Lateral hire

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Lateral hire
(n.)
An experienced person you have hired for a role in your organisation instead of promoting an existing employee into it.

On Peter Rabey’s Leadership Learns podcast, Rory Sutherland makes an excellent point about lateral hiring into the management layer: not only does the candidate come in without any of her own institutional capital but, upon her arrival, she annihilates that of existing staff who will report to her, by the simple expedient of not having a clue who they are or what they do.

Her tendency will be to guage competence through means of quantitative management techniques — metrics — which in turn will incentivise accommodating behaviour. If you ask a silly question you will get a silly answer.

Lateral hires thereby often have the effect of stimulating lateral quitting — not all of it willing — which is generally a matter for regret.

See also

• Lateral quitter
• Mediocrity drift