THE KEY QUESTION IN EXECUTIVE SEARCH
I am sure that there are many interviews in which a candidate, however senior, is asked the question ‘what is your passion?’
It is also impossible to be unaware of Simon Sinek’s “Start with Why” and how that has become an almost universal prologue for both strategy and for leadership development that is focused on the individual.
Each scenario poses two completely different questions. Passion and purpose are quite different. As I reviewed a series of recent C-Suite placements, I started to reflect on the discussions that my business partner and I had with these executives. At this level, most people are having compelling careers. They have developed extensive skill sets in their areas of technical expertise, strategy, management of people and teams and financial dexterity. They have interpreted enough data in their decision-making lives to have developed a refined ability to trust their own intuition.
Becoming a senior executive is a craft just like any other. In all of these cases successful senior people have been able to describe both a personal sense of purpose and also the purpose that they helped to create for the organisations and teams they managed. As I thought deeply about the executive search process, I realised that questions about passion generally came at the end of the interview discussion.
One of the things that Jarvis identifies in his book is that where skilled people have developed passion, this has come afterwards, because of their compelling work. They became passionate about the purposes they were pursuing.
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