How to Hire Strategic Managers?

When interviewing and recruiting, we must ask ourselves, “What does somebody need to have to be a director? Or a VP? Or an executive vice president?” Most look for experience in operations, or in finance, or in marketing. Then they describe a list of technical experience requirements, like “need to have managed a large P&L,” and the description ends there. Technical experience is good enough, right?

We are missing a huge opportunity if we don’t hire someone with experience in the four big-ticket items that make a strategic manager:

1.      setting a vision,

2.      driving change to achieve the vision,

3.      influencing others, and

4.      coaching and developing their team.

When you bring on a director or VP to run a team, you’ll create another Exhausted Hero if you’re exclusively looking to hire only based on technical experience.

Instead, hire the Strategic Managers who can tell you how they set a vision for their team, drove the transformation to achieve the change, influenced other stakeholders outside their team in the change, and developed their team members as they went along.

We must prioritize these four qualities when we interview candidates. The question is no longer, “Do they know how to technically make us more money, technically improve this product, or technically drive the sales organization?” The most important question is: Do they know how to lead?