'll remind talent management and recruiting of an important point when it comes to talent: our job is not to help people get a job, our job is to help our clients (companies) find exceptional talent.
Related point: Mr Intellectual Property Theft shares this research trait with Mr Verbose Victim for a different reason (he wants to steal your intellectual property). When recruiters reveal how they evaluate talent publicly, they are unintentionally helping the Mr Verbose Victims and Mr Intellectual Property Thefts of the world.
The Return of Barrier To Entry
Mr Verbose Victim depends on talent management and recruitment foolishly talking about talent in ways they should avoid. He's not the only corporate creatures who gains advantages by companies doing this. One solution that I apply on this site and in discussions with executives is exactly this. I don't share some information publicly nor will I because I know that Mr Verbose Victim relies on misguided public information sharing. Some information shouldn't be public. Don't forget that a lot of public information is now being indexed in AI - Mr Verbose Victim will have an easier time finding out how to undermine you. This is why intelligence agencies from the CIA to the Chinese MSS don't announce what they're doing ahead of time: their enemies will use that information to then change their strategy.
I have long predicted that we are in the slow process of returning to "barriered" information. When you attempt to devalue information by making it free, you undermine yourself in several ways - one of which is distraction. But one way in which talent management and recruitment undermines itself as we've seen is that they're metaphorically handing the keys of their kingdom to the wrong people. Take this post as an example: most of my readers are either executives or work in the human capital field. However, 2-5% of my readers are the exact corporate creatures you want to avoid like the plague - Mr Verbose Victim, Mr Intellectual Property Theft, etc. They're reading this post right now with the lens of "how do I hide who I am" unlike those of us who work to make a company succeed. But this post does nothing for them because they're not seeing a counter strategy they can employ. This explains why I limit who I consult with at companies - I don't want to speak with your entire human resource or talent management team because you have to realize that some of them are not mature enough to know some information.
Informational barrier to entry is already in the process of returning. Two weeks ago, I showed an executive an example of this that I won't elucidate here, but I will only highlight the overall point: I showed the executive how you could easily get information about a topic from different AI bots even faster than a quick search engine evaluation. However, all of them including the search engine result were wrong. The executive felt stunned: all the information from AI to search engines were wrong. How? Because all this is sourced from public information. If public information is wrong, all of those research tools are wrong. What I highlighted to the executive was that success requires thought and most people in using AI and search engines have lost their ability to think. They are training themselves daily on outsourcing one of their most powerful tools. If you zoom out in what I told this executive, you can see the barrier to entry: "free information" was completely wrong and most people wouldn't know it (fewer than 1% of people would suspect they're getting false information).
Unfortunately, talent management and recruitment can't solve every problem with public information. That's an extremely naïve view of the world. That's why the first rule of battle is "never reveal your position" and why intelligence agencies operate in secrecy. Barrier to entry is an advantage. There is no barrier to entry with "free" - keep this always in mind. There are thousands of companies right now consuming free material to avoid Mr Verbose Victim without realizing that the Mr Verbose Victims of the world are reading that same material to counter strategize. This is why I've seen these Mr Verbose Victims take companies down - the companies lacked thinking and acting strategically in talent management and recruitment.
Related Error - Overconfidence
You should now know the importance of secrecy. Why do people overshare and devalue information then? There are numerous reasons which go beyond the scope of this post, but one reason involves overconfidence. Like intelligence agencies operate in secrecy, they also know the wisdom in overestimating your enemy’s strength. When you share too much information publicly, you are underestimating your enemy. Most people actually think that they’re smarter than the average person, though everyone should be aware of the obvious statistical fallacy.
Like we saw with the talent management post about hiring someone who’s on time, people post their techniques and strategies publicly because they underestimate their enemy. Most people actually think that Mr Verbose Victim or Mr Intellectual Property theft are dumb. A wise company (and wise person) knows that your enemy is much stronger than you realize. You never enter a battle thinking your enemy is weak. You’ll enter unprepared and your enemy will win.
Consider these points the next time you see companies openly boasting about how they hire and how they find talent. Short term success is not and will never be long term success.
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