The paradox of recruiting a CEO is that every finalist has an excellent CV. At this level, the track record no longer discriminates: everyone has led, transformed, delivered. What separates the future great CEO from the casting error cannot be read on LinkedIn. It is called leadership, and contrary to popular belief, it can be assessed. Not by gut feeling: with criteria, a method and tools.
Here is the grid we use to objectify the leadership of a candidate for a general management role, built over 33 years of assignments on executive profiles.
Why the classic interview gets executives wrong
A candidate who has spent twenty years in executive committees masters the interview exercise better than most recruiters. They narrate well, structure well, reassure well. That is precisely the trap: narrative fluency produces a halo effect that contaminates the whole judgement. You leave the interview convinced, without being able to say what you actually verified.
The remedy fits in one sentence: separate what you assess from how you assess it. First, a stable grid of criteria, defined before the first interview from the real mandate. Then distinct mechanisms for each criterion: what the interview measures poorly, a business case or a test measures better.
The six criteria that predict a CEO’s success
Leadership is not a monolithic quality. On general management mandates, six dimensions come up systematically in what makes an executive succeed or fail. Peter Drucker put it differently in a piece that became a Harvard Business Review classic: effective executives do not resemble one another, but they all do the same things.
| Criterion | The underlying question | Observable signal |
|---|---|---|
| Vision and sense of direction | Can they state where the company is going and why? | A strategy told in three clear sentences, not twenty slides |
| Decision-making under uncertainty | Do they decide with 70% of the information? | Dated, owned past decisions, including the bad ones |
| Managerial courage | Do they face the difficult subjects? | Has already replaced a close ally, said no to a shareholder, killed a pet project |
| Ability to surround themselves | Do they hire people stronger than themselves? | The career paths of their former direct reports: did they grow, did they stay? |
| Alignment and communication | Do they create buy-in beyond the executive committee? | How they describe the way their messages travelled down the organisation |
| Integrity and accountability | Do they own it when things go wrong? | The ratio of “I” to “we” in their account of failures |
No candidate ticks all six boxes at the highest level. The goal is not to find the perfect executive; that person does not exist. The goal is to know precisely where the strengths and the risk areas are, then to judge whether that particular profile matches the mandate: you do not weight these criteria the same way for a hypergrowth scale-up as for a company in crisis.
Objectifying: structured interview, business case, KOAN
A grid is only worth the mechanism that feeds it. Our assessment method crosses three sources for each criterion, because a single source always lies a little.
The structured interview works on past facts: not “how would you handle a conflict at board level?” but “walk me through the last conflict you had with your shareholder, week by week”. Past behaviour remains the best predictor of future behaviour, provided you dig down to details nobody could invent.
The business case confronts the candidate with the company’s real files: a budget to arbitrate, a fictional leadership team to reshape, an investment decision to defend. You observe the reasoning, not the conclusion.
We’ve been using the KOAN tool for 30 years. Thirty years isn’t a detail: it’s what lets you read a test beyond ticked boxes. A KOAN properly interpreted doesn’t just say “this candidate is extroverted”. It tells you what drives them, what blocks them, how they react under pressure, and whether those dynamics fit your team’s culture. That’s rare, and it’s what turns a psychometric test into a business decision tool.
– The Archetype method, since 1993
The personality test closes the triangle. It replaces neither the interview nor the case: it illuminates what the other two cannot see, the deep drivers and the behaviours under pressure. When the three sources converge, the decision is solid. When they diverge, that is the signal to dig further, never the licence to pick the source that suits you.
References, done properly, are worth gold
On a general management profile, reference checks are often botched: three courtesy calls to contacts chosen by the candidate. Done properly, they work differently. You look for people who saw the candidate from all three angles: a superior or shareholder, a peer, a former subordinate. You ask behavioural questions, the same as in the interview, and you listen to the silences as much as to the answers.
One absolute precaution for a sitting executive: no reference without their explicit agreement, and never inside their current company. Discretion is part of the assessment; we come back to it in detail in our article on the confidentiality of an executive recruitment.
The criterion everyone forgets: fit with the context
A brilliant executive in one context can fail in another. The builder who excels at structuring a family-owned SME can get bored, then self-destruct, in an already structured group. Leadership is therefore never assessed in the absolute: it is assessed against a mandate, a culture, a shareholder structure, a stage of development. That is the work of the briefing at the start of the assignment, which we describe in the walkthrough of an executive search process for a CEO.
It is also why assessing leadership should never be delegated to a generalist agency discovering executive roles. Assessing a future CEO means comparing what you observe against hundreds of executives seen in real situations: that depth of reference, built assignment after assignment on executive and management profiles, is what turns an impression into a decision.
