How do you hire a great leader? Adam Bryant provides some insightful answers to this question in an article adapted from his new book titled, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons from CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed.
Wally Bock writes this about Bryant's book:
Adam Bryant's Corner Office interviews are must-reads for me, so I'm excited about his new book. I'm also excited about this article because it distills Bryant's key learning from those interviews. What I like about the interviews and the lessons Bryant draws from them is that they come from CEOs who are not celebrated media darlings which gives them a freshness that you won't find in the standard business book or your typical hagiographic CEO biography.
After interviewing over 70 CEOs, from Alan Mulally of Ford Motor to Steve Hannah of The Onion to Judith Jamison of the Alvin Ailey dance company, for his New York Times column, Bryant distills the overarching lessons from what they said about the qualities they look for when hiring leaders for their organizations. He describes these traits in this way…
The good news: these traits are not genetic. It’s not as if you have to be tall or left-handed. These qualities are developed through attitude, habit and discipline — factors that are within your control. They will make you stand out. They will make you a better employee, manager and leader. They will lift the trajectory of your career and speed your progress.
The five traits are:
Passionate curiosity - always asking questions that get people to think reflectively about what they are doing, why they are doing it, and how they can do it better
Battle-hardened confidence - using the experience of failure and perseverance to achieve success and to learn from both failure and success
Team smarts – knowing how to build teams and help them be effective; being aware of group dynamics and facilitating productive interaction among group members
A simple mind-set – making complex ideas simple so that everyone can quickly understand the main points and how the ideas affect what they are doing
Fearlessness – willingness to take reasonable risks and learn from those experiences
Any search for exceptional leaders should consider these traits. Do candidates exhibit these traits in their behavior? Can they describe how these traits are a part of who they are as leaders? Can they explain to what extent they are strong or weak in each of these areas? What I like most about these traits, other than that they were generated from the practical experience of successful leaders, is that they are not about how much someone knows. Rather, they are about the ability to listen and communicate with the people around them in a way that makes everyone successful.
