Hiring a new CEO? Stop looking for a clone

When founders decide to bring in a professional CEO, they need to find someone who can take the business forward into its next stage of growth, which usually means someone with different skills and outlook from their own.

But unfortunately, the tendency is to hire people just like you.

It’s understandable really. Our cognitive biases generally mean we see our way of doing things as the right way of doing things, which means we instinctively hire mini-me’s without even realising that’s what we’re doing.

But it’s not a good idea. Not only do founders tend to struggle to find people who live up to their own self-image (funny that), trying to do so also means the business doesn’t get what it needs.

Indeed, often the reason entrepreneurs decide they need a professional CEO is that they know they aren’t the right person for the job any more.

It could be that they’re better suited to growing a start-up, and struggle with the operational requirements of running a larger organisation. It could be that growth requires leaning into tech or international expansion, and they decide this requires someone at the helm with deep experience in those areas.

But if you’re going to hire someone different, it’s important to hire someone with is actually different — with different skills, who sees the business and its situation differently from you. There’s no point replacing yourself with… yourself, someone with a similar background, experiences and outlook.?

If the founder is staying closely involved, for example by becoming chair or taking on ‘founder’ status, then they can still add much of the special sauce they always did. But their new CEO needs to be someone who will be the other half of them, complementary, able to work closely with them but also to do all the things that they cannot.

Even in companies that are not founder led, it’s rarely a great idea for a chair to hire a new CEO who is a carbon copy of the outgoing one. The last person may have been great, but times change and so does the business and its needs.

A skilled headhunter will probe and stretch the brief at the research and longlisting stage, to find candidates with unconventional experiences and backgrounds as well as those that fit pre-existing expectations.

To work, the founder or chair needs an open mind, and the willingness to take what might initially seem like a risk, as a different type of leader is often an unknown quantity.

But if the search is undertaken with rigour, based on a clear-headed understanding of what the business needs, then it’s both a better bet for the business and ultimately a safer one.

To find out more about how ORESA can help in finding your next game changing CEO, get in touch here .