Archives for June 2019

The most effective CEOs concentrate their efforts on leading with vision and values to inspire and enable others to do their absolute best together to realize a meaningful and rewarding shared purpose. They focus 20-30% of their time up, 20-30% out, and less than 50% down. They can do this because they delegate managing.

Up

By definition, chief executive officers are the “chief” or most senior executives in organizations, reporting to the owners or boards of directors. Thus, they are critical links between organizations and boards, shadow boards, and owners.

Any time they spend building one-on-one relationships with those key stakeholders is time well spent. That time and those relationships help board members do even better jobs in their advisory and governance capacities, enabling everything in the organization to function better.

Out

Almost all CEOs need to get out more. Getting out and spending time with customers, collaborators, competitors and those influencing their organizations’ conditions gives CEOs the perspective they need to ask “What if” and challenge their own best current thinking in order for their organizations to continue to evolve. CEO Connection’s CEO of the Year, Susan Salka told me in 2011, how important it was to “be out in the field listening, listening, listening.”

This is not a substitute for having others challenging that thinking as well. The most effective teams include disrupters, rebels, challengers, deviants, and the like who serve as the loyal opposition, keeping the leadership team from falling into a group-think trap.

Down

As I’ve written before; Leaders influence; Managers direct. While it may not be that black and white, leaders generally do focus on what matters and why as managers focus on how. Both use different forms of influence and direction at different times. But leaders have a bias to influencing by inspiring and enabling through advice and counsel and co-creation, while managers have a bias to command and control, organizing, coordinating and telling.

The most effective CEOs lead strategic, organizational and operational processes. The only way they can keep this effort from eating all their time is to have others manage those processes. Instead, they focus on inspiring and enabling: inspiring by leveraging purpose, frameworks and incentives to drive vision and values and enabling by linking and integrating efforts.

Inspiring

If you seek compliance, indirect communication to produce awareness is enough. If you seek contribution, you’ll need direct communication so people can ask questions to build understanding. And if you want commitment, you’ll need emotional communication so people believe in the cause. Scaling that means focusing on purpose, frameworks and incentives.

People generally don’t commit to leaders, organizations or even teams. They commit to causes. When a cause-focused purpose is genuinely shared, all understand why they must do what they are setting out to do. Net, CEOs should drive purpose and why people should care to scale emotional commitment.

Frameworks are the basic conceptual structures that people use to flesh out their ideas. They help people know where to start, and they focus and guide thinking about how to achieve purpose. CEOs should leverage frameworks as swim lanes for others’ thinking.

Incentives are the consequences of behaviors. If the incentives are clear up front, they serve as antecedents, prompting the behavior. Even if they are not clear, people figure them out eventually. CEOs should leverage incentives to keep people focused on the most important whats on the way.

Enabling

Enabling is about linking and integrating efforts across the organization. The requires real delegation. Effective leaders focus their own efforts first on things they have to do well themselves and secondly on things they have to do themselves, but not necessarily well. Then they delegate and have others manage important things, delegate and do not manage less important things, delaying or cancelling the rest.

The key is finding others to manage the delegated but important things so they can devote more time to leading up and out while digging deep into their own organization from time to time to get a read on current and future talent and capabilities.

Need help finding the right CEO with the right Up/Down/Out orientation?
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ATLANTA GA, June 21, 2019:  The evolution of organizational culture today is being driven by speed, boundarylessness and social awareness says a new study by Cornerstone International Group, a global executive recruiter.

Writing on Forbes.com today, George Bradt, an authority on executive onboarding and transition acceleration, identifies digitalization, technology and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as primary influences identified in the survey.

“The report confirms that speed and ubiquity of digitalization are rewriting information flows and technology has erased boundaries,” says Bradt. “Perhaps most significant is the growing impact of CSR.  The new generation of talent will only work where their social expectations are being met.”

The in-depth survey of CXOs was conducted in 20 countries by members of Cornerstone International Group, led by Heinz Wester of Cornerstone Stockholm. The Group is a global leader in retained search and leadership development with headquarters in Shanghai and here in Atlanta.

“Our structure allowed us to conduct one-on-one interviews with business leaders in different regions,” says Wester.  “As a result, we were fortunate to obtain really meaningful insights into the very fast- moving evolution of culture and leadership challenges.”

Issues identified by respondents included:

• Decision-making is being moved closer to the customer
• Information is reaching executive levels faster and unfiltered
• Social responsibility must start with the Board and permeate the entire organization
• Work groups are becoming more autonomous
• Niche talent acquisition is being favored because it delivers necessary knowledge on Day 1

Visit the global website of Cornerstone International Group to read or download the report “Where is Your Business Heading”.

The executive hiring process is a high-stakes undertaking. Line and operating vacancies are based primarily on assessing a candidate’s skill set, experience, and knowledge. These roles are usually filled rapidly. When filling an executive position, on the other hand, additional, complex requirements call for a longer term view, where leadership, people skills, vision, and cultural fit are crucial.

With so much on the line for organizations, it’s not surprising the field has developed its own different specializations and niches. Organizations without deep in-house recruiting teams often turn to retained executive search firms to fill an open leadership role. To fill line and operating vacancies, they may hire one or more contingent search firms which will supply a greater volume of available candidates (read more on the difference between retained search vs. contingent search).

Either one may be called a recruiter, a search professional or a headhunter.  Is there a difference?

 

What is a Headhunter?

The term Headhunter is out-of-date slang for a person who works to recruit candidates with specific talents… in other words, someone hunting heads.  Most recruiting professionals feel it is pejorative and dislike the description.

Nonetheless, headhunter is a more inclusive term.   Calling yourself an “executive search firm” or a “contingency search firm” specifies quite different methodologies that will produce different results.  Both types, however, can be called headhunters – even if they don’t like it.

 

Meet the Executive Headhunter

There are some claims that the term is re-acquiring some respectability by calling it the executive headhunter.  In this re-incarnation, headhunter is presumed to mean an executive recruiter who actively seeks out the “passive” candidates – the ones who are currently employed and not among the thousands competing to make their availability known.

But this is already one of the core differentiations of the executive search methodology.  So, the result is to tack another description on to executive search.  (One unlikely to be widely adopted given the past, derogatory associations).

Executive recruiters or executive headhunters are experts in not only finding great talent, but the right talent for the role.

Since they are contracted exclusively by one company,  their loyalty lies with the company rather than the job seeker. Their only purpose and goal is to fill the executive seat. An executive headhunter contacts the candidate to see if his or her professional skill set, attitudes and goals match the demands of the executive role they have been hired to fill. They are focused and efficient—they do not focus on every candidate and move on quickly if the candidate does not match the demands of the role.

 

What is Retained Executive Search?

Retained executive search is a type of management consulting, referring to the contract under which consulting and recruiting advice is performed. The search firm brings industry-specific expertise and insight on the client’s needs and demands for the executive vacancy. The retainer provides professionalism, credibility, and partnership between the executive search firm and the employer. It also insulates the organization and job seeker in a sensitive environment where considerable damage can be caused if the proper process is not known, recognized, and followed.

Potential hires can rest assured that their professional skill set and career history will be held in the highest degree of confidence and only disclosed with their agreement. Search consultants serve as a trusted intermediary between the organization and the candidate.

 

Which One is Best for Your Organization?

 While executive headhunters and retained executive search are used interchangeably, there are nuances between each role, based primarily on precedent.  The description of an executive headhunter as representing the in-depth search qualities and methods of the executive search specialist is comparatively new and perhaps not yet widely accepted.

The term executive recruiter, or executive search professional, on the other hand, denotes a specialist with a clearly defined methodology known around the world.

The AESC (Association of Executive Search and Leadership Development Consultants) has 16,000 consultant members who must adhere to uncompromising standards to be eligible.

There is no known association of executive headhunters.

 

How Cornerstone Can Help

Finding the right candidate to fit your vacant executive seat is difficult. With an unparalleled global footprint, exceptional service delivered by experienced consultants and best practices, Cornerstone International Group utilizes a model for retained executive search that represents the optimum path to building a winning executive team. Contact us today if we can help as your organization explores building your team for tomorrow.

 

Better known for its panda sanctuary and spicy local cuisine, Chengdu could be the first Chinese city to offer mutual health insurance.  What is at stake is the supplemental financing of healthcare in the world’s second-largest healthcare market.

The initiative is coming from VYV, a French insurer, which is taking the first steps towards introducing China to mutual insurance, whereby the insurance company is owned entirely by its policyholders.

Chinese patients to date have only state-sponsored schemes to mitigate the cost of healthcare, but the extraordinary economic development of the country has stretched social relationships and institutions to their limit.

Financing healthcare around private insurance has been tried but this has not been fully successful as it is limited to very narrow needs and wealthy people.

The Chengdu pilot would be the first real mutual insurance in China. Eric Bouteiller  of our Cornerstone Beijing office and leader of the Cornerstone Life Science Practice in China, examined the potential impact of mutual insurance in a recent essay for Pharma Boardroom, a global industry magazine.

Read the full story here

Cornerstone International Group has been selected among the top 30 global recruiting firms for the second year in a row.  The rankings are compiled by Hunt Scanlon, publisher of the Executive Search Review for the past 27 years.

Hunt Scanlon does not rank the individual firms within the Top 30 Global Group. Cornerstone International Group is the seventh largest firm listed with 60 locations worldwide.

Global recruiting predictions by industry leaders are upbeat as low employment in many economies results in companies struggling to find qualified talent.  Among specific expectations: further rise in the importance of AI on hiring, a growing need for digitally literate leaders, a stronger push for diversity and inclusion and a continuing requirement to manage chronic uncertainty.

“Attracting and retaining top talent remains the number one business issue around the world,” says Simon Wan, Chairman and CEO of Cornerstone International Group. “But the specifics are constantly changing. Five years ago, we worried about Next-gen leaders. Today, the top concern by far is digital transformation.”

Executive recruitment is estimated as a $15.6 billion global business by the Association of Executive Search and Leadership Consultants and growing at over 10% each year.

Cornerstone recently completed its annual conference which brings together members from 35 countries.  It has headquarters in both Asia (Shanghai) and North America (Atlanta).  Member firms all own their own businesses, resulting in a world-wide network of highly qualified, senior consultants in each location.