Behrend professor’s new book tells you how to hire
the right leader for your organization
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At some point, nearly everyone participates in hiring a leader, whether it’s at work, at church, or at a social service organization. As voters, we select leaders for our local, state, or national governments. Whether hiring a company CEO, a staff member for your social club, or choosing a new mayor, Peg Thoms’ new book, Finding the Best and Brightest: A Guide to Recruiting, Selecting, and Retaining Effective Leaders (Praeger, 2005) offers sage advice to help you through the process. “Research shows that there are specific traits that identify successful leaders, but most organizations don’t seek out those traits. They choose leaders on a superficial level,” said Thoms, who is an associate professor of management and director of the MBA program in the Sam and Irene Black School of Business at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. |
“We rely on characteristics we can easily observe, such as glibness. If someone talks a good game, we believe them, and we shouldn’t.” Finding the Best and Brightest is Thoms’ third book, and it is based on more than a decade of research in leadership and human resources.
Beginning with a discussion on why the selection of a leader matters—especially in a corporation or government—Thoms walks readers through the process of recruiting candidates, selecting the top choices, interviewing, and choosing the best and brightest. Using six different organizational scenarios as examples, Thoms identifies the necessary attributes for leaders, how to select and recruit candidates, how to develop and conduct a structured interview, how to weight the candidates’ attributes, and how to offer the job.
The seventh chapter, titled simply “Structured Interview Questions,” provides dozens of interview questions that will tell you if the candidate has the necessary attributes to fill your organization’s leadership position. By asking the right questions, interviewers can get an accurate glimpse of the candidate’s attitudes, values, stability, and planning and organizational skills.
“Many managers prepare for an interview by grabbing the resume from their desk as the candidate walks to their offices,” Thoms said. “In these cases, the resume drives the interview, but it doesn’t provide the answers the interviewer needs.” She advocates better planning for an interview, so that all the important questions are asked.
What about our political leadership? To improve the quality of America’s elected officials, Thoms advocates a specific track of university training for those who want to run for political office and compensation comparable
to the private sector. While that track should include political science, she believes it also should include finance, sociology, psychology, and more.“We could do a better job of developing students for public office, and we should look at our top students for this type of education,” she said. “We also need to pay close attention to our primary elections, to make sure that our parties nominate people with the skills and qualifications to be successful in office. When they don’t we only have the party platform and superficial impressions to inform our voting.”
“We need to choose our leaders based on the skills and qualifications that the job calls for,” said Thoms. “These criteria differ for every job, and it takes a lot of preparation to make a good selection. But when you’ve chosen the right leader, you’ll be glad you made the effort. It matters!”
Thoms book is available for purchase at barnesandnoble.com.