Changing bosses

My grand-boss is retiring in July. Since he is effectively our CIO, this has a wide-ranging effect on our future. The search process has come down to three candidates, and all three are showing up over the next 7 days for meetings with staff.

This is somewhat unusual to my experience. Managers, especially in civil service like we are, get hired and the top candidate is selected. All without input outside of the search comittiee. Getting a voice in the process of selecting my grand-boss is a little... weird.

Being civil service, certain things can be taken for granted. A series of interviews were held, duringwhich the candidates were assessed against a pre-defined set of parameters. After the interview process was completed, each candidate was rated against the parameters and a list was drawn up, first to last, of how they placed against the list of parameters. The top three candidates were then offered to the hiring manager (a Provost).

At least, that's how it is supposed to go. I have no doubts at all that the selection comittiee has a top candidate in mind already. Further more, I have no doubts that the staff interviews are not likely to have a significant impact on the person in the top slot. There is always the chance that some significant and objectively useful detail will come out in the interviews with future-staffers and that'll affect the rankings, but that is not a given. I also doubt that a report of, say, "all of ATUS hated the guy," would have little impact as well, given the objective nature of civil service hiring rules.

The prospect of a new CIO is giving the existing CIO a case of short-timer syndrome. Involuntarily. There have been a few major decisions made of late that the various people directly under the CIO are quietly stonewalling implimentation, prefering to await the new guy's (or gal! One of the candidates is actually female) opinion on the whatever. I suspect this is a very common thing when a high level exec leaves in a planned way such as this. The outgoing exec is going to be sticking around in some undefined capacity, so the chances of the new person changing stated direction are slimmer than some would hope. IMHO, of course.

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