What a vita will not tell you!
I am reading the chapter in the "Destructive Org Comm" book on guidelines for managers. Within academe, one of the most vital ways of creating a climate is figuring out whom you are hiring. However, here is the limit to the information we typically are trained to attend to in making our hiring decisions. So on a search committee, the first thing one will pay attention to (and I know that this is the first criterion I have used in search committees I have chaired and served on) is the academic vita of the applicant? Is the applicant going to be a productive colleague? Are they going to add to the productivity of the institution as well as productively work their career up toward tenure and promotion? This I still believe is perhaps the most important criterion, particularly if you are at a research-based institution that values research productivity as a marker of promotion and tenure.
Having already established the importance of paying attention to productivity and the potential for productivity, however, let me move on to discussing something else that is much more difficult to assess and yet equally vital: what kind of colleague is the person going to be when she/he joins your department? Whether she/he is going to be a colleague who engages in civility or one who is uncivil in his/her stay in the Department? What are the kinds of influences this person is going to have on the organization and on the organizational culture, and what kind of model is he/she going to be for graduate students who look toward faculty to learn the lessons of academic citizenship? If this person is going to be a destructive influence on the organization and on the graduate student culture, one who partakes in gossip, spends time undermining others, dishes out "scoop" about faculty colleagues over martinis with graduate students, simply makes up stories about others and fans them to get a high, fights with graduate students and threatens to punish them through gossip mills, makes them do household chores under the veiled threat, what indicators might you have in the two-day interview in figuring these things out?
On an interview circuit, when the candidate is in and out of meetings, the breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and the meetings with committee members are the few settings we have for data gathering. These settings can be fairly limited as sources of information. And even in places where the information might actually be available in terms of cues from the interviewee, we are often trained to turn the other way because (a) it is good to give someone the benefit of the doubt, and (b) the productivity of the colleague is what is considered to be most important. In addition, the ethics/legality of search processes prevent academic search committees often from talking to others outside of the referees listed by the person (remember, these are typically listed as referees as they will probably have nice things to say about the candidate). So what other sources of data might committees be urged to pay attention to?
The interview in the academic world is perhaps the most important step as it is difficult for academic organizations to fire employees on grounds of incivility, especially if this is a productive colleague(In this case, if you end up hiring an productive bad apple, you run the risk of being stuck with them for the lifetime of the organization). Within these contexts and criteria then, what are sources of data for making effective hiring decisions in organizations, especially as they relate to nurturing a climate of civility?
Having already established the importance of paying attention to productivity and the potential for productivity, however, let me move on to discussing something else that is much more difficult to assess and yet equally vital: what kind of colleague is the person going to be when she/he joins your department? Whether she/he is going to be a colleague who engages in civility or one who is uncivil in his/her stay in the Department? What are the kinds of influences this person is going to have on the organization and on the organizational culture, and what kind of model is he/she going to be for graduate students who look toward faculty to learn the lessons of academic citizenship? If this person is going to be a destructive influence on the organization and on the graduate student culture, one who partakes in gossip, spends time undermining others, dishes out "scoop" about faculty colleagues over martinis with graduate students, simply makes up stories about others and fans them to get a high, fights with graduate students and threatens to punish them through gossip mills, makes them do household chores under the veiled threat, what indicators might you have in the two-day interview in figuring these things out?
On an interview circuit, when the candidate is in and out of meetings, the breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and the meetings with committee members are the few settings we have for data gathering. These settings can be fairly limited as sources of information. And even in places where the information might actually be available in terms of cues from the interviewee, we are often trained to turn the other way because (a) it is good to give someone the benefit of the doubt, and (b) the productivity of the colleague is what is considered to be most important. In addition, the ethics/legality of search processes prevent academic search committees often from talking to others outside of the referees listed by the person (remember, these are typically listed as referees as they will probably have nice things to say about the candidate). So what other sources of data might committees be urged to pay attention to?
The interview in the academic world is perhaps the most important step as it is difficult for academic organizations to fire employees on grounds of incivility, especially if this is a productive colleague(In this case, if you end up hiring an productive bad apple, you run the risk of being stuck with them for the lifetime of the organization). Within these contexts and criteria then, what are sources of data for making effective hiring decisions in organizations, especially as they relate to nurturing a climate of civility?
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