The Leadership Requirement That Never Makes It Into the Job Description

Something interesting is coming through in a number of conversations we are having with CEOs, Boards and senior leaders.

It isn’t that skills and experience no longer matter. Of course they do, but increasingly, they don’t seem to be enough.

Organisations can find themselves inundated with CVs and profiles that, on paper at least, look remarkably well suited to the role. The right title, right sector, right scale, right transformation experience, the right functional expertise.

And yet, somewhere through the interview process, confidence starts to disappear.

Sometimes a candidate who looked perfect on paper doesn’t quite land.

Sometimes different members of the hiring team come away with completely different views of the same person.

And sometimes everyone agrees that the candidate could do the job, but nobody feels sufficiently convinced that they are the person they want to entrust it to.

Perhaps the question isn’t really the question

We have been thinking about why.

One possibility is that there is an increasingly important part of senior leadership hiring that rarely makes it into the job description.

We might ask:

“Tell us about a transformation programme you have led.”

And receive a perfectly competent ten-minute answer about governance, stakeholders, technology, milestones and results, but perhaps that wasn’t really what we needed to understand.  Perhaps the real question was:

“How will you create enough clarity, belief and momentum to take this organisation from where it is today to somewhere it hasn’t been before?”

That requires a very different answer and a different interview.

The same applies to many of the things organisations now expect from senior leaders.

• Can they operate without having all the answers?
• Can they make good decisions when the data is incomplete?
• Can they challenge constructively without losing the room?
• Can they simplify complexity?
• Can they create followership?
• Can they move between strategy and execution?
• Can they lead through ambiguity, uncertainty and increasingly rapid technological change?

And perhaps most importantly:

Will the way this person leads work here?

A few years back now we wrote about how we felt that Job Descriptions were a waste of time.

The job description can only tell us so much and this may be where some senior hiring processes are becoming unstuck.

We spend considerable time defining what someone needs to have done.

Ten years’ experience, a particular sector, certain size P&L, transformation experience, board exposure, international responsibility, all useful evidence.

But considerably less time can be spent defining what someone will actually need to make happen, and the leadership behaviours that will enable them to do it in this particular organisation.

Those aren’t always obvious. Two businesses recruiting apparently identical COOs may need completely different people.

One may need a leader who brings discipline, control and operational rigour.

Another may need someone who can dismantle established ways of working, create energy and take people with them.

Both candidates could have almost identical CVs, their likelihood of succeeding could be very different.

A CEO we were talking with recently summed it up perfectly, talking of his recruiters generally, both internal and those they have used externally, including some really accomplished large search firms, they said “They are very good at getting me what I have asked for, but I am increasingly considering what I don’t know I want yet and what I might be missing and no one is asking or showing me that”

And others increasingly tell us of receiving the same rehashed shortlist, even for different jobs, they receive many of the same names, regurgitated months, even years later.

And there is another side to this

Candidates also need to think differently about what is being asked.

At senior level, an interview shouldn’t simply be an opportunity to demonstrate that you have experience of X because somebody asked you about X.

The stronger response often starts by understanding why they are asking about X at all.

What are they trying to achieve, what are they worried about, what has prevented them getting there already, what would success look like twelve or eighteen months from now?

Only then can you decide which part of your experience provides the most useful evidence and that isn’t about giving an interviewer the answer you think they want to hear, or a ten minute example of something that actually doesn’t cut through.

It is about understanding the business problem behind the interview question and demonstrating how you think about solving it.

Looking beyond the CV and interview – Impact 360.

This is one of the reasons we developed our Impact 360 methodology at Douglas Jackson, because we were more interested in not just filling a seat but helping organisations hire people who stay longer, fixing that well known churn and retention problem, and perform better, helping organisations achieve the right outcomes, growth and transformations, and the question we are often asked;

“how do we uncover the individuals we want to hire, the behaviours, the human elements that might be missing?”

Before assessing candidates, we work to understand more than the vacancy, what does success actually require?

What is distinctive about the organisation and its environment, what makes its strongest people thrive, where have previous appointments struggled?

What leadership behaviours will complement the existing team, not just repeat it.

And what needs to be true twelve months after this person joins for everyone to agree that the appointment has worked?

That gives us another lens through which to assess candidates alongside experience, track record and interview performance.

It doesn’t replace judgement, it gives that judgement a stronger foundation.

Because when several candidates can demonstrate that they have done the job before, the hiring decision increasingly becomes about understanding who is most likely to make the right things happen next.

And that may be the part of the role that was never written in the job description.

Before you make your next senior appointment

If you are recruiting a senior leader and finding that several candidates look equally credible on paper, it may be worth looking again at what will actually differentiate success in your organisation.

If you are shaping a new leadership role, reconsidering an existing brief or simply want to sense-check what you should really be looking for, talk to us.

Sometimes the most important part of the brief is the part that hasn’t been written yet.