Lesson 12 is a continuation of searching on LinkedIn for CEO prospects.

In this Lesson we want to leverage the affiliations CEOs may have with each other in your specific communities on governmental committees, civic boards and commissions, and non-profits.

I assume you've already gone through all your existing CEO members for their local leadership roles in civic, community, and non-profit organizations. If not, you might consider starting to collect this information about each member and TA in your next one-to-one.

We’re going to use a technique Brad and I leverage in our Executive Search Practice and one that we teach in our hiring program "You're NOT the Person I Hired" to the Vistage/TEC community. We are going to use “one-degree” of separation to get to our ideal CEO prospect.

We’re going to search on LinkedIn for all the CEOs who are on the boards of these organizations. First, we’re going to make a list of the organizations (Mayor’s Business Council, Yale School Business Advisory Committee, Make a Wish Foundation, Vancouver Educational Enrichment Board, etc.).

The assumption (one-degree of separation principle) is that similar CEOs will flock together and can be found in one place. If I can identify one or two CEOs on the Make a Wish Foundation Board in Pasadena – it’s very likely they will lead me directly to 2-3 other CEOs on that same Board/Committee.

Once you start connecting to CEOs who are on public boards, committees, and commissions, you’ll notice they list these on their profiles. The name of the organization will be a hot link to the actual organization. When you click on the link it will show you other people who have listed that link on their profiles. As an added bonus, if the target CEO is on LinkedIn, they are probably very proud of their affiliation/membership and leadership in those organization and display them on their profile like a badge of honor.

Second, we are then going to search on LinkedIn using variations of the names of these organizations (full name, partial name, abbreviations). Once we have identified the CEOs who are in leadership roles in these organizations, we can then look to see how we are connected to them and leverage our existing contacts for an introduction if appropriate.

We want to connect to these individual through our mutual network contacts since they will open up another door of potential contacts. Most influencers/connectors in your network will be "joiners". Their peers will ask them to participate on the Boards of Commissions, Agencies, Non-Profits, and other Civic organizations.

Lesson 12 Action Steps

• The Make A Wish Foundation of Houston
• United Way of Rochester
• The Zoning Commission of St. Louis
• Junior Blind Society of Los Angeles
• The San Francisco Chapter of the National Flour Distributors Association

Lesson 12 Discussion Topics