For anyone who follows the nighttime drama ’24′, I’m sure you’ll agree wholeheartedly that the fictional Head of State, President Allison Taylor, has an epic nepotism fail on her hands.
In a reactive move following her Chief of Staff’s voluntary resignation, President Taylor, guided only by her biased, warm-and-fu
zzy gut feelings toward her previously estranged daughter, Olivia (and only remaining offspring following the assassination of her son, Roger), promoted her to the vacant position. Shortly thereafter, and to no one’s surprise, Olivia set about circumventing her mother’s administration in a bull-in-a-china-shop meets high-school drama queen approach, combined with the simple fact that the woman has no relevant experience or qualifications for such a high profile position, that is soon to bring everything down like a house of cards.
How could this have been prevented? I have a few educated theories.
By engaging the Office of Personnel Management in advance of the catastrophic events of this particular day to establish a replacement chart outlining all the possible replacements for key roles within the administration that could become vacant through attrition (read: assassination or resignation), she would have had an automatic successor trained, briefed and ready to step into the role of Chief of Staff and pick up where Ethan left off.
It has been proven that the worst hiring decisions are almost always made when managers are faced with time constraints or where there are criterion-deficiencies present that prevent the job candidate from being appropriately assessed for a role. Where there is no policy in place for how and when a candidate can be hired or promoted, and judgments can be based on minimal or contaminated evidence, you are almost guaranteed to offer the job to the wrong person. Inevitably this leads to significantly high direct and indirect costs to the organization, that include the cost of having to replace the individual, fix their errors, and manage the reduced departmental and/or organizational morale and public relations damage that would result.
And I think we can all agree, this gross error in succession planning is one problem that even Jack Bauer can’t solve.
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