Choosing a candidate for a top executive position is a high stakes game.
Make a good choice and you’ll reap the benefits for a long time.
Get it wrong and the consequences can be fatal.
You can improve your odds of making a good choice by comparing all the candidates in five key areas.
General management performance: How has the candidate demonstrated the level of general management skills that the position requires?
Strategic skills and performance: What strategic challenges has the candidate met? How do those challenges compare with what he or she will face in the new position?
Industry knowledge: Highly regulated utilities offer different challenges than cutting edge technology companies and both differ from international financial companies. If the candidate is not experienced in your industry, is their experience in an industry with similar challenges?
Support dependency: If that candidate has relied heavily on their team for success, will you be asked to hire or promote the team as well? If so, what will be the impact on others in the company? Outside candidates may owe their good performance to the support system in their current company. Will they have the same kind and level of support at your company?
Company-specific knowledge and skills: Obviously, this gives an edge to internal candidates, but that reflects reality. Internal promotions tend to perform better over the lifetime of an assignment compared with those brought in from outside.
Use these five areas as a framework to guide your discussion of each individual candidate for a top executive position. Use it as a framework to compare the relative strengths and weakness of all the candidates. You won’t get a quick or easy answer to the question of whom to select, but you will have a discussion that increases the odds that you’ll make the right choice.
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