Tips to make your Leadership Profile Stand Out.

Being an executive search professional, each day I am consulted by a lot of seasoned leaders who are seeking their next big opportunity. While they sound impressive in person but once I receive their profiles, it leaves a lot to be desired. While some profiles really stand out, most others fail to excite. In spite of having done solid & meaningful work in their careers, many leaders struggle to articulate their profile well enough on paper. Having worked on many leadership positions with organisations of varying sizes and across sectors, I am attempting to list down a few tips which can help leaders strengthen their profile especially during these tough times:

1.      Past is Done, Future is the chance to create new milestones: Many accomplished leaders tend to highlight a lot of their past achievements in granular details, making their profile go into multiple pages. When we meet job-seeking leaders for coffee meetings, this is one of the first advice we give them – emphasise not on what you have achieved in the past but what you can do for a potential employer. How can your experience help in adding disproportionate value to the business of your potential employer? Your Past achievements were what you were paid for, but your future aspirations will determine your value creation abilities for a future employer. 

It is important to show your track record, but you should be able to summarise it to a page or two in an impactful way. Eg: Having always worked in enterprise segment, if one desires to move to a start up world, some people tend to give personal reasons like need for new challenges, creating impact etc. This is why you want to switch to start ups but what is in it for them to hire you? How will your enterprise experience add value to the start ups? What is the kind of transformation your leadership facilitated in your previous employers? Answering these questions will help you position yourselves as a business centric leader than a self-centric leader. 

2.      Show the Business impact created more than the personal impact: As a leader you are expected to carry the business forward along with a set of capable teams. Highlighting personal milestone achievements over business impact can often make you appear as a silo-based leader or a functional expert. As a leader, you need to highlight solid understanding of business fundamentals and how your contributions helped your business achieve prominence. An example I wanted to point is related to HR leaders – there are mostly 2 kinds of profiles we get from HR leaders. One set of profiles mentions a lot of transactional activities facilitated by the HR leader, but they are unable to link it with the impact of those activities in the business. Yes, you reduced the attrition rate in the company, brought down the hiring costs etc. but link it with what impact it had on overall business margins, employer brand, EVP etc. 

A similar example can be used for Sales Leaders who sometimes tend to highlight the numbers achieved as an indication of past performance. However, as a sales leader what is expected out of you is to bring in sales excellence and a culture of high performance in the whole team. As a sales leader, it will be critical for you to showcase your strategic understanding of your business which goes beyond competitor landscape, addressable market segments etc. As the President of a commercial vehicles company once told me, he looks for leaders who can display more of blue ocean thinking than red ocean thinking. Blue ocean thinking is possible only with a strong alignment with the business vision and the long-term understanding. 

3.      Move from ‘I’ to ‘We’: No doubt that your profile is your first chance to build an impression about your expertise but as they say, “A leader is only good or as bad as his team”. I am sure as leaders you realise that all the significant achievements in your career would have been difficult without a collaborative effort. The collective success of the business is a reflection of your leadership capabilities while your personal success may not necessarily be a reflection of business success/leadership capabilities. Eg: Giving an indication of the YoY growth of the business under your leadership is not necessarily a complete reflection of your leadership capabilities. If you focus on the steps you took to achieve this YoY growth, it will have a far more value for your potential employer. In a nutshell, the collaborative flavour in your profile will indicate your ability to navigate through friction and diverse mindsets to achieve a collective goal. 

4.      Highlight your VUCA Experience: Needless to say, VUCA Leadership experience will be one of the most critical aspect, an employer will look for while hiring leaders. If you are a leader with 15+ years of experience, it is quite likely that this is not the first time you are faced with such a crisis. Also, every business has its share of highs and lows and it will be interesting for employers to know how you navigated yourself and the business during crisis period. How & when were you able to use your agile thinking to capitalise on potential business opportunities? You may/may not have experienced turbulent periods in your business in the past but a reflection of your readiness during such times could also be a good indicator. An employer needs to know whether you will have your skin in the game or not. A leader’s approach during VUCA situations will always have a cascading effect on the rest of the organisation and you need to highlight evidence of how you stayed invested in businesses during the low periods as well. In a nutshell, display the outlier in you. 

To conclude, imagine bumping into your dream employer in a parking lot. If in 1 minute, you can communicate your story or an elevator pitch for yourself, you will not go wrong with your profile. What was relevant yesterday may not be so tomorrow and just relying on your organisation brand & title may not be adequate to carry you through. If you have an interesting story to tell, there will always be listeners.