Talent Management
Pin It

By Rowan O’Grady

The world of work is changing. Technology has eroded borders and given small and medium sized companies a chance to punch above their weight.



Easy access to new markets has increased competition, placing a greater emphasis on innovation and creating more pressure to meet deadlines in increasingly complex business environments.

How have today’s business leaders responded? Of course they’ve changed in lock-step with the times, but rather than augmenting technical ability they’ve focused on developing the “softer skills” associated with motivating high performance teams. Today’s decision makers are juggling more than tech specs and data sets; they’re focusing human capital on business goals.

Hays Canada recently released three reports as part of a “DNA series” that examined the skills needed to become a CFO, CIO and a vice president of construction in Canada to get a sense of how the C-suite skillset is evolving. Successful professionals that reached the top were frequently asked to stretch how they defined their vocation to include less traditional qualities. An ability to get along in an office setting, motivate staff and communicate to both internal and external parties formed the basis of how they were measured. And while these are more subjective than other skills, they should nonetheless act as a guiding light for employers hiring C-suite executives.

Qualifications and technical expertise can be learned on the job. What’s much harder to do is teach someone to live and breathe a company’s core values. Leadership on this front will create a trickledown effect that will strengthen overall corporate culture – vision, business acumen and emotional intelligence play key roles at successful companies. Despite the radical changes in technology at work, it is the performance of human beings that continues to fuel overall growth.

Of course, qualifications and technical ability are essential, but what gives an employee a competitive advantage on his or her way up the leadership ladder are the people skills that come naturally or are acquired through experience and mentorship. At the upper echelons of corporate Canada, technical ability is assumed. For example, almost 60 per cent of CFOs in Canada don’t list technical skills on their resumes. Greater emphasis is placed on overall leadership and experience as a steward of business.

Perhaps that’s why CFOs and CIOs both rank operations as the most important department to partner with, which speaks volumes about where they believe they add the most value. Furthermore, these roles believe networking is an extremely important contributing factor to their success. That draws a clear line in the sand – the ability to form and manage personal relationships at work and in the industry at large is what signals the arrival of the modern executive.

As a result, HR managers should approach hiring for these positions differently. If you’re looking externally, put professionals with diverse backgrounds at the top of your candidate list. Exposure to various business departments sharpens communications skills and fosters the ability to build consensus, which form the basis of “soft skills.”

It’s also possible to groom an ideal candidate by implementing a succession plan that includes an executive rotational program. This approach has the advantage of ramping star performers up quickly in an environment that emphasizes the company ethos.

Today’s business environment requires a modern executive to provide vision and act as a counterbalance to market uncertainty. Technical ability alone might have helped get an organization to where they are, but it takes more than that to help it get where needs to go.

Rowan O’Grady is president of Hays Canada.

Pin It