Promote Someone Internal?

In the world of business, the question often arises whether I should promote internally or go external. Actually, I’m going to broaden this topic further by including the question of whether or not to do business with friends or family. In essence these questions might center around the theme of “do I promote or do business with those I’m in a relationship or seek others outside my existing relationships?” Hum!!! Let’s ponder that one a bit.

Some would say, I want to hire the best possible person to do the job. Actually, I believe it was Andy Stanley who said something to the effect of if I need a new bass player for our worship team, I look for the best bass player out there. Whether that person is a believer or non-believer is not relevant. This same mindset is one many people use in aspects of business. Whether I’m in relationship or not, I’m looking for the best person to do the job. In fact, I might prefer not being in relationship as I don’t want to mix business and personal and create a mess if something goes wrong. Yes, that’s one school of thought.

Another school of thought is that when we go outside, we’re always seeing people with their best foot forward. It’s kinda like meeting that gal/guy for the first time, we both are on our best behavior attempting to make the best impression. So, the results are sometimes we fall in love after the first date or two and have a 50/50 shot at discovering a mess down the road. Given all of this, there are others who would side on the side of “they may not have everything we’re looking, however, we’ve been in relationship and we know what to expect”.

To some extent, both these pictures which I’ve painted are on the extremes of the ideal situation. When is comes to hiring or doing business with others, if you’ve been around the leadership scene much, you may have heard the 3Cs – character, competence, and chemistry. I find these 3Cs to be a fantastic guide through this entire process. Let’s unpack this a bit.

Character – If we have been in relationship with someone, we likely know their character. Vice versa, character can be an extremely difficult thing to assess through an interview process. We all have flaws in our character and, for the outsider, we must insure our interviewing process is digging deep to uncover these flaws.

Competence – Likely, this is the easiest of the of the three to uncover. Through a process of discovery, we’re typically able to assess whether one is as competent as another. That challenge for many is that this C can sometimes take priority over the other C’s if we’re not careful; however, it may be the least important of the 3C’s.

Chemistry – First, how do you define “chemistry”? Well, this may be the hardest of the 3Cs to define. Every relationship or team has some type of chemistry. In a business or team environment, we might also say that we have a particular “culture”. Again, going back to the people we know, we normally have a pretty good feel of whether there is “chemistry” in our relationship as well as others impacted. Vice versa, this is yet another one that bringing one in from outside can be very difficult to discern after only a few meetings upfront. For this reason, this is another area we need to be strategic in the interviewing process.

As briefly mentioned, most naturally are going through the 3Cs assessment; however, are placing a higher value on “competence” through the process. Our challenge to you is to be much more intentional about evaluating people on the basis of “character and chemistry” knowing “competence” will more naturally be uncovered. Once you’ve had an opportunity to evaluate internal and external candidates on the basis of all 3Cs, we’d tell you to hire the best person for the job.

Do you utilize the 3Cs in your hiring process? We’d love to see your thoughts in the comments below!