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248 SNAKES IN SUITS
But these are only the basic requirements for an executive’s job.
There are some other very important competency areas relevant to
the topic of this book that should be considered during every hiring
program or succession planning assessments.
Handling Challenges to Organizational
Responsibility and Effectiveness
Executives are presented with challenges every day as a routine part
of their job. Their ability to meet these challenges goes beyond
whether they are good at specific technical competencies such as
communication and interpersonal skills and decision making (among
others). Broadly speaking, executives are expected to make organizationally
responsible choices, and they are judged by how effective
these choices are in advancing the aims of the corporation. Over
time, a pattern of responses to the expectations of organizational responsibility
and effectiveness emerges, which can be used to define
the “true” person. While individual lapses in judgment may garner
attention in many cases, the ability of psychopaths to cover or explain
away their individual decisions makes evidence of these lapses
difficult to obtain. Rather, it is the long-term impact of their behaviors
in a variety of situations and their dealings with a variety of people
that can shed more light on who they really are. In this sense, it is
the choices made in response to organizational challenges that provide a
clear picture of the person as an executive.
SOME “RED FLAGS” TO CONSIDER
The following list is presented to give the reader a sense of some of
the long-term consequences of psychopathic features that might be
observed in a business setting. While no single consequence is necessarily
indicative of psychopathy, all of them are problematic if not
addressed in training and coaching sessions. At the very least, evi-