In our work helping clients to redefine their selection criteria, we often ask whether it’s possible for a leadership candidate to be highly tenured but relatively inexperienced.
It’s common for job descriptions to specify a minimum number of years of experience that all candidates should possess. Instead, we advocate that you identify the specific experiences—and the expected outcomes—that more accurately reflect the work environment and help identify candidates with the greatest chance of success.
Experiences That Do Matter
We found that although some experiences were extremely common—like spending time in a marketing role—they rarely contributed much to a leader’s overall success and effectiveness and were little more than “pass-through” experiences that might have added knowledge about the company but little else. The following experiences, however, did seem to add value. Across all the organizations we studied, these were the experiences that helped multiply a person’s talents and capabilities.
We don’t have a list of specific experiences that leaders need to have accomplished in order to be the very best. Instead, we have defined a descriptive framework for analyzing experiences for their potential value. Risk is a consistent element in all the best leadership development and growth opportunities, and each of the following experiences should make that clear.
Delivering a High-Risk, Out-of-Expertise Project
“Delivering” means a successful outcome on predefined terms expressed in revenue, margin or other measurable criteria. “High-risk” can mean a few things. It could be a high opportunity cost, where a multimillion-dollar investment has 1.5–2x potential gains. Alternatively, the outcome could be closely linked to the leader’s career development, the implication being that failure likely results in termination.
“Out‑of‑expertise” means that the leader is operating away from their comfort zone. They are leading the project not because of technical expertise but because they are believed to be the best at coordinating everyone else’s technical expertise. Other team members on the project might have more expertise than they do.
An interesting feature of this type of experience is that it typically occurs earlier in a leader’s career so that they are thrown far outside their comfort zone. It amounts to being given assignments or promoted to roles beyond their capability (in terms of experience, skills and knowledge—not talent), with significant visibility by upper management, a great deal of autonomy and deep functional focus. These experiences have major financial consequences and expose these individuals to executive-level leaders. Quite often these are classic “sink‑or‑swim” situations.
Complete Turnaround of a Business
Whom would you pick to lead a business turnaround? We suspect it might depend on the state of the business: how toxic it is, how much stress it is suffering and whether the turnaround has the aim of stabilizing costs or a complete transformation. Could it potentially lead to divestiture? One thing should be clear: it will not be an easy assignment. This is why it appears on our list of critically important experiences that help shape a future leader’s growth and development.
The context is key to business turnaround, but typically it reflects a leader either volunteering or being asked to take charge of a stressed or toxic business division. The toxicity can be either external and market-driven (such as competitor activity) or internal (like a facility that is precariously operating with deleterious engagement). This experience isn’t about just optimizing an opportunity; it is about arresting a potentially fatal decline. It must be significant enough that the failure, if it wasn’t reversed, could stress the overall company.
Leading a Significant Client-Focused Initiative
The people whom organizations entrust with high-stakes client initiatives are often their most trusted leaders. Many businesses allow their customer relationships to be defined by their lowest-paid, client-facing employees. Investing in programs and initiatives that shape how client relationships are managed over the long term has significant risk but huge potential upside. Assignments like these require leaders to stay especially connected to the essence of their business. It requires a deep understanding of the core operations and interpreting the motivations of clients to develop unique insights.
While leaders experience client-facing roles early in their careers, these projects are significant to the high-performing leaders we study because they tend to occur much later in their career, quite often after they have established themselves as leaders. The projects may have some technical problem-solving requirements but are much more demanding because they involve the following:
• Profound relationship awareness and cultivation
• The need to contextualize decisions within broad scopes
• A mastery of skills—like communication, delegation, planning and strategy—expressed and used differently in this role than in any previous role
• Full accountability for financial, operational, client and employee outcomes
• Leading assignments in a significantly new direction with direct, experiential impact on the client
Successful Leadership of a Complex Technical Project
Almost every major project tackled by an executive leader is both complex and technical. However, the experience we describe here is reserved for the most complex and those with the highest technical elements. An example might be leading the integration of a new enterprise resource planning platform, such as Oracle or SAP. Even mentioning projects of this scope and complexity will cause dread and anxiety in those who truly understand their magnitude. They are definitely the most complex, and in each functional area, they are certainly extremely technical.
These experiences require leaders to change their attitudes from “I can do it on my own” to “I need to do it through other people.” It is through this transition that leaders show evidence of a systematic, holistic focus. Such roles and assignments require leaders to let go of the pieces (individual products, services, clients) and focus on the whole—how well do we conceive, develop, produce and market to all clients? This attitudinal transition is achieved through the complexity of the project and the need to play a skillful coordinating role.
Building and Leading a Cross-Functional Team
This might seem like a relatively easy bar, but the critical component is that the leader is required to select the team. In most projects, a leader is typically assigned to lead a project with a team already in place. They might already be part of the team and elevated to lead it. Selecting a team is extremely difficult and often has to be done under extreme time pressure with the project already underway and up against rapidly approaching deadlines and deliverables.
The cross-functional element makes team selection more complex and demanding. A new team leader has to assess future team members and depend on recommendations from business partners, some of whom they might not know well or have any relationship with. The leader needs to help the team navigate through issues like project management and measurement, stage gates, updates and presentations. They accomplish this while being the face of the project to the organization in terms of accountability. Projects of this kind are successful only if team members feel a high degree of engagement with the issues being resolved, which is nearly always the product of effective management and team leadership.
Excerpted from The Five Talents That Really Matter: How Great Leaders Drive Extraordinary Performance (Hachette Go; August 27, 2024) by Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton. Excerpted by permission of Hachette Go, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
