Don’t Crash the Bus

I’m often asked by CEO candidates, ‘what will make me successful at interview’. Very few candidates few ask me, ‘what will make me successful in the role’ and yet this is the more important question to ask. It is a question I urge hiring managers to lace through their interviews.

In 30 years in the workplace, I’ve seen many a CEO sell a vision to a board to get the role. Often the vision is unobtainable within the organisation. I’ve seen CEO’s sell the same vision to successive boards to achieve successive roles and every time, I’ve seen that 5-year tenure pass with, at best, no impact, and at worst, damage or decline at the organisation.

Boards come and go, as do CEOs, but the mission remains and it is sadly common that an organisation can pass through half a decade or more without making much progress. In the worst case I have witnessed, two successive CEOs tried to transform a programming organisation focused on valuable and effective service delivery, into a campaigning organisation. That blunt force trauma, which disconnects the organisation from its staff, its original mission and its funders showed in many ways, but most, in the bottom line. Organisations shouldn’t be the plaything of CEOs but they can be, where care isn’t taken in the process of finding a replacement.

These stories are exactly why hiring managers need to ask the second question and why I tell CEO candidates that if they are genuinely connected to the mission, that selling a vision isn’t enough. They must be able to convince that they can execute. Anyone can take the resources of an organisation and do ‘stuff’ with it. We encourage candidates to back up their passion with the track record required to deliver, an understanding of what makes organisations successful, and the components that have to come together to do so, either to maintain or to improve the existing model.

Refreshingly, recently I heard a Chair of the Board ask for candidates that ‘weren’t going to crash the bus’. One can read that quote and think that means ‘a safe pair of hands’ or a ‘seat warmer’ when it fact it doesn’t. Keeping an organisation moving forward and evolving is a real skill, requiring real experience and stewardship. Breaking things is easy and all too often breaking stuff is misinterpreted as growing or building. They are not the same thing.

Finding the right CEO who can achieve the mission, depends on a board that understands the organisation and has thought deeply about the next five years of the organisation and its delivery against the mission. Defining the purpose of a CEO’s tenure is important and often something that boards should spend more time on. It can be more prudent to recruit an interim while this thinking occurs than it is to dive straight in. It requires hiring managers, recruitment infrastructure and process to be able to cut through to find the right individual to meet this need. It also needs candidates who can present themselves as the viable solution to meet this need and convince they can execute on their vision.

At Oxford HR we sit at the nexus of all of this. We work closely with boards to define the right profile, we search for aligned individuals, work hard to ascertain the correct addition, complete detailed due diligence and screening, advise hiring managers on assessment, act as a trusted sounding board using our own expertise as senior leaders and coach candidates to be able to show the best of themselves and their value.

All of these things matter, because ‘crashing the bus’ rarely happens suddenly as the analogy suggests; rather it is often more like sleepwalking toward damage. At Oxford HR we are passionate about placing the best leaders for impact and we are very proud to contribute toward the ongoing success of important organisations.