Too many companies are recruiting mediocre candidates for senior positions, writes Claudio Fernández-Aráoz in the MIT Sloan Management Review. According to the author, a partner at Egon Zehnder International, top candidates for C-level positions are rare. Assessment errors, the changing skills required in senior positions and the difficulty of measuring such soft skills reduces firms’ chances of success even further. Fernández-Aráoz and his colleagues have devised a set of best practices to help companies avoid these pitfalls:
- Draw up a detailed definition of the skills required before beginning a search
- Cast a wide net to boost chances of finding outstanding individuals
Use a consistent benchmarking process to evaluate all candidates - Evaluate thoroughly, including behavioral based interviews and in-depth reference checks
- Do good groundwork to filter out biased or false views within the hiring team
- Keep the hiring team small to save resources and eliminate false negatives
- Support the candidate selected during his/her first few months on the job.
The expense of conducting such a thorough search needs to be offset against the lost opportunity costs of appointing a mediocre player to head a company, warns the author. In some markets the leader effect on performance can be as high as 40%, demonstrating the power of strong people decisions at the top, concludes Fernández-Aráoz.
For full story: Claudio Fernández-Aráoz: "Getting the Right People at the Top" in MITSloan Management Review (Number 3, 2005). Article can be purchased online.
This sounds like a good checklist for any role.
ReplyDeleteI take the view that organisation and culture are important as (my take) is that performance is at least partially situational. So, for example, if we consider Porter's types of organisation (in an abridged sense operational excellence, customer focused and product innovation) someone who succeeds in an organisational culture such as found in firm competing on cost (operational excellence) might not be right for one leading on innovation in products.
Using this sort of view (one could use lots of different models than just Porter) the wide net does not mean similar sectors, but similar 'types' of firms.