The selection, development, and retention of leaders is recognized as one of the best investments a company can make in its future.

Today’s business climate no longer permits leaders and potential leaders to develop their skills along a lengthy growth curve. The complex demands, problems, and challenges faced by businesses require that key managers, leaders, and executives quickly achieve and reliably sustain high performance, while avoiding the derailing factors that used to be called “opportunities for personal growth”. For an employer, the choice then is whether to “hire” or “develop” leaders.

Executive Solution Partners offers services to support either path or their integrated continuum:

The hiring or selection process (whether for new hires or advancement) is difficult, time-consuming, and costly. The cost of mis-hires or “missed” hires can be considerable. A thorough selection evaluation begins with an interview with the hiring manager(s) to develop relevant job content specifications and organizational culture issues impacting the position. With these specific criteria guiding the process, a licensed professional then conducts a structure interview to assess the relevance and “fit” of a candidate's experience, values, attitudes, education and training, and accomplishments. Often, one or several appropriately normed and validated tests are administered to provide objective standards of comparison and supplement subjective impressions. All of these impressions, observations, and data are conveyed in a selection evaluation report, together with a hiring recommendation.

The retention of and timely promotion of high-talent individuals is a hallmark of successful enterprises. A proven method for retaining top performers is to engage them in an ongoing development process. The comprehensive assessment of interests, aptitudes, values, and personality characteristics generates a rich database for the exploration of options. Coupled with more anecdotal observations and impressions offered by co-workers at the peer, subordinate, and supervisor levels (the 360°), a consulting psychologist begins to develop a picture of strengths and developmental opportunities. Through feedback sessions and input from a participant’s supervisor a developmental plan is crafted. Addressing personal and professional growth issues and expectations, the plan is laid against a timeline and measurable productivity and career outcomes.

Among the skills and talents often targeted in Executive Coaching are communication, presentation, effective partnering, techniques of persuasion, resolving conflicts, and decision-making. Our years of experience have found that high-level managers and executives often apply the approaches that have worked for them in the past, only to find that they are no longer effective in a new setting or at a higher position than they have held before. In such instances, leaders are sometimes awakened to the reality that “what used to work no longer works” by their failure to achieve the results that they and their organizations are accustomed to seeing. In other situations, executives are brought to the realization that, although they have gotten the desired results over the short run, the means by which they have attained their goals are no longer accepted in the corporation’s culture.