Strong leaders can mean the difference between a team’s success and its failure. This kind of influence makes it that much harder to select candidates for senior management and executive functions. As far as the potential cost of choosing the wrong person, the stakes are much higher. So how can we feel more confident in our hiring decisions for management roles?
Kazim Ladimeji outlines two crucial factors to consider when selecting leaders.
1. Can they build strong and effective teams?
Or – more specifically – teams that are balanced, comprised of members with different strengths and personalities. Some projects require a great deal of coordination, whereas others call for innovation, still others implementation and so on. A fully balanced team should be able to handle projects with a range of challenges. Your candidates should be able to verbalize what strategies, philosophies or methods they’ve employed to pull together cohesive, synergetic, successful teams in the past.
2. How flexible are they?
A recent Harvard Business Review white paper, Leadership That Gets Results, suggested that managers who can roll with the punches are the best leaders. They tend to be able to change their leadership style according to the needs or demands of different staff members and situations. A leader with a more rigid approach or style may perform phenomenally in the short term, but may struggle to lead the team successfully as circumstances change.
Selecting leaders is certainly among hiring managers’ more challenging objectives, though the task can be made simpler by bringing on an executive recruiter.
Published by Conselium Executive Search, the global leader in compliance search.
