Rethinking talent in the boardroom | Joe Fuller, Professor Harvard Business School

The Better Boards Podcast Series

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Organisations are facing major challenges. Many boardrooms have not yet caught up with the avalanche of recent and current profound changes, and both boards and members of nomination committees need to think carefully about talent and the C-Suit. It is easy to talk at a high level about moving from a shareholder economy to a stakeholder economy but what does this really mean for the selection and development of the C-Suite?

In this podcast, Dr Sabine Dembkowski, Founder and Managing Partner of Better Boards, discusses the implications of major changes on the selection and development of top talent with Professor Joe Fuller. Joe is a Professor at Harvard Business School and co-founder of the Monitor Group, now known as Monitor Deloitte.

"We've moved away from just looking for executives with deep industry experience"
Joe outlines how his recent research highlights that it is no longer safe to assume that leaders with traditional managerial pedigrees will succeed in the C-Suite. While executives with deep industry experience and high-order process management skills are always good candidates, new criteria around social skills have been added to the desired mix.

"Boards of directors tend to hire and evaluate in the way they learned over the course of their careers"
Joe believes this issue represents a real challenge for boards. Historical criteria looked at the track record, career progress, responsibilities, and business units or companies. However, those measures were flawed. Traditional ways of evaluating people are subject to error - and now evaluating the new skills required is both different and difficult.

"To assist management in hiring a new senior executive… broaden the aperture on what they evaluate"
Joe explains that, in his opinion, the first thing a board or committee member hiring a new senior executive needs to do is broaden the aperture of evaluation and widen the kind of experiences they want to see represented in a track record.

"The stakes have never been higher, and the punishment never greater for getting it wrong"
Joe points out that senior executives must refine their management and/or communication styles for today's social media. Essentially, anything said at any point during their working day may end up on a platform with global reach and almost no barriers to being observed. The stakes have never been higher.

"We have to set aside some of our rather, frankly, lazy approaches to evaluating people"
Joe believes that boards need to make clear to executive search firms that they seek people with experience managing different constituencies and handling volatile problems successfully, not proof of someone's performance in more traditional measures.

"This is a new era that requires new solutions, and old dogs with old tricks is not going to be a sufficient response"
Joe also speaks about internal candidates and highlights how succession planning can be tweaked to grow candidates with the skills required. Career planning and career paths for high potential young executives are essential.

The three top takeaways from our conversation are:
1. The whole field of human assets is undergoing a radical transformation and the old rules will not suffice.
2. The paradigms used for advancing executives and candidates for advancement and the types of experiences and competencies they must demonstrate to move forward need to be changed.
3. Companies that are better at cultivating social skills will prosper relative to those that are not.