I was frustrated working on teams selected by a numbering system in elementary school. Some people understood the project goals and got to work. Others focused their effort on destroying what we built or picking fights. Some goofed off.
I would come home frustrated and explain my experience to my Dad. He listened patiently, then said, “It’s hard to soar like an eagle when surrounded by turkeys.” So often in life, we are randomly selected to work together. Some people are of the same caliber, while others are not. It is nearly impossible to perform at your highest level when working on teams where everyone is not an eagle.
How do you calibrate talent? As the CEO, how do you ensure that the team you put together consists of top performers who will collaborate?
Here are 3 steps that help:
- Identify core values you want your team to share.
- Identify 6 key goals you want to accomplish by adding this person to your team. Ferret out what accomplishments your candidate needs to have met or exceeded, such as running a $50 million division rather than a $5 billion division.
- Could you identify 4 key attributes in your current team that make them successful in your company? For example, how do they manage challenging situations? How do they communicate vision for their teams? Is there a bias towards execution or building consensus before execution?
An excellent professional recruiter helps you identify these personal attributes and prioritize them. Armed with this information about your context, the recruiter can identify and present only candidates who meet or exceed your criteria:
- The recruiter knows people and the entire pool you are looking at. It’s easy for us to calibrate talent. The best recruiters remember great talent, often keeping them in mind.
- Good recruiters vet people for “fit.” We know whether someone will work well with you and only send the right people your way.
Our job is to know the universe of talent in the C suite and calibrate that talent. To ensure we have a list of A Talent (eagles), we not only dig into our network but also continue to identify, source, and screen talent for every search, providing you with fresh talent for each role we are hired to help you fill. This ensures you get new—and likely unfamiliar—candidates to assess independently. We make it possible for you to hire the very best talent available.
Fusion Search Partners is a partner-led firm focused on identifying top-performing leadership talent and delivering an exceptional search process, guaranteeing our clients' solid performance.