5 Transformational Leadership Characteristics to Look For in Your Next Hire
Your team is your biggest asset when it comes to digital transformation, which is why it’s critical to hire talent with transformational leadership characteristics. But how do you ensure your candidates embody the qualities that actually push transformation forward? And what kinds of questions reveal the skills that aren’t easily bulleted on a resume, like customer-centric leadership, user-centric leadership, outcome-focused leadership, agility in leadership, and an ability to embrace transformation?
Today’s post explores five transformational leadership characteristics to look for in your next hire, why they’re so critical to success, and how to uncover those qualities during the interview process.
1. Understanding the User-Centric and Customer-Centric Leader
For transformation to be successful, you’ll need to hire people who are deeply curious about customers and users, and have a knack for developing digital initiatives designed with them in mind. Hires that have the fire in their belly to solve problems will create more intuitive, seamless, and personalized digital interfaces / products / services that resonate with users. This empathetic approach – of encouraging teams to actively listen to user feedback, comprehend pain points, and anticipate future needs – fosters innovation and solutions that genuinely address the challenges faced by users and customers. Need I say more?
Interview Question: In your last role, what was something unexpected that you learned about your user? How did you figure it out, and how did it affect what you built?
2. Agility in Leadership: Thinking in Sprints, Not Marathons
Another mark of a great hire for digitally-transforming companies is an ability to think in weeks and months, rather than years. I realize this might be a hot take since it’s so tempting to hire solely based on someone’s vision for the next 3-5 years, but transformation requires people who can think in sprints, not marathons. Of course, you’ll want to know their vision for the big picture, but you’ll also need to know how they plan to get there and what needs to be done next month, next quarter, and next year in order to achieve it.
Interview Question: What’s your methodology for breaking down big ideas?
3. Evaluating a Leader That Can Embrace Transformation
Technology is an important component to digital transformation, but it’s not the secret sauce that actually drives innovation or delivers a return on your investment. What is? Your people. I’ve waxed poetic about this time and time again, and it’s because I so often see leaders get caught up on tech as the solution. But someone who truly “gets” transformation knows that the endeavor is a whole-org effort, not just something tech does. In your next hire, look for someone who understands the value of putting time, energy, and resources into the cultural, operational, and systemic changes that need to be implemented in order for the entire initiative to be successful and lasting.
Interview Tip: This is less of an ask and more of a listen. Do your candidate’s answers reference partnerships with departments across the org, like HR, finance, marketing, operations, etc? Are they sharing examples of the ways in which they engaged other teams to bring the vision to life? What non-tech examples can they give that demonstrate they understand a whole-org approach?
4. Identify Strengths in Cross-Functional Collaboration
Transformation is a team sport, which means that strategy, insights, and innovation should be contributed by many departments and teams – not just set by the C Suite behind closed doors. Any candidate being considered for a role within a digitally-transforming company should be able to demonstrate experience with or a desire to be part of a team where insights and innovation come from unexpected places and cross-functional teams.
Interview Question: In your last role, who did you meet with regularly, other than your delivery team members? Do you have a system or approach to engaging partners and stakeholders on a regular basis?
5. Outcome-Based Leadership: The Shift from Outputs to Results
Something I always look for in a new hire for a digitally-transforming company is results-based language. Sure, it’s helpful to know tangible outputs like what they’ve built, but if it’s starting to sound like a checklist they may be missing the point. What you really want is someone who can talk in terms of outcomes, not outputs. For example, maybe the product they worked on helped the company achieve specific optimizations or performance results. Whenever I start hearing language like this, it’s an immediate green flag.
Interview Tip: This is less of an ask and more of a listen. When talking about their work, take note of their use of output vs results-based language to gauge this mindset.
In Conclusion
Digital transformation requires companies to work differently than ever before, and that means your key to success starts with your talent pool. To cultivate the right kind of skills, be sure your hiring criteria and interview process shift to support the direction the company is headed. Because technology doesn’t create agile, responsive, relevant organizations – people do.
Here are a few more resources about leveraging talent within digitally-transforming companies: