🥁 The OffBeat #75: How to Hire Well, Duke Ellington Style
Including my time-tested go-to interview questions
This is The OffBeat, from jazz drummer, two-decade marketing leader, and mom of two Allison Stadd: music-inspired answers for your leadership challenges, like identifying the “drum rudiments” of your professional life.
One of my leadership icons is Duke Ellington.
Ellington was a major force in jazz from the 1920s through 1970s. Whereas Ellington’s compatriot bandleader Benny Goodman was a perfectionist rarely pleased with his musicians, the Duke Ellington Orchestra thrived for 50 years because he didn’t demand perfection; instead he built everything in the band’s repertoire on his personnel’s individualized demonstrated strengths.
Ellington created music customized to each of his players. He put little stock in virtuosity and technical parameters; he’d rather hire a player with a distinctive tone or engaging musical personality.
As a result, most jazz scholars agree that no ensemble in the history of jazz can match the Ellington orchestra’s half century of artistry.
This is how I aspire to build and lead a team.
But let’s back up.
How did Ellington, and how do Ellington-style aspirants like me, decide who to actually employ?
Hiring is SO HARD. It’s taken hiring the wrong people and the right people over almost two decades of interviewing, onboarding, restructuring, and parting ways with marketers to hone an approach that is decently dependable.
Because, like Duke Ellington, I build my teams to celebrate each individual’s strengths and superpowers, I’m particularly on the lookout for people with interesting or unexpected backgrounds or life experiences.
And because it’s important to me to build not just a diverse team, but an inclusive one, I want every candidate’s experience to be similar and to remove as much of my own bias as possible. I’ve found one of the best ways to do that is to use a similar set of questions for each interview.
So let’s get into it.
Firstly, there are three things I hire for; these are the non-negotiable traits I won’t greenlight an offer without:
1) Emotional intelligence
What I mean: Attunement to the needs of those around them; low ego
How to gauge:
Do they listen well?
Are they humble?
2) Intellectual curiosity
What I mean: Intrinsic motivation to think critically and learn
How to gauge:
Listen for at least one “lightbulb” moment throughout the interview, a point that makes me go “Hmm! Interesting”
Do they ask smart, specific questions?
Do they like to learn / are they deeply engaged in their discipline?
3) High standards
What I mean: Strong desire to excel; disciplined attention to detail
How to gauge:
Explain I work best with highly accountable, efficient people—ask how they track against that
Are they ambitious/driven?
Notice I didn’t include technical expertise as one of my non-negotiables. Certain roles of course require a certain amount of experience with the work itself, but particularly at a senior level when it comes to how to hire well I’m far more interested in how candidates show up as leaders—of themselves as well as a team.
As
put it, “People who've been great at *anything* are more likely to have the drive and self-discipline to excel even at something unrelated.”Secondly, beyond my three non-negotiables for how to hire well, I adhere to two hard-won rules of thumb:
Rule of thumb #1: Ask yourself if the person could become one of the top 2-3 on your team.
They just have to have the potential to get there, not be there now. (Potential, not perfection!)
Famed General Electric CEO Jack Welch chose executives on the basis of “runway,” their capacity for growth; similarly, storied ballet teacher Marina Semyonova chose students who were “energized by criticism,” per Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success.
I always talk about building the “A Team,” and you can’t do that without hiring only A-potential players.
Rule of thumb #2: Remember any red flags will be 10X worse when the person’s on board.
Ignore your instincts at your peril! If anything is pinging a warning bell in your brain (this goes for when you’re interviewing for a new role, too), DON’T IGNORE IT OR EXPLAIN IT AWAY.
Finally, below, my list of time-tested, go-to interview questions to hire well. I’ve honed this list over almost two decades of building teams.
Part of what makes hiring so hard is that lots of people can do “well” in an interview, but still not be the right hire; the questions you ask are KEY in order to prompt the most helpful conversation in ascertaining whether this role, right now, for this person, is the right mutual fit.