Recruiting for Senior Leadership positions is costly and high risk. Fraendi can help you reduce that risk and hire well by using our Leadership Profiles. Leadership profiles use the best researched Harvard based profiles to look into enabling factors in a person and what they are capable of, and look into the mind and thinking of people. They will help you recruit ambitious leaders that have the inner development and skills to meet the novel and complex challenges that businesses and organisations are facing today. 

Today’s leaders face an increasing number of novel and complex challenges within a multitude of contexts and require a particular set of developmental skills to navigate these well. Leaders are being called to lead in the face of the unknown and uncertain. Leadership is no longer mainly about ensuring stability or the question of adapting to a huge technological shift. There is a strong demand for a more in-depth ability to perceive what is actually happening, create orientation and clarity when there is general uncertainty and to make decisions without knowing in advance what the outcome will be. 

These living strategies are vital for your business or organisation and yet, only leaders with a particular leadership profile have the skills to enable them to meet and navigate within these living systems.

What is the cost of recruiting Leaders who cannot meet today’s challenges?

Remember the Senior Leadership hire that started out full of ambition, single-minded focus and created expectation that was so attractive to the business but was unable to sustain or deliver over the medium term. 

The pattern of this ‘tunnel view’ approach reveals itself over time in one or more symptoms:

• toxic leadership, 
• micromanagement, 
• harassment 
• increasing numbers of complaints.

Remember the disappointment, dysfunction and damage that emerged as the vitality of the organisation waned and instead of breakthroughs, black holes began to appear. Remember how the team(s) became a high stress, low energy workforce and a breakdown in trust began to take over. Perhaps, for example, after an initial boost in sales in the first year that the following 2-5 years showed a drop in quality and expectations and long term client relationships began to fray. By the time you realised what was happening the damage had been done and this leader, who lacked empathy, had no sense or awareness of the damage they were creating. 

These leaders have a self-orientated profile.

What skills and abilities does a leader with the most suitable developmental profile bring?

A leader with the most suitable developmental profile has a self orientation that allows them to be self-authoring. At first appearance these leaders may seem less ambitious than people with a self-orientated profile because they are calibrating the opportunities they are living within with their own principles and view of the world. In interviews these leaders might not sell themselves as strongly as a person with a self-orientated profile.

We have all met these leaders as our boss or colleague at some point in our lives. They are distinguished by: 

• Independence of thought and judgement
• Developed sense of empathy
• Ability to take difficult decisions well and with consideration
• Ability to articulate own principles 
• Skills to create reliable lasting relationships 
• Ability to calibrate well and choose differently
• Share their inner worlds and can reflect on it

The pattern of this self-authoring approach reveals itself over time in the ability to:

• Recognise and navigate within the complexity
• Deliver systems growth (not just self growth)
• See and live well within the systems they are part of – perceive seemingly unrelated relationships
• Evolve a generative vitality that can sustain, adapt, transform or metamorphosize

These are the leaders that can deliver a living strategy for the business when the ground is unknown and uncertain.

How can leadership profiles tell the difference between leadership patterns?

If at first glance self-orientated and self-authored profiles can appear similar what will allow you to discern the difference at the hiring stage?

Leadership profiles differ because of the quality of the 50-minute in depth interview/conversation. In most interviews a self-orientated profile will be able to ‘hide’ and ‘play the game’ of what you want to hear. The leadership profile interview counteracts these tendencies such that after a while a self-orientated profile cannot sustain ‘playing the game’ and will drop into the reality of where their lived centre of gravity really is. 

A self-authored person will want to share their inner worlds and reflect on it, revealing rather than hiding themselves and embracing the conversation as an enriching process. As generative people they like the interview/conversation and learn a lot from it. 

The leadership leadership profiles allow you to:

• Go behind the mask and look into enabling factors a person has developed
• Understand what their inner development capacities are and are capable of
• Identify the edges of current perception and ground for action
• Deconstruct how people define opportunities
  •  how they see organisations as systems
  •  how they can meet and navigate complexity

If these profiles interest you, to find out more or to organise for an assessment for yourself or a colleague, please email: hema@fraendi.org