In a lot of those situations, the leadership brought people along with them. A number of these managers are waiting to see what the leader is going to do now. I think you see more of that today than you did in the past. In a good executive, the most important quality is integrity. This is something that every company is looking for in its leaders, and it comes out in the reference process in a strong way.
Integrity is important for a bunch of reasons.
The investors and Wall Street need to trust who s running the company, and the employees have to trust that they re being led in the right direction. The leader s integrity adds to the character of the company that they work for. People need to make sure that what they re doing is tangible to the success of the company. They need to be well-versed in everything that is going on in the company and understand it well and to be able to ascribe part of the company s success to something they re responsible for. They must be able to identify their specific contributions and build on them.