Perspectives on Talent | Selecting the right leadership to drive business growth

My name is Ryan Moore. I'm the VP of Executive Search for North America and EMEA here at Wilson. Built my career 16 years in executive search. The bulk of that has been helping organizations find leadership in a go-to-market capacity. And I'm typically helping organizations that are moving through a growth phase.

Often working with private equity, as to how do we make sure we've got the right leadership that drives the business forward and puts them in a place to be able to hit their growth.

So using agility to become that change maker, or how do you create agility in an organization that may feel somewhat rigid in nature, ⁓ really comes down to small baby steps. And I think that becomes critical of, let's test a couple things and fail in a particular area that we know is, I don't want to safeguard it, let's call it, where it's not going to do significant damage to the business, but we're able to test particular pieces and move them forward. Are we seeing success? Great. Let's two X that or let's three X that or let's push it over to this team. And can that also double a number that we're trying to achieve? So I think agility is often, how do you test in smaller instances in companies that may feel rigid to where the company itself is not ready for large sort of significant pivots. And then I think off the back of that, when you think about agility, it is quickly ended with a conversation of change management protocol. And if you don't follow a good change management protocol, agility can be very detrimental to a business because people are going to feel like today it's blue, tomorrow it's purple, and the only reason is because we were told that. And so you often have to, with agility, answer the question of why? Why are we changing process or why are we changing path? And then the second piece to that is what does it mean to that individual? Why did they need to change too? And if you start to put those two pieces together, it helps support agility in organizations that are gonna feel rigid or aren't ready for significant sort of change.

So the idea of being able to do more with less and how do you prep your team for what's called the unknown in today's market? think sort of the easiest way to do that is just know that there's aspects of it that you can and you cannot plan for. This sort of doubles back on agility is you need to be able to understand how to move quickly. I think that the piece that I've seen really successful in candidates is those that are lifelong learners.

If as a leader, you are not constantly trying to learn and have your finger on the pulse of where is your market? What are our buyers wanting? What's happening in the organization? What is the next tech piece? We'll use AI as an example, sort of came out of nowhere, ramped very quickly into the business world. And now the world is trying to figure out what does it mean? How does it fit into my business? What effect does it have the leaders who stay ahead of those curves and do learning and are involved in organizations and networking groups that allow them to expose themselves to that sort of thought leadership early are the ones that are better prepared to help their team as it starts to transition into market and move deeper through.

Not all leaders are created equally. And I think it's often a piece that gets missed in hiring leadership. And it's one of the pieces that I've often had discussions with, with business leaders around, made this hire, it's not the right person. And when we start to dig in, we realize that it comes back to this idea of not all leaders are created equal. That doesn't mean they're it's good versus bad, it means they function in a very specific growth pattern of a business. And when you start to pull them out of those and try to put them in a different one, example I'll use is if you've got a leader that's fantastic at driving sort of the zero revenue to 15 million, that same leader doesn't often do really well in a hundred million to $250 million organization and vice versa. You know, I think often we see the vice versa happen of or trying to pull somebody out of the very household logoed company that is in leadership in a billion dollar organization and asking them to step into an organization that's 75 million. Will that leader succeed? Possibly. There's going to be a massive growth and learning curve there. So just understand that not all leaders are created equal in the context of it just may not be the right leader for your business where it is in its growth phase.