How to spot an exceptional leader (or not), according to a top UK board-level headhunter.
http://gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/science-politics-and-intuition-in-executive-selection

An HR manager, a politician and a business executive walk into a bar to choose the next CEO of Barclays, Archbishop of Canterbury or head of your kids' school... take your pick. The last forty years have seen major changes in the way people are chosen to fill front-line or middle management jobs. We now have job descriptions, person specifications and competencies. Interviews sit alongside ability tests, psychometric profiles, job simulations or '360 feedback'. But how people get selected for jobs at the top of organisations has changed very little. Why? Are we choosing leaders badly, and if so, could we do better. Douglas Board argues 'yes'.
This lecture is based on the author's doctoral research into his experience as a board-level headhunter. Over 18 years he recruited leaders for a diversity of organisations - household-name retailers and NHS trusts, banks and universities, government departments and charities. A way of understanding our skills, our thinking and our acting (and our science) is proposed based on the concept of 'practice' as developed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930 - 2002). Seeing differently the place of science, politics and intuition in our lives and our society, clarifies why leadership selection is stuck and how it could change. It also offers insights into ourselves.
http://gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/science-politics-and-intuition-in-executive-selection

This was a part of a symposium explores leadership from a number of angles, focusing on recent contributions to aspects of leadership at the most senior levels which management literature tends to neglect. Speakers assess the correct balance between public leadership, the roles of power and politics in effective leadership and the limited treatment of this subject in much conventional thinking. They also consider who we would want to lead us, and ask whether we should offer ourselves for such roles?
http://gresham.ac.uk/leading-at-the-top-power-and-politics

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: http://gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/science-politics-and-intuition-in-executive-selection

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