What Judging International Business Awards Reveals About Leadership Excellence
Judging hundreds of international award entries showed Craig Fearn what separates organisations that genuinely lead from ones that describe themselves well: the leaders provide evidence of what changed, and the describers provide adjectives.
As a judge for the Stevie Awards, the international business awards programme that evaluates nominations from organisations across more than 60 countries, Craig Fearn reads many executive nominations every cycle. Each one attempts to make the case for why a particular leader deserves recognition. Each one tells you, whether the writer intends it or not, something about how that organisation thinks about leadership.
Over multiple judging cycles, certain patterns have become unmistakable. And they are not the patterns you might expect.
The Inverse Correlation Nobody Talks About
Here is the first thing: the quality of a leader and the quality of how they articulate their leadership impact are often inversely correlated. The best nominations are frequently from competent, well-organised leaders who happen to work in organisations that value self-promotion and narrative construction. The worst nominations are frequently from truly exceptional leaders who work in environments where talking about your impact is seen as unseemly.
This is not a trivial finding. It means that awards systems, and, more importantly, promotion decisions, board appointments, and speaking invitations, systematically disadvantage the very people who most embody the quiet, outcome-focused leadership that organisations claim to value.
What That Looks Like in Practice
To be concrete. Nominations arrive from mining sector executives who have transformed site safety cultures, reduced serious incidents to zero over multi-year periods, and fundamentally changed how thousands of people go home safely every day, and their nominations read like a job description. Dry. Generic. Full of passive constructions. The impact is buried under corporate language that communicates nothing.
Other nominations come from leaders who managed incremental improvements in already well-functioning teams, but who understood narrative structure, who connected their impact to commercial outcomes, who made it easy for a judge to say yes. This is not a criticism of those leaders. It is a criticism of a system that does not teach senior people how to tell their own story.
The Ninety-Second Test
The practical lesson for any executive: learn to articulate your impact in terms a stranger can understand in ninety seconds. Not your job description. Not your responsibilities. The specific things that are different or better because you were in the role. If you cannot do that, you are relying on other people to interpret your value, and most people will not take the time. This is the gap between being competent and being read as competent, and it decides more appointments than anyone admits.
The same test applies from the stage. A keynote that changes what a board does has to survive the same compression, in front of an audience with no obligation to be generous.
Speaking and keynotes demonstrate that this skill, the ability to compress complex leadership impact into compelling clarity, separates the executives who get heard from those who get overlooked. And it is a skill, not a talent. It can be learned. The judging role itself, along with the rest of it, is on the record.