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Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric from 1981 to 2001. Under his leadership the GE stock went up by 4,000 per cent, making it the most valuable company in the world. Fortune named him the ‘Manager of the Century’ in 1999

Suzy Welch is a former editor of Harvard Business Review. She is also the co-author of Jack Welch’s latest book Winning

You can e-mail Jack and Suzy Welch questions at winning@nytimes.com

(Please include your name, occupation, city and country)

I run a small firm and it is time to pick a successor. I can make the case for any four of my people. Now what? Losing someone could hurt.
– Michael Rueckert, Sioux City, Iowa

You have a rare and wonderful problem. Indeed, you face the exact opposite of the usual case, in which companies find themselves empty-handed at succession time, and, in desperation, are forced to back up a Brinks truck to pay for an outside hire. Congratulations on buil-ding a leadership team with such bench strength.

But we understand your concern. You have got four stars and only one top job – plus the sinking feeling that your small company can't take an exodus of its most experienced managers. Your instinct is probably to forge some kind of compromise solution: picking one person and giving the others job titles and money to stick around in support roles. That approach can work. But if your candidates are who you think they are, the likelihood of that is, well, low. Very few real leaders are satisfied with second-tier roles or maintaining the status quo.

And in fact, your goal right now shouldn't really be downside protection. It should be finding the right person who can take your company to the next level. It may feel as if you have four great candidates, but it is unlikely they are interchangeable. Not all of them have the stuff for the challenge ahead, meaning the kind of insight and courage that will be required to reinvent your organisation after you go. You need to push yourself to identify the single candidate who does.

Will that move prompt the runners-up to leave? It's very possible, due to feelings of disappointment or embarrassment. But don't focus on that too much. Their departure will actually be a favour – for them as well as the company. For them, because it certainly sounds as if they earned the right to run their own shows, and they deserve the challenge and fun of it. Make sure their severance packages are fair and generous, and contain some form of non-compete clause. That will help everyone when other companies show up to steal them away.

Their departure will be a favour to your company because, in our combined experience, keeping failed candidates around is too often disastrous. Each cand-idate's sense of let down – compounded by the bad vibes of his or her followers – enervates the organisation. By contrast, if the runners-up go, you can reach into the teams they surely built along the way to find replacements. These new managers may not come as fully loaded as their predecessors. But very likely, they will be bursting with new ideas and positive energy.
Basically, you don't have a problem as much as an opportunity. With four candidates to choose from, you are guaranteed to pick a successor who will hit the ground running. Yes, there may be an initial jolt to the company when one or two of the runners-up depart. But soon enough, the change will open the doors of their careers and bring fresh air through your own windows too.

My team has been forced to put up with an incompetent manager for two years. I spoke to the regional head and was told they were working on it. That was six months ago. I don't want to be seen as a whiner, but I am thinking of going to the CEO to get some action. What's your opinion?
– Name Withheld, Atlanta

If you take your case to the CEO, you'll get action all right! And that sound you hear is the collective groan of everyone who has ever watched in wonder as some poor, naive soul has tried to pull an end-run. In fact, the fate of people who go to their boss' boss to complain is so well-known that we wouldn't have felt the need to answer your question – except we get one like it almost every day. Sure, the details are different, but the final quandary is the same: I'm frustrated with my boss. Can I break rank?

For the record, then, the answer is usually no. Don't do it unless you have a big safety net or ano-ther job in hand. The facts are, end-runs backfire 80 to 90 per cent of the time. Very few bosses reward people who sneak around the organisational chain of command.

Moreover, most companies are painfully aware of bad bosses, but struggle to find a way to force them out. Shoving that point in their face won't make you a hero. It will make you an annoyance.

If you dislike your boss so much you are ready to burst, you really just have two foolproof choices. Wait it out or walk out. Most end-runs only end you.

How fast should you move when you sense you've made a hiring mistake?
– Magdalena Fernandez, Santiago

In a word, very. So fast, in fact, that if you are moving at the right speed in taking care of a hiring mistake, it will probably feel too fast. That's okay. In every case, a rapid intervention is better for the organisation, your own career and even the person you are letting go.

Look, hiring great people is brutally hard. New managers are lucky to get it right half the time. And even executives with decades of experience will tell you that they make the right calls only 75 per cent of the time – at best.

The problem is, though, that the stakes are so high right now. Never has it been so important to field the team with the best players. Every smart idea matters. And every ounce of passion makes a difference. You cannot have a black hole in your organisation where a star should be.

So that is the first reason you need to face into hiring mistakes quickly. Sure, may be one individual's poor performance is not going to sink the company. But when your mistake isn't doing his or her job, it invariably puts a strain on the whole team. It makes work harder for everyone else, not to mention the resentment an underperformer builds in those covering for him or her, or toward you for the miss.

And yet, as your question implies, too many managers twist in the wind for months before acting on hiring mistakes. They will tell you they’re hoping the hiring mistake's performance will improve with time and experience. They might also moan about the time sink required to find someone new and bring him up to speed.

But the real, unspoken reason most managers don't act is that they fear looking stupid and worry that admitting a hiring mistake is career suicide. Ironically, in any good organisation, that logic is exactly backward. There, managers are rewarded when they acknowledge they have hired someone who is wrong for the job and swiftly repair the
damage. And they get even more positive buzz for the operational improvements that occur when the right person is finally in place.

Indeed, facing into mistakes – and fixing them boldly – builds a manager's credibility. Hoping against hope that they will go away does the opposite. Now, it is important to note that ‘boldly’ doesn't mean harshly.

Remember: You made the error. Don't blame the recipient for it. Break the news candidly, take responsibility for what went wrong, make a fair financial arrangement, and then give the departing employee time to look for a soft landing somewhere else. Both you and he need to feel as if you handled everything right – especially if you should ever meet again when your former hiring mistake happens to become a potential customer.

That said, of course, the best way to handle hiring mistakes is to not make them in the first place. Yes, brutally hard, as noted above. But you can sure improve your chances if you fight against the three main hiring impulses that most often get managers into trouble.

The first is using your gut. Don't! When you have a big, burning job opening to fill, it is just too easy to fall in love with a shiny new candidate who is on his or her best behaviour, telling you exactly what you want to hear and looking like the answer to all your prayers.

That's why you can never hire alone. Make sure a team coolly analyses the candidate's credentials and conducts interviews. And by all means, make sure that team includes at least one real hard-nose – the kind of naysayer who is particularly good at sussing out whether someone really fits the opening and sniffing out phonies.

The second instinct you have to fight is what we call the ‘recommendation reflex’ – in which mana-gers rationalise away negative references, with excuses like, "Well, our job is different." If only!

Not only should you seek out your own refe-rences to call – not just the ones provided by the candidate – you should force yourself to listen to what they have to tell you, even if it ruins the pretty picture you are painting in your head.

Finally, fight the hiring impulse to do all the tal-king. Yes, you want to sell your job, but not at all costs. In interviews, ask candidates about their last job, and then shut up for a good, long while.

As they describe what they liked and didn't, you will likely hear much of what you really need to know about fit. True, you may still make a mistake – but not because you rushed. Save that impulse for fixing things.

There's an old saying, ‘It is not what you know, it is who.’ How true do you think this is, especially in terms of career success?
– Ling Chen, Jiangsu, China

It doesn't matter. Really. You just cannot let yourself believe it. Oh, sure, there are some times a person gets ahead because his father used to work with so-and-so, or his college roommate was part of the this-and-that family or he used to play golf at the same country club with ... etc., etc.

Connections happen. When they do, mediocre people can certainly leap forward faster then they seem to deserve. Yes, that's discouraging.

But the minute you start thinking connections are more important to career advancement than brains, positive energy, and zealous hard work, you are signing up for a bad attitude, or worse, our favourite nemesis, self-inflicted victimhood. You start thinking, "It doesn't matter what I do. Some dope out there with a better pedigree has the edge."

Not only is this attitude self-defeating, it is also just not true. The world is filled with people who started with nothing and because of their brains and passion – i.e. what they knew and what they did – created their own connections. Put your head in that place, and keep it there.

The victimhood vortex can takes you to only one place. And that’s down.