'Moneyball' Your Career

Who knew that eventually Brad Pitt would end up in our blog series? Other than, of course he did.

In the CISO Tradecraft® piece we've been touting recently there's a section we haven't touched yet: their case that aspiring leaders should apply 'Moneyball'-style statistics to their own careers. The point is that you're rarely promoted purely on your own merits, you're selected against whoever else happens to be in the room. Sometimes the deciding factor isn't your strength, it's the field's weakness.

That's a useful, slightly uncomfortable idea, and it connects to something we've argued in this space before: climbing and performing are not the same test. Moneyball makes that concrete. If promotion decisions are relative then "I'm ready" was never the whole question. "Ready relative to who else is being considered, using what criteria, at what level" is the actual question.

If that feels off-putting, CISO Tradecraft offers two diagnostics worth borrowing.

First: look at the last three hires into the role you want. Were they internal promotions or external hires? If the pattern is consistently external, that's not a coincidence, it's data. It means the organization's culture, for whatever reason, doesn't trust its own bench for that seat. You can be the best-prepared internal candidate in the building and still be running against a pattern, not a person. Recognizing that early changes what you do about it: you either address why the organization doesn't promote from within, or you stop waiting for a seat that historically doesn't open from the inside.

And remember you're partly accountable for that culture. If it's not delivering top-quality bench strength, that's because you don't understand it.

Second: don't build your case on last cycle's criteria. The skills that got someone promoted two years ago are not a fixed target, they're a snapshot of what a specific committee valued at a specific moment. Betting your development plan on replicating that snapshot is betting that last week's lottery numbers  will repeat. What actually transfers is the underlying capability that produced excellence, not the specific checklist that happened to get rewarded last time. This is the same trap we described in the climbing-vs-performing piece: chasing the visible signal instead of the talent that generates it.

You need to ask the same underlying question: what is this organization actually selecting for, regardless of what it says it's selecting for? A security organization that talks about strategic thinking but has promoted five straight tactical operators is telling you what it really values. A security organization that's hired externally every single time is telling you it doesn't yet trust its own leadership pipeline to produce someone up to its challenges.

Pattern-reading tells you what's been selected for. It doesn't tell you whether you, or the person you're developing, actually has the underlying talent profile the next level requires, independent of whether last cycle's committee happened to reward it. 

If you're building the bench, not just watching it, the same statistical reality check applies to your promotion patterns. Run the numbers on your last three leadership hires. If you don't like what the pattern says about what you actually select for, that's worth fixing before your next opening, not after.

Ask us how you can leverage talent data to increase the odds of better outcomes. 

(image credit: GabboT, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)