Leadership competencies

How firms now select a CEO

During our recent 21722 lecture, we heard how an internationally successful executive search firm - Egon Zehnder International - assesses leadership skills.
The example assessment shown here is from CIO magazine and highlights competencies such as "Team Leadership", "Strategic Orientation", "Collaboration & Influence", and "Results Orientation".  Others include "External Customer Focus" and "Commercial Orientation" and indicate that the competencies are more fitting a "senior manager" than "leader".  Are they the same?

How firms used to select a CEO

Levinson (1980) listed 20 behavioural dimensions of chief executives under the categories of "thinking", "feelings and interrelationships" and "outward behavior characteristics" including "judgement", "sensitivity [to] others' feelings", "sense of humor", "vision", "integrity" and "social responsibility".  Behaviours that seem applicable to any leader, not only CEOs.

Begone!

In their 1985 book "A Passion for Excellence", Tom Peters and Nancy Austin (p.265), declare that the Manager (the "dispassionate analyst, professional, decision maker, naysayer") must give way to the Leader ("cheerleader, enthusiast, nurturer of champions, hero finder, wanderer, dramatist, coach, facilitator, builder").

It seems that "leadership" and "management" have become conflated since the 1980s.  But why?

Peters and Watson believe that Hayes and Abernathy's "Managing Our Way to Economic Decline (1980) was the "cornerstone of the corporate revolution" that they describe as "attacking the "MBA/number-only mentality of American managers".  Hayes and Abernathy themselves declare that there had been  "broad management failure" of "vision and leadership".

Leadership sells

Who would now admit at parties that they were a "manager"?  Who would answer a job ad the spruiked a "management" role?  The word has become a pejorative.  Better to be a "leader" even if the job description hasn't changed!  Just as "frozen food" is hard to sell but "fresh frozen food" walks off the shelves, so is "leadership" sellable while "management" has passed its use-by date.


Peters, T and Austin, N. 1985, A Passion for Excellence - The Leadership Differences, Collins: Glasgow.
Levinson, H. 1980, Criteria for choosing chief executives, Harvard Business Review, vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 113-120.
Hayes, R. H. & Abernathy, W. J. 1980, Criteria for choosing chief executives, Harvard Business Review, vol. 58, no. 4, pp. 67-77.