Hiring the right way for top jobs
tions are often inconsequential when selecting a CEO or picking someone for an even more overarching leadership role, like the one that Jack Ma has played at the Alibaba Group. The process of hiring leaders is not a scientific one yet, it’s crucial to clearly define the criteria a potential leader must meet. Given that hiring leaders or c-suite executives is a lengthy process which sometimes takes as long as more than a year, many of these criteria are bound to change with the changing priorities for the organisations or with the plans to pivot the business. However, the key bench marks for assessing leadership qualities seldom change since they are tied to the organisation’s overall mission and culture. Experienced directors and board members understand that a company’s goals and plans can change quickly in today’s fastbusiness landscape. This is why they need to keep an open mind when creating a succession plan, and not just focus on a few individual favourites.
Further, when finally getting down to the actual hiring process, it is important to look beyond just the business and financial results achieved by the candidate to assess their potential performance, and look deeper for certain essential, but intangible, qualities. Even the smartest candidates with supposedly high IQS may not always have the EQ to be a leader, which includes qualities such as empathy, ability to build and nurture relationships, and self-awareness. Or the shrewdness, acquired through both learning and maturity, that’s necessary to be a good CEO or leader.
When preparing a succession plan, it is also crucial to ensure that the directors and leaders get to know the company’s top leaders, be it by observing them during boardroom presentations, talking to them during company events, or seeing them in action as they work with their teams. Along the way, however, directors are often bound to pick favourites, especially if they have a good personal dynamic with someone in the succession pool. Such psychological barriers can be especially hard to break. On the other hand, there is the matter of battling biases and assumptions about particular candidates, both their own as well as that of others, which can eventually pose a challenge to making a sound and objective decision.
AUGMENTING SUCCESSION PLANNING WITH TECHNOLOGY
The process of hiring for a CXO role is certainly a long and complicated one, which is why leveraging technology can enable more efficient decision-making without personal biases and assumptions creeping into it. The concept of technology-driven assessments lends itself perfectly to the process of succession planning by helping the management pick the right candidate through a more advanced set of metrics that are otherwise impossible to be measured through simple human interactions or verbal communication. Whether an organisation is looking to fill a CXO’S position with someone belonging to the same industry, or with cross-functional expertise, assessments allow decisionmakers to adopt a more objective and comprehensive approach and glean advanced insights into the competencies required for a job role. Psychometric assessments allow the management to accurately determine whether a candidate will be the right fit to the company’s culture and if she/ he possesses the qualities that a leader requires in order to inspire confidence from their team. On the other hand, skill-based assessments help them assess the hard skills and their level of expertise in specific functions.