Cornerstone Blog

The literature of ancient Israel invites any leader to consider the following: If you have the gift of leadership then lead with diligence.

We don’t often speak of diligence in connection with leadership. Maybe we should.  When is the last time you did a personal assessment of your competency to lead, and the outcomes of your leadership? Today might be your best day to honestly assess the Diligence Gap in your work of leading.

Start by considering Leadership as a gift.

The Gift You are Given.  An organization gives you a gift when you are invited to take on a role of leading others. The gift is given to you when your exceptional performance is continually noticed. It’s a risk because it assumes that you also have the potential to lead at a higher level of organizational complexity.

The Gift You Give.  Every individual you lead receives the opportunity to invest in their career development. In your leadership you give the gift of feedback, training, delegating responsibilities, stretch assignments, and promotions. Your responsibility is to be fair with each individual in light of their capacity and capabilities.

The way you do this is through Diligence.  It represents your drive to keep learning how to develop your    leadership competency. It is defined as “careful and persistent work or effort.”  It implies careful attention with haste and speed in doing something that you highly value, aspire to, and love.

It is the opposite of letting the leadership for each individual linger at the end of your “To Do” list each day.

Diligence is:

…Passion – The desire to lead more effectively and efficiently.

…Experience – The willingness to take on stretch assignments to enhance your leadership capacity.

…Intentionality – The delegation to develop high potential team members to increase team productivity.

…Return on Investment – The impact of developing the next generation of leaders.

What is the Diligence Gap in your leadership? What will you do this week to demonstrate the careful attention and persistent work of leading others?

What happens to recruiting when there is no-one to recruit?

In another 12 years, says a global survey, the world will be missing more than 85 million skilled workers.  That’s more than the current population of Germany.

The survey is the most recent of Korn Ferry’s “Future of Work” series. It’s one of many recently to sound the manpower alarm.  Numbers vary but they all say the same thing:  the problem is not robots replacing people, we’re running out of people to replace people.

Not that populations are generally declining – although countries such as Japan have experienced low birth rates for several decades. We are still breeding: there are plenty of people.  It’s the skill part that has gone wrong.  We are on course to run out of skilled people.

According to the Global Human Capital Report from the World Economic Forum, the world has only developed 62% of its human capital.   In 14 countries, less than half of the human capital has been developed.

The report measured 130 countries in four key areas of human capital development – Capacity, Deployment, Development and Know-How.  It concludes by blaming governments for failing to translate investment in higher education into opportunities for higher-quality work.

EU No Further Ahead

A telling statistic comes in yet another survey focusing on European countries.  Indicators suggest that the free movement of labor, a key benefit of EU membership, is unlikely to solve the skills shortage.

There are other pressures.  The Korn Ferry report singles out the passage of the baby-boomer generation in the United States.  Most of the boomers will have moved on by 2030, but the next generations will not have had the training or the time to be ready to take over the highly-skilled jobs left behind.

The impact could be great enough to affect leadership in some sectors.

The report cites the US as the current, undisputed leader in tech but concludes it faces losses as high as $162 billion of revenues per year if it fails to find more high-tech workers.  In contrast, India will have a surplus of a million high-tech workers by 2030 and could become the new tech leader.

Constant Learning Will be Central

“The savviest organizations are taking on the onus of training talent themselves, hiring people straight out of school,” says Jean-Marc Laouchez, president of the Korn Ferry Institute.  “Constant learning will be central to the future of work.”

Then there are today’s workers.

Writing this week in the publication “Emerging Europe” Tom Quigley, who believes Europe is “looking over an abyss of severe talent shortage,” states:

“The future of work doesn’t just require different skill sets and early access to talent potential. It also requires the adoption of entirely new ways of working for existing employees.”

This includes more flexible relationships, per-project engagements, working from home as well as workers taking responsibility for their own professional development.

While committing to help train the next generation, leaders will also need a comprehensive understanding of the current talent supply chain in order to have in place the skills they need.

Pity the person in the corner office.

 

 

The world has become less friendly to recruiters in recent months.

Surveys have singled out many and growing challenges facing those who search to find top talent in virtually any field.

Allegis Group, a $2B giant in the field, put it in memorable terms a few days ago in the new 2018 Global Workforce Trends report, the first paragraph of which reads:

“Today’s employers must contend with a perfect storm of talent supply and demand challenges. Unemployment rates hover near historic lows. New technologies raise the demand for new skills. Many older workers are retiring, and companies face new competitors in the race to acquire talent while retaining the workers they have.”

In addition to the Workforce Trends report, other surveys remind us of:

• The perils of the gig economy – difficulties of hiring resulting from the decline of FTE and rise of independent and contracted workers (Forbes.com))
• The impact of disruptive technologies (Allegis Group)
• Predictions of a worldwide talent shortage of more than 85 million people by 2030 (Korn Ferry- Future of Work)

And then there is the summary from Saba with the cheery title “Failure to Develop, Engage and Retain Talent” to remind you that things can only get worse.

Although conditions fluctuate with geography, indications are the challenges are not regional.  The Allegis survey was global and reached 700 talent acquisition professionals.  Among respondents, 80% have had problems acquiring critical talent due to changing global labour markets due to economic environment, demographic shifts, generational differences and more.

Nearly two-thirds of companies (65%) have had to adjust business strategy because they could not secure the right talent in a specific function or geographic area.

So given all this, times must be tough for the people who make their living recruiting top talent, right? Well, not so much.  In fact, far from being half empty, the opportunity glass seems to be half full.

Retained Search Firms Happy

Members of the global AESC – the Association of Executive Search and Leadership Consultants – are unfailingly optimistic over the state of their profession.  In the Americas, all countries but Mexico are more optimistic with regards to 2018 business performance, in Asia all but China, and in Europe all members without exception.

Here at home, Cornerstone International Group (CIG) specializes in retained executive search and has member offices in 35 countries.   So far this year, business activity would seem to reflect the usual ups and downs of a global network with the market in the Americas being notably robust.

Why are they having an easy time of it when surveys say the talent market is getting tighter all the time?

“It’s actually not such a surprise,” says Larry Shoemaker, President of CIG. “For two reasons. One, it is getting more difficult to find the right people but employers have to find them, so the volume of hires doesn’t necessarily decline.  Two, when top talent gets harder to find, you look for the best searchers. You don’t leave things to chance.

“Retained executive search firms such as Cornerstone have more experience, very broad contacts and superior expertise.  We deliver when in-house recruiters struggle.  We are in the market every day and know where the appropriate candidates are and how to attract them.”

There is also the new challenge of finding agile talent, the kind that will stay longer with the hiring employer.  But that’s for another day.

To learn more about Cornerstone, click here to read our e-Book “Recruiting top Talent”

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Ed: Part 2 of a recent HBR article “Why a new leader should be wary of quick wins” by former CEO Dan Ciampa.  Read Part One here )

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman explores the intricacies of judgment and argues that different tempos of decision making are better for different challenges. Fight/flight/freeze decisions must be intuitive and quick. But actions that are complex and require careful judgment must be made more slowly and deliberately.

In order to build coalitions, a new leader must recognize that a handoff at the top is unsettling for everyone. Employees wonder how expectations of them will change, and executives worry about the effect on their power bases. It takes months for a new leader to allay concerns and win loyalty — a reality even for a leader who is promoted from within and is therefore a known quantity.

Subordinates will follow a leader they can count on. Decisiveness is an important factor, but more important is wise judgment in the face of complex, important challenges. Followers want the leader to listen to their ideas and merge them with her own, and they want to see her handle difficult problems carefully. This requires controlling the action and slowing down the pace.

 

How to Slow Down in a High-Speed Job

There are a handful of techniques that allow the new leader to do this. They fall into five categories: control the flow, reflect, repeat, question, and use silence.

Control the flow. Because a new leader inherits their predecessor’s administrative system, the mismatch between the rhythm of the new office and their decision-making style can slow progress toward early successes. Managing the flow of information into your office and into your brain is critically important for the judgment required by the most important issues. That can happen much more quickly with a structural step: creating a senior aide position, such as a chief of staff, who is responsible for making sure the right information reaches you at the right time and in the right format.

Reflect. Controlling the flow should offer more time for reflection so that you can better grasp subtleties of relationships and the underlying meaning of information coming at you. It’s enormously helpful to have trusted advisers — both inside and outside — who are dedicated to your success and have expertise in areas important to your agenda. If there’s no one to talk with confidentially when you first take over, the next best option is to talk to yourself; that’s where keeping a personal journal comes in (see “The More Senior Your Job Title, the More You Need to Keep a Journal”).

The next three tactics help to control the pace of interactions.

Repeat. Even if you understand perfectly what has been said in a meeting or one-on-one discussion, repeat what you heard. Similarly, when you want to verify that you’ve been understood, ask the listener to repeat what you said. In addition to allowing confirmation of what is intended, repetition momentarily halts the discussion’s forward motion and gives you a chance to think about where you want to take the conversation next.

Question. From time to time, ask summing-up questions such as, “What did we just do?” “What just happened here?” and “What should we learn from that?” Questions such as these force a pause, preventing a discussion from rushing to a premature decision or blocking a group from coalescing around what may be the wrong conclusion. Unlike declarative statements, which only require listeners to be polite, questions require them to “go active” as they think of an answer and try to figure out why the boss is asking.

Use silence. A pause before responding has a double benefit. It offers the leader a chance to weigh alternatives and decide the best way to respond, and it pushes others to wonder what’s going through the leader’s mind, which may cause them to think more creatively.

All of these steps would have helped Greg immeasurably (in the first article,(LINK) new leader Greg moved fast  but lost loyalty). They would have slowed the pace of his interactions and decisions so that he was more aware of how he was being perceived and so that he could have carefully assessed the consequences of his decisions. He would have elevated above the action to a position where he could have exercised better judgment. He would have been more likely to realize that how he achieved early successes was as important as achieving them. If he had slowed things down, Greg would be CEO today.

Dan Ciampa (DC@danciampa.com) is a former CEO, an adviser to boards and chief executives, and the author of five books, including Transitions at the Top: What Organizations Must Do to Make Sure New Leaders Succeed (with David L. Dotlich, Wiley, 2015) and Right from the Start: Taking Charge in a New Leadership Role (with Michael Watkins, Harvard Business Review Press, 1999).

 

(Ed: Ginger Duncan (Cornerstone Nashville) is at the leading edge of new integrated onboarding strategies to get a new leader up and running quickly. But there’s a downside. Ginger sends along this curated article from HBR on the danger of quick wins. 1st of 2 parts.

As soon as a new leader steps into a top position at a company that needs to significantly improve the way it operates, there’s pressure to get off to a quick start.

Yet the best way to succeed, paradoxically, is to slow things down.

Forces pushing in the other direction are powerful, of course. You must prove you are the right leader by getting the organization to deliver better results, and soon. That’s why you were brought in.

So, you set out for early wins in what seem like obvious areas to fix — on the cost side, perhaps the speed of processes within production, and on the revenue side, the size of the sales force.

But rushing toward early wins, even in areas that seem uncontroversial, can be unexpectedly hazardous. That’s because when a new leader takes hold, changes aren’t just about efficiency or revenue; they are also about people’s feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty about what the changes will mean for them.

No matter how sophisticated and mature he or she may be, rushing too quickly toward early wins can deprive the new leader of the insight needed to understand the culture and build relationships. As a consequence, quick wins may soon be undone, or they may beget new leadership problems.

Deliberately slowing down allows you to clarify what the people around you want most, the effects of your behavior, sources of resistance, and the ramifications of your decisions. The result: You will have more control over the pace of your transition to new leadership responsibilities and the company’s transition to its new era.

The New Leader Who Starts Too Fast

For an example of the importance of controlling pace, let’s look at the case of Greg. Although talented and competent, he allowed himself to enter a negative cycle of activity after being hired into a large consumer goods company as the COO, and the presumptive successor to the CEO, who planned to retire in 24 months.

Greg rolled up his sleeves and worked harder than he ever had, pushing the organization and himself. To be responsive, he studied each presentation deck and answered each email right away. To be accessible, he said yes to each meeting and one-on-one drop-in. All of this took time, but he wanted to do everything possible to prove to the board — and to others in the company who had been passed over — that he was the right choice to be the next CEO.

His projects redesigned the supply chain for significant cost and time savings, created a new structure to quicken decision making and increase flexibility, and improved the new-product process. Managers grumbled, and the CEO wasn’t as enthusiastic as he should have been, but Greg assumed these were consequences of the inevitable resistance to change. What mattered was that people were following his plan and responding to his direction, and the results were good.

To make sure he was being clear, Greg had a habit of using a sort of double-barreled communication approach, following up each request with a here’s-what-I-mean explanation. And it worked: Subordinates listened, nodded, and rarely pushed back.

At his 16-month mark, as he prepared for his performance review, Greg wondered how big his bonus would be and when he’d be named CEO. Instead, he was told that the CEO would stay until the CFO developed the capabilities to succeed him, and Greg would be allowed to resign. The CEO acknowledged that Greg’s changes had improved performance, but he hadn’t won people’s loyalty and his style was mismatched with the company’s culture.

Greg learned the hard way that people at the top rarely fail because of strategic or operational problems; usually it’s because they have poor self-awareness and mismanage relationships.

In going full throttle, Greg had misinterpreted the CEO’s reactions and missed signals that direct reports saw his intensity as a way to get promoted rather than to help them or the company. His behavior blocked him from getting feedback and cost him the support necessary for success. And that double-barreled explanation technique backfired: People quickly learned that they didn’t have to ask questions, give feedback, or even think creatively.

(Thursday:  the five key steps to controlling new leader development)

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author is Dan Ciampa, a former CEO, an adviser to boards and chief executives, and the author of five books. These include Transitions at the Top: What Organizations Must Do to Make Sure New Leaders Succeed (with David L. Dotlich, Wiley, 2015) and Right from the Start: Taking Charge in a New Leadership Role (with Michael Watkins, Harvard Business Review Press, 1999).

 

Asking open-ended questions is one of the most productive coaching techniques.

Conflict shows up every day in our lives in one form or another. It can be over which route you take to a destination or a tough situation at work. Taking time to think it through and ask more questions is typically when you get the relief of that “AHA” moment of clarity.

Not just any old question. Closed-ended questions that be answered with a “yes, no, or I don’t know”, give you no further information.  Asking an open-ended question begs for more information which can be critically revealing.

A while back, my client Darrell and I were going through a list of his current clients in order to make some decisions on which ones were good for him to continue working with, while also wondering if there were any that he should drop. Darrell was a big man, a retired NFL player, so I found it surprising when he told me he was intimidated by one particular client. Darrell felt he had to let him go.

Dreaded answering the phone

Even though I couldn’t imagine Darrell being intimidated by anyone, he shared with me that this particular client treated him like he was an idiot, questioning every transaction they did together. Darrell dreaded answering his phone when he saw the man’s name come up on his caller ID.

To complicate matters further, this client gave him more business than any of his other clients. In spite of how profitable their relationship was, he was anxious to stop working with this guy because he was tired of being treated poorly.

Now was the perfect time to ask an open-ended question! I gave Darrell the homework of calling his client and asking, “Somewhere along the way you seem to have lost your trust in me. Help me understand….” The client roared with laughter and said he treats everyone like an ass and that he actually loved working with Darrell and had great respect for him. This was certainly not at all what Darrell expected to hear!

With one conversation their entire relationship changed. They now look forward to working together and challenging each other with a great deal of laughter! Understanding each other’s behavior, the path is clear for effective communication.

It took the right question

Imagine the alternative – walking away from a really good client because Darrell failed to discover the truth. Something he finally did simply by asking an open-ended question

What assumptions have you made about relationships at work or the rest of your life? The next time conflict shows up, give yourself a chance to look at the situation without your emotions involved. Take a breath, get curious and ask these questions:

• What do I know about this situation to be true?
• What stories am I making up?
• What assumptions have I made?
• What questions do I need to ask?
• What is absolutely right about getting into this situation?
• What lessons have I learned and how did I grow?

Be the example for others on how to handle conflict. Show your leadership skills and help others to calm down by simply asking curious questions rather than simple agree/disagree questions which give you a data point but nothing more.

There is a beauty in open-ended questions and how they can change everything.

Learning agility is an important universal indication of top talent. Paired with adaptability it is one of the essential characteristics of innovative leadership and agile talent.”

Recently in Thailand, on the occasion of the annual global conference of Cornerstone International Group, I presented to a group of local CEOs on how to select tomorrow’s Top Talent. Thailand has an extreme low unemployment rate and a very tight labour market; conditions which can make for a challenging executive search process. A huge focus was being put on finding talent that combined fluency in English with relevant industry experience.

As tempting as it may be to recruit someone with years of experience in a similar job, it turns out that it is not the holy grail. Research conducted in 2014 by Claudio Fernández-Aráoz and published in the Harvard Business Review showed conclusively that experience, although not trivial, is perpetually overrated.

In recent years, other key performance qualities have become more relevant and popular. These include the right motivation and drive, commitment, mental acuity, determination and openness to new things. Although I am happy with these developments, I am convinced it is still not the whole story and that selecting people based on those qualities alone is not going to cut it.

In a world in flux – the impact of which is unprecedented – positions themselves are evolving before our very eyes. Most organizations have little use for employees with outdated knowledge and “past performance is no guarantee of future results” applies to working as well as investing. Someone may achieve great things in a certain job, and still be confronted with outdated knowledge in the immediate future, which ultimately renders them obsolete.

I am convinced that in the very near future, it will become impossible to select people based on their current skills and experience and expect them to perform well on the job. Instead, it will be imperative to shift your focus to finding future proof management and talent.

As businesses come to depend more on agile talent, their only way forward to successfully coping with the future is by unleashing their employees. Selecting the right people then takes on monumental importance. This means focusing on people who are resilient and adaptable, and who can quickly learn in completely new circumstances.

Learning agility in more detail

Learning agility is a mental trait whereby a person is willing and able to learn from experiences and then apply this knowledge in situations that are often unforeseen and quite challenging. But you have to bear in mind that unlearning, or the ability to let go of familiar opinions and ways of working, is a key dimension of learning ability.

People with high scores on learning agility will learn quickly in unfamiliar situations. Usually they will proactively ask for feedback, excel at discovering patterns within the unfamiliar and actively seek out new challenges. I believe that learning agility is the ultimate predictor of future success in roles of management and leadership in our new tumultuous world. It’s such an important indicator that it has become a critical element of our executive coaching services.

During a recent interactive guest lecture in Bangkok, I encouraged CEO’s to not only focus on candidates’ experience and skills, but to blend them with criteria such as personality, motivation and – in particular – learning agility.

John Sullivan, an internationally renowned Silicon Valley HR guru, says that learning agility has become the ultimate distinguishing characteristic for the rapidly-evolving business world. Google’s former Chief HRO, Laszlo Bock is of the same mind. He tells people that at Google they view learning agility as the leading predictor of success in the future, leaving factors like intelligence and education far behind.

Still, it is a rare quality in candidates. Korn/Ferry Institute vice president Kenneth De Meuse estimates that a mere 15 percent of all employees have strongly developed learning agility. Research by the Corporate Leadership Council suggests that no more than 30 percent of current high performers have the potential to do excellent work in a higher position. It makes sense to take learning agility into account during your focused interview, the test or assessment stage and in the in-depth reference checks.

 

Learning agility is the capacity for rapid continuous learning from experience. It means giving up what may have worked in the past.” – Monique Vacour, Harvard Business Review, December 2015

The importance of learning agility

There are several reasons why learning agility has become more important than ever before. In this column I cover two:

Rapid developments in technology make ongoing personal advancement imperative and place serious demands on learning agility. In today’s world, people are forced to improve themselves if they wish to keep up. The time-honoured Peter Principle describes how people are generally promoted to the point where they reach their own level of incompetence. A while back I amended it with what I call “the Charles Principle” (after Charles Darwin). The Charles Principle states that people who cannot keep developing themselves, are now becoming incompetent within their current role and will lose the struggle for survival in business.

Globalisation requires development and learning agility, as the world is increasingly becoming interconnected, Brexit and Donald Trump notwithstanding. More businesses are expanding their markets internationally, leading to more information and complexity. Businesses are now operating in a context with different cultures, interacting with a wider variety of foreign languages and broader ranges of legislation and trade agreements. International and cultural differences and the implications of these developments require training on the part of managers and employees. Obviously, fast learners have a better chance of beating their competition. In other words: the pace of learning is well on its way to overtaking knowledge itself in terms of importance.

The Peter Principle, that describes how people are generally promoted to the point where they reach their own level of incompetence, will soon be replaced by the Charles Principle. This means that people are now becoming incompetent within their current role, unless they manage to continue developing themselves.” –The Charles (Darwin) Principle

Measuring Learning Agility

In today’s recruitment process there are at least three ways to measure learning agility:

• A specialized assessment that focusses on learning agility
• A criterion-based interview that focuses on the learning agility and ability to adapt of the candidates
• Serious gaming

Of these, the first is perhaps less known to most people.

One way to measure learning agility is to present candidates with completely new situations in a focused assessment to see how quickly they learn to cope. Using similar online assessments is another way. There are various tools available; one of them is the model used by HFMtalentindex and Korn/Ferry. This model measures learning agility through four separate factors and one transcending element: self-awareness. This last element strongly affects the other four.

1. Change agility. Does the candidate enjoy change? Are they curious and interested in trying out new things? People with high change agility tend to be passionate about new experiences and are keen to explore the unknown.
2. Results agility. This factor focuses on the candidates’ ability to achieve goals in circumstances that may seem strange, unfamiliar and challenging. People with high results agility are generally focused on and driven by a need to achieve.
3. People agility. Is the candidate able to deal with a variety of people? Those with high people agility have an open mind to others with different opinions and from different backgrounds. They are eager to gain in-depth knowledge of others and can easily adapt to different surroundings or cultures.
4. Mental agility. This factor deals with the ability of a candidate to solve problems in an original or unique way. People with high mental agility are frequently provoked by new ideas, relishing the opportunity to think outside the box. They are more adept at discerning patterns in new circumstances than others are.
5. Self-awareness. This factor focuses on the ability of a candidate to have a realistic view of his strengths, weaknesses and areas of improvement. People with a high level of self-awareness are drawn to self-improvement and are eager to deepen their understanding of themselves and the world around them. A high level of self-awareness can work as leverage for the other aspects of learning agility. Conversely, a low level might have the opposite effect.

Overall my conclusion and advice to the CEOs I met in Bangkok was that in contemporary search, we should no longer just focus on skills and experience.  As Laszlo Bock, former senior Vice President HR of Google, would say – “we have found that learning ability is the leading predictor of success, number one above intelligence and education!”

 

 

This is the fourth of four articles digging into cultures aligned with the four fundamental strategies: Independent design, Stable production, Interdependent delivery and Flexibility.

A culture of flexibility is – wait for it – flexible. Its people are going to be all over the map. When you focus people on service or customer or guest experience as a higher purpose, when you ask them to care more about customer impact than about short-term results, when you push decisions out to them, don’t be surprised when your managerial authority is diminished. “Customer first,” by definition means everything else second.

Cultures like this help you win with service strategies. They are counter-productive for producing and delivering and probably distractions for designing.

Flexibility

This culture is labeled “Flexibility.” This is the opposite of stability, which suggests either outsourcing production and delivery or at least setting those functions up as separate groups with their own sub-cultures. There is an unavoidable conflict between people wanting to do whatever it takes to enhance customers’ experience and people trying to make or deliver things in a stable, orderly, safe way.

Ritz-Carleton hotels are filled with “Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” If you ask any bellboy to fix your broken TV, that bellboy owns that problem until it is fixed and has full authority to do whatever it takes to make you happy.  That bellboy does not have to fix the TV himself. But he does have to make sure it gets fixed and that everything that happens from that moment on enhances your experience.

Wonderful examples of retail service happen in high-end bridal boutiques. Their staffs’ attitudes are all about making their customers feel like princesses for the day. Expect Champagne and fawning service with wonderful gowns brought to you. These people don’t design the gowns, make them or even deliver them. Their job is to make you feel wonderful.

Leading flexibility

Leading a culture like this is akin to steering a galloping horse. You’re not really in control – and you don’t want to be. You’re going to have a decentralized organization. You’re going to give those decentralized leaders accountability. But you’re going to use things like the Ritz-Carleton’s “Gold Standards” to guide that accountability.

Polices are like holding the reins too tight. But letting go of the reins completely is a recipe for chaos. Deploying guiding principles is a middle way that guides your decentralized decision makers without tripping them up.

This is why these organizations’ ultimate leaders must think of themselves as chief experience officers. As such, they are keepers of purpose, the most caring people in belief, word and deed. This is how to get people in a flexible culture to follow you and provide the service required to deliver superior customer or guest experience.

ATLANTA, GA.  August 16, 2018 –   Concerns over the loss of company values may be delaying adoption of the gig economy, according to a new survey.

In the gig economy, freelance and contract workers will replace much of the salaried workforce.  The Harvard Business Review finds 150 million salaried workers have already been displaced, with expectations of filling 40% of the workforce by 2020.  But a new survey by Cornerstone International Group (CIG) shows that almost 90% of respondents still rely on full-time employees (FTE) for two-thirds or more of their workforce.

You can download the survey report here.

“The gig economy is a radical change to the traditional workforce structure,” says Larry Shoemaker, president of CIG. “We may have been overestimating how quickly it would happen”.

One overlooked reason for a more measured adoption of the gig economy is concern over company values.  Over 63% of respondents cited low involvement in, and knowledge of, company values as their biggest concern in replacing salaried employees with contingents.

“The concern over company values should not come as a surprise,” says George Bradt, a leading management authority and consultant to Cornerstone New York. “Your culture is your competitive advantage.  Competitors can reverse engineer your processes and poach your people, but they can’t replicate your culture.”

These reservations notwithstanding, survey results convey a sense of inevitability with regard to structural workforce changes.  Proponents of the gig economy cite flexibility as the biggest management benefit of on-demand labor. Over 15% have already changed their recruiting strategy and 74% are in the process of doing so – a total of just under 90% who acknowledge that change is on its way.

Cornerstone International Group provides global executive search and leadership development services through 56 offices in 35 countries.  The new workforce report is the 11^th annual survey of global business and economic expectations.

Are you gearing up for the gig economy ?

Although HBR believes 150 million workers have already left the organized workforce to work as independent contractors, our latest survey finds business leaders are still more comfortable with full-time employees.

Their biggest concern is a decline in knowledge and sharing of company values by freelancers and independents.

Continue reading…

• 2018 GLOBAL BUSINESS SURVEY REPORT – North America
• 2018 GLOBAL BUSINESS SURVEY REPORT – European