I had one of those. I thought he was fooling upper management until I started working directly with the CTO, who was very open about the fact that this VP was more about performance than execution. He explained that the guy’s overwhelming desire to look good and be viewed as a thought leader also made him very receptive to incentives. You could give him a task, tell him it was important for his career, and he’d get it done because he was so afraid of looking bad. If it was something he could write about on LinkedIn or his personal newsletter, even better.

The challenge was setting the incentives correctly so he couldn’t game them. He was tasked with hiring a team to accomplish some specific goal once and the first set of people he tried to hire were not qualified at all, they were just the first people he could get to interview and want to join. You had to watch him like a hawk to make sure he wasn’t running yet another performative game.

The other weird part is that a lot of candidates were really impressed by him. He dressed well and had hair that obviously took a long time to do every morning and he spoke with confidence. This was remarkably effective at convincing many candidates that he knew what he was doing and could run a tight ship. Lot of disappointed people trying to leave his team after the first 6 months.