Archives for August 2019

On the surface, if you need to recruit an executive in a hurry, you’ve done something wrong.

Poor performance?  That doesn’t appear overnight. As soon as your suspicions were confirmed, you should have been talking to a headhunter.  (Remember, the Retained Search firms work in strictest confidence when needed; it’s hard to keep a secret with contingency recruiters).

Bad fit with the team? That should have been apparent in the pre-hire investigation and evaluation. Someone dropped the ball.

But sometimes it just happens. if a senior leader suddenly buys a Honda Gold Wing, yearns for the open road and walks out of the door, there’s not much you can do.  You are left scrambling for top talent to fill a suddenly imminent void.

Where the rush-to-sign gets a bit out of hand is with day-to-day expectations. Sophisticated technology and particularly AI, is slashing the time once need to find and evaluate key leaders.  That, in turn, has turned into a competitive issue for recruiters. If headhunter “A” says he can give you a list of candidates in 21 days, headhunter “B” sets out to do so in 14 days.

In the Retained Search arena, the most comprehensive and complex (and successful) of them all, eight weeks was, for a long time, the industry norm for submitting a verified list of qualified candidates. Today, many firms promise fulfillment in 20 business days. Some promise a preliminary list in 10 days.

Does it matter? Is it that much better to recruit an executive in three weeks instead of six? Is the delivery timeline important enough to you to influence a decision which firm to retain?  Let’s take a look.

On the pro side. Efficiency is a valued attribute and speed is associated with efficiency. So, in general terms, filling a leadership void as quickly as possible is a good thing.  Also, other things being equal, the sooner you get your new exec contributing, the better off you are.

But that comes with a big “if”, as you will recall from your schoolday Shakespeare: “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly”.  Quick is only a plus if you get it right.  If it unravels in a trail of not-quite-what-we-thought-it-was, it suddenly jumps from the pro side to the con.

What technology is good at is finding people fast on a formulaic basis. But that is no longer the primary challenge.  As our president Larry Shoemaker is fond of saying:

“It used to take 80% of the time to find the candidate, now we find them in 20% of the time.  It takes the other 80% to verify the fit.”

And that’s why executive search should at least leave enough time to make a phone call.

The guiding consideration when you recruit an executive is the future of the company. In any business, the organization is only as good as the people running it.  Growth, profit and working environment come from people, not systems. So setting out to find the best person for the job in the shortest possible time can add to the inherent challenge of the task for marginal, if any, benefit.

As they say in the woodworking shop, “do it right, not over”

Dick Daniels is a highly experienced and qualified Cornerstone coach and the founder of the Leadership Development Group in Chicago. His latest blog post approaches an issue that some organizations still have trouble with – assessing the return on investment in developing leaders within the organization.

The name of Dick’s mission, Intentional Leadership Development,  underscores a frequent failing in organizational leadership strategy — once is not enough. An ad hoc strategy of engaging skilled coaching in response to a specific challenge or weakness is better than doing nothing. But after putting out that one fire, and perhaps returning a major talent back onto the track, the strategic benefit declines.

The alternative, superior strategy is what Daniels means by “intentional leadership development,” which is structured to move high-potential talent into a leadership development environment at multiple levels. Such an approach results in an organization of collaborative leaders throughout the structure, focused on operational efficiency and enhanced productivity.

Because the strategy is applied to key points in the organization’s business journey, an intentional leadership development program can be expected to lead to:

• Improving bottom-line financial performance
• Attracting and retaining your industry’s best talent
• Driving a performance culture
• Increasing organizational agility

“When you take an organizational view of executive coaching, it becomes an important investment in the growth of the company,” says Daniels. “You are building a foundation for greater effectiveness and efficiency.

“Numerous studies have reached the same conclusion. Organizations that invest continually in leadership development perform better than those that don’t.”

Read more about Dick Daniels’ philosophy of intentional leadership development.

Does your trust in business people go up once you know what they look like?

We’ve just refreshed our video library here at Cornerstone International Group. It’s been a while but will become a frequent occurrence.

Video in marketing is now ubiquitous. According to various studies:

• Over 75% of global internet traffic is video based
• 87% of businesses use video as a marketing tool
• 50% of companies in North America and Europe will produce videos this year to support brand awareness.
• 96% of people prefer watching a video to learn more about a product or service

These statistics are heavily oriented towards consumer marketing, but they include the rapid use of video for all business communication purposes.

We’re in what’s called the B2B sector of commerce. As an executive recruiter and leadership developer, our customers are other businesses, so our focus is business-to-business.

The B2B sector, as a generalization, has been slower than B2C to adopt digital technology in communications. What we market is not usually brightly colored, visually attractive, makes music, or moves intriguingly.

Our business rationale is deliberative, complex and very customized. Not an argument that benefits from packaging sound and motion. Or so you would think.

We produced six marketing videos earlier this year. We took the occasion of our annual global conference to interview 22 members from offices in 20 countries around the world.   We had a lot of fun doing it and learned some unexpected things.

Here is Unexpected Learning #1.

Cornerstone International Group is among the global leaders in executive recruiting.  Our members likely speak over 30 languages, which is an interesting statistic made more interesting when you see and hear them discussing their work in their native tongue.  If you watch this video, you’ll see and hear members talking in Swedish, Portuguese, Flemish, Spanish and German as well as English — (don’t worry, there are sub-titles).

For the first time in our 30 years, we had finally put a face to some of the most skilled and experienced professionals in executive recruiting, demonstrating at the same time the truly global reach of our services.

In the process, we made use of one of the basic attractions of digital media, visual identity. A majority of participants in social media post their photo because people want to know what you look like. It bonds them just that tiny bit closer.

Same with business video if we go back to trust in business. Benefits are not restricted to product demos or leadership exhortations. Video puts a human face on the organization, as we just did. We’re very diverse, spread all over the planet, but we share common beliefs and represent to our customers a common cause. It’s possible that people in the marketplace might warm to those attributes more once they’ve met our team — even on video.

So, if you are researching search firms or leadership development, check us out on our global website or just hit play on the video up above. You will not only learn important little factoids about how we can be of help to you, you will also see we’re a pretty likeable bunch to partner up with.

Add a comment here after you’ve checked out the video.

Some data regarding executive recruiting failures doesn’t add up.

Executive search is an excruciatingly diligent process. This is not looking for a plumber on Angie’s List. Executives get paid a lot more, they have more responsibility, and there is a pronounced relationship between their competence and the company’s bottom line.

So an executive recruiter, such as Cornerstone International Group, has a lot riding on its work, its discovery, evaluation and recommendation.

Despite this, there is a failure rate in the business that gets scarier and scarier. A few years ago, Forbes established that many as 40% of new managerial hires were gone at 18 months. More recent studies have pushed that to 60%.

Those are staggering failure rates that contradict processes used in selection.  Which would imply, perhaps, that a dangerous generalization is being thrown around.  I have never seen an attempt to identify and associate the hiring process with the failure rate.

Contingency search, and conceivably some in-house search, are not by design as sophisticated as retained search. Judging by random performance reporting of our members, new executive hires in place at 18 months is likely to be at least 90%.

That said, there are definitely issues that a company needs to at least be aware of and is possibly able to manage when hiring a key player. And it is this.  An HBR article two years ago quoted a 10-year longitudinal study that found 61% of executives said they were not prepared for the strategic challenges they faced when given senior leadership roles.

In other words there are quite possibly many situations where, despite a broad competence and suitability, a new executive just does not have the depth of experience for specific hurdles.  It’s a situation that exceeds the limits of the recruiting safety net

The strong performance of Cornerstone International Group members can be attributed in part to our structure and outlook. We are a network of individually owned firms, most with long standing in a regional market, and we share best practices and principles. One is to get to know the client as thoroughly as the candidate to ensure fit.

That’s the first line of defence, but today’s specialist recruiter needs another. Increasingly, we are seeing the emergence of the hybrid recruiter-coach with the joint capability of finding the best person and then helping her or him to master the challenges of the specific role once in place.

We are in the early stages of this journey by doing things a little differently. Many of our members have highly qualified coaches backing up the recruiting offer. But we have also assembled a powerful global network – one of the largest – of highly qualified, certified independent coaches with the flexibility and range of services to meet any individual leadership challenge, either supporting a hire or stand-alone.

We will be tracking performance data relating to recruiting support and leadership capabilities growth. I look forward to sharing it here.