Experience or brains – Which matters more in a senior role?
Which matters more when you're hiring someone for a senior job - intelligence or experience? You may be thinking, 'it's obvious, go for the experience'. On the other hand, you may be thinking, 'it's obvious, go for the brains'. Which one you favour tends to reflect your own biases rather than any universal truth. Ideally, of course, you'd want both, but let's say that's not on offer. Imagine you're recruiting a Senior Operations Manager in a manufacturing company. In your business, raw materials come in, you turn them into something else and store those products, before shipping them out. This ...
Targets or deadlines – What’s your key driver?
Which motivates you more – targets or deadlines? That may sound like an odd question. They’re both about meeting some kind of goal in a certain time frame, after all. Well yes, but in my experience people tend to focus on one or the other and this has a profound impact on the way they work. People who focus on deadlines are generally interested in the task they need to complete by that deadline and the quality of their output. An example might be writing a report or compiling a set of accounts by a certain date. In a non-work ...
So you’re a leader – What do you actually do?
Much has been written about leadership and leaders. Are they born or made? Can you teach leadership? What are the characteristics of a great leader? And so on and so on. What is frequently omitted, however, is the question ‘What does a leader actually do?’. What is the job of leadership? It’s as though we think the answer is obvious, but it’s not. When this question is addressed, the focus is often on the aspects of leadership related to people, such as how to inspire others to follow you. But there is more to leadership than this. It’s useful, for ...
What does it take to get to the top in business?
Yesterday I was asked what it takes to reach the boardroom. It's not an unusual question to ask a business psychologist and when I coach on leadership programmes it's the background noise to most discussion. But it's not often I get asked by the Financial Times* and it led to an interesting conversation. What are senior leaders like? We started looking at the characteristics you need to work at a really senior level. As I’ve discussed here before, you have to be smart enough to handle the complexity inherent in running a large organisation and to make decisions whose ramifications ...
Why it doesn’t pay to be too smart when you’re learning
How quickly do you learn? Are you one of those people who picks things up with ease? Feel slightly smug in training courses? Don’t need anything explaining twice? Well here’s a way of thinking about learning that might give you pause for thought. From my favourite assessment measure, the Cognitive Process Profile (CPP), comes the distinction between ‘Quick Insight’ and ‘Gradual Improvement’ learning. Quick insight learning is when you pick things up through learning a new theory or by putting ideas together to come up with one of those ‘Aha’ moments (as I did when I came up with this ...
The importance of managerial judgement
In my last blog post, I looked at how you can tell whether someone has the intellectual firepower to cope with a senior job. This is incredibly important but it's just the start. In situations where there is no 'right answer', people need to exercise judgement and a surprising number of people find this difficult. Good judgement pre-supposes that you've understood the situation correctly - but it's more than that. I'd say that the two key additional factors are courage and intuition. Courage Some people just don't want the responsibility of making decisions. It takes courage to nail your colours ...
How do you know if someone is up to the job?
You’ve got a vacancy for senior position. It’s critical you get the right person. You’ve got a range of qualified, experienced candidates to choose from. How do you know which ones are up to the job? I don’t mean here ‘Will they take on the responsibility?’ or ‘Can they handle the pressure?’. These are important factors and will be the subject of a future blog post. But much more fundamental than that is the question ‘Do they understand what they’re doing?’. Dealing with complex issues The more senior you are in an organisation, the more complex the issues you’re faced ...
Experience or brains – Which matters more in a senior role?
Which matters more when you're hiring someone for a senior job - intelligence or experience? You may be thinking, 'it's obvious, go for the experience'. On the other hand, you may be thinking, 'it's obvious, go for the brains'. Which one you favour tends to reflect your own biases rather than any universal truth. Ideally, of course, you'd want both, but let's say that's not on offer. Imagine you're recruiting a Senior Operations Manager in a manufacturing company. In your business, raw materials come in, you turn them into something else and store those products, before shipping them out. This ...
Targets or deadlines – What’s your key driver?
Which motivates you more – targets or deadlines? That may sound like an odd question. They’re both about meeting some kind of goal in a certain time frame, after all. Well yes, but in my experience people tend to focus on one or the other and this has a profound impact on the way they work. People who focus on deadlines are generally interested in the task they need to complete by that deadline and the quality of their output. An example might be writing a report or compiling a set of accounts by a certain date. In a non-work ...
So you’re a leader – What do you actually do?
Much has been written about leadership and leaders. Are they born or made? Can you teach leadership? What are the characteristics of a great leader? And so on and so on. What is frequently omitted, however, is the question ‘What does a leader actually do?’. What is the job of leadership? It’s as though we think the answer is obvious, but it’s not. When this question is addressed, the focus is often on the aspects of leadership related to people, such as how to inspire others to follow you. But there is more to leadership than this. It’s useful, for ...
What does it take to get to the top in business?
Yesterday I was asked what it takes to reach the boardroom. It's not an unusual question to ask a business psychologist and when I coach on leadership programmes it's the background noise to most discussion. But it's not often I get asked by the Financial Times* and it led to an interesting conversation. What are senior leaders like? We started looking at the characteristics you need to work at a really senior level. As I’ve discussed here before, you have to be smart enough to handle the complexity inherent in running a large organisation and to make decisions whose ramifications ...
Why it doesn’t pay to be too smart when you’re learning
How quickly do you learn? Are you one of those people who picks things up with ease? Feel slightly smug in training courses? Don’t need anything explaining twice? Well here’s a way of thinking about learning that might give you pause for thought. From my favourite assessment measure, the Cognitive Process Profile (CPP), comes the distinction between ‘Quick Insight’ and ‘Gradual Improvement’ learning. Quick insight learning is when you pick things up through learning a new theory or by putting ideas together to come up with one of those ‘Aha’ moments (as I did when I came up with this ...
The importance of managerial judgement
In my last blog post, I looked at how you can tell whether someone has the intellectual firepower to cope with a senior job. This is incredibly important but it's just the start. In situations where there is no 'right answer', people need to exercise judgement and a surprising number of people find this difficult. Good judgement pre-supposes that you've understood the situation correctly - but it's more than that. I'd say that the two key additional factors are courage and intuition. Courage Some people just don't want the responsibility of making decisions. It takes courage to nail your colours ...
How do you know if someone is up to the job?
You’ve got a vacancy for senior position. It’s critical you get the right person. You’ve got a range of qualified, experienced candidates to choose from. How do you know which ones are up to the job? I don’t mean here ‘Will they take on the responsibility?’ or ‘Can they handle the pressure?’. These are important factors and will be the subject of a future blog post. But much more fundamental than that is the question ‘Do they understand what they’re doing?’. Dealing with complex issues The more senior you are in an organisation, the more complex the issues you’re faced ...
