Finding That Management Trainee
Predicting leadership potential is hard; very hard.
Background
Of late, I’ve been thinking about the management trainee programme at Citibank, known familiarly as the Management Associate programme, or MA programme for short. This was triggered because of my interactions with a few management trainees from various organisations in the last few weeks. It got me thinking about what made for a good management trainee.
Management trainees are purportedly hired with the potential to be senior leaders in an organisation in the future. The two operative words here are potential and future. The further out one goes, the less accurate the outcome. And potential that is not realised doesn’t mean that the potential didn’t exist. Because of these challenges, management trainees are hand-picked and will be subjected to more stringent selection criteria than a regular hire. The use of AI-supported solutions are almost non-existent in this space because the hiring numbers are small and the management trainees, in a way, represent “outliers”.
Could a more structure data analytics approach to this problem help? And so I dedicate my 65th article to discussing how we can take an information signal perspective on management trainee selection.
(I write a weekly series of articles where I call out bad thinking and bad practices in data analytics / data science which you can find here.)
Inadequate Research
The theoretical landscape on the selection process is a hot mess. Even after nearly 40 years of research, there is no convergence. The entire domain suffers from poor definition (e.g. what is “leadership potential”?) and poor measurements (e.g. how do we measure “learning agility”?). So much bullshit about the talent skillset required for management trainees, like Analytical Thinking, Communication, Time Management, Problem-Solving, Adaptability, Project Management, Data Analysis and the ability to Make Hard Decisions. I call bullshit on this because most management trainees are fresh or nearly-fresh graduates, and would not have enough real work experience to reveal any directly relevant information signal on the aforementioned list of skills. How are the interviewers supposed to quantify the existence of these skills?
While it’s obvious why most organisations fail at their management trainees programmes, some organisations seem to be doing an outstanding job at it, Citibank being one of them. Many Citibank MA go on to become C-suite leaders, regardless whether they choose to stay at Citibank or not; observationally, more so than any other bank that I’m aware of. The standard argument that Citibank had the right nurturing environment for management trainees to thrive is not wholly supported as many don’t stay long enough, and yet make it the C-suite. And the arguments made by researchers that successful leaders are well-liked, extrovert and have high integrity is also not supported; Citibank has had its share of unliked, shady-integrity yet successful management trainees over the years. So clearly, the management trainee selection process that Citibank had developed works in identifying the right kinds of information signals that indicates that the person is more likely to become a C-suite leader, regardless of the kind of leader they turn out to be.
Full disclosure time. I was an MA with Citibank. 500 people applied for the role. I went through 7 senior management interviews. I became a C-suite leader. To this day, I can’t figure out why I was selected as an MA. I was graduating but wasn’t particularly looking for a job (the bank wrote to me). I wasn’t a student leader or anything on campus; I kept mostly to myself. Yes, I was beyond-average intelligent, but that’s a given minimum requirement to get your foot through the door. And I was a part-time singer-musician. I was odd. In fact, many of the recruited MAs were “odd”; I remember one was a part-time DJ. Did the oddness carry some relevant information signal?
Personality vs Behaviour
Let’s start at the beginning. With management trainees, we are looking to predict exceptional leadership in the future. That’s a wholly different kind of problem from describing attributes of leadership. We are also not trying to answer the nature vs nurture question (e.g. born leaders) because we don’t really care how you come about to acquire the desirable characteristics at the point of being selected as a management trainee.
Given the lack of much work experience to embody behaviour information signals, it is more likely that the information signals that we are looking for (that separates a management trainee from a regular hire) is in their personality. Now, personality traits can be divided into dispositional and proximal. Examples of dispositional personality traits that correlate with effective leadership are Motivation, Energy, Dominance, Integrity, Creativity, and Charisma. Examples of proximal traits that correlate with effective leadership are Interpersonal Skills, Written Communication, Managerial Skills, and Decision-Making. Dispositional traits are more deeply ingrained and more difficult to change, whilst proximal traits are more malleable, and can be modified through education and training.
There are various personalty tests and theories out there. The common ones are the Big Five (most commonly used today) and the often-discredited Myer-Briggs or MBTI for short. (I’ve read some of the literature regarding MBTI, and those discrediting claims may not be entirely valid, some of it motivated by intellectual snobbery because MBTI was developed by non-academics / non-psychologists Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers.) Of the 16 personality types, MBTI indicates that 4 personality types (ISTJ, ESTJ, ENTJ, and INTJ) are more likely to become effective leaders. Interestingly, all of these 4 personality types include thinking and judging (TJ). Perhaps T and J can be somewhat proxied by Intelligence and Decision-Making respectively. Perhaps.
Another set of research found that Conscientiousness and Openness to Experience were strong correlates of leadership. Perhaps “oddness” was somehow a proxy for openness to experience, i.e. the proverbial “road less travelled”. Yet another set of research found that Intelligence, Personality, and Learning Agility were key predictors of leadership potential. And between the two, intelligence had a larger effect than personality. Of late, learning agility is becoming a hot topic, and is partially proxied by Problem-Solving and Critical Thinking.
Role of Management Trainee
Whatever the (personality) traits of the management trainee, there must also be a “lock-and-key” fit with the expectations of the role. If anything, the role of a management trainee is marked by fluidity, rather than rigidity. Management trainees are expected to thrive in the former. They are thrown into the deep end pretty early in their career; I know I was. They are asked to perform at levels equivalent to a senior regular hire. Therefore, they need to have high creative intelligence, be able to take initiative, are self-organising, and score high on individualism. Individualists are known to be Inventive, Entrepreneurial, Independent Thinking, and Confident. Perhaps having strong individualist traits are necessary for exceptional leadership. So interviewers should be looking to see if the management trainee candidate chooses to stand alone or run with the crowd.
Conclusion
Interviewing for potential future leaders is a difficult job. It’s unlike any other recruitment. The kinds of information signals are harder to detect as they are meant to correlate with a very future outcome. By their very nature, personality and behaviour traits are latent variables, and thoughtful unpacking is required to see which (measurable) data elements might be a close proxy. Also, the man-in-the-middle is particularly good at detecting non-obvious and ill-defined information signals, ensuring that an AI solution for recruiting management trainees isn’t going to yield much success at present.
