The Outside Hire Is Having Trouble
(Her Team Had Already Chosen Someone Else)
THE SITUATION
A non-profit hired a director of operations from the outside. She was the only Black person at the director level. Everyone reporting to her had been there forever . . . including the internal candidate who was told he came in a close second.
Five months in, the CHRO called me. No complaint, no incident, no performance issue. But the new director started asking for meetings to be documented in writing, and she was the only director doing that.
WHAT I FOUND
She described a team that answered her questions completely but volunteered nothing. Twice she made important decisions and learned afterward why no one else would have made it.
The runner-up was being a good soldier. Never insubordinate . . . that was the honest part. On the other hand, he was holding back eleven years of history because no one softened the blow of his losing the promotion. So, he waited to be asked about everything. And only answered exactly what he was asked.
Neither of them was acting improperly. They almost never are, which is exactly why nobody upstairs could find anything to fix.
WHAT WAS ACTUALLY HAPPENING
The outside hire arrives with a title and no credit. Everyone else in that building had years of deposits. She had a résumé and a start date.
And she could not tell whether the resistance was about being new or about something ugly. So, she said nothing and started building a case file instead of relationships.
That’s when a workable situation becomes a case. Not when someone does something wrong. But when someone decides they are on their own.
THE WORK
Six coaching sessions with her, two interviews with him, and two half-days with both on Zoom.
With her, the work was not communication skills. It was the fear that she had been hired as a symbol and would be blamed when it didn't take.
With him, one question nobody asked in five months: What did he think was going to happen to him next? He assumed he was out. So, he held back.
The two joint conversations were uncomfortable. They were supposed to be.
WHERE IT LANDED
She stopped documenting. He got a defined scope of his own. She began openly routing the history questions to him, in front of the team. This changed what the entire team understood about who had authority and who had standing. After that, nobody went to him without her knowing why. Five months later, he told me she was good at the job.
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