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Helping find a new president and CEO for the Tampa Bay Partnership is a full-circle moment for St. Pete executive recruiter Tina Winner.
Her firm, Winner Partners, was recently selected to find the replacement for Rick Homans, who is retiring from the Partnership in November. Homans was chosen for the top spot at the organization in 2015, and Winner was part of a group that helped recruit him for the position when he was at the Tampa EDC. Winner Partners, coming of a successful search for the CEO of Visit Phoenix, edged out some of the nation’s best-known and established recruiting firms to win the Partnership assignment, according to a statement.
Winner tells Coffee Talk she will use her firm’s immersive approach to understanding clients’ organizations to find the just right fit for the Partnership. The firm, founded in 2018, has four core employees and more than a dozen on-demand partners who work on an as-needed basis. That model, says Winner, allows the firm to stay nimble to meet opportunities.
Winner worked for LabCorp and later a search firm with offices in Pittsburgh and the Tampa region before launching her own company three years ago. One of the reasons she went out on her own was to go away from the transactional nature of the business. “I wanted to put the relationship back into what we were doing,” Winner says.
One of the keys to the Winner Partners model, she says, is to talk to a variety of groups and people within multiple organizations to find out the type of leader who would make the best fit. In the Visit Phoenix search, for example, the firm talked to at least 50 people before developing a composite of the person they sought. In addition, Winner says things that stand out to her in finding a leader are strong soft skills and a demonstrated ability to mentor others.
Another key to finding the right leader for an assignment? Never assume.
“We don’t want to go into an assignment thinking we know the right person,” she says. “There could be something we hear in the listening sessions that takes that person out of the running right away.”
“We are also looking to find the people who may not have an applied for the job,” she adds, “the people who have their head down working, but might be really great for this opportunity.”
(This story was updated to reflect Homan's previous work assignment before he joined the Partnership.)
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