“The Most Qualified”

On Tuesday, former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores sued the NFL and three of its teams, alleging discriminatory hiring practices. 

For me, the most damning accusation from Flores was that the NY Giants interviewed him solely to fulfill the NFL’s requirement that teams interview at least two minority candidates for their head coaching positions. 

Prior to Flores’ interview, however, he received texts from his former boss and current New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. The ESPN story describes the content: “In those texts, Belichick told Flores he had heard from ‘Buffalo and NYG that you are their guy.’ Flores asked Belichick to clarify whether he meant to talk to him or Brian Daboll, who was also in the running for the Giants' job. Belichick acknowledged his error and informed him that the Giants wanted Daboll. ‘Sorry -- I f---ed this up. I double checked and misread the text. I think they are naming Brian Daboll. I'm sorry about that,’ Belichick allegedly texted.”

Crazy story, if true.

The Power of Justification

What really motivated me to write about this topic today was the Giants’ statement about their process that resulted in hiring Daboll. In response to Flores’ lawsuit, they said, “Ultimately, we hired the individual we felt was most qualified to be our next head coach.” (emphasis mine)

No offense to Brian Daboll—even Flores says that he’s a good football coach. But given that Daboll’s never been an NFL head coach, there’s no way he should be considered more qualified than someone who actually had the job and was successful at it.  

So that left me wondering: When they could have just said, “Daboll best fit the direction we wanted to take,” how could they have reached the “most qualified” rationale?

In What Works for Women at Work, Joan Williams describes an experiment in which participants were asked to choose which of two candidates to hire. Before seeing the candidates’ resumes, participants said they would rank education ahead of work experience. Indeed, when asked to select between the resume of a better-educated man and the resume of a more experienced woman, they selected the better-educated candidate—except when the choice was reversed , and it was between a better-educated woman and a man with more work experience, they chose— *drumroll*—the man.   

Williams writes: “This pattern of bias is called casuistry, a technical term for what happens when people misapply general rules to justify a specific behavior or use specious reasoning to rationalize their behavior. Casuistic bias is particularly pernicious because people think they’re using objective criteria to make their decisions when in fact they’re modifying the criteria used for judgment based on unconscious biases.”

Put another way, when faced with a choice that goes against our previously stated criteria, it’s really easy to simply change our criteria and convince ourselves that we’re being objective. That’s the only way I can see how the Giants could argue with a straight face that someone who’s done the job successfully isn’t more qualified than someone who has. 

Merit is Made Up

We’ve also seen arguments about who is “most qualified” in the conversation around President Biden’s forthcoming Supreme Court nominee, which he has promised will be a black woman. Even before the nominee is chosen, some are arguing that, by definition, his pick won’t be the most qualified. 

Of course, that’s a ridiculous argument on its face, unless one believes that the most qualified person cannot be a black woman. Indeed, there are several judges under consideration whose credentials—namely, degrees from leading law schools and appeals court judgeships—exactly match those of every nominee of the last four presidents.  

But this gets to a larger point worth remembering: hiring processes never get to some objectively defined “most qualified” person. 

Supreme Court nomination processes, for example, look for someone who is “qualified enough” on paper and who agrees with the president’s perspective on the law. It’s never been about more than that. 

(Aside: this Washington Post article describes how Nixon wanted to nominate the first woman to the Supreme Court, but Chief Justice Warren Burger threatened to resign if that happened.) 

In most other hiring processes, we might say we were looking to hire the best person, but the goal is usually to find the first person who is good enough. Even if “good enough” reflects a high bar, no one waits for the elusive “best” person.

Finally, while organizations try to come up with “objective” measures of competence or fit, those are actually built on subjective judgments about what skills matter. Even if an organization does a rigorous study to identify the people who do well here and embeds those characteristics in their hiring criteria, they’re still going to be picking up the aftermath of choices about who they want to fit. 

Nothing’s truly objective. We’re just making things up.

Leadership Wisdom

“Life isn’t fair. That’s okay. Life isn’t impossible, either. It’s just unfair. It is not your fault that things are harder for you, but you must not let it harden you. Don’t blame yourself, and don’t waste your energy blaming others. If you allow life’s injustices to define you, they will. But if you choose to define yourself, to believe in yourself and align yourself with others who believe in you, you will find a way to live the life you want.”

— Shellye Archambeau, in Unapologetically Ambitious