Boards of directors say they want to know two key qualities in a CEO or Managing Director: integrity and resilience, due to the competitive advantage these skills bring to a dynamic business environment.

Integrity is the quality that allows the board to have baseline trust in a CEO’s judgement and ethics.  It is essential to a CEO's leadership style as it influences the trust and credibility between a leader and their stakeholders which can be combined into three approaches.

• Commitment approach - where individuals hold steadfastly to their commitments explicitly and implicitly.
• Virtue approach – where integrity is primarily a social virtue ‘standing for something’.
• Moral approach – where integrity places constraints on ones commitments

Resilience inspires and stimulates confidence that a leader has the ability to recover from inevitable setbacks and hindrances and use them to make the organisation even greater. These qualities of emotional fortitude transcend specific business situations as it allows executives to handle virtually any business situation.

As important as these qualities are, they are also difficult to measure accurately. The only measurement that can be of evidence of an executive’s integrity and resilience as a business leader is via conversations with those who have worked with an executive in the past.

Andy Raymond, Redline Executive Director is a Competency-Based Interviewing practitioner and a licenced practitioner for several key profiling and assessment methodologies. Andy discusses whether executives can truly understand and truly know if someone will hold up under pressure when hiring a new leader for their board.

“Due to the common measurement limitations around integrity and resilience, most leadership development programs and CEO succession efforts tend to instead focus on more observable personality traits, such as charisma, influence, and passion. This often leads to a bias for people with relatively loud personalities who can cast great visions and persuade others to follow them.

The bias towards a loud executive can be subtle, however, it is always well-documented. Over the years, researchers have found significant correlations between being a likable, attention-getting extrovert and becoming a leader. This is accurate in the hiring of C and D-suite candidates and also in the choices about who gets into high-potential development programmes.

Andy continues: The stereotypical loud CEO traits are laudable ones that can often unlock greatness. But do they make the best CEOs – and are they even relevant given today’s fast-changing and often data-driven business environment?

By consulting closely on the nuances of the requirement and translating said nuances into the right combination of competencies, we can very effectively identify evidence of the thought processes and actions a candidate has displayed in a given real-world business scenario. By digging deeper and exploring the reasoning, the execution, the outcome, and what has been learned, we can generate meaningful data relating to the style and attitude of the candidate giving us a tangible sense of their integrity and resilience.

Popular views and decades of academic research on leadership tell us that extroverts are the best leaders, as extroverts enjoy the company of others, they tend to adapt better to different social situations and are adept at persuasion which is a strong leadership skill. Those who confidently and aggressively speak out, give orders, make bold plans, and are the centre of attention. People who are generally the most dominant, outgoing people.

However, there are many characteristics of introverted ‘quiet’ leaders to take a lesson from such as Warren Buffet, Tim Cook, and Barak Obama – they are all describes as having calm, introspective natures as well as focusing on thoughtful decision-making and operational excellence. Research from Harvard Business Review showed that introverts are more capable leaders in complex and unpredictable situations. Introverted leaders are motivated by productivity, not ambition, they tend to solve problems with thoroughness rather than in haste.

Quiet introverted leaders’ traits include;

• Ability to empathise - They think first and talk later, considering what others have to say, then reflect, and then respond.
• Attention to detail - They focus on depth not superficiality. They like to dig deeply into issues and ideas before considering new ones.
• They do not require external validation - Though they appreciate external recognition, it is not a necessary part of the equation and should not establish or detract from the end objective.
• They exude calm - In times of crisis, in particular, they project reassuring, unflappable confidence.
• They prefer writing to talking - They are more comfortable with the written word, which helps them formulate the spoken word.
• They embrace solitude - They are energised by spending time alone and often suffer from people exhaustion. They need a retreat, from which they emerge with renewed energy and clarity.

Anyone with any personality type can find success in leadership. A leader is not determined by how you present yourself socially, but rather by the values and beliefs you have as a person.

In conclusion, both introverts and extroverts display attributes that are crucial to leadership. In fact, the two groups have a lot to learn from each other. When selecting and developing the right leaders for the next decade (which promises to be a period of heightened uncertainty) is not going to be a painless task. In a volatile world. It is increasingly important for companies to understand how well a CEO and/or MD candidate will perform if, or perhaps when, circumstances change. This means paying attention to both the loud and quiet traits when selecting a candidate.

Redline Executive are the industry-aligned key partner for C and D suite permanent and interim hiring assignments for the European Technology market. To find out more about our Executive Search Process you can download a brochure.

Redline Executive offers an extensive portfolio of executive search services and strategic planning, assisting high-technology and engineering businesses to build world-class teams. For more information about our process or to continue the conversation, you can contact Andy Raymond, Director on +44 (0)1582 878907 or email ARaymond@redlinegroup.com.