ExecMOJO

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

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