CLAUDIO FERNÁNDEZ-ARÁOZ

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