Executive Success Starts With Fit: How Cowen Partners Helps Companies Build High-Performing Teams
By Shawn Cole, Executive Recruiter & Cowen Partners Co-Founder — Shawn Cole is a trusted thought leader and premier authority on executive recruitment, culture fit, leadership assessment, executive compensation, and more across all industries. As President & Co-Founder of Cowen Partners, Shawn Cole is a pioneering leader and visionary thinker in C-Suite recruitment, known for sourcing exceptional talent while unearthing all-new insights about today’s executives and industry leaders.
With each passing year, organizations looking to hire executives find it less important to focus on traditional indicators of success.
In today’s competitive markets, companies need leaders who possess soft skills and have personality traits and values that align with the business they wish to lead. This is otherwise known as having a “cultural fit.”
The term deserves the recognition and popularity it has enjoyed in the corporate world in recent years. Cultural fit not only results in greater success rates for individual executives but also enhances the whole team, including in times of crises or when it’s time for successful turnarounds.
If you want to mold your C-suite or other leaders into a high-performing team, you should know how Cowen Partners’ method of assessing candidates can help your organization get there.
How Cultural Fit Leads to Stronger, Higher-Performing Teams
Every company wants a high-performing senior leadership team to help the organization achieve its goals and objectives. However, a long list of technical skills and achievements isn’t the greatest predictor of whether an executive can lead a team to success. Cultural fit is essential as well.
Here’s why everyone benefits from having leaders whose traits and behaviors fit in with your organization.
More Seamless Collaboration
A significant part of an executive’s job is forming and maintaining relationships with both internal stakeholders and external partners. Communicating well and behaving in a way that aligns with company values is essential to these functions.
In this way, cultural fit can be a key driver of productivity and performance, allowing executives to collaborate with others in pursuit of a common goal.
Greater Retention
Executives who fit in well at a company are more likely to stay in their roles, remain satisfied with their jobs, and stay motivated to advance an organization toward longer-term objectives.
Working together long-term fosters greater comfort, cohesion, and camaraderie among the team, as well as a better sense of belonging and purpose.
This sort of team dynamic can also lead to more effective work toward a shared goal.
That’s not the only great reason to focus on retention.
According to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), the cost of a bad executive hire can be excessive, hitting as much as $240,000, depending on the role, the industry, and how long the position remains empty (among other factors).
Priceless Inspiration
Leaders who believe in and embody the cultural norms and values of their company can inspire the whole team to do the same. When employees see that executives are committed to the company culture, they feel more confident and want to follow their lead.
Motivating employees toward values like innovation, creativity, productivity, and engagement can lead to better performance throughout the entire organization.
Cowen Partners’ Leadership Assessments Contribute to Executive & Team Success
Our team at Cowen Partners has extensive experience helping clients find their next long-term executives.
While we use several proprietary tools and methods to ensure executive success in the organizations we work with, one of the most important is our DISC leadership profile assessments. These assessments promote self-awareness as well as communication, conflict resolution, customer service, and leadership.
DISC personality assessments are independently validated and meet standards for psychological testing. Each DISC profile provides our clients with insight into a candidate’s behavioral and communication styles and the motivations that drive them.
These profiles help candidates as well. When they understand their own motivations, an executive is better able to pinpoint possible friction points and focus on the skills needed for their role.
Once we assess a candidate, we then benchmark their scores against other executive profiles. This is yet another proprietary process that helps us select the candidates who are the exact fit our clients are looking for.
When Hiring for Cultural Fit Leads to High Performance: Two Cowen Partners Case Studies
Having worked with many clients over the years, our team has many examples of how assessing fit has led to greater success for the whole team. Consider how these two companies have enhanced profitability and performance by focusing on cultural fit in the executive search process.
Photonis Defense, Inc.
Photonis Defense tasked Cowen Partners with finding an executive director of operations to work alongside the CEO and the vice president of manufacturing operations.
The candidate needed not only excellent communication, creativity, and business acumen but also extensive experience in DOD-compliant manufacturing and sales.
The Cowen Partners team applied our rigorous evaluation process to potential candidates. We used in-depth behavioral interviews and assessments to understand operational competence, leadership style, and cultural fit.
The outcome was a candidate who not only possessed the specific operational experience the company needed but who also worked with the team in a way that allowed creative solutions to flourish. As a result, Photonis Defense has increased its bottom line through greater production efficiency and cost management.
Roof Doctors
Roof Doctors turned to us to find a new head of sales who could expand the company and increase revenue.
We paid special attention to one key aspect during this search: finding a candidate who could foster team alignment and morale by rallying people around a common goal.
Success in the role was dependent on the candidate being a good cultural fit.
Our Cowen Partners team implemented a multistage screening process that included behavioral assessments and strategic presentations to ensure the candidate had both operational acumen and the ability to bring a team together.
The search ended successfully, as the company hired an executive with 15 years of experience who led a sales team to a 25% year-over-year revenue increase and 20% territory expansion.
Finding the Right Fit Is the Key That Unlocks Solid Team Performance
When an executive joins your organization, they become part of your team. You must ensure they have the necessary values and personality traits to work well with employees, other executive team members, and external stakeholders.
Your organization’s performance will depend on the ability of your leadership team to win influence, build relationships, and communicate effectively. To support this goal, Cowen Partners has developed a robust system of leadership assessments that empower executive search teams to make wise and well-informed decisions.
With the help of scientifically validated personality profiles and other behavioral assessments and interviews, we make sure our clients can find a candidate with the right mix of skills and values to push their teams toward greatness.
Top Executive Recruiters Specializing in C-Suite Culture Fit
Cowen Partners is a leading executive search firm dedicated to finding leaders who not only excel in their fields but also align with your company’s culture and values, empowering teams to achieve sustainable success.
Giving clients access to the top 1% of human capital, Cowen Partners is an executive search leader, creating opportunities to accelerate growth and market share while helping companies grow at scale, create value, and drive results with world-class talent.
Cowen Partners serves clients across industries, including small and large, publicly-traded, pre-IPO, private, and non-profit organizations, with placements spanning the entire C-Suite and include visionary CEOs, VPs, board members, product and tech leaders, and director-level leadership roles.
At Cowen Partners, we continually innovate in executive search, offering cutting-edge resources that provide deeper insights into recruiting and retaining leaders who fit seamlessly into your company’s culture. Discover why Cowen Partners is a trusted name in executive search nationwide by exploring our premium resources below.
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