Ideas That Drive Change: Why Visionary CEOs & COOs Lead the Best Corporate Turnarounds
By Shawn Cole, President & Founder — Shawn Cole is a nationally recognized authority on CEO recruiting. His insights regularly appear in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, and other leading publications, delivering nuanced and critical analysis on executive recruitment, corporate turnarounds, and the evolving demands of modern C-suites.
The business world has seen many stories of heroic company revivals and corporate turnarounds.
Tech giant Apple, Inc. experienced a comeback when co-founder Steve Jobs returned to the company amid declining sales and increasing competition.
To return the company to its former glory, the innovative CEO cut unnecessary products, secured a $150 million investment from rival Microsoft, and built one of the world’s most recognizable smartphones.
It’s no secret that visionary leaders are often the catalysts for reviving stagnating or declining businesses. What isn’t universally known is how they accomplish this goal and:
- How Visionary Leaders Accomplish Successful Revivals & Corporate Turnarounds
- What Cowen Partners Looks for in the Ideal Turnaround Executive
- Unique Assessment Tools for Gauging Vision Capacity
- A Visionary Leader Keeps Their Gaze Toward the Future of Your Organization
If your company is in need of a strategic revival, here are the traits a CEO or COO must possess to be considered a visionary and what you should be looking for in your next turnaround leader.
How Visionary Leaders Accomplish Successful Revivals & Corporate Turnarounds
In times of uncertainty, visionary leadership can positively impact how employees see their jobs by increasing the perceived meaningfulness of their work. With a strategic vision to look to, employees often feel more connected to the broader mission. According to Gallup, even a 10% increase in connection with the organizational mission can result in an 8.1% decrease in turnover and a 4.4% increase in profitability.
Visionary leadership can keep the organization from experiencing high turnover, which can be devastating in an already struggling corporation.
Lowering turnover rates, especially for key employees, can help keep the high costs of replacing them at bay. It also keeps knowledge inside the company, allowing veteran employees to mentor new hires and reducing the chances they’ll take their best ideas to competitors.
What Cowen Partners Looks for in the Ideal Turnaround Executive
Visionary leaders are crucial to the survival of struggling companies. However, they aren’t always easy to spot. While deep experience and a track record of success are essential when searching for your next CEO or COO, here are three less-obvious traits you should be looking for.
Strategic Creativity
All visionary leaders have an analytical edge. Your next COO must be able to observe operations across the organization and find the inefficiencies that are costing you money and hindering your ability to beat competitors.
The CEO must consider financial reports, market fluctuations, and other internal and external factors to determine the causes of the company’s turmoil.
Then, these turnaround leaders must develop ideas and plans to get around roadblocks and overcome obstacles to growth. This involves coming up with new and innovative ideas (or crowdsourcing them from forward-thinking employees) and formulating them into a concrete plan to move the business forward.
This mix of strategy and creativity is important to bring fresh motivation to the company and its employees.
Risk-Taking
It isn’t enough to just formulate innovative ideas. Visionary leaders must also be able to act on those ideas. This doesn’t mean the visionary leader doesn’t do their research; risk assessment and mitigation is a wise move. However, it does mean that visionaries don’t let their teams get stuck in a cycle of “analysis paralysis,” in which teams continually hesitate to act on good ideas because of the fear of failure.
Instead, a turnaround CEO or COO should have a history of making moves that can propel the company forward. They must be able to recognize opportunities in the market and pivot quickly to take advantage of them.
When a leader can see challenges early, articulate possible risks, and formulate a plan to safely take them on, they’re more likely to have the courage it takes to pull the company out of the hole and get it back on track.
Bold Decision-Making
Undoubtedly, the art of the corporate turnaround isn’t easy. There may be a lot of tough decisions ahead for your new CEO or COO. There may be cost-saving restructuring plans that eliminate roles and negatively impact employees.
In some cases, there must be a return to accountability measures, which some may look upon unfavorably.
Still, a visionary leader understands what is on the line and moves forward with their bold decisions. They act decisively with compassion and transparency, as this is what builds momentum and shifts the business toward positive changes.
Unique Assessment Tools for Gauging Vision Capacity
Our team at Cowen Partners uses a variety of executive search methods to gauge a candidate’s vision for driving company-wide change. In addition to our structured competency and behavioral interviews, we also use proprietary psychometric testing.
Our assessments uncover candidates’ personality traits and help the search committee understand what motivates their behavior. We use assessments that look for the following:
- Leadership: How a leader will influence and inspire others to work hard at carrying out the strategic vision
- Teamwork: How a leader collaborates with others toward accomplishing a common goal
- Self-Awareness: How a leader assesses and works around their individual strengths and weaknesses
- Conflict Resolution: How a leader communicates with others to solve disagreements and keep working toward the shared vision
These assessments help us understand what drives a candidate’s decisions in these critical areas. Once we have the results in hand, we benchmark them against other executive profiles in our database. This proprietary evaluation method allows us to find the CEO or COO candidate that fits well in your company’s culture and has the necessary traits to turn your organization around.
A Visionary Leader Keeps Their Gaze Toward the Future of Your Organization
Visionary leaders are invaluable for organizations that are in need of a turnaround.
To restore a company to greatness, CEOs and COOs need to be both strategic and creative in their approach to problem-solving.
Additionally, they must be bold risk-takers who can make quick, decisive moves that go against the established norm.
Visionary leaders ensure employees can find meaning in their work, which reduces burnout and the turnover that often comes with it.
With so much on the line, it’s important that companies don’t just hire a leader and hope for the best.
With a deep understanding of your company’s needs and robust tools to evaluate candidates for critical traits, you can find a leader that both suits your company culture and isn’t afraid to make the necessary moves to change it for the better.
How to Recruit Visionary CEOs, COOs & Other Executives
Cowen Partners Executive Search stands at the forefront of executive search, dedicated to sourcing visionary leaders who not only demonstrate exceptional qualifications but also embody the cultural and strategic vision of your organization.
As a premier executive search firm, our mission is to empower companies to achieve sustainable success through leadership that aligns with their core values, drives transformation, and fuels long-term growth.
Our search capabilities extend across diverse industries, supporting companies of all sizes—from early-stage ventures to publicly traded corporations and non-profits. We provide strategic placements across the C-suite, including private equity CEOs, VPs, and director-level leaders, ensuring that each executive aligns with your organization’s distinct objectives and long-term vision.
Cowen Partners Executive Search is recognized for its pioneering approach to executive search, offering state-of-the-art resources that enhance our ability to identify and retain leaders who not only meet the demands of today’s business landscape but who are also poised to shape its future.
Discover how Cowen Partners Executive Search consistently delivers exceptional leadership solutions nationwide by exploring our elite resources below.
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