What is the greatest hiring mistake you have made and what did you learn from it?

The greatest hiring mistake was simply hiring for skills and hiring an individual I knew was a bad fit and was just going to be disruptive to the group. They had on paper what I needed, but in the interview my gut feeling was, This isn't going to work, but I was desperate to fill the role. If my memory serves me correctly, I think there were weekly issues with the person. And it built a little toxicity into the team. It's so damaging to have people on teams who just don't want to be there for whatever reason. It's damaging for the individual and damaging for the team. Nobody wins.

Did you have to fire this person?

I believe in lots of feedback. I was able to provide a stream of feedback so that the person realized that they were not a good cultural fit and they took the initiative to find a new job. If that had not happened, I would have let them go. Team cohesiveness is paramount.

How do you deal with situations like that, where you like someone or need someone, but the team does not like the person?

A couple of years ago I wanted to hire someone because I knew this person was exactly what the team needed. The individual was an outstanding person in every dimension who I was confident would help the team move to the next level. The team, however, was just not comfortable with this person, and I did not hire him because he would not have succeeded on the team. It was a heartbreaking decision.

Why do you think the team was not comfortable with this person?

I think they were threatened by the individual. I think perhaps I had not done a good enough job preparing them for why this was okay. I had not given them enough time to internalize it. Eventually, we got through it. It took another six months, but the team was very strong and healthy in response to that. I'm sure they recognized their input in the decision making, but I don't know if they recognized the rest of the subtleties. The other problem is that with pushing people onto a team, if you have an inclusive interview process and you disregard the consensus of the team, you are undermining trust. The team is then thinking, "What else is the chief information officer going to do that he's not really being up front about?"

You've served as a manager in a number of different industries. Prior to higher education, you worked for Art Technology Group, Sapient, CrossCom and shoemaker Stride Rite. Do you hire differently for those industries?

In some industries, domain experience is more important than others. I think where domain experience becomes most important is when you look at people who want to work in higher education. For people who work in law firms or consulting firms, the transition into higher education is pretty easy, but for people who work in the financial services industry, where there's much more rigor and control, I think they have a harder time migrating. Anybody can do it, obviously, but I just think the stretch is larger.

I'd say the majority of the people we've hired have no previous higher-ed IT background. Some have come out of higher ed, but by no means the majority. We've had people out of the financial industry and service organizations. We've had people out of technology product companies. We get people with diverse backgrounds, which is wonderful.

Is it hard to manage so many people with different backgrounds?

For me it's not, because I've been in those different industries. Certainly if you had people who were all from the same background managerially it would probably be easier, but I think you lose a lot of the creative tension that makes a team powerful. I think different perspectives and backgrounds are a wonderful thing on a team as long as the team is built based on trust.

How do you develop trust?

I think part of it is setting a culture where the bar for success is high and where there is no penalty for failure as long as you gave it a good, honest effort. Building trust is also about empowering people to make decisions when appropriate. There has to be management structure, and you want to push decision making down, but you want to approach information sharing across. You want to keep people informed. I think dialogue supports trust. I think other ways teams build trust is by just working on projects together and delivering great results. Success builds trust.

And what is the bar for success?

That means always delivering on our promises. We [in IT] are ambassadors across the entire campus. I told my team that their job is to each make 10 friends on campus. If we do that, since we're 110 people, we would have 1,100 friends on campus. The importance of each of us making 10 friends is to communicate our message, to make sure they understand the opportunity and challenges of IT on campus. In return, my team hears the needs of the campus very clearly in a trusted way. Next: Laster's interview questions and advice to candidates.