Talent Management

By: Paul Croteau
August 16, 2009

According to McKinsey & Company, building and maintaining a positive performance culture in your organization is essentially the heart of competitive advantage in today’s fast paced world. Yet, we know that while building such a culture can take years, it can be quickly ruined by failing to recruit and select the right leader to move your organization forward. This risk of failure makes it all the more important to ensure that prior to beginning a recruitment process, your organization clearly and accurately identifies both the required leadership skills as well as those terrible career “derailers” that you wish to avoid. Let’s take a moment to examine what these skills or attributes look like.

High Performing Leaders

High performing leaders are grounded in and have a passion for the mission of your organization and share similar beliefs and values. With this foundation, they then have the ability to be champions for your business as all their goals and objectives are aligned with the corporation. High performing leaders have a strong sense of self-confidence in their decision making; they are able to separate their own personal and business interests so that corporate outcomes are achieved with minimal difficulty. They thrive on challenge and are able to steadfastly focus on the organization’s strategic direction and can easily and successfully rally and mobilize their team toward these goals.

High performing leaders are themselves continuous learners and they share information and communicate with team members to ensure skills are developed throughout the organization. They are good communicators who work with, through and for others in a team-based environment. Their skill in teambuilding creates a multiplying effect and ensures that all business activities are aligned and optimized most successfully. Finally, high performing leaders are very strategic, they think out of the box, are creative and know when to take advantage of opportunities. When they see gaps in performance, they act decisively to rectify the situation and make modifications to their plans and objectives as need be. Higher levels of performance and success are always on their mind.

Career Derailers

If you have ever had a chance to dissect a business or organizational failure, you would surely see a number of challenging leadership behaviours. Unfortunately, many of these weak leaders fail to look at themselves in the mirror and fail to learn from their mistakes. Sometimes, leaders derail because they are impatient, inconsistent and don’t appear to use their common sense. Still others cannot manage complexity and the organizational demands soon outgrow their leadership capabilities.

One of the most frequent career derailers found with business failures is the personal trait of arrogance. These leaders suffer from a “Superman syndrome”. In other words, they are so self-assured, self-absorbed and egotistical that anything and everything they do is all about them. In a competitive environment, egotistical leaders will distort reality, blame others (particularly staff) and will even engage in underhanded and sometimes unethical tactics to stay in their perceived role as “king of the castle”.

As a result, the needs of the organization are often neglected because the leaders’ strategic plans not only don’t fit the reality of the situation but they fail to make adjustments.  They continually make poor decisions and overinflate/overestimate their projected outcomes, then pressuring staff to work towards unreachable goals. Within a few years (typically three for some reason), employees will no longer be able to tolerate these leaders and will soon begin to drift away from the organization. Once one employee leaves, many more will quickly follow. The organizational culture begins to show many cracks and its reputation in the marketplace begins to suffer.

As indicated earlier, we know that while building a high performing culture can take years, it can be quickly ruined by failing to recruit and select the right leader to move your organization forward. Having a high performing culture in your organization, be it a business and/or not-for-profit, is not a luxury; it is an essential component of ongoing success.

Recruiting and selecting the wrong leadership style will quickly destroy this culture and set your organization back several years. You simply can’t afford for this to happen to you. With this in mind, be sure to spend considerable time examining just what leadership skills will best serve you and then apply a systematic executive search process that can assess and confirm each candidate’s skills before you make the final hiring decision.

Research and Review: 6P Marketing

Paul Croteau, B.Comm., CMA, FCMA is a partner with Waterhouse Executive Search Partners, a Canada-wide executive search firm. He can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or 204-943-0553.