Consult the Greybeards

The older I get, the more I think about advice I was given when I was younger and didn't take.

In thirty years of recruitment and executive search, I've met plenty of remarkable people. Some had degrees and impressive titles. Others left school early and spent their careers quietly getting on with the job. The ones who stood out had usually made their share of mistakes and come through a few hard years. What they had to show for it was perspective, and you can't pick that up on a leadership course or download it.

There's an old expression for this: consult the Greybeards. We're so taken with the new at the moment that I wonder whether we're walking straight past the people who have already travelled much of the road ahead of us.

Recruitment has a contradiction built into it here. Organisations pay consultants good money for their experience, then turn down candidates who have exactly that experience. I've heard accomplished people written off as overqualified, too senior, too expensive or unlikely to adapt. When I ask what that's based on, the answer is usually an assumption rather than evidence.

Executive search has taught me that the job description is a poor guide to who should get the job. The right person is whoever can solve the problems the organisation actually has. Sometimes that's an emerging leader with energy and new ideas. Sometimes it's someone who has already been through the difficulties the business is about to walk into.

I accept that age doesn't guarantee wisdom. Some people have thirty years' experience, and some have one year's experience thirty times over. Our job is to tell the two apart, and a date of birth, a career length or a salary history won't do that for us. We have to look at how someone thinks and what they've delivered recently.

The best organisations I work with use both: the ambition of their younger people and the judgement of their older ones. Every Greybeard was once a young disruptor, and today's disruptors will be Greybeards one day if they're lucky. So before reinventing the wheel, it's worth asking someone who remembers why it was designed that way.

What worries me more than organisations failing to consult the Greybeards is how often they only see what they knew once they've gone.

Ikram Rabbani is Founder and Executive Managing Director of Imperium Executive Search, a retained search firm specialising in senior and board-level appointments across engineering, infrastructure, construction and the built environment.