It's not about how much success your candidate has had relative to failures during his or her CEO tenure: it's all in the attitude that he or she brings to each situation, good and bad alike. For example, pretending that significant negative events never happened might not be a good sign.
The more emotionally mature a potential executive might use these moments within his or her past constructively the better, and an executive recruiter can help a company be more sharp in noticing this specific attitude.
Stories about CEOs who seem to maintain this healthy kind of look at their lives show up in the news from time to time. USA Today has a piece about the head of online real estate firm Redfin named Glenn Kelman.
In the interview, Kelman described an experience in which he nearly got fired from another company he helped found early in his life. Though he didn't actually get dismissed, he now describes even the close call as "the best thing that ever happened to me."
"Everybody who's been fired has heard before about the problems they have," he told the source. "They just don't know it's that serious. Once you know what the stakes are, you become more serious."
On the other hand, there are those major situations that become an unavoidable part of a former executive's life, like serious crimes. Bloomberg has a piece about the denial of appeal of the former CEO of Tyco International in the wake of a major scandal that got him prison time.
It takes courage to not look away, and it takes keen eyes to figure out how a CEO is considering him or herself. Turn to executive recruiter YES Partners for information on the ways to approach this situation.
Finding people is easy, but finding the RIGHT people is not. YES Partners helps companies FIND the right people – for all company functions, across many industries and globally.
