What Has Talent Selection Got to Do With Making Leadership Simple?
With my newfound clarity about “making leadership simple” being the brand essence for Enlightened Leadership Solutions, I found myself in San Diego last week interviewing a CEO about their greatest people issues as part of a research project I’m doing for my next publication.
As head of a fast-growing company, the CEO quickly got to what he considered was his greatest management-leadership challenge, and it was not motivating people, or getting people to be accountable, or developing leadership, or getting projects back on track - none of the traditional leadership issues. His greatest management challenge was talent selection - selecting and hiring the right person for a particular job. He was losing people 3-4 months after they were hired for a specific critical role because their talents, behaviors and motivations didn’t really match the needs of the job. They seemed to fit during the interview process, but in the end, they didn’t.
Talent selection & development does happen to be an area of expertise for us, and in the process of discussing his challenge with hiring the right people for a particular key role, I began to think about whether and how talent selection fit into “making leadership simple.” It didn’t take me long to realize how perfectly the two fit. When we have the right people “on the bus” and “the right people in the right seats” on the bus (”Good to Great” by Jim Collins www.jimcollins.com), leadership - e.g., getting things done effectively through other people - becomes simple and easy. People who are in the right roles, i.e., their talents fit well with the needs of the job, are naturally more effective and don’t need as much management hand-holding or intervention.
One popular approach to helping assure that person-job match is to do behavioral interviewing directly related to the competencies required by the job. Targeted Selection(R) is an effective process from DDI for doing that, and we have such a process as well. Beyond behavioral interviewing though is the approach of directly measuring or assessing the candidate for the talents, skills, motivation and behaviors needed by the job. This approach is very useful if and only if that assessment can be done simply and easily both for the candidate and the hiring organization.
We will share perspectives on that in a future posting. One thing for sure, talent selection optimization fits very well with “making leadership simple.”
My best to you and yours for a great holiday season!
Ed Oakley www.talentselection.com
Tags:Executive Leadership Training Leadership Development Talent Assessment
This is a good idea, and I struggle with it as well. But, another aspect - what support do I give to someone? I don’t always have the luxury to spend the time (or have the appropriate tools to properly select), the “right” candidate. Yet, I’ve had success, even when it wasn’t an initial perfect fit, because I provided support (training, guidance, patience) that allowed the candidate to grow into the job. The person hired can be just as frustrated (as myself): they want to succeed as much as I want them to succedd. But, it may take a little more time so they can adjust to the job. And, I find providing good-to-great support allows that transformation to occur.