Backchanneling Is Becoming a Crutch

I increasingly see companies backchannel executive candidates before they've had a real conversation with them, before the role is fully thought through, and sometimes before anyone has decided what "good" even looks like. A few texts get sent. A couple opinions come back. Someone decides it's not worth taking the meeting.

That's a quiet way to make a very big mistake.

Most strong executives are not universally liked. Anyone who has spent time making real decisions will have people who were frustrated, sidelined, or unhappy with the outcome. That's what happens when you shut things down, change priorities, or tell people no.

If you treat early backchannel feedback as a filter, you're not screening for ability. You're screening for low friction.

I saw this at Stripe when we hired a number of executives from outside the company. Some worked. Many didn't. And the difference usually wasn't talent.

Stripe had a very specific operating model. A lot of ambiguity. A lot of responsibility pushed down and an expectation to be in the weeds as a leader. In the early days, very little process standing in for judgment. People who had been successful elsewhere sometimes struggled. Not because they were bad leaders, but because the job demanded a different shape of thinking.

Being successful at Google didn't mean you'd be successful at Stripe. Sometimes it meant the opposite unless you understood why you'd done well there. Different systems select for different strengths.

Early backchanneling ignores this. It strips away the environment and leaves you with labels. "Didn't scale." "Too intense." "Hard to work with." These sound concrete, but they're standing in for a much more specific story.

When you let those labels decide whether to engage, you're not really hiring. You're deferring judgment.

You're outsourcing the decision to people at a different company, solving different problems, at a different moment in time. You haven't yet done the work of understanding the role, where it will break, or what kind of person might survive that breakage.

That's backwards. Executive hiring only works if you form a point of view first and then test it.

The ways an exec is difficult are often the same reasons they succeed. Someone who pushes hard on quality can feel abrasive in an org that prizes speed. Someone who forces decisions can feel controlling in a culture built on consensus. Move them to a company drowning in half-finished work or endless meetings and those traits suddenly look useful.

Backchanneling tends to flatten these differences. It turns situational traits into permanent flaws.

Used well, backchannels add texture. Used early, they remove it.

The useful questions aren't "Was this person liked?" but "What problem were they hired to solve?" and "Who did that upset?" Those answers tell you whether the friction is a warning sign or the job itself.

If you want executives everyone agrees on, you'll find them. They're good at reading a room. They don't often change it.

If you want executives who can actually move a company, you have to do the harder work yourself: understand the role, accept the tradeoffs, and talk to the person before letting someone else's context make the call.