Qualities in APPA President/CEO Identified: The Search Begins

In January 2024, the APPA Executive Committee offered a series of APPA Member & Key Stakeholder Listening Sessions. We held these sessions with APPA Staff, business partners, Institute and Academy leaders, current and past regional presidents, regional boards, past APPA Presidents, current APPA Board members, and other key stakeholders. Most importantly, we held several general sessions for all APPA members. We wanted to hear from as many people as possible in our rich and diverse profession. We also encouraged those who could not attend to send in their thoughts, comments, and suggestions, and many did. The response and interest were overwhelming—the input invaluable. Thank you!

These sessions allowed us to hear not only what attributes the APPA candidates should have, but also what APPA is doing well, how we can do better, what we should lean into, and how to address the future of APPA and our profession.

In these sessions we asked several key questions, including:

• What are the 3 most important qualities a candidate should possess?
• What are the possible backgrounds the candidate should have, which ones are more important, and why?

Based on those two questions and input from the listening sessions, a consensus has emerged. The word cloud below depicts the following top qualities, traits, and backgrounds that were identified as the most important:

We shared this list with the national search firm and together we tailored the APPA President/CEO position description, which is now posted, and we will begin recruiting top talent to apply for the position.

Join us on Friday, March 22^nd at 12pm CT/1pm ET and meet members from our search firm, Opus Partners, as we share more information on how to nominate or apply for this position and hear about the search team members.