Hiring patterns in professional sports offer some parallels in what to look for when scouting talent for the corporate world. A safe choice in professional sports is classically someone who has dominated at every level of competition.
The corporate equivalent of "dominating at every level" are executives consistently having a significant, positive impact in nearly every job they have had. Don't expect to see success in every role; even superstars lose some games.
But if these executives have not dominated consistently, they are either sporadic performers or are lacking in their abilities to evaluate roles and choose the right employers. That's a shortcoming in judgment that may also manifest itself on the job.
In the corporate world, "dominating," or excelling at increasing levels of responsibility, has several benefits:
Proving consistency. Even potential is of questionable value if it is not being fully realized in its current environment. Is this someone who exerts herself under all circumstances? If not, does your organizational culture have the necessary elements that will bring out her best?
Validating potential. Are they good, or they lucky? If you are extrapolating off a single job, there is no way to know.
A marketing vice president at a new-product division of a Fortune 50 company told me that he and his peers would sometimes spend hours debating whether a candidate's success in a previous role signified that he could excel in their organization. The CEO would often play devil's advocate by suggesting that the individual had simply been in the right place at the right time.
I suggested to him that the root cause of their dilemma was not negativity on the part of the CEO, but her sophistication. A single event does not constitute a statistical sample. The debates over the candidate's single major success were an attempt to compensate for insufficient historical data on the individual's success rate.
