Criteria For Choosing The Right President For Your Company

Qualifications for President Candidates

Question:

Discuss about the Challenges During The Process Of Hiring A New President.

Being a leader means carrying out the duties and responsibilities of a company. A leader holds the company with his or her values. As a leader, he must hold skills of motivation, positivity, delegating, positivity, feedback, communication and creativity. Recruiting a new President for a company mostly depends on the situation of the company. Hiring a new President is the most significant job a board does. Therefore, choosing the right one is necessary, as it will make the company successful. However, there are criteria for choosing a candidate suitable or who is fit to be a President of the company (Daft, 2014). The board of directors must take into the qualification of the candidate into account. The board has to face a few challenges during the process of hiring a new President. The board demands the President to increase shareholder value of the company.

The criteria for hiring a new President banks on the circumstances and conditions of the company. Firstly, the board needs to hold a meeting and discuss the possibilities clearly, as to how and what they want the new President to achieve and ideally come to some agreement. Leading significant alteration is a tough challenge and it generally requires a proper and experienced leader who will have a fresh outlook on the company (Renko et al., 2015). The basic criteria is to look at the size of the organization the candidate has run before. For instance, if a board is recruiting for a $800 million company, one would not consider a President who ran a $500 million company. Similarly, boards will never recruit a person who has run a $50 million company to run a $20 billion company (Burns, 2016). If the company is less than 10 times the size of the President’s experience then that individual will not be overwhelmed by the alteration. This concept is very restrictive. There are two sized related considerations. The first one is whether the President candidate is experienced enough to run private or public companies. There is a major difference between the two and the President must have an experience of running public companies with the board of a public company. The second consideration is related to the number of locations or the international size of the business (Eichinger & Lombardo, 2015). If the President has no experience in international business then it is a huge hassle if the individual is moving to a company that activates worldwide. After these two considerations, once the candidate has achieved the size related criteria, the next issue is the individual’s experience in the industry (Fairhurst, G, & Connaughton, 2014).

Challenges in Hiring a President

The responsibility of a President is to possess the vision of the company that is difficult carry out if the individual does not have a good comprehension of the company’s industry. Generally, there are two existing key areas to discover the potential candidates that cover the initial strategic challenges, which a new President will face. The opportunity to get the title of a President is extremely appealing to plenty of talented executives and it frequently attracts people who will never think of working for a new company in any other role (Block, 2016). The challenge in this situation is that very few other roles in a company adequately prepare someone for the role of a President. The board selects that individual who had the designation of a general Manager in a larger company by thinking that the role can be compared to the role of a President. Similarly, some of the jobs are similar to that of a General Manager. It is unusual to find large company sales executive that can do a better transition to the role of a President’s at a smaller company (Senge, Hamilton & Kania, 2015). Finding a successful President at a smaller company to run a bigger company is quite difficult. The transition will be much easier as the process of learning curve will be shorter. A President is the leader who must give importance to attending tasks and work relationships. A leader should have the ability to reach out to all his or her employees and communicate a vision with them. Hiring or recruiting a new President for a company is treated as one of the biggest challenges a board faces. The board needs to comprehend and agree on what the President’s role is and what is the situation of the company and what the company is trying to establish. Thereafter, it will be easier to select the correct criteria for choosing a candidate who will be successful. In majority of the companies, board of directors serve as a source of advice and counsel and offers some sort of disciplinary value to act in the situation of crisis. Most Presidents and outside board members agree that the role of directors is highly advisory and does not have a nature of making decision. The management exists to manage the company and the board of directors focuses on the hiring of a new President (Antonakis & Day, 2017). The board serves as sources of advice and counsel to the management. However, maximum numbers of Presidents exploit the sources of advice that are represented on the board especially during the meetings.

Size-related Considerations for President Candidates

For the selection criteria, an ideal candidate for the post of the President, must possess the following qualifications. Firstly, having a University degree from a reputed and recognized institution is must. If the individual has a designation of professional accounting, it would be considered as an asset. Secondly, the individual should have an experience of proven transactional leadership experience that deals in the evaluation and in leading transactions in a set of commercial settings. The individual should have leadership experience in large organizations that deal with business of international level and management of financial resources and human. When it comes to experience, he must also have the experience of an entrepreneur with a medium sized or small business, which would be treated as an asset (Johnston & Marshall, 2016). Thirdly, a candidate for the role of a President must possess the knowledge and understanding of the business activities along with the public policies. An individual must have the knowledge and understanding of the corporate lending practices, transaction structures and investments that are engaged with the management and development of the financial instruments. Along with this, an individual must be educated enough to have knowledge of sound corporate governance and principles of the requirements of the management (Priest & Gass, 2017).

A candidate applying for the post of a President in a company should have the ability of a solid strategic sense, proper thinking, innovation and alteration of skills at the time of the development of business strategies, policy-making activities and corporate planning. He or she must have the capability to built effective working relationships with the Board of Directors, the Deputy Minister and the Ministers along with his or her office. To become a President of a company, he or she must be able to act as the spokesperson by showing off its communication skills in both oral and written form for representing the stakeholders, governments, media, other organizations and public institutions. Lastly, he or she must possess high ethical standards, capability of being fair and integrity. Having ethical traits will make the leader a better person and will increase the goodwill of the company. He or she must have the skills in resolving any sort of dispute in the companies.

However, a person cannot be elected as a President if that particular individual is neither a citizen of Europe nor a permanent resident of that country. He must have been an employer in the public service of a province.  Concerning this, it is noteworthy to mention here that a President of a company should be that individual who has the capability to communicate well, organize the tasks, and motivate others. The board of directors will get convinced to elect such an individual as the President of the company if he or she possesses the above mentioned qualities. The procedure of appointing a new President of a company requires the vote by the Board.

References:

Antonakis, J., & Day, D. V. (Eds.). (2017). The nature of leadership. Sage publications.

Block, P. (2016). The empowered manager: Positive political skills at work. John Wiley & Sons.

Burns, P. (2016). Entrepreneurship and small business. Palgrave Macmillan Limited.

Daft, R. L. (2014). The leadership experience. Cengage Learning.

Eichinger, R., & Lombardo, M. (2015). Twenty-two ways to develop leadership in staff managers. Center for Creative leadership.

Fairhurst, G. T., & Connaughton, S. L. (2014). Leadership: A communicative perspective. Leadership, 10(1), 7-35.

Johnston, M. W., & Marshall, G. W. (2016). Sales force management: Leadership, innovation, technology. Routledge.

Priest, S., & Gass, M. (2017). Effective Leadership in Adventure Programming, 3E. Human Kinetics.

Renko, M., El Tarabishy, A., Carsrud, A. L., & Brännback, M. (2015). Understanding and measuring entrepreneurial leadership style. Journal of Small Business Management, 53(1), 54-74.

Senge, P., Hamilton, H., & Kania, J. (2015). The dawn of system leadership. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 13(1), 27-33.