Pick A CEO Who Truly Fits The Company - Forbes.com

Pick A CEO Who Truly Fits The Company - Forbes.com

Leadership
Pick A CEO Who Truly Fits The CompanyNat Stoddard with Claire Wyckoff, 04.09.09, 02:00 PM EDT
Fit is absolutely crucial, and there are ways you can calculate it.

Excerpts:


Fit comes down to the degree of alignment between the values, beliefs and business philosophies in an organization's cultures and those of its prospective leader. As the management expert Peter Drucker pointed out several decades ago, if a leader's values don't align with his organization's, people won't trust the leader. Without trust, they won't follow. And if they don't follow, he or she will fail.

... two key changes to the traditional selection process must be introduced. The first is to rigorously define and measure the organization's overall culture, including two critical subcultures that every leader must contend with: that of the team the new leader will head, and that of the team he'll be a member of (i.e., the board of directors for the corporate CEO or the CEO's direct reports for a group or divisional president).

The second change is to carefully assess the final candidates' characters--their values, beliefs and business philosophies. Both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies can be used to produce a clear picture of exactly where and how well an individual will fit in with the prevailing cultures, before that individual is immersed in them.

The question to ask at every company right now is, "What are we doing today to improve the selection process and analyze and define our company's culture so we can be in a position to select the right leaders for tomorrow?" After all, if we don't make the needed changes now, we greatly risk getting it wrong in the future--and the costs of failure are huge

Recession be damned. Get your leadership for tomorrow right today.


Read full Article: http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/09/ceo-succession-planning-leadership-governance-fit.html

***********************************************************************
This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.