ExecMOJO

Talent Horizon

There’s trouble on the talent horizon and it comes in a lot of different flavors:

 

• According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, in 2010 over 10M jobs in the United States will go unfilled – in 2022 it will be 30M jobs

• College graduation rates are down to 54% and 75% of new jobs will require a college degree

• Making the wild assumption that Baby Boomers (44 – 62 years old) will leave the workforce when they are retirement eligible (is that at 55 or 65?) – there aren’t enough Gen X (28 – 43 years old) to replace them (78M Boomers versus 40M Gen Xers). Gen Y (7 – 27 years old) is big (70M), but still lacks the experience (hello…most haven’t even graduated) to make an immediate impact

• The average time in a company for Gen X is four years; for Gen Y it’s more like two and while the Boomers have been pretty loyal in the past, but the technology market hasn’t exactly rewarded them for that loyalty.

• According to an AARP survey of Boomers - 31% of mature workers became responsible for a dependent parent; 23% had an adult child move back home; and 16% were providing child care or day care for grandchild.  50 to 80 hour work weeks, while tolerated by Boomers and some Gen Xers, won’t be tolerated by Gen Y and won’t be of interest to Boomers as they ‘mature’ in their careers and many take on the care of family members. So, since everyone knows that a 40 hour work week for technology professionals is a joke – who’s going to be doing all the work?

 

There are a lot more questions than answers, but we’ll explore each of these challenges and some potential solutions in future blogs.

Sue Wyman

Want Top Talent?

The employment climate in the technology sector has changed dramatically in the past eighteen months.  There has been a shift from a client driven market to a candidate driven market.  Clients don’t want to believe that, but it’s true and we don’t see that climate changing in our lifetime.

 

The top candidates we talk to have multiple offers and are often counter-offered by their current companies. Some of the counter-offers we’ve seen in the past twelve months have been killer.   The myth of anyone (headhunter or employer) being able to control the decision making process of a great candidate is just that…a myth.  The candidate decides what’s best for them …not what’s best for the potential employer and certainly not what’s best for the headhunter.  Everyone involved needs to have a clear picture of the needs of the employer and the needs of the candidate. Being on top of what’s in everybody’s heads is paramount.

 

Employers who want to land great people need to be on their toes … companies spend untold dollars on corporate brand and then muck up their employer brand in the interview process by being unfocused, slow, and often times rude.  If candidates perceive that they are treated poorly in the interview process, can they really expect to be treated better when they sign up?  Probably not. 

 

Sue Wyman

Fake It Till You Make It ... a reasonable executive strategy?

Google lists 51,100 results on the phrase "Fake it till you make it".  It appears to us that this is a little-talked-about, but key strategy employed by both executives and managers entering new positions.  You can understand why it happens...who wants to ask their new hiring executive what results they're expected to deliver?  Aren't you already supposed to know that ... intuitively, I guess, since you were cool enough to get hired?  Aren't you expected to 'hit the ground running'?  Asking where the bathroom is, is a safer and sometimes less embarrassing question.

An inordinate amount of time (during the interview process) is spent on past accomplishments and the assessment of 'fit'. we're not saying this isn't important ... it is, but far too little time is spent on desired results and time-lines.  The 'could you'; 'would you'; and 'how would you' is pretty important stuff.  Too often the desired results aren't even known...or if they're 'known' might not agreed upon by the senior team, the board, or the investors.  This fuzziness can greatly inhibit the success of both the executive and the company. 

The bottom line is that everyone wants to be successful at their job.  To have the best shot at that, you need as much information as you can get, as early as you can get it. If the search firm that represents you can't give you the information you need to be successful, break through your reluctance to ask the team that interviews you hard questions.  We suggest some of the following questions.  Know that timing is everything and wait till it's both appropriate and meaningful to ask.

1) What are the three most critical results that this role should produce in the first year? 2) What are your expectations in the first 90 days? 3) What's the most important advice you could give me to be successful in this role?  4) What's the one thing that would kill my chances for success?

Collecting and acting on the information you'll receive from those four questions could go a long way to giving you the traction you need in that critical first year.

Sue Wyman, Partner, JivaroCXO

Keeping Leadership Talent Engaged – Start With Hiring and Onboarding

Low employee engagement and the millions of dollars that this is costing U.S. companies each year continue to be a challenge for executive teams everywhere.  Given a transient workforce, it is up to companies to hire and onboard leaders well, develop the talent and utilize it well while the leader is with the company and help employees leave well when they exit a company.  Starting with hiring and onboarding gives leaders a great start to what can be a mutually beneficial relationship.

There are three things that can be done easily in the hiring and onboarding process to improve the level of employee engagement from Day One.

1.    Work from a position that recognizes the transient nature of the workforce.

Suzanne Rey asserts that “the days of the loyal twenty-year employee are gone…most people will have at least 10 jobs in their lifetime” (source: press release for “Secrets from a Body Broker”).  Yet, it seems that most companies are still hiring and engaging employees as if it is the employee that would be the lucky one to work for their company.  It is critical that the company and the recruiter (internal or external) partner to ensure that the sourcing and recruiting processes are adequately focused on the needs of  “hot talent” – from things as simple as scheduling interviews that are convenient for candidates to the time it takes to come to consensus around which candidate will be offered the job. One of the regretful things that happens more frequently these days is having a hiring manager lose out on the “best’ candidate because he/she couldn’t be interviewed until several weeks from the initial contact.

2.    Ensure that employer brand and culture are transparently reflected throughout the recruiting process.

Hiring well is critical to the employee/employer relationship.  Part of this is making sure that the company accurately reflects itself and its culture during the hiring process.  As a retained executive search consultant, I continue to challenge myself to provide an unbiased view of the employer brand to the client and invest the time to adequately understand the culture/subcultures of the company.  With this understanding, my partners and I can align the process to ensure that it adequately reflects the promise that the company is making to the potential new employee.  So many leaders fail in the first year of starting a new company because they underestimate the impact of a mismatch in culture and values.  Although most candidates say that they can work for anyone, that doesn’t translate to the ability to navigate in unfamiliar cultural waters.

3.    Align expectations with new leaders.

Misaligned expectations are one of the major sources of failure for new leaders in their first year with a new company.  To avoid this, two things need to be in place (1) alignment within the executive team of the expectations of a new leader and (2) alignment and agreement between the hiring manager and the new leader.  We have developed a process that facilitates this alignment.  However, this is an area that can be quite intimidating to executives when they don’t have all the answers.  After all…if it was easy…everybody would be doing it!

-          Sue Schaefer, Partner, JivaroCXO

Employer Branding to Empower Recruiting and Retention

Every company has an employer brand.  The employer brand is essentially the reputation that is perceived by customers and current/potential employees of what it’s like to work at a particular company.  It is uniquely different than, but critically connected to, the customer brand.  Every company has the opportunity to shape their employer brand and create a differentiated perception of their company to ultimately attract and retain the “right” talent to execute business strategies.

Focusing on employer branding is becoming more important because the (1) the talent pool is shrinking and (2) competition for talent is intensifying.

·         According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 2010, 10M U.S. jobs will go unfilled and by 2022, 30M U.S. jobs will go unfilled.

·         If Baby Boomer leave the workforce when they are retirement eligible, there aren’t enough Gen Xers to replace them.

In today’s workforce, people have many job opportunities to explore and the best performers have a number of options available to them at all times.  So, how does a company begin to compete for the best performers needed in their business?  Simply stated, although not simply implemented, the answer is through employer branding that is targeted to the employees they need today and in the future.

There is a continuum of options available to build an effective employer brand.  Which options are chosen are highly dependent upon the level of executive involvement in the process and the openness of the leadership team to look at the difference between (1) candidate perception and reality and (2) the current vs. aspirational view of company culture.  At a minimum, the company can begin by realigning the recruitment process so that it transparently reflects the culture of the company.  The experience that candidates have in the recruiting process shapes potential employees’ and, in some cases, customers’ perceptions of the employer brand.  Optimally, the executive leadership invests the time and resources to identify, cultivate and communicate the employer brand needed to attract the right talent to the organization. 

No matter where the company starts, the best thing to do is get started…get focused…and begin to look at candidates as a type of customer.  Candidates have specific needs that have to be addressed just like the consumers of your products/services have needs that need to be addressed.  We all know that the one who meets the customer needs the best usually wins!

Sue Schaefer, Partner, JivaroCXO

Aligning Objectives to the Business Model

In my former profession, I had an “aspirational” passion around making sure that when people woke up and came to work in the morning, that they knew exactly how they contributed to the bottom line.  I say “aspirational” because it was a goal we never quite achieved, but we got very close.

I worked at a start up within an established parent company.  As a start-up, we had a very clear view of how the business made money and grew.  But, like many organizations, we were very dependent on others in the larger company to execute. And, also like at many companies, a large portion of my compensation was paid in bonus tied to the results I produced. I’m a huge proponent of paying for results, but I would get really frustrated when I would see a peer in another organization succeed at the expense of my goals.  It wasn’t done maliciously; it was just the way it was.  We all have to make trade-offs, and sometimes, my business didn’t make the cut.  It just didn’t make sense – to me (it hit my paycheck) or for the parent company who wouldn’t achieve the growth objectives for our product line. 

Instead of continuing to get frustrated, I decided to start focusing on what I could control (my own organization) vs. what I couldn’t control (the actions of another business).  I knew that if I experienced the pain of not reaching my goals because of what appeared to be competing objectives with interdependent organizations, that certainly the people in my organization were likely also experiencing something similar within our own business.

It was then that I brought in Bill Casey and Wendi Peck from Executive Leadership Group (ELG) to help me create a system of performance objectives for my organization that didn’t work at cross purposes or create win/lose situations.  ELG developed a methodology that is based on MOPS (Measures of Performance).  A MOP had to be specific and mutually exclusive of other MOPs assigned among peer executives in the organization.  An important part of the process was setting parameters for each of the MOPS that clearly identified the negative results that we would need to avoid while supporting the delivery of own objective. For example, I would commit to delivering a set of products and programs that would meet our margin objectives without blowing out the network and causing customer service problems. The ELG process was grounded in our strategy and business model and we defined MOPS/parameters for three layers of the organization.

For the first time since we launched the business, we were collectively focused on the specific results needed to grow the company.  Having these MOPS/parameters in place allowed us to refocus 500 people each time we had a change in direction from our parent company.  From a leadership perspective, it was amazing how the organization was transformed.  It was now relatively easy to redirect the business, respond to competition, and our team members were becoming much more collaborative and thoughtful as they worked cross functionally.  I was also pleasantly surprised to see how empowered people felt and how appreciative they were to have their responsibilities defined with such clarity.

Now, as an executive recruiter/onboarding expert, my passion has shifted from creating clarity in my own organization to sharing my experience with new executives trying to make big impacts within our client partners’ companies.  Tying performance to the business model is much easier said than done, but well worth the time and resources required to really make it work.

                                                                 --Sue Schaefer, Partner, JivaroCXO

Keeping Talent Engaged

It seems like everywhere I turn lately, there is an article, conference or report addressing the issue of low employee engagement or employee dissatisfaction and the millions of dollars that this is costing U.S. companies each year. I participated in a TeleForum by Patricia Wheeler of The Levin Group, entitled “Keeping Talent Engaged…Successfully” (www.thelevingroup.com).   She provided a very pragmatic approach to improving employee engagement and challenged each participant to finding ways to personally improve the situation.

Given a transient workforce, Ms. Wheeler asserts that it is up to companies to ensure that they use employee talent well while they are with the company, find ways to develop and grow employees and help them leave well when they exit the company.  She also describe what leaders, mid-managers and HR/OD professionals can do to improve employee engagement as well as steps that can be taken immediately to improve employee engagement  The second step is the “hire honestly” and effectively bring new leaders onboard.

After outlining how to get started, her call to action for participants was:  What are you going to do to keep people more engaged at your company (or the companies you serve)?  This got me thinking…as a retained executive recruiter, what am I doing to keep the people I serve - clients and new leaders - engaged?  I can honestly say there are three things I am doing:

1.   Working from a position that recognizes the transient nature of the workforce

Patricia started her teleconference describing today’s workforce as more mobile and expecting to have multiple corporate experiences. Suzanne Rey further asserts that “the days of the loyal twenty-year employee are gone…most people will have at least 10 jobs in their lifetime”. (source: press release for “Secrets from a Body Broker” )  Yet, it seems that most companies are still hiring and engaging employees as if it is the employee that would be the lucky one to work for their company.  In my opinion, the company and the recruiter need to partner together to ensure that the sourcing and recruiting processes are adequately focused on the needs of  “hot talent” – from things as simple as scheduling interviews that are convenient for candidates to the time it takes to come to consensus around which candidate will be offered the job. One of the regretful things that happens more frequently these days is having a hiring manager lose out on the “best’ candidate because he/she couldn’t be interviewed by “everyone” until next month.

2.   Partnering with my clients to accurately reflect their culture throughout the recruiting process.

In her TeleForum, Patricia suggests that “hiring well” is critical to the employee/employer relationship.  Part of this is making sure that the company accurately reflects itself and its culture during the hiring process.  As a retained recruiter, I am challenging myself to provide an unbiased view of the employer brand to the client and invest the time to adequately understand the culture/subcultures of the company.  With this understanding, my partners and I can align the process to ensure that it adequately reflects the promise that the company is making to the potential new employee.  So many leaders fail in the first year of starting a new company because they underestimate the impact of a mismatch in culture and values.  Although most candidates say that they can work for anyone, that doesn’t translate to the ability to navigate in unfamiliar cultural waters.

3.      Helping employers align expectations with new leaders

Misaligned expectations are one of the major sources of failure for new leaders in their first year with a new company.  To avoid this, two things need to be in place (1) alignment within the leadership team of the expectations of a new leader and (2) alignment and agreement between the hiring manager and the new leader.  I feel confident that our JivaroCXO process facilitates this alignment.  However, this is an area that can be quite intimidating to executives when they don’t have all the answers.  After all…if it was easy…everybody would be doing it!

-          Sue Schaefer, JivaroCXO

CMO: Most Dangerous Job in Corporate America

I recently read an article in Fast Company (June, 2007), entitled, “Most Dangerous Job in Business – It’s the Chief Marketing Officer” by Ellen McGirt.  As a previous SVP – Marketing and Sales (a CMO equivalent), I was especially interested in what was going on in the revolving door of the executive suites across the country.  The article sited a few interesting statistics from a 3-year SpencerStuart study.

Average Tenure at Top 100 Consumer Branded Companies

CMO Average	23 months
CEO Average	54 months
CMO– Telecom	15 months
CMO – Food Industry	12 months

Although the SpencerStuart study does say that “every departure has its own story…”, McGirt suggests that tenure is declining because pressures on the CMO have increased relative to quarterly Wall Street expectations.  CMOs are said to now need experience not only in advertising and promotions, but also in PR, finance, IT, manufacturing, customer service and branding.  I know this, in part, is true – marketing executives must have a much broader experience base to effectively carry out their jobs.  However, I believe that declining tenure is also an indicator of how these businesses are run and how clearly cross functional expectations are defined/aligned relative to the desired customer experience and business model objectives. 

Certainly there are poor hires, job expectations expand beyond an incumbents’ skill level and some CMOs don’t deliver on agreed upon expectations.  But, the CMO departures that have happened lately cannot universally be attributed to these reasons.   Let me explain my context first.

In my former position, I was held accountable for the numbers, but I was also fortunate enough to lead product development, sales, retention/loyalty and promotion and advertising.  We had a fairly well functioning executive team where we worked hard to set up accountabilities across functions and measure the business accordingly.  In the Marketing/Sales/Product organization, we knew three things:

• What the numbers were (close to real time),
• Why the numbers were the way they were (channel, churn, more spend, etc), and
• Who was responsible for that particular number in the organization.

Based on that, we would drive action in targeted areas when we needed to build on momentum or close gaps.  It really worked quite well and we were able to adjust our actions quarter to quarter based upon investment priorities and changes.  The unexpected perk of doing this was that “bad behavior” stuck out like a sore thumb and wasn’t tolerated often. 

What happens when these measures and accountabilities aren’t in place, is that havoc and bad behavior reign.  We’ve all seen situations where CMOs have been held accountable for numbers outside of their control – where poor numbers are blamed on advertising.  I don’t think I’m alone in believing that it’s impossible to advertise your way out of a product or distribution problem. Or, if it is possible, it’s really expensive and will kill your margins. Unfortunately, facts don’t always matter and executives can be caught off guard by fear-based distractions and attacks that work to get the attention off of poor performing areas of the business. 

I understand that there are always political maneuverings between functions in the business – it is human nature.  What I’m advocating is for the CEO/COO and executive teams to empower themselves and their teams by setting up transparent measurement systems and processes that enable people to work well together and focus on the customer to deliver business results.  The cross functional team that is incented to work together to bring the results in for the business will.  It’s not easy to create processes and systems that function throughout an entire organization, but well worth the effort for everyone – employees, shareholders, and the executive team. 

The SpencerStuart study showed that the tenure of CEOs is just a little longer than that of two CMO cycles (not counting the months of vacancy). It would be interesting to study longer tenured CEOs of successful companies whose CMOs also have a longer tenure to understand what is in the “secret sauce”.  We just might find that has a CEO with a CMO tenure problem may not have people problem, but a “relatively-easy-to-solve” process problem.

-- Sue Schaefer, Partner, JivaroCXO

Executive Onboarding: What, Why and How

I had an opportunity to be a guest on Tom Floyd’s Voice America Business radio show, Insight on Coaching, a few weeks ago  (http://www.modavox.com/VoiceAmericaBusiness 5/14/07 Coaching and New Employees: Shortening the Onramp to Productivity).  The show focused on the onboarding process and how executive coaching is being used to facilitate the process.

Tom first explored what onboarding is and why it is such a hot topic right now.  Onboarding is viewed as the set of activities used to support an employee when they start a new position/company.  Companies are investing more in onboarding programs primarily because they are becoming more and more challenged with retaining talent and helping people become more productive sooner in their positions.  Relative to retention, one statistic sited was that 50% of employees are planning on looking for a new opportunity outside of their companies within the next year (source: BusinessWire).  And, some experts believe this could be low.  The reasons people are leaving their companies was surprising to me.  More and more, employees are leaving not because of their supervisor, but because of the company.  Employees are continually challenged with doing more with less and employers concurrently have been able to “get away with” being less nurturing to careers and people. 

So, as a component of many retention initiatives, companies are investing in onboarding programs to help employees acclimate to the culture easier and become productive.  Studies continue to demonstrate that the better the onboarding process, the higher the level of employee engagement and retention.

While onboarding programs are better and more widely used, it still appears to me that most companies are using a “one size fits all” approach to design their programs.  I believe that with a little customization, companies could get a much bigger bang for their investment dollar, especially at the executive leadership level of organizations.  To customize the programs for executives, I look at why executives tend to fail in their new jobs.  Specifically, executives tend to fail in a new position for three main reasons:

1. Lack of clarity around expectations of the new executive and for the position itself.
2. Inability to adjust their personal work style to how work gets done in the new organization.
3. Inability to use the political acumen already gained in their career.

Executive coaching can help significantly in each of these areas to assure the leader has a good start in the new organization, potentially saving the company millions of dollars and lots of organizational headaches. I believe the most significant time investment is ensuring proper alignment of expectations among the CEO, peers and subordinates of the new executive.  Such a simple statement…but not so simple to do.  Providing a new leader with insight into how works get done can dramatically impact his/her success – especially in the first 90 days!

-- Sue Schaefer, Partner, JivaroCXO

Working for an "Asshole" - Take Control

A good friend of mine is suffering the attacks from her boss that, to quote her, is a “one scary dudette”. The complaint I hear about this and other executives is that they demand excellence and leadership from everyone but themselves. My friend is pondering two questions: 

1. Is this just the way it is in Corporate America?
2. I’m going to make a change.  Until then, what can I do to cope with this situation?

Coincidentally, I had just picked up a copy of a book entitled, “The No Asshole Rule…Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t” by Robert I Sutton, PhD.   The title of the book immediately drew me in because it seemed like it had to be written by someone with enough courage and life experience to call it like it is.  As I listened to my friend I thought that surely this book would have some magical formula for surviving this bully-like behavior. 

The book itself was quite entertaining, but also disturbing at the same time.  Dr. Sutton discusses studies that have measured that 27 - 36% of people feel they are working for an “asshole”.  He does distinguish between a “temporary asshole” (which we all are at times) and a “certified asshole”.  The latter is one that engages is persistent behavior that results in another person (most often a person with less power) leaving the interaction feeling oppressed, humiliated or belittled by the person.  Some of the everyday methods that these bullies use to belittle others are persistent insults, rude interruptions, invading personal territory, two faced attacks, sarcastic comments and/or treating you as if you’re invisible.  As a mother of a preschooler, these behaviors sound very close to the description of schoolyard bully - sans the black eye.

This behavior is not limited to Corporate America.  It exists across for-profit, non-profit and all sizes of companies and organizations.  Dr. Sutton suggests that we choose our opportunities carefully because life is just too short to spend it with “assholes”.  However, if you find yourself working for a “certifiable asshole”, there are two things you can do.

1. Reframe the nastiness in a way that enables you to emotionally detach yourself from the assholes.  One of my favorite quotes from Dr. Sutton’s book is the following:

Passion is an overrated virtue in organizational life and indifference is an underrated virtue.

He points out that sometimes a bit of detachment goes a long way in making life bearable.

2. Don’t struggle against the forces you cannot control and instead, focus on the good people in the company.  Pick the battles you can win and do what you can to make your workplace enjoyable.  This will help to sustain your self confidence.

Obviously, the cost to an organization of “asshole” behavior is huge.  It drives employee turnover, absenteeism, personal performance, time required for “asshole management” and adds to the difficulty of recruiting new employees.  Think of the organizations that have major assholes at the helm, the reputations these companies have and how you feel when approached to work for them. 

Dr. Sutton points out that when an asshole leads the company, the culture often becomes one driven by fear, loathing and retaliation where leaders are constantly trying to avoid blame rather than fix problems.  Sound familiar?  I think we’ve all had careers touched at least one time by such an environment.  If not, count your blessings!  The scariest thing is that he suggests that “prolonged bullying turns victims into assholes”. (Is this where all those people that were bullied relentlessly in school went to work?).

For those of us wanting to create a different environment, Sutton recommends adopting a “No Asshole Rule” to be applied to candidates, customers and clients.  Concurrently, we all need to learn, exhibit and teach our teams how to “fight” in constructive ways.

-- Sue Schaefer, Partner, JivaroCXO