Three colleagues and I have been interviewing candidates for an important vacancy in our company. My colleagues have agreed on one applicant whom they regard as easily the best person for the job. I disagree. And as their boss, I have the prerogative of vetoing their majority choice. Would it be unethical of me to exercise my right to override their preference?
Being the boss, you obviously have the right to make the final decision on which candidate you hire to fill a vacancy; just as you also get the final say on where your business is located, and on which typeface you use on your company’s headed notepaper, and on whether you will instruct your switchboard operator to ask every caller, “And will they know what it’s regarding?” before putting you through to the person, even when you’ve just told the operator that you are calling in response to a message that the person has just left on your answering machine.
Making a decision that goes against the consensus, and later being proved right, may be what helped to catapult you to the top job in the first place. Businesses, football managers, governments, they all encounter options which require decisions that tilt their enterprises this way or that. Often these decisions come down to little more than backing one’s hunches.
Your hunches have been shrewd enough to get you where you are today, so you have every reason to trust them. But your hunches over the years have also been informed and shaped by the advice and hunches of your colleagues. It would thus pay you to think twice before dismissing their views. It is also dispiriting to work for someone who never heeds your opinions. So while it might not be unethical to override your colleagues’ preference, it might prove to be shortsighted.
What’s your view and do you have a dilemma of your own?
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