The most important role of the board.

• Author: ATKINS, BETSY S.
• Position: Brief Article

Since great CEOs are hard to find and hire, boards must be skillful in selecting company leaders.

THE MOST IMPORTANT responsibility of the board of directors is to hire the CEO (and then measure his or her performance). When hiring a CEO, it is very important that the board, through discussion, build consensus on the specifications being sought -- the quantitative measurable characteristics and, more importantly, the qualitative soft characteristics.

Oftentimes it is easy to select a CEO based on quantitative measurable performance, such as evidence of stock price increase, or specific background experience, such as technical background, merger experience, or marketing know-how. These are things that can be measured.

But the attributes that impact success in corporate leadership are often the softer qualitative attributes. You need to be able to assess a candidate's vision, their ability to inspire, their passion and their convictions, and, most importantly, their leadership.

Leadership is something that is difficult to define. Leadership is often a collection of personal behaviors, political skills, and people skills that enable the leader to get people to follow. In order to inspire people to follow you, you have to demonstrate to your prospective followers that they can trust and believe in you, that the values that you communicate are ones that they can and should believe in, and that you have integrity. In order to be successful, you also need to have the ability to empathize with your team. An example would be AT&T's Mike Armstrong: His direct reports will tell you that he truly cares about them, that he makes them feel included, and that he is empathetic, so it is a natural thing to follow him.

A leader has to be able to see the big picture and not get lost in the details. It is also important for the leader to have had multifunctional responsibilities -- so that, for example, you are not recruiting for a chief executive a CFO who is shifting for the first time from being a single functional leader to what is a multifunction general manager role.

It is very important that the board have a shared view of leadership and the importance of this attribute. Sometimes there is not total agreement on the board about how much change the board really wants. It is important that there be consensus on the board because leaders, being agents of change, may be threatening.

Leadership is a destabilizing attribute -- creating a vision, building...