Thomsett Advisory

How To Hire Your Next Leader For Your Business - The Ultimate Guide

Introduction

Hiring the right leadership is just about the most important factor in determining the success of your business.

It sounds extreme. It’s not.

There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.

And if your SME or scale-up hires the wrong leaders, a good situation can turn bad pretty fast. And a bad situation can turn disastrous.

And yet no one gives you the playbook to hire more effectively. No one tells you what to do to ensure you’re making the right hire.

Recruiters throw CVs at you. Executive Search firms do thorough research, but based on what? Based on you telling them you need a new CEO? Just that? And a dusted off job description that was used for the last guy (and the gal before that).

Come on. What a load of crap!

We can do better.

And no, before the clever dick in the back pipes up, we don’t need more psychological assessments, or to fulfil compliance quotas.

The problem is more fundamental.

And it starts with you, boss.

It starts with the ultimate mission of the company, and what the hell it is you want to achieve.

Because leaders lose faith when they don’t know the mission. And if leaders lose faith, so do the team.

And then guess what? Resentment. Poor performance. Wasted money. Blame. And then you start the process again, spouting some rubbish about how there’s no good talent any more.

I said it once, I'll say it again: there are no bad teams, only bad leaders.

You’re a leader, aren’t you?

But rest your head, comrade. I’m not here to berate you. I’m here to help you. I’ve been in the trenches and gotten battle scars. I know my way around this game.

And I’m detailing it here for you. The exact method, as simply as possible.

Because it’s important. Your business is important. You add value and create jobs, you keep the wheels turning and the lights on.

So let’s get it right.

It’s yours to do with as you see fit. At the very least, use it to hold your current recruitment partner to account. Make sure they’re doing the bloody work. And make sure you have your house in order first. Or use it to do everything yourself if you can. Or reach out to me, and if we match, we’ll work together. Only if we match though, and that’s all in the chemistry. If we don’t, at least the playbook is yours.

And so without further ado, let’s get into it.

I promise I'll keep it short. I’ve got no one to impress. No jargon from me, sir. It’ll be brief.

Leadership Hiring Overview

There are three parts to effective leadership hiring:

That’s it. It looks stupid simple. But guess what? 4 out of 5 of you reading this only think about the role. And even then, you’re not thorough.

Let’s get into it.

Your Company

The Mission

Hiring a leader starts with you, boss.

In fact, great company performance starts with you. There’s no one else coming to save you.

Get comfortable with that. Take extreme ownership.

‘Who shall I send?’ ‘Send me’, you say.

I don’t think you get the point, so I’ll repeat for clarity.

If your business is struggling, or your department, you are to blame. You. You might have shitty performers with bad attitudes. You might have gaps in the team. You may have disheartened and confused employees.

It’s on you.

With that in mind, the first thing to do is ensure you know where you’re going.

What’s the damn mission? What’s the raison d’etre for the company? Don’t say ‘to line my pockets,’ that’s not inspiring. Keep it to yourself. You need a grander call to arms than that.

I’m serious. What’s the company mission? If you sit down with the key leaders in the company, what are you communicating as the primary mission this year, or for the next 3 years.

You need to tell them in just a few sentences.

It’s your elevator pitch.

It’s the Why behind What you do. And everyone needs to know it. And everyone needs to understand it. And everyone needs to be for it. And if they don’t understand it, that’s on you again, and you have a duty to simplify.

Extreme ownership, remember?

Once you have the mission in place, you need 1-5 Key Objectives for your company. These are the results required in order to achieve the mission.

This isn’t complicated, friend. But don’t scoff at me, unless you can recite your objectives for the next 3 years with such clarity that an intern would understand them.

You need to know your objectives with absolute clarity. And they must tie in with the mission.

Don’t start listing 20 objectives either. Improving operations is absolutely not important if you don’t have enough sales. Laser focus on the mission, and translate it into a few key objectives.

Mission, check. Results, check.

Don’t celebrate yet, it’s not enough.

You’ve clarified Why (Mission), and What (Results). Now you need to detail How.

And I don’t mean job descriptions. What a load of baloney!

I mean the values required in order to achieve the results.

You know, those things you put on your website ‘About’ page to impress other people! Turns out, used correctly, they’re not just for virtue signalling. In fact, used right, they’re the exact thing that shapes the complete culture of your organisation.

What do you value? Is it intelligence? Integrity? Attitude?

If every single person you ever hired had as a minimum the exact core values you’ve selected to achieve your objectives and mission, do you realise how powerful that is?

Is it sinking in? To win, hire winners.

If you do all that – Mission, Objectives, Values – agreed upon by all key leaders – things will start to feel, dare I say it, exciting.

Get it on one page though. Absolute clarity. If you write War and Peace, fire yourself.

Onwards!

The Situation

Now you have the Mission, what does the landscape look like?

Because I’ll let you in on a secret – Leadership is entirely situational. One year you want a defensive wizard. The next year is all out attack. Each situation requires its own set of leaders. Because leaders have different skills and experiences.

So with that in mind, what’s your current situation? To achieve your current mission, where is the waste, and where are the gaps?

Guess what your gaps are? The leaders you need to hire.

The exact leaders you need to hire, that is.

Not some hunch; not some general meeting discussion because you’re bored and you have a budget.

The exact leaders.

However many gaps you have, you need to prioritise them. And you do so by looking at the objectives required to achieve the mission, and ranking leadership hires in accordance with the most important objectives.

Don’t complicate this, captain.

Done. We have a mission, objectives and values. We know who we need to hire, and in what order.

So let’s get to the hiring.

The Role

Scorecard

Don’t you dare start looking for job descriptions! I mean it. Can you imagine telling Michael Jordan how he should shoot a 3-pointer?

Give me a break. Descriptions come later, contrary to popular belief.

The most important thing to do, far more important than anything else, is to repeat your company scorecard exercise for the role.

Of course. It’s ridiculously obvious, and yet nobody does it. Except winners. Winners do it.

Think of it this way, how can a leader be successful if:

They can’t. No clarity, no results.

So do the bloody work. Because if you don’t, it’s your fault, no matter what you tell your friends and family.

When creating the role scorecard, you can add a few specific role values. You have core company values you want every hire to have, but the role might demand specific skills. For example, if you’re hiring a sales director who needs to build a team, you’ll likely want them to be world class at finding and developing talent.

Here’s an example scorecard:

Example Role Scorecard

Scorecard for Sales Director

A Player Company Ltd

Mission

To double revenue over 3 years, by signing large profitable contracts with technology providers. To set up one hunting team to land new accounts and one farming team to grow existing accounts.

How It Ties Into The Company Mission

The company mission is to become the leading challenger UK technology provider within the next three years, before making a global play. Your role is critical to the company's success. To be the leading challenger brand, we need to surpass competitor market share, whilst providing a substantially better product and service. Your work will directly lead us to surpassing competitor market share.

Outcomes

  1. Grow revenue from $10m to $20m by the end of year 3 (26% compounded annual growth)

  1. Increase EBITDA margin from 10 to 20% by the end of year 3

  2. Create an A-Player Sales Team by the end of year 1

Company Competencies

Role Competencies

Background Info

The most competent leaders will do company research. At the right stage of interviewing (hint: not the first interview!), you want to give them background information.

The more senior the role, the more information you want to give.

Yeah yeah, get them to sign an NDA if you need it. Of course. The point remains.

So prepare in advance.

Because, by the way, great leaders are interviewing you too. It’s not a one-way assessment, dummy!

Here are the sorts of things you can prepare:

Screenshot 2024-11-01 at 14

Can you imagine losing out on a great leader because they felt like parts of your company were a black box, whereas their experience in an alternative process was transparent and clear. And all you had to do was share the information at the appropriate time?

That’s a failure of leadership on your part. No one’s ever told you. I’m telling you now. Prepare it in advance.

Let’s keep moving.

Interviewing

Remember that role scorecard you wrote? It’s not just lip service. That little one pager will be the most important bloody document you’ve never written.

From now on, you’ll carry it with you. Keys, cards, a picture of your significant other, and the leadership role scorecards.

You know why? Because it’s the standard of performance you’re selecting for, and the standard of performance you’re judging against post selection.

Pretty critical then. And you’ve never written one.

Quick pause. If you’re above doing the work, and you haven’t done the scorecards yet, and you don’t intend to pay me handsomely to work with you, then get to it. Unless this is an exercise in time wasting for you, captain.

Okay, so bear this in mind at all times. You’re judging every leader against your scorecard. Nothing else. Have they completed a similar mission? Have they achieved similar objectives? Do they embody the values you’ve selected for?

Before you start interviewing, you need to understand your non-negotiables. For example, no team chemistry, no hire. You might hire an artist and be talking to Picasso. But if there’s no jam, there’s no toast, you get me?

As you interview candidates, you want to be referencing on the scorecard, or on a document or spreadsheet tied to the scorecard, when they’ve demonstrated the particular mission, objective, or value. Because when you come to choose your leader, that’s what you’ll be looking at.

Talking of interviews, you want to be conducting a minimum of three, as follows:

Note, I said a minimum of three. You might introduce an aptitude test, or team member interviews, or something else. When I work with companies, I generally do three myself and two with the client. Two of them serve as relationship building exercises.

‘How many interviews?’ I hear you say, scoffing. Okay captain, go back to your whim and prayer methods. Come back to me when you’ve messed up again. Interviews don’t have to be long, chum. Au contraire, be concise. Get to the point.

I’ll briefly touch on the three main ones. For a detailed explanation, call or email me.

Disqualification Interview

Believe it or not, the point of the first interview is to understand approximate fit, as quickly as possible.

That’s it. So stop wasting time.

Do their career goals jam with your mission?

Do their competencies line up with your objectives?

How would their ex-bosses rate them on a scale of 1-5?

Is there a chemistry fit? Are there any red flags?

Do they meet salary, location, and notice period requirements?

If yes, onwards. If not, thank you and good bye.

Exposure, exposure, exposure. Speed. Get it done. You’ll soon have an exciting list.

Experience Interview

Now might be a good idea to give some of that company information. If not now, definitely next time.

In the Experience Interview, you want to get into the meat of things. Standardise the format, and tell the candidate so. Say, ‘the first half is going to be question based. My aim is to get a thorough idea of your experiences and skills. Then we’ll open up to more general two way questions.’

Your goal is to go through their work experience chronologically, uncover patterns, and match them to your score card.

At a minimum, you want to ask:

  1. What were you hired to do? (what was their scorecard?)
  2. What accomplishments are you most proud of? (stories. Do they match your job outcomes?)
  3. What were some low points during that job? (stories)
  4. Who were the people you worked with? (Specifically)
  5. Why did you leave that job? (Looking for push or pull. Promoted, recruited, fired.)

In this way, you’ll gather an immense amount of information, which you can reference against your scorecard.

Don’t deviate at this point, captain. You want the same questions for each person. A fair fight requires similar conditions.

There’s a bit more to it, friend, if you want to cover 100% of the terrain. But this gets you most of the way there.

Situation Interview

By this point, you should have narrowed down your list significantly. I’m talking 3-5 people.

Many people will be excellent. But if they don’t vibe with the mission, don’t have the experiences, and don’t practise the values, leave it.

I get it, sometimes it’s tough. A leader who doesn't fit, but is world class nonetheless. It would be stupid not to take them on, right? Wrong!

Leadership is situational, remember? That person isn't for you today. Better to develop the relationship in preparation for tomorrow. Their time will come..

Talking of situational, now's the time to see situation-based performance.

This is where I differ from the ‘experts’. Conventional wisdom is to get your candidate to do some kind of presentation – either fictional, or based on what they ‘would do’ if they joined.

Both are sub-optimal, captain. Fiction is fiction. And ‘would do’ is unfair. Your leader doesn’t yet know the terrain, and all great leaders seek to understand the terrain.

But seeing how they think, how they work, how they interact; that’s all vital stuff.

So what I suggest you do is discuss a real problem with real information. I said discuss, not present. You want a conversation. With the people who will be solving the problem. That’s adjacent leaders, key team members and your prospective candidate. It can be together or separately.

You’re looking for chemistry fit, to see values demonstrated, and real time leadership and collaboration styles. You’re looking for red flags too, El Capitan.

This is where we go from academic to practical. In my experience, the right leaders present themselves here.

Selecting Your Leader

Getting to the wire, now it’s time to choose.

Lucky for us, we’re prepared, and so selecting is simple, friend.

Grab that old scorecard. You don’t need to look for it, you keep it with you now. And gather all the intel you have on each candidate.

Bring in all the key decision makers.

Shut the door.

Start with the first candidate. Go through the scorecard, and score each bullet point.

Have they demonstrated similar results? Do they tick the values?

And just as important:

Score them A, B and C. Or 1, 2 and 3 on each point.

Add up the scores. Who has the most A’s, or the most 1’s? Do they tick the non-negotiables?

If so, provided they have a passion for the mission that’s your hire, comrade.

Perhaps I should make this blindly clear: if they don’t have absolute enthusiasm for the mission, it’s a no, Captain. Save yourself the heartache. We’ve all had that friend who fell in love with someone who didn’t love him back – it never ends well.

And there you have it, time to make an offer.

Negotiation is beyond the scope of this piece. But needless to say, it’s an art unto itself. I believe in you though, Boss. Go land that fish.

As if referencing. But you must do it. You hear me? Call up the old bosses. Ask the difficult questions. Make sure the stories line up.

Re-Cap

I need to congratulate you, friend.

By reading this, I know that leadership hiring is on your mind. I know you want to do it well. And that’s a good thing, because:

There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.

So well done you. Thinking about How to hire is Good Leadership.

I’ll re-cap, succinctly.

Thanks for reading, boss. I hope it helps you in your next leadership hire.

Take your time with it. It’s important, and you’ve worked hard.

Email to see if you qualify.

#exec hiring