In our ‘Way Ahead’ series of articles, Richard Moore leans on the track record of Mercuri Urval’s consulting team and insights from our global network to offer practical advice on important topics that CEOs and Boards face, through and beyond Covid-19. This article addresses what is perhaps the key question Boards and CEOs face:
Other articles in ‘The Way Ahead’ series address important associated challenges:
Your organisation’s Way Ahead relies on effective leaders. Despite many well-researched attempts, there is no standard profile of an effective leader. It is difficult to predict who will succeed. Yet now, more than ever, you need leaders who will succeed.
Leaders who know what they are doing and who can take care of your people and achieve results are in high demand in times of change. It’s not only you that are in need. Demand has just gone up, but supply has not.
Volatility and uncertainty mean fewer leaders will perform well. New risks, opportunities and problems come and go at breakneck speed making the job more difficult. At the same time demand on your leader’s performance increases, their contribution is ever more obvious, and they may prefer a change themselves. It is highly likely you will need to consider new leadership soon.
Acquiring the leaders that will be highly effective in your new context becomes more important, urgent and demanding than ever. It is arguably your greatest opportunity and your largest business risk. To ensure you acquire effective leaders follow these three steps in a well-managed professional project:
Winners focus, losers spray
– Michael LeBoeuf, business professor and author
An effective leader correctly understands their current conditions, determines the right opportunities and decides how to organise for success in a given context. They will stick to the things that need to be done and secure the most able and willing followers. And so they will have huge and immediate impact on results. The ineffective leader will decrease the company value, undermine your culture and as a worst-case – given long enough to do their work – will erase your enterprise altogether.
Understanding the leadership you need can be made simple. Effective engagement and selection of a new leader will come later, if a clear understanding of precisely what you need is defined at the start. To begin the project, decide on your most important expected results, the context in which the leader must perform and the tasks they must succeed in. Then by connecting these three, you will create the profile of the leader you need for your organisation.
Fortunately, although every leadership challenge is unique, the scope of results your leader must achieve is not. Analyse the scope, and then decide what matters most:
Within this scope, the essence of superior leader performance in your organisation can be crystallised. Is it a transformation of how you operate, or to drive out costs? Is it a repositioning towards your customers or growth through organic means or acquisition? Once you know precisely which result is most important and agree it with all key stakeholders, the context in which your leaders must perform can be considered.
The main reason why there is no single profile for effective leaders is that each context in which leaders must perform is unique. The environment in which the leader must succeed needs to be properly understood:
Post Covid-19 every leader’s context has changed of course – already now and further so in the months to come. The effect of the recent disruption on leaders and followers may be profound, but most likely there is no ‘new normal’ for all of us – but rather versions of change for each of us. How has the furnace of Covid-19 forged your context?
Understanding your context, and how it is changing, means the most important leader tasks and the effort required to accomplish them can be determined. To succeed your leaders will rely on relevant functional expertise and will need to perform well in the most vital leader tasks:
Formulate strategy: The task to solve certain problems and decide on future actions – What strategic choices does your leader need to make and when?
Execute strategy: The task to relate to and influence individuals and teams – What change does your leader need to secure and how?
Manage operations: The task to ensure performance – What must your leader make happen and how?
In summary, to create the profile of the leader you need, these are the essential points to work through:
With these essentials in hand, you precisely know what leader you need to find and attract. Now the search for relevant candidates moves your project on to the next stage.
Go after the cream of the cream
– Apple founder and former CEO, Steve Jobs
It’s not what you know or who you know – it’s how you reach who you need to know. In the ‘old normal’, many thought it was enough to have leaders with similar leadership experience who would take on the job. Your personal network, or that of a contact, was regarded as enough to find a new leader. But the enlightened always knew securing an effective leader was the most important act to get right. Now, with leadership at a premium, we all need to set the bar to its maximum height.
To be able to employ the most effective leader possible, you will need to know what relevant leader talent is available to you. This necessitates a profound knowledge of where such leaders can be found and an analytical and systematic approach to map them. Only a targeted, engaging and adaptive search will work. Thorough enough not to miss suitable candidates, focussed enough to not waste time on those who cannot perform the vital tasks you need:
With a systematic and complete mapping identified, you will have identified and engaged candidates with relevant professional background and track-record. But which leader should you entrust with the keys to your organisation’s future?
The best way to predict your future is to create it
– Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the US
Unless you have achieved something valuable, you have not been a good leader. But everything your effective new leader needs to create will be in the future. Whilst analysing the past and the current has brought you potential candidates, matching the right leader to your context requires you to relate their achievements to a new future situation. A new future that the new leader will play a big hand in creating.
As performance in the future cannot be directly observed, the selection of a leader needs to be predictive. As the future is uncertain, and leaders are complicated, the prediction has a high risk of error.
To make an accurate prediction, selection must effectively forecast a leader’s behaviour and performance in relation to your result need, context and vital leader tasks. The more these performance demands on the leader can be described in an observable and measurable way, the more accurate the predictions will be. These three steps will guide you to select an effective leader. And in following them, make sure your approach avoids a few increasingly large pitfalls by ensuring your way of working is properly regulated, data compliant and ethically sound. Read more about those here.
Step one is to focus on a small number of the most important facts about the leader and the performance demands. This limits the amount of distracting information to focus on the core issues:
The more valid the information considered, the more reliable and accurate the prediction of which leader will be most effective. Place special attention on:
The simpler and more factual the assessment, and the sharper your focus on needed leader results, the more reliable your selection.
The second step is to focus on the likely shorter-term future for your new leader. In order to make effective long-term predictions, you need to first get short-term predictions right:
If leaders fail in the beginning, they will not have the opportunity to succeed for you later. Only a leader with current success stays in a role long enough to have a longer-term impact. The best approach is to separate expectations on leader performance over time and weight nearer-term predictions higher in your decision-making logic:
The closer in time the predictions are, the more accurate they will be. Success at the start is the best predictor of success much later. For leaders, the future potential is built on current performance.
The third step is to augment the right data and facts on the leader with the right human expertise that understands the leader’s future task and performance context. Effectively combining facts and data with a suitable person’s judgment improves forecast accuracy.
In a situation like matching a leader to performance demands and context, it is necessary to handle large amounts of information. Digital tools, algorithms, ‘big data’ and structured methods process data in a way that minimises error.
This data will then need to be augmented by a person able to understand it fully, weight it correctly and apply it effectively to the situation the leader will face and must perform in. Specifically, someone who has expertise in making such decisions in a proper objective way, understands the leader talent market and knows how to process it through appropriate means, such as:
Once an expert has processed the most important information about the leader and weighted it in relation to the required result, performance context and vital leader tasks, a logical chain of arguments that form a solid prediction can be made. Reporting this recommendation allows for effective follow up with the leader and the Board or CEO later. Consistency and accuracy always increase if a suitable expert makes a clear recommendation and documents it for follow up. Professional projects are always reviewed for impact.
In summary, the key points for successful predictive leader selection are:
Following these steps will ensure the most important decision – Who will lead your organisation to future success? – is well made. Having completed the project and secured leaders that will succeed, it is now possible to accelerate their performance further. And that is the subject of the next article in our ‘Way Ahead’ series:
Much of the content in this article about the changing leadership context organisations face, post Covid-19, came from fellow leaders in our network. As they did, please send your ideas, additions, questions and challenges to me, and we’ll develop our advice with your input included. And if you need expert assistance to acquire the leaders that will pave your Way Ahead to success, our team is ready to help – online, face to face, wherever you are and wherever you need us.
Richard
For more information, please contact marketingsupport.int@mercuriurval.com or email Richard directly richard.moore@mercuriurval.com
Richard is Mercuri Urval’s Chief Executive Officer. Richard leads the Mercuri Urval team worldwide, working closely with colleagues and clients in all sectors across Europe, Asia-Pacific and the Americas. Prior to this, he has more than 15 years’ experience in advising organisations in Leadership Acquisition and Business Transformation. Richard has a Masters in Psychology and is also a Board Member and Partner at Mercuri Urval.