You’ve heard the old adage “if the business isn’t growing, it’s dying.” Another truth that follows this and is highly related to this is that “if you’re not growing and improving your organizational competencies and expertise you are dying”. While organizations organically learn and grow their expertise on an on-going basis, one the best way to quickly grow competencies and expertise is by bringing new talent into the organization.
Whenever organizations make a key executive hire it is a golden opportunity to grow and improve their organizational competency in a way to meet future requirements of the business.
However, many organizations when faced with replacing a key position or hiring a new position do not exploit this opportunity. There can be an over-emphasis on short-term needs, hiring to fit the needs of the current organization today and not hiring to fit the needs of the organization in 3-5 years and the transformation that it will require.
To keep from missing these opportunity organizations should consider taking the following 4 steps for each key hire:
- Define Key Future Competency Requirements – Build an understanding of your true organizational competencies today – what makes you successful in the marketplace today. Forecast what you think will be needed to be successful in 3-5 years and determine the gap in competency. What expertise and talent are currently lacking in the organization to compete in the future.
- Determine How Your Organization’s Culture Needs To Change – Build an understanding of your current organization’s culture or how they operation to get things done. Identify how you think the organization needs to change to be successful in the future.
- Re-define The Position – Balancing Current and Future Needs -Instead of using an old job description that emphasizes current and past needs, design a new position focused on the current and future needs. Translate what’s needed from an organizational competency to specific individual competencies required for the role. Instead of trying to hire an individual that “fits” the current culture, define profiles of individuals that bridge between where the current organization is culturally and where you think the organization needs to go.
- Have An Objective Approach For Evaluating Candidates – It’s critical to define and communicate an objective approach that the organization will use to evaluate candidates to fill the roles. Without doing this the organization tends to gravitate to hiring professionals that are like them, like the person who was previously in the role and not the professional the organization needs for the future.
It’s difficult and sometimes inaccurate assessing what your organization truly needs 3-5 years out but, the organizations that get these key hires right and have a future-looking and competency growing mindset will have a distinct competitive advantage over their competitors over time. Hiring a search firm like M&A Executive Search can assist with these key hires.
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