If I'm confident in my competence and the candidate has a trustworthy and compelling narrative about how they undermined incompetent leadership to achieve a higher goal - yep, for sure.

Also, ones persons incompetent is anothers performer.

Like, being crosswise in organizational politics does not imply less of a devotion of organizational goals, but rather often simply different interpretation of those goals.

But being in a situation where this was called for twice?

That strikes me as someone who is either lacks the ability to do proper due diligence or they're straight up sociopaths looking for weak willed people they can strong arm out. Part of the latter is having the ability to create a compelling narrative for future marks, to put it bluntly.

I’ve hired people that were involved in palace coups at unicorn startups, twice. Justified or not, those coups set the company on a downward spiral it never recovered from.

I’m not sure I can identify exactly who is liable to start a coup, but I know for sure that I would never, ever hire someone who I felt confident might go down that route.

Startups die from suicide, not homicide.

"Startups die from suicide, not homicide." - That's a great way to put it. 100% true.

> I’ve hired people that were involved in palace coups at unicorn startups, twice...I know for sure that I would never, ever hire someone who I felt confident might go down that route.

So you hired coupers but you would never hire coupers? Could you clarify this, seems contradictory...

>So you hired coupers but you would never hire...coupers? Did you not know about their coups cuz that's the only way I can see that makes sense here. Could you clarify this, seems contradictory...

You might have missed this from GP's comment:

>>I’m not sure I can identify exactly who is liable to start a coup

In other words, at least once these people have pulled the wool over their eyes during the hiring process.

Thats what I thought ;)

These people were early hires at a company I co-founded (but was not in an official leadership role at). They had never pulled a coup before, but they would do so within two years of being hired. The coup didn’t affect me directly, and indeed happened when I was out of the country and was presented as a fait accompli. But nevertheless I left not long thereafter as the company had already begun its downward slide.

The point in my comment was this: in retrospect, I’m not sure there’s anything that would have tipped me off to that behavior at the time of interview. But if this was something I could somehow identify, it would absolute be my #1 red flag for future hires.

Edit: The “twice” part might have made my comment ambiguous. What I meant was after I hired them, these people went on to pull two separate, successive coups, which indicates to me the first time wasn’t an aberration.

'S all good

You should have made them fake manager like Michael Scott appointed Dwigt Schrute