By Paul Bohne, WittKieffer, and Terence Bostic, Ph.D., CMA In challenging times like today, it is even more critical to hire the right leaders. Yet...
By Paul Bohne, WittKieffer, and Terence Bostic, Ph.D., CMA
In challenging times like today, it is even more critical to hire the right leaders. Yet if they’re being honest, most hiring managers will tell you that they “get it right” about six or seven times out of 10. This is true even at the executive level. That’s not a great ratio, especially when you consider the cost of a bad leadership hire. The “opportunity costs” alone of hiring the wrong executive – not having the right person setting the vision and making key strategic decisions for your organization for the coming years – are exorbitant.
For this reason, reducing hiring risk should be the obsession of every hiring manager and search committee. It’s our obsession as two people who support executive hiring for a living. We’ve come to realize that with every executive recruitment, getting it wrong isn’t an option. It’s critically important to maximize the likelihood of hiring the right person. People’s careers and organizations’ well-being are at stake.
There are two kinds of risk that enter executive selection, really. One is that the person hired won’t have the leadership qualities to fit the role; the second is that they won’t have the qualities to fit into the culture. While “culture fit” can be a loaded term from an implicit bias perspective, we have seen many instances in which an executive who fit the role didn’t fit the culture, and the results were disastrous.
Why Assessments Matter
Leadership assessments are a way to address both role and culture, to reduce risk. A whole industry has evolved around these assessments as a means of providing reliable, objective data to either support or disprove opinions formulated through the vetting and interviewing of candidates. Validated psychometric assessments are an important way to conduct pressure-testing of candidates on specific themes. They inform the vetting process, providing texture and insights on someone beyond what interviews, referencing, and resumes may indicate.
Assessments have the most impact when job performance variability is high – that is, their validity increases with the complexity of the job, which is why they’re so critical as a supplement to executive-level hiring. On that note, we’ve put together the following rules of thumb for leveraging assessments to mitigate risk:
Rules to Reducing Risk, Leveraging Leadership Assessments
Leadership assessments, if integrated into the hiring process expertly and wisely, add a high degree of certainty to the risky endeavor of selecting executives.
Terence Bostic, Ph.D. is a managing partner in CMA Global, Inc., a market-leading assessment and leadership development firm. Paul Bohne is the managing partner of WittKieffer’s Healthcare Practice.