After continuing our focus of executive recruiting within Marketing, Supply Chain and HR functions – and expanding more into IT (Engineering, Cloud & Infrastructure, Cybersecurity, BI) for multibillion dollar global corporations – it’s been evident that the leadership traits we seek on behalf of our clients remain consistent. I can now narrow them to just two core leadership traits: courage, and change management. And the two very much lean-in on each other.

We’re often engaged to find executives with the chops to lead through something drastic. (Call it “change management”): M&A activity, restructuring under new C-Suite leadership, new product or service launches, “unprecedented” business changes in a post-Covid climate, etc. Whether it’s moving to a hub & spoke model in Marketing, or executing a complete cloud infrastructure lift on a global scale, it takes considerable influence to drive change management within the complex organizations we’ve served … and one typically cannot accomplish it without courage. What does courage look like in these instances? Going against the grain of “we’ve done it this way for years”; motivating and inspiring your teams when you yourself struggle; pushing your leadership (hard) to provide what you need to accomplish the vision and execute the plan; accepting some loss of headcount along the way, and planning for it; holding all accountable; the persona and candor you hold throughout, because everyone is watching you.

So as we assess the executive talent we connect with our clients, rest assured we are qualifying – through our various dialogues and assessments – the individual’s ability to harness some substantial courage in order to drive change at scale. And while we don’t claim to be experts in many things, we’ve become quite effective at consistently producing leaders who create immense business impact.

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