Building Cohesive Teams: 3 Steps to Calibrating Talent for Fit

by | Jul 11, 2023 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

Our job is to know the universe of talent in the C suite.
When I was in elementary school, teams were selected by a numbering system. Some people understood the project goals and got to work. Others focused their effort on destroying what we built or picking fights. Some simply goofed off. It was confusing and random who you would end up with.

I would come home frustrated and explain my experience to my Dad. He listened patiently, then said, “It’s hard to soar like an eagle when surrounded by turkeys.” So often in life, we are randomly selected to work together. Some people are of the same caliber, while others are not. It is nearly impossible to perform at your highest level when working on teams where everyone is not a high performer.

How do you calibrate talent? As the CEO, how do you ensure the team you put together consists of eagles?

Here are 3 steps that help:

  1. Identify core values you want your team to share.
  2. Identify six key goals you want to accomplish by adding to your team. Ferret out what accomplishments your candidate needs to have met or exceeded, for example, running a $50 million division versus a $5 billion division.
  3. Identify four key attributes in your current team that makes them successful in your company. For example, how do they manage tough situations? How do they communicate a vision for their teams? Is there a bias towards execution or building consensus before execution?

A good professional recruiter helps you identify these personal attributes and prioritize them. Armed with this information about your context, the recruiter can identify and present only candidates who meet or exceed your criteria:

  • The recruiter knows people and the entire pool you are looking at. It’s easy for us to calibrate talent. The best recruiters remember great talent, often keeping them in mind.
  • Good recruiters then vet people for “fit”. We know whether someone will work well with you and only send the right people your way.

Our job is to know the universe of talent in the C suite and to calibrate that talent. To be sure we have a list of A Talent ( eagles), we not only dig into our network, we also continue to identify, source, and screen talent for every search, providing you fresh talent for each role we are hired to help you fill. This ensures you get new – and likely unfamiliar – candidates. We make it possible for you to hire the very best talent available.