Rajeev Vasudeva, in an interview with the Australian Financial Review (28-29 March 2015), highlighted four key markers that Egon Zehnder now look for when headhunting executives: curiosity, insight, engagement and resilience.

Individuals who keep themselves fresh, linked in to new and emerging ideas and trends and are proactively learning is someone demonstrating curiosity. The pace of change is so swift today with business models being put under pressure from disruptive technologies and new entrants, that keeping abreast with this pace of change is a constant challenge. Many executives will tell you that they are so busy managing the business that there is little time available to keep abreast of changes in their world. While understandable, it is a poor excuse given that these changes may undermine the very business that they are trying so hard to manage or present opportunities that they cannot take advantage of because they are ignorant of the possibilities.

While developing intellectual curiosity is a good start, of itself it is not enough. You must also develop the discipline to make the time to engage in reading widely, following the views of global thought leaders across a range of issues and seeking out experts who can broaden your thinking of what is possible.

The second marker, insight, relates to the individual’s ability to ‘join the dots’; to sift through the overload of information and see the potential short and long term risks and opportunities for the enterprise. Constantly asking: “What does this information potentially mean for our business and our customers’ businesses?” and “Where is the opportunity here for us to create more value in our offering to our markets?”

Thirdly, they look for engagement. Recent high profile CEO terminations have exposed the truth that the old way of leading companies is long gone. “The alpha male chief executive embraced by boards of directors because of his aggressive and confrontational management style, is on his last legs..” says Tony Boyd of the AFR (March 18, 2015). CEO’s today need to manage more diversity in the workplace across genders, cultures and generations, and often a complex group of disparate stakeholders. This requires humility and emotional intelligence to produce a more collaborative and inclusive approach. The challenge is to connect with people emotionally and engage with them to build a shared understanding of what the company stands for.

The final marker is resilience. Vasudeva says that “The new normal is that the world is going to be volatile.” The ability to adapt quickly and robustly in a volatile world and lead the required change is critically important to the successful executive.

Vasudeva’s caution to leaders is “what got you here is unlikely to keep you here or get you further”; suggesting that the task of leadership has changed.

Given Egon Zehnder’s role in headhunting executives world-wide, current executives and future aspirants would do well to consider these four markers when assessing and developing their own leadership style.

Working originally in public health, he grew increasingly concerned at the number of people he came across whose views on global health were predicated on ignorance of the facts.

He soon came to see that this global ignorance was not just confined to the area of health but pervaded much of the thinking across multiple areas of enquiry.

In 2005 he founded, with his son Ola Rosling, the Gapminder Foundation and its mission is to:

Fight devastating ignorance with fact-based worldviews that everyone can understand.

Their initial activity was to develop the Trendalyzer software which converts statistical numbers into animated and interactive graphics which tell a story that all can understand – based on the facts. (This software was purchased by Google in 2007).

In this entertaining TED talk from the June 2014 Berlin TED conference, Hans and Ola Rosling share with us their insights as to what underpins our global ignorance.

They argue that there are three things which produce skewed information on which we often base our views of the world and subsequently our decisions:

• Personal Bias – based on our upbringing and experiences
• Outdated Facts – used as if they were still current
• News Bias – that tells us that things are better or worse than they really are (i.e. never let the facts get in the way of a good story.)

This is a cautionary tale about challenging our assumptions – before making major decisions that can impact our organisation.

The talk is well worth a look and Hans and Ola do suggest some guides that may help to counter our inbuilt ignorance. The talk is called “How not to be ignorant about the world”.

More information on the Gapminder Foundation can be found at www.gapminder.org.

In 2009 Hans Rosling was listed as one of 100 leading global thinkers by Foreign Policy Magazine, and in 2011 as one of 100 most creative people in business by the Fast Company Magazine. In 2011 he was elected member of the Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences and in 2012 as member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences.

So…worthy of listening to, I think.

So, how can the board or executive team have a sensible conversation regarding reputation risk without having to include every potential risk exposure that the entity has registered on its profile? A starting point is to ask the question – on what is our reputation built?

For some companies, it may be the superior quality of their product, for others it might be the environmentally conscious philosophy they employ, for others it may be the caring nature of their service provision.

Having considered the platform on which the “trust’ of the organisation is based, the executive and board can construct scenarios of events that have the potential to significantly erode that platform of trust.

While these events/risks might be different organisation to organisation, there are generic types of risk that tend to have the potential to impact organisations similarly.

These are:

Strategy related

Culture related

Crisis related

Operations related

Governance related

Strategy Related

This relates to failure of significant strategic initiatives where the actions of the organisation are seen to be operating well outside the risk appetite determined as appropriate for the organisation. This does not relate to isolated pockets of discontent. It covers issues where the strategic initiatives are seen by many as inappropriate to the organisation, where the strategic initiative fails spectacularly or, in the pursuit of new strategies, the organisation drops the ball on its core business activities.

Culture Related

These risks relate to inappropriate behaviour by staff or contractors and the more senior people involved, the greater the significance of the reputation damage. While a ‘rogue’ operator might be forgiven by shareholders and the community, lingering doubts will remain regarding how the perpetrator was able to operate without the organisation knowing. Equally, circumstances where the organisation sanctions “ends justifies the means” behaviour in achieving organisation objectives can come back to badly bite the organisation when that behaviour is seen to run contrary to expected standards of ethics and decency.

Crisis Related

This relates to how the organisation responds to a crisis. History shows that organisations that respond poorly to a crisis have the ability to destroy more value than the crisis itself. Alternatively, organisations that respond well have the ability to enhance the organisation’s reputation despite the crisis that has occurred. The nature of a crisis is that it is unexpected, occurs rarely and creates highly charged environments not conducive to calmly and objectively considering appropriate responses. The organisation’s crisis preparedness is the single most important capability that will guide the entity through a crisis soundly.

Operations Related

This relates to issues that could jeopardise the reputation platform relevant to the entity. If the platform is built on product quality for instance, then the key risks that could threaten reputation include product failure, product recall, death/injury from recommended use of product, or failure of quality accreditation for example.

Governance Related

This relates to events that involve the governance standards of the organisation and speak directly to the interface between the shareholders, Board of Directors and executive management of the organisation. Governance is a professional discipline and, at times, people become involved in governance roles without the training, emotional intelligence or understanding of the rules and expectations around these positions. Where the behaviour and the performance of the key governance players becomes dysfunctional, this can erode trust in the entity very quickly. Examples might be related to inappropriate responses to conflicts of interest, gaining material personal benefit, personality conflicts, operating contrary to constitution and shareholders’ agreements, or legal requirements.

Reporting of Reputation Related Risks

Having identified the broad, generalised set of risks that have the potential to lead to significant reputation damage, the organisation can review these on a regular basis to determine whether the management systems in place are adequate to prevent the risk occurring or what more can be done to better enable the organisation to respond in the event that the risk occurs. Reporting might be annually or every six months to the board with a quarterly review by the executive team. In addition, the CEO could include a commentary on any area of emerging risk that may have significant reputational consequences to the entity in reports to the board.

A Caution

Because every risk in an organisation has the potential to lead to reputation damage to some degree, there is a tendency by some people to want to focus on any issue (no matter how low its impact may be) and demanding an urgent response to protect reputation. This can lead to over- reactions by the organisation to what are often insignificant events. The governance oversight should be on issues of potential high impact or systemic issues which, overtime, significantly erode the reputation standing of the organisation as a whole.

In this age of global competitiveness, organisations are challenged to increase productivity, accelerate innovation, and maneuver themselves into a position of strategic sustainability. This requires strong alignment of motivated people to deliver results.

Morieux argues that the continued use of complicated organisation structures, controlling policies, and segmentation and reduction of authority achieves the total opposite of the outcomes we are hoping for.

He suggests six simple rules for achieving real and lasting collaboration throughout the organisation.

1. Understand what your people do
2. Reinforce integrators
3. Increase the total quality of power
4. Extend the shadow of the future
5. Increase reciprocity
6. Reward those who co-operate

His rallying cry is that the real battle is not against our competitors, but against ourselves, and the biggest threat to our success is our own bureaucracy and complicatedness.

Having seen for myself many of the characteristics he describes in organisations I  have worked with, I recommend we give consideration to his suggestions for change.

View on Ted: Yves Morieux: As Work Gets More Complex, 6 Rules to Simplify