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CLAUDIO FERNÁNDEZ-ARÁOZ

Leading global authority on talent, leadership, and succession. Author of “It's Not the How or the What but the Who” and “Great People Decisions”

Global speaker highly acclaimed in the Americas, Europe, and Asia
Ranked by Bloomberg as one of the most influential consultants in the world and by Thinkers50 as one of the leading global thinkers on talent
Executive Fellow for Executive Education at Harvard Business School, where he teaches at the comprehensive leadership executive programs
He worked for McKinsey & Co. in Europe, and as Partner and Member of Egon Zehnder’s global Executive Committee for over a decade
Author of It's Not the How or the What but the Who, winner of the Axiom Gold Award for the best HR book in the world, and the global bestseller Great People Decisions, with 15 international editions and adopted by many of the world’s top business schools
Author of more than 50 major contributions to Harvard Business Review
In his keynotes, he delivers useful, practical, and actionable content, as well as applicable tips from the very first moment

Claudio Fernández-Aráoz is a top global expert on leadership and talent, family businesses, and personal growth. He was ranked by Bloomberg as one of the most influential executive search consultants in the world and selected by Thinkers50 as one of the world’s leading thinkers on talent.

He is one of the most highly acclaimed global speaker in large business conferences and global leadership meetings in the Americas, Europe and Asia.

An Executive Fellow for Executive Education at Harvard Business School, Claudio teaches at the school’s comprehensive leadership executive programs for company owners, CEOs, senior executives, and general managers.

He worked for McKinsey & Co. in Europe, and for over 3 decades for Egon Zehnder, as partner and member of its global Executive Committee for over 10 years.

While at Egon Zehnder he founded the firm’s Assessment and Development practice, and served as global leader of its Professional Development, People Processes, and Intellectual Capital Development.

He selectively advises and coaches global CEOs, company owners, next generation family leaders, and managing partners of professional service firms.

His latest book, “It's Not the How or the What but the Who”, was the winner of the Axiom Gold Award for the best HR book in English in the whole world. His previous bestselling book, “Great People Decisions”, has 15 international editions in all major languages and was adopted by several of the world’s top business schools.

He is also the author of several bestselling Harvard Business Review articles on leadership and talent, family businesses, and personal growth, including the cover articles “21st Century Talent Spotting” and “Leadership Lessons from Great family Businesses”, as well as “Turning Potential into Success: The Missing Link in Leadership Development”, and “The Definitive Guide to Recruiting in Good Times and Bad”.

Claudio earned a master’s in science in Industrial Engineering from the Argentine Catholic University (Gold Medal, highest GPA ever in that university) and an MBA from Stanford University, where he also graduated with honors as an Arjay Miller Scholar.

Claudio Fernández-Aráoz tailors each presentation to the needs of his audience and is not limited to the topics we have listed below:

Human Capital
Talent Management
Leadership
Family Business
Hiring, Recruitment, and Selection
High Potentials Management
Leadership Development
Personal Growth
Succession Planning

Keynote

Turning Potential into Success

Most leadership development programs aren’t working.

This should be no surprise when most companies don’t use a robust model for assessing potential or train their senior leaders in assessment. How can you find your future stars when you don’t know what they look like and how to look for them? On top of it most companies don’t practice the right type of job rotations and stretch assignments, the best proven way to unlock our leadership potential.

Claudio was the founding leader of Egon Zehnder’s Assessment and Development practice, and spent three decades researching potential and helping companies develop their stars. In this session he will share what HBR labeled “the missing link in leadership development”, to help your best people reach their highest potential.

Succession Planning

Many large companies fail to pay adequate attention to their top-level leadership pipelines and succession processes, which results in excessive turnover and massive value destruction.

By hiring the wrong outsiders or promoting ill-prepared insiders, companies are not just hurting their performance, but also shattering the motivation of their often-ignored highest potentials.

Supported by massive original research, Claudio will explain the reasons behind the amazingly high cost of poor succession planning, while sharing a best-practice agenda to get succession at the top right.

Hiring During this Crisis in Latin America

Sadly, Latin America is likely to be one of the last regions to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. Many companies and even whole sectors are at risk, and an unprecedented number of people in the region are looking for a job. At the same time, given the traumatic lockdowns, Latin-Americans are recalculating their personal purpose and individual and family priorities, with massive implications for their work preferences and travel habits.

As we have in front of us the best available pool of talent in our whole business lives, we should not myopically focus just on survival, but also capture the soon-to-close window of opportunity of the hiring of the century.

Claudio will share how visionary leaders have historically mastered (and how you can master today) the magic of the and, while both downsizing and capturing this unique opportunity.

Thriving in Latin America’s Extreme Environment

Latin America is a region where, as Claudio likes to put it, “even the past has become unpredictable.” Few parts of the world systematically show similar levels of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

Yet, it is precisely this extreme environment which allows visionary leaders to obtain extraordinary results: While the average company results in Latin America are appalling, the performance of the best CEOs in the region is much higher than that of their global counterparts.

In this session Claudio will share the key leadership and talent practices which have allowed Latin America’s best leaders to not only survive but even thrive in this unique environment of risk and opportunity.

Workshops

Session #1: Succeed by Surrounding Yourself with the Best

At your high level of seniority, nothing will be more important for your further career success than making great people decisions. The people you choose will hugely determine your performance and your risks, more than any other controllable factor.

The problem is that making great people decisions is brutally hard because we have a prehistoric brain (with all sorts of unconscious biases) and, on top of this, most of us were not properly trained in assessing others.

The good news is that, despite what most people think, making great people decisions is not an art, the result of a gut feeling, or an intuition: It is a craft, and a discipline, that can be learned and should be learned for your career success.

In this session, Claudio will share with you:

Why surrounding yourself with the best is the key for your career success
Why now is an unprecedented opportunity to hire great talent
Why making great people decisions is so hard, and what to do about it
What exactly you should be looking for when deciding who to appoint for a senior role
How exactly to assess someone’s competence for a job, including the right type of interviews and reference checks
How to attract and motivate the best

Session #2: From Potential to Success: Developing Great Leaders

Once you have surrounded yourself with the best, the key to rise to ever higher levels of career success will be to properly retain, motivate, and fundamentally develop your great people, helping the best become greater each day.

Yet, most organizations do a very poor job at developing talent, both because of the lack of a robust model for assessing potential as well as a weak development process.

Developing great leaders will help you retain your best players, while improving their competence and motivation and – as a result – their job performance and your personal and organizational success. Equally important, it will turn your high potentials into the great leaders they were always meant to be.

In this session, which builds on the previous one, Claudio will share with you:

Why we are watching the dawn of a new era for managing talent, where potential is the key
What exactly to look for when spotting your high potentials
How exactly to assess someone’s potential, including the right type of interviews and reference checks
How to forecast how far each person can go, based on their very personal potential profile
How to plan the right type of job rotations
How to implement a sound process for managing your high potentials