Enlow and Associates Identify the Intangibles Shared by Outstanding Executive Candidates
When curriculum vitae and corporate balance sheets don’t point to a clearly superior candidate for an open executive position, what does? Executive recruiters Enlow and Associates work with each client to ensure every candidate meets the objective requirements of their proposed position. But they also cultivate a keen awareness of the personal characteristics that serve their clients well in the corporate suite.
Confidence
Leadership inspires followship with a clear vision that is confident enough to leave room to treat subordinates with empathy, courtesy, and respect. Swagger and assertiveness can team up with generosity and kindness in executives who are confident in their positions.
Transparency
Transparency is an often-misunderstood attribute of effective executives, Enlow and Associates say. Transparency doesn’t mean peers, subordinates, and competitors should be able to read you like a book. Transparency means that everyone who deals with an executive should have a clear understanding of the relationship between actions and consequences.
Focus
It is often said that leadership requires making unpopular decisions that are important to the health of the company. That’s a partial truth, but it underscores the importance of focus. Executives who put major emphasis on major issues and minor emphasis on minor issues can swim through the ocean of detail surrounding every executive. To get a few critical things done, executives sometimes must practice selective ignorance.
Integrity
Employees reflect the values they see in executive leadership, says Enlow and Associates. Effective executives don’t play from somebody else’s playbook. They focus on being authentic in all of their interactions on the job. Integrity has a way of becoming infectious throughout an executive’s staff—and a lack of integrity does, too.
Passion
Successful executives model a constant push for bigger and better. They lead by example, not because that was what they were taught in business school, but because that is the way they lead their lives. On the job, they obsess over their companies and see them as something bigger than themselves.
Innovation
Innovation isn’t just critical for success. It is critical for survival in a crowded marketplace. Successful executives innovate by technology, organization, and thought to push their organizations forward.
Patience
Patience is a measurement of an executive’s commitment to the company. Patience isn’t tolerance for slipshod, careless, uninspired work. But patience that lets things come together—consumer demand, technology, capitalization, external markets, and a little luck—is a virtue no successful executive functions well without.
Wonkiness
Businesses live and die by their numbers. Profits ultimately must exceed losses. Earnings per share cannot remain negative. The instinctual ability to nudge a profit margin from 24 percent to 25 percent or to find a half of a percent to shave off overhead can make the difference between long-term growth or inevitable failure of a commercial concern.
Decisiveness
Who isn’t familiar with the old adage “Never complain, never explain”? Enlow and Associates identify executives who can make the call, make it fast, make it loud, and never look back. A decision made decisively that turns out to be wrong can yield a better result tan a wishy-washy decision that turns out to be right.
