The First Audit

There is a quiet conversation that capable people on this island have with themselves. Some of them have it in dorm rooms in California or Oregon, weighing whether to come home after graduation. Some have it across a kitchen table on a Sunday afternoon, weighing whether to apply for a government position that needs them. Some have it more privately still, weighing whether to stay in a job where they suspect their best work is being wasted. The conversation rarely turns on the work itself. It turns on the person they would answer to.

This is the part of public life that recruiting bonuses and hiring fairs cannot fix. A position can offer competitive pay, a defined-benefit retirement, and the chance to serve the community one was raised in, and still find itself unable to attract the people it most needs. The reason is almost always the same. The ceiling of any organization is the person at the top of it. Capable people read the ceiling before they read the offer.

A bad hire two levels down in Sacramento or Honolulu is a statistic. A bad hire two levels down in Hagåtña is half the senior bench of a division. On a small island, the math of leadership is unforgiving — less anonymity for senior leaders, less room to remain a stranger to the work below, and a much smaller pool of capable people to draw replacements from.

Decades of research in social psychology suggest a humbling pattern. In 1999, two psychologists at Cornell, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, published a paper with one of the more memorable titles in their field — Unskilled and Unaware of It. They found that the same cognitive skills required to perform well in a domain are the ones required to recognize poor performance in that domain. So the people who most need correction are the least equipped to see it.¹ The pattern tends to be most dangerous not in junior employees, who are still learning, but in senior leaders who have stopped.

The opposite of this — knowing what one does not know — is a quiet, often overlooked, virtue. The best leaders carry an honest internal map of their own limits, and hire deliberately to cover the territory beyond. A leader who can say, "I do not understand this domain — I need someone who does, and I will trust them to tell me when I am wrong," has already done most of the hard work of building a competent organization. Capable people will run toward such a leader. The work itself is the recruiting tool.

The opposite pattern has its own name, coined inside Apple. Guy Kawasaki, recalling his years with Steve Jobs, described what Jobs called the "bozo explosion."² A-level talent, Jobs believed, hires A-level talent. They are not threatened by competence; they are drawn to it. B-level talent does the reverse. Threatened, ego-bound, anxious to remain the most capable person in any room, B-players hire C-players. C-players hire D-players. Within a few hiring cycles, the alphabet has been exhausted, and the organization is full of people whose primary skill is making the person one rung up the ladder feel safe.

The collapse is rarely dramatic. It is incremental, almost invisible from year to year, and yet — looking back across a decade — entire institutions can be unrecognizable. No one decided to make the place mediocre. A succession of small choices — each defensible in isolation, each driven by the quiet fear of being outshone — produced the mediocrity together. On an island where so much depends on so few institutions, the cumulative cost of these choices is felt by everyone, often without anyone able to point to the single decision that caused it.

This pattern is not anecdotal. Gallup, drawing on engagement data from millions of employees across thousands of organizations, has consistently found that managers account for at least seventy percent of the variance in team engagement.³ The single biggest predictor of whether a team performs well, stays put, and draws out one another's best work is the person sitting at the head of it. Pay, perks, mission statements, and benefits combined cannot offset a manager who diminishes the people around them. Capable people sense this within weeks. Some leave for the mainland. Some leave for the private sector. Some stay, and quietly stop trying. What remains is an organization intact on paper, and hollow in practice.

The chairs in our public institutions will turn over, as they always do. For whoever inherits them in the years ahead — in any branch, at any level — there is a body of work on how to begin where dysfunction has settled in. The path is well-mapped, even if it is rarely walked.

Begin with people, not with strategy. Some leaders would argue the reverse — that a clear vision must come first, and the right people will follow once the destination is set. Jim Collins, after a five-year study of companies that moved from good to great, found a consistent pattern. The leaders of those organizations did not begin by setting a new vision. They began with people. "First who, then what," he wrote — get the right people in the right seats before deciding where to drive.⁴ A vision without the people capable of executing it is, in his phrase, irrelevant. The right people make the right vision possible; the wrong people make even the best vision unreachable.

For any leader who inherits a paralyzed organization, this means something specific and uncomfortable. The first audit is not of strategy. It is of the people in the senior chairs — and of the leader they answer to. The questions are blunt. Where am I out of my depth? Which of my direct reports are protecting their own positions rather than building the institution? Who on this team would I hire again today, knowing what I now know? The honest answers are usually painful. Acting on them is harder still on a small island, where the people one must reassign or release are often known personally, or related to someone who is.

But there is no shortcut, and the people who have suffered most from years of dysfunction — the line workers who keep the offices running, the residents who depend on the services, the capable people who have stayed away — are not served by sentiment that protects mediocrity in the senior chairs. They are served by an honest hiring chain. The right senior people will, given time, begin to hire upward again, draw in the capable Guamanians who had been waiting, and replace the coasters with people who came to work to do work. The flywheel that turned competence into mediocrity runs on the same logic in reverse.

There is a deeper principle here, and it is older than any management literature. Authority over other people is not a possession. It is something held in trust — owed to the people one leads, and to the institution one serves. On an island the size of Guam, this trust is not abstract. The people in the senior chairs know, or could know, the names of the people their decisions affect. They can be greeted on a Sunday by someone whose life has been made harder by their carelessness, or made better by their care. Few public servants anywhere stand so close to the people they serve.

Leaders who understand this tend to be honest about their limits, generous with credit, and unafraid to be surrounded by people more capable than they are. They are not less by sharing their authority; they are more. The capable people walking past the door, deciding whether to apply — or whether to return home, or whether to stay — can already tell which kind of leader sits inside. They are not waiting for the press release. They are reading the ceiling.