Hiring a manager – especially, but not only, when it comes to a functional director – is always a tough decision, even when CVs and professional experiences would leave no doubt about the candidate's qualifications.
In the near future, it will be even more so!! No doubt!
Why? The change in companies, markets, business models, and therefore roles is today more than ever in continuous transformation. So, while experience may be perfectly aligned, the future will still be different and will always require the ability to face challenges that were unforeseeable at the time of hiring. The complexity is now such that it is hard for people to be prepared to face something tomorrow that we can't even imagine today.
So, how should we proceed?
From my experience, it’s important to carefully evaluate two aspects.
The potential of the candidates
The first is potential: beyond the experience gained, it is crucial to understand, in the conversation with the candidate, how quickly they will be able to grasp the key points of change and then lead it, using past experiences as a learning platform to adapt them in response to new scenarios and needs.
It will be important to evaluate how many options the candidate identified and considered in past situations. How deeply did they analyze them? In hindsight, how do they assess the choices they made, and what have they learned?
A heterogeneous profile – once considered almost a flaw, a lack of coherence – has now become a strategic asset.
The more diverse experiences a person has had – in different geographies, companies, cultures, and roles – the more opportunities they have had to "train" themselves to face and manage different, constantly changing situations.
If in the past changing companies frequently was viewed negatively, today, if each experience has been lived intensely and used as a "training ground" to learn, it is an advantage.
Soft skills
The second aspect is the person in their entirety, the so-called soft skills – such as optimism, flexibility, and resilience – which have been widely discussed in recent years, but also creativity, often coupled with courage, and humility, a lot of humility, to admit and learn from one's mistakes.
These are not just slogans, but real abilities often referred to as "soft" because they can actually make the difference. Let's see how and why.
Flexibility
Flexibility: it is crucial for quickly course-correcting, adapting one's style to new contexts, understanding change swiftly, and knowing how to change what is necessary, while redefining strategies quickly, with humility.
Optimism
Optimism: believing, knowing that a solution, a way to reach the goal, exists. If I know that it exists, I don’t lose energy or confidence, and I keep investing in research, dialogue, analysis, and experimentation until I find the key to success.
Resilience
Resilience: in new contexts, facing new challenges, we don’t know what lies ahead or how things will evolve, because we don’t know all the factors at play, and it is certain that we will make mistakes many times.
Resilience is exactly this: the ability to get back up after making a mistake and learn from it, a quality that allows you to make decisions even in the absence of all the necessary information.
Courage and creativity
Courage and Creativity: inventing new ways of doing things and creating new solutions often requires the courage to experiment and fail. Because you are charting a new path where no one has been before.
Humility
Humility: the idea, the solution, often comes from people and elements that were never considered before. Past positive performance and experiences do not guarantee a higher likelihood of success; one must know how to ask and be open to inclusion and dialogue, even if it means stepping out of one's comfort zone.
Conclusions
In short, the complexity is becoming such that in the future, technical knowledge, hard skills, will likely often be managed by artificial intelligence.
But the soft skills listed, which are emotional intelligence competencies, will continue to be essential to navigate successfully within organizations, in any role, to collaborate, coordinate, make decisions, lead, and succeed in organizations and in many activities, not necessarily professional.
And this has to do with empathy, feelings, and the human touch that each individual brings as their uniqueness.
