Appointing the right CEO is often the bedrock of an organization’s ability to define a market. Despite the numerous recruitment and assessment processes that are applied to CEO selection, many do not consider “identity” to be a central theme, which deprives an organization of a key ingredient of peak performance. All of our actions stem from an understanding of who we are and who we want to become. We are rooted in our identity.
It might be simplistic to phrase it as such, but to lead industry is to define it, and by the same token to lead a company is to define it, so If you want your company to lead your industry, you must define it, just as Apple defined the smartphone industry, and Ferrari and Lamborghini have defined the supercar industry for decades. This requires such a deep sense of identity that it cascades beyond the boundaries of your company. Your CEO will define your company, they, therefore, need to have professional and personal identities that are deeply nested and intrinsically connected, in a remarkably robust and focused sense of identity. Think of Harley Davidson: its CEO has been in the company for 21 years, having joined it in 1994, before being promoted to CEO in 2015, and who has a deep passion for the brand. Once you are aware of this fact, it’s not hard to know where his employees get the drive to go as far as tattooing the company logo all over their bodies, and proudly touts the mantra “Live to Ride, Ride to Live”, unprompted.
In this respect, it’s important to understand that a person’s decisions are expressions of their sense of identity, including joining a group or organization and choosing to quit them. We define our individuality by the groups that we belong to, and once this concept is taken into consideration, it becomes a core tenant to attract top talent.
If you want to have a leading company, you need true leaders who love what they do, but more importantly, love who they are becoming when they are doing it. It is a quality that they must cascade across the organization to all its staff. There is a key distinction between the person who is doing a job because of what they get out of it (paycheck, benefits, etc) and someone who is doing a job because of who they are becoming. People will only follow your CEO when the leader is able to offer them a road map to become the person they envision themselves becoming. This starts with the CEO having a deep value in the company, industry, and sector. If your CEO does not see any value in the long term in your company how will the staff find value in being part of the team?
Candidates will not volunteer such information, so the responsibility falls on the recruiter to ask the right questions and recognize tell-tale signs that allow them to gauge if you’ve got a top performer on your hands.
Is your candidate extracting value from the market or creating it? From the outside they can look the same but on the inside, they are worlds’ apart.
First and foremost, you should not be considering candidates who have moved around between industries, because they are unconsciously saying their profession and work yield very little value to them as they don’t even care which industry they work in. They move to wherever the highest bidder offers. They are speculators who never stay in one spot long enough to create any real value, and are too busy extracting value from the market rather than creating it. Adversely, top performers define themselves by what they do, just as Einstein was as much a physicist as he did physics. Every action is an expression of who they are, eventually if this type of personality self-actualizes they become synonymous with their industry. These factors, coupled with their vision of who they want to become and the self-confidence they possess to chase it, make them unstoppable.
Here are 3 examples of questions that allow you to identify top performers:
- I see you have excellent soft skills which are highly transferable to other industries. Did you ever think of switching industries to something sexier?
Firstly, note how the question is leading the candidate. It is encouraging them to agree with you, and if they do agree, you know immediately that you have an identity issue on your hands. A candidate with a strong sense of identity will say “I would never switch industries, this is the greatest industry in the world.” After all, can you imagine Mohamed Ali switching sports from boxing to basketball? Or Warren Buffet getting out of investing and becoming a hotelier? Never.
- Would you encourage your kids to follow in your profession?
The candidate’s answer will help you identify if they value what they do and if they feel like it is an essential part of society. Are they even going as far as considering their profession to be a noble cause, and would they be proud to see their children follow in their footsteps, or do they hate their jobs and their last wish would be for their kids to do something better, something more meaningful?
- What value does your profession offer society?
Despite the esoteric appearance of this question, it is an important one: let the architect shout that they have laid the foundation stone of civilization, let the banker tell you that finance is the currency of society, and let the salesmen tell you they alone are responsible for the economy, and let every professional claim their right to the success of their companies so that they have set the highest price on their own profession. I have never met a top performer who has not seen a larger value than the dollar expression of their service or product, they have always seen a larger impact on what they do.
- Who will you be 10 years from now and what will you be doing?
Someone who doesn’t have a strong sense of identity will enumerate all the possibilities about what they could do. As soon as you hear “Well I can do this (…), or I could do this (…)” you know you have a major problem. The candidate you are looking for has a clearly defined path on which they are walking, a clear vision, and a prescribed destination which has been dictated by their sense of identity.
Looking for more questions to ask a CEO? Read “CEO Assessment and Selection” to learn more about the 7 universal success factors for the Chief Executive Officer, and unlock over 450 fail-safe questions that allow you to recruit top performers. Get more free CEO Assessment tips at https://tpgleadership.com/ceo-assessment-selection-book/ .
If you like this essay, you can see our video here