Specific Responsibilities
Carefully determine specific responsibilities and management skills necessary for success in the position. Remember management and leadership are two different disciplines. It is possible to be a great manager and a lousy leader. Management has to do with coping with complexity and order. Leadership has more to do with coping with ambiguity and change. Identify specific management skills necessary for the candidate to succeed not only today, but in the foreseeable future. Remember that no candidate is perfect and no one possesses every conceivable management skill.
Management skills basically have to do with planning, organizing, directing and controlling. Other things you should consider are problem identification and solving skills, process orientation, execution, follow through and resource allocation.
I have seen more than a few mismatches occur because the CEO or senior executive in question, while having excellent overall leadership attributes, did not have the ability to operate in a specific environment.
Example: An extremely effective supermarket CEO, who had exceeded shareholder expectations in a privately held debt free company, was subsequently fired in a seemingly very similar supermarket company where he had great difficulty operating in a leveraged environment where resources were very scarce.
Some organizations are simple, dealing with a homogenous product or suite of services. Some are extremely complex and require a completely different set of organizational skills.
Does your new CEO or senior executive really need to have specific industry or product knowledge? Or is best practices a bigger concern? Just be careful that you fully understand what really drives your business. If excellent personal customer service is what really built your company, it would probably be a big mistake to bring in a new CEO with a GE model mindset.
EXAMPLE (CEO)
- Providing the leadership that sustains improvement in operations and service
- Formulating the organization's goals, priorities, and policies in conjunction with the Board of Commissioners;
- Planning and executing policies, programs, and projects;
- Making all leadership decisions that direct the daily operation;
- Regularly informing, recommending to, and communicating with the Board of Commissioners concerning operations, fiscal status, projects and opportunities;
- Ensuring the financial integrity and controlling the financial assets;
- Communicating effectively with local, state and federal officials; the news media, public and social service agencies; business organizations and representatives; neighborhood and community groups; resident councils; and employees and contractors;
- Negotiating effectively with business and government entities;
- Compose or review, and then approve the reports and documents required by federal, state and local jurisdictions;
- Advise the Residents Councils by attending regularly scheduled meetings to brief the representative officers on new or proposed changes in policies and procedures, maintenance problems and other areas that may affect residents; and
- Attend professional conferences, training sessions and seminars to explore new concepts, trends and activities in the field of housing management.
EXAMPLE (SVP)
- Responsible for total store operations, as well as merchandising, loss prevention, marketing, advertising, industrial engineering, customer service, store design and store maintenance.
- Interact with chief executive and chief financial officers as a part of a three person internal board of directors to establish corporate strategic and tactical plans
- Responsible for maintaining world class merchandising and marketing programs. This does not necessarily mean leading the industry - just selecting the best of what has been tried and proven.
- Responsible for improving store level employee morale and retention.
- Responsible for maintaining excellent store conditions and service levels while minimizing expenses.
- Responsible for Topgrading in all departments, at all levels.
- Supervise vice presidents of marketing, merchandising, operations, loss prevention, store operations support, customer service and maintenance.