Executive Selection: Strategies for Success

By Valerie I. Sessa and Jodi J. Taylor

Book Overview

Strong leadership is essential for survival in today's competitive business environment. Yet it has been estimated that from 25 to 75 percent of top executives hired today fail. Such failures can cripple the organization and adversely affect its stakeholders. So how can senior-level positions be filled with leaders who fit the bill? The Center for Creative Leadership has studied executive selection for years. Its researchers have interviewed hundreds of executives, analyzed the decision-making styles of the people who make selections, and studied the latest management and psychological literature on the subject. Executive Selection draws on this research, and on the extensive experience of the authors in working with top-level management, to offer a series of steps that decision makers can follow to make better hiring decisions. After detailing who should be on the selection team, the book shows how this group of people can develop a systematic way to look at the organization, its environment, the open position, and the candidate requirements. The team thereby develops an image of the ideal candidate that can be used throughout the selection process. Next, advice is given on the best way to develop a good candidate pool and how to gather and use the right information to determine who should be hired. Finally, Executive Selection makes recommendations that will help ensure the new executive's successful transition into the organization and his or her continued development. In all, these steps represent a comprehensive, easy-to-follow system that takes the mystery out of selecting for success. The book's strategies for pinpointing the right person for the job apply to the selection of CEOs, officers, and others in the executive suite. Executives, boards of directors, and HR professionals can use these strategies to improve their selection processes. Investors can use them to assess the executive selections being conducted within companies of interest. And researchers can use them to garner ideas for additional work in the field.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0787950203
• ISBN13: 9780787950200
• Release Date: June 2000
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Advice: get here before the lawyers do

I can't believe no one has reviewed this great book yet! Most of my graduate class in executive assessment read it all in the first week--not a response most professors expect of busy students. As a management psychologist for 25 years before returning to teaching last year, my reaction to almost every page of this book was "yes, yes--you're right, corporations are never so embarrassingly irresponsible and irrational as when they pick their leaders (OK, it's a close tie with acquisition frenzy). This book presents clear, easy to understand, research on the selection of over 500 executives by senior execs attending seminars at the Center for Creative Leadership. The reserachers found that the processes used to select successful executives are clearly different than the techniques to select executives who "didn't work out" (failures are in the 50% range for this sample--no surprise given Hogan's widely accepted estimate of over 60% failures). The researchers note that it doesn't take much more time and effort to do this task in a way that can enormously--no, I mean astoundly--improve the probability of a successful selection. My students, at Alliant International University, are smart, but they haven't yet figured out why businesses don't just use the approach outlined clearly and justified by data in this book. That's why it makes such a great text for a professor--this book brings corporate politics, egos, turf protection, and communications (you thought it was only their own teenagers that executives can't communicate with?)right down to the level that students (or your own executive team) can't deny. If you are an executive, use this book, or you'll be sorry. If you're a lawyer--hmmm, would an executive team who ignored these data be culpable from a class action perspective if their brand new executive bombed? Don't ask me--but it is a great supplementary text book for Gen-X psychology students who love examples of Boomer bombers.