Passion
People tend to be more successful in roles about which they’re passionate. If people like what they do, it will make a job more than just a job, and achievement will follow. We at Lantern Partners are always working with our clients to strive for success, and a candidate that displays a good deal of passion can bring that to a new team and put both themselves and their co-workers on the path toward achievement.

It’s important to pay careful attention to the intensity of candidates’ passions and where they lie because, for the most part, it seems to be an innate quality in people and is not necessarily transferrable from one company or position to another.

Work Ethic
Work ethic isn’t necessarily so much about working hard as it is about working smart. It’s all about how executives use their time, and it’s all about a candidate being a right match for a company. A strong work ethic doesn’t always mean working 70 hours a week. More often, it means having a good work/life balance and being ready to put in the effort when on the clock. A smart work ethic is also about the ability to set goals, prioritize, stay on task, and adjust to any ebbs and flows in work loads throughout the year, as quarterly changes and big deadlines approach and pass.

Intelligence
Lantern Partners’ management assessment tests and in-depth referencing go beyond interview skills and tap into the intelligence of the candidate. It’s important to focus in on intelligence — thinking on feet quickly, decision making, and so forth – rather than just how candidates look on paper.

Drive For Self-Improvement
Strong executive candidates should have a drive to learn new skills and better themselves. This can happen on the job or through other means, such as night school. Because much is revealed through interview responses, asking pertinent questions and talking candidates through each step in their career can help interviewers learn about the candidate’s drive. Assessing candidates’ drives is essential to choosing the right fit for a position, as it can result in a significant amount of added value from a new hire.

The three panelists, all of whom are now considered leaders in their industry, included Bryan Johnson, founder and CEO of Braintree; Dhiraj Rajaram, founder and CEO of Mu Sigmu; and Scott Griffith, CEO of Zipcar.

What stood out in my mind was the high level of importance each panelist placed on human capital and culture. All of the panelists had a great business idea, but none of them believed that they would be successful without a talented and committed team.

When Bryan Johnson started Braintree, he had clear and defined goals in mind. Simply, they were:

1. Be the best payments provider in the industry.
2. Be the best company an employee could work for.
3. Be an organization that capable people would find interesting.

Bryan won the New Venture Challenge in 2007. After four years of bootstrapping the business, he accepted $34 million from Accel Partners. Braintree just celebrated its 53rd month of profitability. From my point of view, the most interesting fact is that no one has ever LEFT Braintree.

Similarly, Dhiraj Rajaran set a vision for Mu Sigma as seen through the eyes of his customers. He measures his business through three “Moments.”

1. Moment of Thought — Do our customers feel that we have delivered, but can we still do more for them?
2. Moment of Action — Will they act to buy our services and recommend us to others?
3. Moment of Heart — Do our customers enjoy working with us?

When Dhiraj started the company, the picture was pretty stark. He was 28 years old, with no rolodex, and he had put his entire savings into the business (including his house). He talked to roughly 65 people before he could “beg” someone to come and work for him, all while not taking a salary for 3 1/2 years. That said, after finally convincing a Fortune 100 company to run a beta of his services, Mu Sigma has been enjoying a historic period of growth.

Scott Griffith refocused his life goals after a brush with cancer. Scott wanted to do something meaningful that had an impact in the world. Although he was not the founder of Zipcar, Scott joined the failing business in 2003.

Scott is a strong believer in using Net Promoter Score. In brief, the NPS is calculated when each customer is asked “On a scale of 0-10, would you refer us to a friend?” A nine or a ten is a good score. Sevens and eights are passive referrers who need to be converted. Anything below a seven is a “throwaway,” according to Scott.

That said, Scott spends time calling these low-ranking customers and trying to find out how his company can improve. This score is starting to be used internally as the company collects a new employee metric called the e-net promoter score. He believes that the use of both net promoter scores provide the best measure of how long-term shareholder value is created.

Each of these entrepreneurs commented on the value of having outstanding people on their teams. They agreed that to attract top talent, you need a mission, a vision, and an environment that embraces change. They talked about how a fledgling company will live or die by its first 15 hires. To thrive, a CEO needs to define the culture to welcome change and remove all the distracting politics. Leadership has to continue to focus on the core concepts that define the company, which translate into the environment that nurtures its people, and the world-class service it provides for its customers.

Sandberg and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. Image courtesy of dealbreaker.co

Take, for example, Facebook’s meteoric rise.

When Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, joined the company’s leadership in 2008, the company had 70 million users and no business model.

Sandberg, a graduate of Harvard Business School, brought to the company her experience working for McKinsey & Company as management consultant and Google as VP of global online sales & operations.  More importantly, she understood social media, and had proven that she could monetize information.  Over a courting period of many months, she also built a very strong relationship with Mark Zuckerberg.

Since she joined and began guiding the Facebook team, the company has expanded to 845 million monthly active users with profits reaching $1 billion on $3.7 billion in revenue in just four years, according to The New York Times. Now, with Sandberg at the helm, the company has filed an initial public offering. According to The Huffington Post, “Facebook seeks to raise $5 billion in an IPO that looks likely to be the largest by a web company since Google in 2004 and could place the social network’s value as high as $75 billion to $100 billion.”

In picking Sandberg as an executive, the Board of Directors at Facebook chose wisely.

With the cutting-edge candidate assessment process from Lantern Partners, we can help your business choose wisely, too. Our comprehensive assessment process includes extensive sourcing and research, experience validation, role-specific competency assessment, leadership competency assessment, and in-depth referencing for competency validation and professional development opportunities.

By taking these steps, we aim to help you find the right person for executive leadership that, like Sandberg, can help your company make achievements that defy all expectations.

Still want more? Here you can watch Sandberg talk about why she thinks we have too few women leaders at the TED conference:

From the very beginning of the Lantern Partners senior executive recruitment process, we work to apply as many measurable metrics as possible. It’s important to connect with candidates, but we want to go even deeper than that to do the absolute best work for our clients.

Both customization and specificity are critical to our interview process: If we ask in the interview for pertinent position-related specifics that are specially chosen for each individual job, we’ll get back those specifics from the candidates and help find the best fit for our client. We ask for the details and provide them to our clients.

We focus with open-ended questions about position-related competencies and those specific instances in candidates’ careers where they have had experiences with those competencies, along with the outcomes of those experiences. During interviews with both Lantern Partners and the client, candidates’ competencies are objectively scored.

We also administer to the candidates an online management assessment, which provides us with even more details about the strengths and weaknesses of the candidates.

Additionally, we understand that we (and our client, by extension) are being interviewed by the candidate as well, and the interview process is about “mutual selling.” Not only are we working hard to find the right fit for the client, but we’re also working to find out if the position is right for the candidate. We go to great lengths to gauge the candidates’ interest and enthusiasm for the position, as we’re looking for long-term success in the future for both our client and the selected hire, rather than simply a quick fix to fill a job vacancy.

It works like this: After a final decision has been made on a new hire, Lantern Partners holds an onboarding meeting with the hiring manager and HR representatives from the client company in order to assist with the new hire’s transition into his or her position.

In that meeting, Lantern Partners addresses with the client the new hire’s strengths, as well as all potential stumbling blocks — based on extensive data and research — that could keep the new hire from being extremely successful in his or her new role. From the meeting, the client consolidates a wealth of information that can then be utilized with both formal and informal professional development.

We all have our strengths and weaknesses; no executive is perfect. Thus, it’s all about being proactive to increase the odds that the new hire will reach optimum success.

What’s crucial to the data-heavy onboarding meeting is the detailed approach Lantern Partners takes from the very start of the recruiting process. From the get-go, Lantern Partners is uncommonly thorough in our effort to make sure the job description of the ideal candidate is factually correct and competency based. With the client, we then establish a list of job-specific competencies that a candidate would have learned from on-the-job experience. From there, we create a custom competency scorecard used in candidates’ interviews with both Lantern Partners and the client.

Lantern Partners also gathers information on the candidates through a custom online leadership trait assessment, which focuses on topics such as strategic vision, creativity, and communications — both verbal and written. Even more objective, comprehensive data is gathered on candidates through in-depth reference checks with the reference sources strategically chosen by us to best reveal candidates’ strengths and weaknesses.

Traditionally, search firms conclude services as soon as a position is filled. However, we believe that squanders a marvelous opportunity for us to be helpful to our client.

That’s where onboarding comes into play.

Because of our detail-oriented approach to the recruitment process, we’re able to bring to the onboarding meeting extensive pertinent data — scorecard results from us and the client, online assessment results, and reference check results — on the new hire. And the more the client knows about the new hire’s strengths and weaknesses, the more the client can take a deeply informed, proactive approach to tailoring the new hire’s path to ultimate success.

For your senior executive recruitment needs, choose Lantern Partners. We go the extra mile to help you find the right executive and set them up for success.

According to a recent Wall Street Journal report Where’s The Boss?, CEOs are spending about one-third of their time in meetings. When the study calculated other tasks, such as email, lunches, phone calls, personal time, etc., CEOs averaged only around 6 hours of work a week.

There is a ripple effect with poor time management that can increase opportunity cost losses. An unnecessary meeting is not just time spent in a boardroom, it’s time NOT spent maintaining other aspects of the business. Email and phone calls build up and become harder to manage. Don’t think you’re immune to it: According to this University of Chicago professor, all businesses suffer from too many meetings and poorly designed ones.

Despite the fact that they are easy to poke fun at and blame for creating an unproductive environment, meetings are essential in sharing knowledge and communicating with your team.

So what can you do to make sure you are only spending your time in productive meetings and not time-eating ones? Ask yourself:

Who are you meeting?
One similar CEO study in Italy found that meetings within the company were more beneficial for the CEO than ones with outside firms. Obviously being treated to lunch or a golf outing is a little perk of C-suite life, but too much of a good thing can hurt performance.

Should you be in the meeting?
Simply put: If you trust your team, you probably don’t need to be in there. If you don’t trust your team, then you have larger issues than wasting time in conference rooms.

Your corporate structure could be eating into your time. The Wall Street Journal article noted that:

“In companies that incorporated a finance chief or operating chief into the corporate hierarchy, the CEOs’ time in meetings was reduced by about five-and-a-half hours a week, on average…”

Find places where you can better utilize your senior executives in meetings.

Is the meeting efficient?
Imagine what you could do with 20 uninterrupted minutes right now. Would you take time to think about all of the information that came across your desk today? Would you catch up on industry news? What about phone your husband or wife?

There is no law that says meetings have to be in 30-minute increments. Schedule meetings for forty minutes instead of one hour, or leave early when a meeting is no longer applicable to you. Ask that all meeting requests sent to you have an agenda and that areas pertinent to you be placed at the beginning, and don’t be afraid to excuse yourself when necessary. However, be sure to let the meeting planner know your intentions before you arrive.

Time is the common denominator among all persons in your company, but if senior level executives aren’t making the most of their time, the company as a whole suffers. Break the bad meeting habits and spend your newfound time investing in your company.

Now researchers at three universities have created a “Facebook Score” that attempts to formulate your Facebook status updates, captions, comments, photos, and friends into a predictor of job performance.

The “Big Five” personality traits that researchers have highlighted in their study are:

• Conscientiousness – Are they organized and hard working?
• Emotional Stability – Do they avoid negative posts, particularly ones about being stressed out and pessimistic?
• Agreeableness – Do they get in constant debates?
• Extraversion – Do they have plenty of Facebook friends, or do their pictures show many social situations?
• Openness to Experience – Are they “cultured,” and do they travel, read high-brow literature, and have many different life experiences?

But how accurate of a personal picture does this data paint?

For HR departments or university admissions employees looking at an enormous pile of applications, the option of removing a portion of them based on a Facebook Score could be intriguing. As hiring processes become more competitive and technologically advanced, Facebook Score screening could very well become a commonplace part of some hiring processes.

While a Facebook Score, or Klout or any other formulated metric of online personality and influence indexes, will never be a serious threat to qualified candidate assessment and recruitment, it does provide more evidence that recruiters and HR departments are looking for quick and easy ways to separate the wheat from the chaff. Social media is continuing to evolve as one of the first stops primarily due to its easy accessibility and quick referencing.

One danger of these online metrics, as written by Bob Sullivan for MSNBC, is the lack of transparency in the formula. And therein lies the inherent problem of using these “scores” as a hiring tool. If a company doesn’t show its formula for scoring, then it lacks authority and can be dismissed as being unscientific. However, if companies do show the backend formula, then it becomes easy to game the system and raise rankings, thus delegitimizing results.

Keeping your social media house in order and free from information that creates a poor impression of you is important; however, trying to extract complex competencies, personalities, motivations, and values from them is something better left to the professionals.

Take, for example, a clerk at the U.S. Post Office and a mailroom employee at a large firm. They both may basically have the same job, but only one has the chance of landing a big promotion, even if they make less money today than their government-employed brethren. Your firm benefits from these highly skilled, though underemployed, workers. They are often performance-driven, ambitious, and will accept lower wages just to get a foot in the door. Think of it as an Internship 2.0.

There are plenty of “Mailroom Moguls” who have started at the bottom and worked their way up, including Dan Adler, VP at Walt Disney Imagineering, and George Bodenheimer, President of ESPN and ABC Sports division, who both started in the mailroom. Your company should be organized in such a way that talent and hard work are rewarded, rather than people just moving up based on titles.

The economic factors of the last four years have created a traffic jam of young professionals all vying for the same jobs — jobs which, as it turns out, are not opening up at the rate they should as legacy employees try to earn back their lost 401k’s, home values, etc., before retirement. Your lower-level employees are the same people who may have been middle-management already, had economic woes not stifled business growth for a half decade and counting.

All C-suite execs needs to be keenly aware of what is happening in their firm — who is moving in, who is moving out, and who is moving up? Use your interior network of directors, managers, and supervisors to identify high-potential employees, and put them where they are most useful to the firm and where their skills can be put to better use.

For those of us in executive recruitment, this also means we can’t just take a look at someone’s job title and recommend you hire based on that alone. Every company has under-utilized high-potential employees, and that’s where our research, paired with a comprehensive candidate assessment process, can target and recruit these employees from the competition and bring them to your firm. Make sure your corporate ladder extends to all high-potential employees, no matter where they are today, and take advantage of other companies whose vision is too short to see their own talent.

At the time of the memo, worms and viruses were spiraling out of control not only on home computers, but also on corporate computer networks running Microsoft operating systems. C-suite execs were growing increasingly frustrated when computers were crashing and confidential data was being put at risk. Company leaders were growing unable to trust Microsoft products.

Gates understood that if Microsoft’s security was not improved, the security nightmare would not only endanger consumers’ information and reflect poorly on the company’s products and services, but also negatively impact the reputation (and, therefore, the long-term success) of the company overall.

Since that memo was issued, what have Gates and Microsoft done to help keep your company’s computers and data safe?

The Trustworthy Computing initiative kicked off an adjustment that was not only for appearances and PR purposes, but was also a fundamental change in the company’s entire culture. Microsoft began working from the ground up to improve security and implemented privacy and security features into the process of software building, rather than haphazardly tacking it on later. And, writes Elinor Mills for CNET, two major technologies improved security by leaps and bounds: address space layout randomization (ASLR) and data execution prevention (DEP).

Over time, Microsoft became an industry-leader in security, and now the company even lends its trusted security expertise to other companies.

For potential business catastrophes, executive leaders need to know how to respond and work together. If your company isn’t built to handle a crisis, then it isn’t built for longevity. Leadership at the top of a company needs to have vision and to have the right people in place in order to navigate troubles.

Bill Gates and his senior-level team were the right people to handle the problem. Do you have faith in your company’s leadership?

When companies misleadingly slap “green” labels onto products or engage in other tactics that exaggerate their sustainability, it is almost always revealed through the media that they’ve been dishonest. As this trend of untrustworthiness is revealed to consumers on an increasingly regular basis, it’s no wonder consumers are doubtful of the actual amount of environmental good companies are doing.

Keeping in mind all the cynicism associated with “environmentally friendly” practices, how can company leaders get past this hurdle and both implement and benefit from true sustainability?

Much on this topic can be learned from the philosophy of the #1 company on Corporate Knights Magazine‘s list of the 100 most sustainable large corporations in the world. The magazine, which focuses on clean capitalism, placed Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk at the top of the standings.

Here’s what’s remarkable: “Novo Nordisk reports on its environmental and social performance – including water and energy consumption, waste reduction, employee turnover, the diversity of its management team, new patent filings and charitable donations – alongside its financial performance in a single annual report,” writes Marc Gunther.

This approach of linking environmental and social performance directly with financial performance and company wellness is innovative and is arguably the way of the future. Rather than thinking of sustainability as simply a side note on the periphery of its business workings, Novo Nordisk has implemented an integrated business and sustainability method. And that’s how it’s getting sustainability to work within the company — and pay off.

On top of that, this philosophy sends a message to consumers, loud and clear: Novo Nordisk is a leader in the green movement, and the company is serious about sustainability.

While this sustainability mindset hasn’t yet been embraced on a large scale, it’s a mindset that will get companies ahead in the long run. This is especially true as consumers are increasingly choosing to give their business only to companies that adhere to high environmental and social standards.

Novo Nordisk has figured this out.

All company-wide change starts at the top and must be embraced by leadership first if it is to succeed. When beginning senior executive recruitment, you have a list of qualifications and competencies you want in a new C-suite exec. This can be everything from business acumen to technological expertise or thought leadership. It can be someone who has an ability to find cost savings and business growth through environmentally friendly means.

Determine what’s important for your company’s growth and mission, and recruit leadership that can take you there.