Fantasy Football is back

Football is back, which means somewhere right now you’re refreshing an injury report and agonizing over whether to start the running back with the great matchup or the one your gut keeps whispering about.

I mean, not me. I dropped out of my Fantasy Football league this year after too many auto-draft debacles. Life is busy and sometimes something has to go. For me, it was Fantasy Football. But, you, you glorious diehards, you may still be fighting the good fight while the rest of us are being crushed under the weight of our to-do lists and the falling leaves.

Wait, go with me for a moment, because the Fantasy Football metaphor works.

Here in New England, we had a rare September nor’easter. Mother Nature spent the weekend reminding us who’s in charge: seven-plus inches of rain on parts of the Cape, about three in Boston, thousands without power, and a very unhappy Logan Airport. (Ask any fantasy manager with a kicker in 50 mph winds how they feel about weather.) Still hoping my flight to Madison, Wisconsin, where I'm speaking to the leadership of Aspirus Health is on time.

But, I digress.

Here's why the Fantasy Football metaphor works: every start/sit call is a hiring decision in miniature.

I know this because for years, making gut calls about people was literally my job. As an executive recruiter, I’d sit across from a candidate and know, sometimes in the first few minutes, before I could have told you why. I was right often enough to build a business on it. What I couldn’t have done was explain how it worked.

So I went back to school to find out. I’m now in year two of my doctorate at Babson, and my dissertation asks one question: how do experienced leaders actually use intuition when they hire? To answer it, I’ve interviewed more than sixty CEOs, CHROs, hiring managers, and executive recruiters.

What’s emerging is a cycle, not a single flash of insight. It starts with Embodiment, a physical, emotional, or mental reaction that arrives before the reasoning does. Then Patterning, where that reaction gets matched against years of reps. Then Calibration, checking it against the evidence. Then Social Validation, testing it on people you trust. The hire gets made. And then, if you’re doing it right, Reflection: going back to see whether the gut was right, and why.

That last stage is the one almost nobody talks about. You bench the guy, he drops 30, you curse and move on. You make the hire, it works, and it becomes “I just have a knack for people.” It doesn’t work, and it becomes “nobody could have seen that coming.” Either way, the loop never closes, and the gut never gets any smarter.

When I presented these early findings at a research conference this month, under the title “I’ll Know It When I See It,” the sharpest feedback was that my model could describe any intuitive decision, not just hiring. Which, fair. It describes your fantasy lineup, too. (See? Metaphor!)

My job now is to show what’s distinctive about the moment one human sizes up another, and it comes down to the thing I know to be true this week: Your intuition is better than you know, but also not as good as you think.

To show you what I mean, I have an assignment for you: the next time you make a people call — a hire, a promotion, who leads the project — write down your gut read and what you think it’s responding to before the outcome comes in. Put a date on the calendar to grade it. That’s how a hunch becomes a skill.

If you’re new here, welcome! Four weeks into the semester, I just finished my first in-person residency, and I'm still looking for a few CHROs of large companies to interview. It’s 45–60 minutes on Zoom, and your perspective would fill the most important gap left in this research. If that’s you (or someone you could introduce me to), just reply to this email and we'll send you the details.