Harmonics

Career ceilings happen; there are only so many seats at the top table. But, if you feel you have hit a career ceiling where you work, it’s important to firstly ask yourself, could I have done any more here? I would caution before you assume and blame others or the organisation. Start with holding the mirror up and go from there, but change starts from within.

As an Executive Coach, I worked with Rachael (not her real name) recently.  She worked diligently hard in her role and went beyond the call of duty to deliver big projects and get stuff done. When she came to me, she needed urgent interview preparation for an upcoming promotion. Unfortunately for her, she had left it too late. She had fallen foul to being busy in her job but not on her career. She said she was frustrated with an old boys’ club in her organisation. She ignored it and assumed her hard work would be rewarded in time. Surely, they couldn’t overlook her outstanding work achievements? Yes, they did. She was, in effect, considered too good in her current role to promote. More truthfully, she was doing such a great job, she hadn’t considered taking time to develop a suitable successor. She had made herself irreplaceable for now; but had also fenced herself into a role with no career development plan. Rachael had also never sought to influence across the organisation, she believed this was not her place. She relied on her work to speak for itself. When I challenged her more, she admitted she feared exposing herself in projects outside of her expertise. She preferred to stay within her own area of expertise, her comfort zone as she later conceded as she reflected more.

5 GREAT QUESTIONS

Hitting the ceiling happens for different reasons, here are 5 great questions to ask yourself. The answers will help you navigate the next best career move for you to advance your career.

Context – Is it them or is it me? Before you blame the culture, be honest with yourself. Have you worked hard to build a career brand that demonstrates you always wanted this next step up. Are you seen as a High Risk of leaving to the business if you leave? Why? Is this a culture you want to be part of in your future career? What is their track record for internal promotions here? Who gets promoted and why? Have you asked others, how they got their promotion?

Stepping Out – Do you need to step out before you step up? Stepping out is about becoming more visible, influential and known by others outside of your day job. Stepping up is what happens when you have stepped out often enough. Stepping out of your comfort zone is scary, but this is where there is high challenge and high skills development. Stop being busy in your day job and start creating opportunities to influence across and above in your organisation.

Executive Connections – How influential is your network? Stepping out across the business demonstrates your capability. The key leverage for breaking the ceiling is building Executive Connections. These are the influencers. Create ways to be in their company, target them at meetings or informal gatherings. Your job is to get to know them and become interested in their world and they in yours. Find out what their pain points are and what is keeping them up at night. Reflect on how you could be a solution. These influencers must know what you want to do next and why. The interview is often a charade, yes it may scupper chances if you don’t perform on the day, but most important is your relationship with key influencers before internal interviews.

Do you want to stay here anyway – Have you overstayed your welcome? Sometimes not getting promoted can be the great career alarm clock. Is it time to get up and go? Have you realised through this interview process the promotion was not for you anyway? Maybe you may have stayed too long and, if you stay longer, it is likely you will end up plateauing. If you can’t afford to leave because you have too much to lose financially, start making plans to do so. This starts with investing in yourself and your external network to become more employable and marketable outside your employer and your sector.

Peter Principle – Are you up to what the job requires right now? Beware you may be evaluating your performance in your current role rather than what is expected when you get promoted. Seek honest feedback, not just from the interviewers but others who know you and will challenge you. I have given frank feedback to many people in sessions and some have taken offence. “No one has ever been that direct with me before!”, one person said to me. I nodded my head and agreed, but then I asked “What have I to gain from telling you lies? You didn’t hire me to be your friend; you hired me to be your coach to improve your future performance!”

In Rachel’s case, she accepted the feedback and described one of our sessions as a “great awakening” and the day she woke up to the reality of what is required to overcome her career ceiling. The alarm clock went off for her.

If you have hit a career ceiling, do any of the above questions resonate? Be honest with yourself and act. Rachel has undertaken an external development programme and is exposing herself to a new network outside her own organization. We have assigned her a Communications Coach to build her influence and brand internally while she now spends time to mentor her future successor. She is serious about stepping out and stepping up and her CEO knows it, she has told him what she wants and why. She is now working smart and not just working hard! Time is ticking, and she is making herself ready for internal or external moves. She now sees the day she didn’t get promotion as the day the alarm clock went off and woke her up!

“Talent sets the floor, character sets the ceiling” Bill Belichick

If you are interested in finding out how you or one of your team can overcome the career ceiling, you can speak with one of our Coaching team https://www.harmonics.ie/meet-the-team/ by contacting Harmonics on 01 8942616, 061 336136 or 021 7319604 or email info@harmonics.ie

John Fitzgerald is the Founder of the Harmonics Group. Harmonics specialises in helping organisations plan for change, manage change and support their people through change.

Have you ever looked on in wonder at a young child totally immersed on their mobile device playing their computers games. They immediately go into their own world. This is a world of simulation, a repeating process of trial and error. Here the real learning happens; they must through exploration find the best way to gain a higher score in their computer game. They are continually trying new ways, raising their own skills and awareness. They are in competition with their peer community and they know who has attained the highest score. They are eager to climb the rankings to more challenging levels. To be competitive in this environment, they know they need to learn from their mistakes, and start again at zero if they fail. They accept failure as just a part of the game. They have autonomy to be creative and competitive in their chosen field without anyone telling them they look or sound stupid or giving negative feedback when they make a mistake. They know when they played bad, they don’t need telling; they just dust themselves down and go again. When they make a mistake they almost instantly know where they went wrong and how to make it right next time.

But at work they are warned to ensure they get it right first time. If they don’t, it will have big consequences. The boss, line manager or colleague shows them up in public and tells them and everyone else just how wrong they got it. Taking risks, trying new ways, being innovative are all espoused as something organisations want more of, but they better get it right first time! This leads the adventurous gamer who takes risks in their personal life to play safe and within the rules, fearful of doing something wrong at work. At home, this gamer tries, fails, tries again and fails, each time learning, adapting and raising their own performance standards even further. The difference? They have freedom within the framework of the game and are committed to learning and being the best they can be.

We are asked by HR departments for interventions to help shake their people up, to motivate them. When we delve into the problem we’re told their people are often on autopilot, working hard, but fearing they will get it wrong.  It’s understandable. A person’s standard rarely improves once a task is learned. At work, we become ‘lifelong doers’ instead of ‘lifelong learners’. Performance reviews don’t help much either, it’s a tick the box exercise for both parties. It’s no surprise that virtually every sector has seen their productivity flatline since around 07/08. The Global Gallup study shows employee engagement pretty much stagnant at 33%, year after year.

HR chases too many Fads’ – I see too many fad HR initiatives being rolled out in response to poor career development scores in employee engagement surveys. Fads don’t work but they tick the box that the organisation was seen to offer something to address the issue. Let’s do a motivational talk or a talk on managing stress and everyone will know then what to do when they are stressed. No, they won’t because the work environment will not change the day after the inspirational talk. These initiatives are all targeted at helping the person to change behaviour. We have seen from our kids playing computer games that if you create the right environment we will thrive to be better. It’s the environment that needs to change; this is a much bigger prize for HR to go after. This will bring the Big Win longer term. This is how HR will become more strategic and influential.

Stop going for the low hanging fruit HR with health and well-being talks, gyms on site and short-term fad’s. These won’t work if people are still working 60-hour weeks. These won’t work if you report into a boss that is known to be a bully and has poor relationship skills but is never challenged on their behaviour. Things won’t change if you are rewarding managers and employees to stay in roles too long. Start taking some risks – challenge your senior leadership team to create environments that enable talent to thrive, not plateau or leave.

I had a conversation recently with an organisation that has 97% retention. They wanted to increase movement around the organisation to build new skills, but found it hard to do this. The problem is a mud layer of managers at a certain level in the organisation, who have stayed too long and have no intention of leaving. It is their comfort zone and the organisation has facilitated this mud layer. They also found that new graduates are not staying. Why would they? They have nowhere to go. They can see no career prospects while the mud layer of management stay where they are. The organisation had a problem but didn’t know how to change it and create a high-performance culture. With our support, this was a goal worth pursuing which won’t just tick the box. We are transforming their culture and helping drive commitment, performance and productivity.

“Engaged employees are in the game for the sake of the game; they believe in the cause of the organization.” –Paul Marciano, PhD.

James Carville, Bill Clinton’s campaign manager for the 1992 Presidential election once claimed “it’s the economy stupid” which proved a highly successful strategy. He focussed on what was concerning people most and this had the greatest resonance.

In observing many organisations’ approach to Talent and Career Management, I believe many are not focussing on what is concerning people most. You might say “it’s the environment stupid!”. Bruce Lipton first coined this phrase in his excellent book ‘The Biology of Belief’. Bruce is one of the foremost thinkers in the revolutionary field of Epigenetics. He observed the impact a changed environment had on the cells he was studying. The cells changed their structure and function depending on their environment. These cells were shaped by where they live. It’s the same with people in organisations today, you and I are shaped by where we live and work.

They need to change! – We get many calls each week for Executive Coaching assignments. The assignments are common in nature – “Can you support a manager who needs to change their management style, develop their emotional intelligence and leadership capability?”

HR will share with us how their CEO would like a particular Senior Manager to change. In certain cases, these coaching assignments are remedial as it’s not about how the manager is or isn’t working out or changing, quite often, it’s the environment! The environment needs to change but no one is willing to have the courageous conversation with the CEO or the site leadership about why or how it needs to change. Organisations are outsourcing the problem to Executive Coaches to fix the unfixable problem. The problem is not just the person, it is the person in the environment.

Courageous Conversations – We know from Bruce Lipton that if we changed the environment this coachee could change. Instead, we are being asked to mould managers uncomfortably into a structure that does not work for them. Courageous conversations are not being had. The problem is often caused by the system, yet we focus on trying to fix the person. The answers are all in nature. Stay with me here, I am not going all earthy, I am simply speaking about you and me (human beings) who have evolved and adapted for the last 150,000 years on this planet. We thrive in systems that offer autonomy, mastery and purpose as Dan Pink confirms in his book ‘Drive’ on the psychology of motivation. See his Ted Talk here.

The pyramid structure – Institutional models are largely a creation of the industrial era. They were created to keep the managers who had all the knowledge at the top of the pyramid and the worker bees at the bottom on the production line. These traditional hierarchical legacy systems are no longer ‘fit for purpose’ for the future of work. The transition to more natural models is proving quite a challenge and this is where a lot of the tension lies in the system. There is a lack of courage to change from what we know, even though the industrial model is only over 100 years old. Instead, we try to change the person. I am not for one minute saying Managers don’t need coaching to develop their leadership capability. What I am saying is that it is a shared responsibility between the organisation changing and the person changing. Change is the order of the day and research below is a case in point.

The CEB Enterprise Performance Research in a multiyear global study showed some interesting findings from 23,000 respondents in answering what change they have seen in the last 3 years:

• Greater Organisation complexity 44%
• More interdependencies 50%
• Increased access to information 56%
• Co-workers in another global location 57%
• Work that requires collaboration 67%

New capabilities and critical skills are required by Organisations that demand greater collaboration, sharing knowledge and staying closer to the customer. This cannot be managed successfully in a traditional pyramid structure. There is a seismic shift happening in the way we are working. There is, and will continue to be, a shift away from the individual who is in it just for themselves or the hero leader who hoards information and knowledge to achieve their personal goals and bonus. People can see through this today and don’t like being used as pawns in the system. If they see this happening, they purposely slow the system down or leave, thus giving your competitors the advantage.

Model from Josh Bersin, The New Organisation: Different by design

The big shift is to collaborative working, greater interdependency and access to new sources of changing information. The future organisation needs to be fluid and this requires agile individuals and teams who give and take information freely and speedily to deliver better enterprise solutions. This fluid system is simply a representation of the biological cell system. The cell system is not a hierarchical one, it is a networked system all working in unison. The hierarchy requires higher level decisions, slows information response time and causes blockages in the system, yet organisations still adhere to this traditional pyramid structure.

If you want to foster agile working and greater innovation you need to create a networked organisation. Many Leaders will share with us “If only they could get their people to change”. The CEB research contradicts this view and highlights “it was not employee willingness to change that was the problem; it was the environment structures and heritage practices that blocked innovation”. We are moving from the industrialised economy to the connected economy. Control and job titles are being replaced by innovation, agility and varied work tasks.

Your organisation is more than likely a spider’s web full of interconnected networks rather than an ordered pyramid. Organisations need to value and reward contributions of those with critical expertise and those who collaborate both inside and outside the organisation to enable innovation. Your Leaders need to know who these people are and have career conversations to understand their motivators, career aspirations and skills they are capable of developing in the future.

Feel the Fear and Do it anyway – In our experience, HR are fearful of challenging the CEO and Leadership on their thinking. They do not believe they have enough clout and will not be taken seriously because they do not have an accountancy degree or a background in business. In other cases they fear for their jobs if they rock the boat. The HR role is to gather that presenting data for change and become more influential in helping to change the structure of their future organisation. With the onset of automation, it will be your people’s ability to innovate and influence that will be the key differentiator. Lean and Six Sigma programmes have in many cases taken out costs and made many businesses more efficient.

The future is about adding value and driving a culture of agility and innovation. This is harder to measure and predict the end result. Boardrooms like certainty, if you do x you will get y. This is why many Leaders are stumped. They are fearful of changing away from what they know because there isn’t a proven model. They need to understand there won’t be a proven model because change is happening so fast. The future is about adapting as you go. If you wait you will die, if you adapt you will fail sometimes and win sometimes. The future of work is going to be a roller coaster.

Career Frameworks are needed to reflect the new reality of the more networked organisation. We are living in a highly connected open networked world of work. There is a need to build strategies to support more networked organisations. Chris Ernst in his research work featured in his book ‘Boundary Spanning Leadership’ found that the greatest challenge Leaders found was in enabling people to make horizontal cross functional moves. Organisations speak about the scarcity of talent in the market; they spend lots of money trying to attract new talent but from our experience are not doing enough to reimagine their in-house talent in upskilling them to make cross functional moves.

Some reflective questions in summary

• Is your environment enabling or disabling your Talent Management Strategy?
• Are you avoiding a courageous conversation with a Business Leader out of fear?
• How many of the 5 changes in the CEB study impact your organisation and how are you preparing your people?

If you would like to speak to Harmonics about any of the above, here are just a few of the interventions we make available to clients

• We share our insights in Future of Work talks on Leadership off-sites to introduce external thinking into traditional businesses. We challenge Leaders to think differently and come away with fresh perspectives on the environment they are creating to attract and develop talent.
• We deliver ‘career conversations’ workshops to enable leaders and managers have courageous conversations about creating career growth opportunities that match business challenges.
• We design Career Frameworks that reflect a modern networked organisation that is close to the customer and offers non-traditional internal career transition moves to meet changing business needs.

It’s January and it’s a busy month of the year for Transfers in the Premiership Football season. Sky Sports has a Transfer Centre to update us on the latest big money moves before the transfer window closes. These Premiership Football stars have their agents to advise them and negotiate big money moves between clubs. Alexis Sanchez recent move from Arsenal to Man United will see him earn a staggering £600,000 a week, yes a week.

It’s also hectic Transfer season for Employers scouring the market for new talented stars to join their teams. All this transfer talk got me thinking about the many talented people we meet that have to make life changing decisions by accepting or turning down a job move.

Here, I have looked at four categories of people we meet – you may identify with one of them – and I highlight some of the career advice I might be giving you if you retained me as your Highly Paid Agent

So where are you now in your career?

In my experience, you are somewhere broadly in one of these 4 categories:

1. Reactive/Curious – You are not actively looking but have been contacted by a recruiter for a new job, you don’t feel now is the time to move but you are curious why you were contacted
2. Reactive/Ready – You have been contacted by a recruiter, you have not been job seeking but with the right offer would be open to consider new moves
3. Proactive/Ready – Your role is going to made redundant or you have experienced redundancy and keen to get back into another job
4. Proactive / Curious – You are proactive and always testing the market to see what further career opportunities are out there. You are not ready to move right now but always keeping an eye to the future

Reactive/ Curious

You have received a call or a LinkedIn message out of the blue; a recruiter would like to speak to you about an opportunity. Let’s face it, it is flattering, we all like to think someone wants us. Even if you are really happy in your current role, it peaks your interest even to find out how much they might offer. If you do return the call, it can open up an interesting conversation about a new role in a new sector. My advice is to be curious, find out more about the employer, their challenges and how they compare to your employer. A word of warning, you may also be contacted as a result of a robotic AI recruitment process churning out matches to your LinkedIn profile. This leads to a conversation with an inexperienced junior recruiter with little business experience busily trying to hit their monthly sales targets. The increase in online recruitment means you are going to get many more suggested job offers than before. Take time each week to review your LinkedIn requests and build career connections with a select number of quality recruitment professionals. They have lots of personal connections to employers and you never know when you will need them in the future.

• Be curious and ask valid questions to increase your market knowledge
• Don’t ignore, a courteous reply is never wasted, stating the type of role you would like to be contacted about in the future

Reactive/Ready

You have been contacted about an open role and after a conversation, the role sounds appealing and you would consider a move. The recruiter would like to put you forward for an interview. Remember, you are at all times in control of your personal brand and the CV that is forwarded will need editing and tweaking to marry the job specification. It is not enough to ask the recruiter to tidy up your CV. Your CV is your personal brochure and it speaks volumes for your brand. Get professional support to make it the best you can in advance of forwarding. I have found people are poor to highlight their own achievements but it is very easy for me as a career coach to ask questions to uncover these achievements. This work also helps with your upcoming interview and marrying your relevant experience to the role requirements. If you consider going forward for the role, write down 3 big reasons why you want the role and commit to give it everything in the interview process. I have seen people contacted about a role and adopt an attitude that the employer has to prove to them why they should work for them. If the employer feels they have to impress on you so much why you should take it, the future work relationship is doomed for failure. Like in any relationship, there needs to be a mutual commitment to making this work

• Present your brand in the best way possible at interview, even if you don’t end up taking the job, remember hiring managers move jobs too, so you never know where you might meet them again
• Review the process, your learnings and any potential development gaps you may not have realised you had pre-interview

Proactive/Ready

As a result of a restructure you have found yourself out there again proactively trying to find a new role. As we deal with a lot of outplacement candidates, this is often a time where we see urgency getting the better of common sense. Proactive job search is a process. There are steps in every process, but urgent job seekers will want to skip vital foundation steps in an effort to get to find another job. Certainty is replaced with uncertainty. This leads to panic replies to every potentially suitable job advert online. My advice is to clearly define what your ideal next role looks like. You don’t go online to buy any car, any dress, you shoes. You have a good idea what you want and what style, model and colour will suit you.

I cannot tell you how many people fail to do this exercise. What work tasks ideally would you be doing, in what sector, at what salary level, in what location, in what type of culture, what next challenge appeals to you and why, what type of company describes this list? When I get people to complete this exercise, I then speak about their gaps to finding this role. These gaps might be network, education, skills or salary expectations. To address gaps you need to reinvest in your learning. This could be practical or academic. I have just worked with someone and there gap is a network in a new sector. Once we started to discuss who may be in that sector, names started dropping. They had more connections that they had thought. This was their gap. When I ask some urgent job seekers to complete this exercise, they say “I just want a job, as any job is better than no job, I just need to get back earning again”. I say yes, but you also want to get back earning in an environment where you will thrive rather than just survive and soon want to leave.

• Clarify what your ideal next job looks like, you simply have to know what you are looking for before you find it, otherwise you allow yourself to take a job that’s not for you
• Address your network, skills, education or salary expectation gaps as these are your barriers to future career success

Proactive/ Curious

You are happy doing what you are currently doing and wouldn’t describe yourself as actively job seeking. But you have the mind-set of a top football player who always seems to be in control of a game. Top sports stars don’t just focus on the outcome, they focus on the process. This is a critical mistake a lot of people make in their careers. They target one future role as the Holy Grail. I once coached a client who told me that in his twenties he ambitiously set a goal to be a Country HR Director by the time he hit 40. He worked hard and exceeded his own expectations by reaching the role at 36 years of age. He was sent to me for career coaching at 39. He had achieved his lifetime ambition but when he got there felt unfulfilled. He was still only 39 and had not thought about the next 25-30 years. He had one focus that, when realised, was not what he once thought it might be like. This hero’s journey to the top often follows with questions like “what’s next?”
The top footballers can see a potential future move before anyone else. They can sense the way the game will go from fine tuning their skills. In the modern career game, you need to see the world of work as an evolving series of game changing events. You need to learn to spot new potential opportunities that are a match for your skills and talents. If you don’t, someone else will.

• Scan the internal and external market for new future projects and opportunities, like a great footballer, you have your ‘head up’ looking for a gap to exploit
• The career game is a process, there is no one ‘holy grail’ job, best to focus on a series of intrinsically rewarding career growth moves.

If you remain proactive and curious throughout your career lifetime, you will largely remain in control of your future career moves. If you choose to remain reactive, you will always be adapting to fit into someone else’s idea of what they think you should do. Speak to one of our team of Harmonics career coaches and let us be your insightful agent to gain that extra insight before you feel pressurised to make the wrong move for you and your future.
Every success for your next career move.

People who end up with the good jobs are the proactive ones who are solutions to problems, not problems themselves, who seize the initiative to do whatever is necessary to get the job done.
― Stephen R. Covey

Building a strong performing leadership team can take time. However, for a private equity-backed business, they often don’t have the luxury of time. In this guest blog, Kevin Murphy sets out four guiding principles to building a senior leadership team for a PE backed business. At the speed at which larger and more established organisations are changing, I believe some of the principles would serve many CEO’s who are under pressure to deliver immediate results. Finally, as a member of Ireland Smart Ageing Exchange (ISAX), I’m delighted to see Kevin highlighting the ‘reverse ageism principle’. Hope you enjoy the read, John.

 

When looking at building a senior leadership team for a PE backed business, it’s hugely different from that of a plc or large corporate. From my experience, a PE backed business typically has a timeline of 3 to 5 years to deliver significant results for the PE fund. Accordingly the leadership team, and the hiring CEO, must develop and deliver strong business results quickly.

Whenever I joined as CEO of a business, one of the first things I would do is assess the existing management structure to ascertain if adjustments were necessary to turn the performance of the business around, or to push a successful business to achieve greater returns. I generally use a few firm principles to guide me and these are broadly as follows:

Don’t compromise and be ruthless if necessary

There can be no hesitation or compromise to ensure you build the strongest performing teams. I believe it’s crucial to wait for the right person; it’s all about getting the right people you need to achieve business goals. If not, it will come back to haunt you and cause you unnecessary issues later on.

If you inherit a team, then it may be the case that this team is not structured or built with the right skills to enable you to carry out the activities required by the business. The growth of the business simply requires bringing in fresh team members who have the necessary vision and skills.

In this situation, you need to make the hard calls. If people lack the right skills or cannot do the job, then they must go. There is no scope for compromise. With the demands and pace of a PE backed business, there really is no room for passengers. This is frequently a difficult part of the job to exit people, however I believe that the wider business understands that difficult decisions need to be made. They will acknowledge where a CEO has made a difficult leadership decision.

Experience is essential

On that basis, there are certain things I always look for in building a leadership team, namely people who have 25-30 years of experience under their belt. I call it my “grey hair” principle. It’s a great support to me as CEO to have a mature, experienced team sitting around the leadership table who will not be fazed by the various business challenges. They will pretty much have seen it all before. This reverse ageism principle has always served me well and I have had great, older colleagues who have done great jobs for me. The other big advantage of this is that they tend to speak their minds more and can contribute strongly to the growth of a business.

As CEO, I don’t have the time to wait through a long adjustment period for management to find its footing or develop into their roles. With the right leadership in place, I can be more confident of delivering the annual return and ongoing growth that investors expect.

Once or twice however I’ve made mistakes, hired someone who wasn’t ready, or wasn’t right for the role. This is when the 6-month probation period is crucial as this allows a get-out for both parties. I believe that setting clear goals for the first 6 months, and giving regular performance feedback, is crucial to letting a new hire know he / she is performing. If they are not hitting the required standard in these first 6 months, I have at times exited people at this stage. This is tough to do but is better in the long run for me as CEO and for the business.

Let them get on with it

When you have experienced people in place, who know more than you do frequently, it aids in the overall momentum of the business. You can give them clear goals, get out of their way and simply let them do their jobs. By identifying situations where strong existing leadership just needs greater independence and rewards, this makes it easier to push the business forward. A good friend of mine uses the 3D rule of management – Decide, Delegate & Disappear! I don’t quite do the “disappear” bit but I do like to actively delegate and let my experienced team work away on delivery.

I also strongly encourage people to have different opinions to me. This challenges me, and ultimately provokes more valuable discussions with respect to business issues. Tapping into the reservoir of others’ experience can lead to far greater returns than having to pull people along with you.

So, in summary, when you hire people that have been around the block, they can handle themselves and the demands required of them leaving you to focus on strategy, direction and other issues.

Consider your Succession Plan

Lastly, as CEO, I believe that it is imperative that you think about your succession plans and how to develop more junior colleagues so that they can potentially step up to more senior leadership roles in due course. Ideally the skillsets and experience is there for every team member to move upwards in the chain but it’s up to the CEO to ensure that smooth transition and to create opportunities for it to happen. Keeping an eye on the future line-up is part of maintaining a strong leadership team.

Hopefully you have enjoyed this short read about the few key principles that I have used in building leadership teams, particularly in demanding PE backed businesses. Perhaps in different types of businesses a CEO may have a longer development time line or may not be under such intense pressure for results each month or quarter. Certainly when I worked as CEO in a plc business, there were always options to move people to other parts of the wider Group so the need to exit people was not as intense. However PE backed business have a particularly demanding dynamic I believe and hence why, as CEO, I adhered strongly to these principles. They have served me well to date!

 

Kevin Murphy is an independent leader in the payments industry, working with domestic and multinational clients to shape their business strategies and improve business performance. With more than 30 years of experience in the financial services industry across Ireland, UK and the US, he is skilled in all aspects of the global payments business, cards and payment systems and in consumer finance issues, including consumer protection, banking regulation and marketing strategies. Kevin now uses his depth of Consumer Finance and Payments knowledge and experience to assist organisations with strategy and execution, advising clients on EU and domestic payments strategies. He is also highly experienced in working with Private Equity businesses in this market. His niche consultancy Colthurst Card & Payment Solutions offers consumer finance and payments solutions to businesses across Ireland, the UK and the USA. You can follow Kevin on @kevinmurphyIE, connect with him on uk.linkedin.com/in/kevindmurphy1 or contact him at kevin@colthurst.ie

 

 

To learn more about Harmonics Leadership Development programmes, please contact Harmonics on 01 8942616, 061 336136 or 021 7319604 or email info@harmonics.ie

 

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“It’s the first time you’ve driven me to school Dad!”

As part of an Executive Outplacement Programme Harmonics is delivering for an organisation, I am currently coaching a Senior Executive who has decided to take a voluntary severance package. He is a driven go-getter and always has been. Keen to look to the future, he has quickly put his previous employer behind him and wants to move on. He only finished up in the past month with his former employer and already has a job offer on the table which he was keen to accept and get back to work.

He loves being busy, achieving goals and ‘driving on’, as he says himself. He is a talented executive who will do well in his next position for the employer lucky enough to get him. He is in his late forties now and the change in career is coming at the right time for him to reposition himself into a different industry sector.

On the rebound

In our sessions, I noticed this rush to get to the next job. It’s fairly common, especially before people have finished up in their previous roles. There’s a mad dash to bank the severance package and make a seamless transition to the next role. The mad dash is derived from the fear of not being busy and that life would not have the regular routine structure. Getting another job as soon as possible also seems the perfect remedy to get over a relationship that ended not so well. If we were speaking about relationships, we might call it “on the rebound”.

Time to himself

In the last few weeks my client has found himself with more time on his hands than ever before in his life. He doesn’t have a structure, meetings, deadlines, emails or teleconference calls. So this week he did the school runs. His eldest, who is 15 years old (the same age as my own daughter), surprised him by saying “Do you know it’s the first time you have driven me to school Dad?” He was dumbstruck.

It dawned on him for the first time just how consumed he had been by work, striving to achieve more and more year after year. He was never around to do the school runs. He has always been busy at work. Busy making sure his family have everything they want. But the simple things in life can be overlooked in the chase to be successful. He spoke of the blindness that extreme work brought to other parts of his life.

It happens. Aspects in your life suffer that you don’t even notice, because you have been blinded by what you think is important. It is not until you take the time to stand back that you can see how consumed you have been by it all.

Time passes swiftly

Following my coaching session, I went for lunch and bumped into a former work colleague who was having lunch with his 17 year old daughter. He had spent the last six months recovering from a health scare. He couldn’t drive because of an eye disease that turned serious. He had to stop work but his scare has been averted and he’s looking to get back to work again early in the New Year. The illness, he said (as he looked at his daughter), made him realize the really important things in life are those closest to you, your big rocks.

It is only two months ago that I lost a big rock in my life. I buried a great friend who passed away after a two year battle with cancer. He was only 48 years old and a role model to so many who knew him. He was hugely successful in business, but always had time for a coffee and a chat. He exercised daily, was a non-smoker, non-drinker and left behind a loving wife and two teenage kids. He even wrote a moving message to be read out at his funeral. In the note he had written “I have no regrets”. He had balanced a successful business life with spending lots of time with his kids and family. He always spoke about having time for family. He has been taken too early but his words “I have no regrets” lead me to think, how many of us can say the same?

Time to think

In the last couple of weeks, my coaching client has been able to get some time to think and reflect. He has begun to notice the things he has missed for so long because he has been distracted by being busy. He has time to think.

We are coming up to the Christmas break when many of us get time to think. The break gives us time off the roller coaster we call work. We let go of emails for a while and catch up with family and friends. We get time to indulge ourselves and have some fun. We take time to read for leisure or go for long walks. Our days lack discipline and are unstructured. It takes a bit of getting used to recalibrating to just being. The technology enabled world wants us to stay connected and prompts us to keep engaging, read the latest tweet or social media post.

Time to be

One of the key lessons I have learned from coaching is not to miss out on our own daughters growing up. I was coaching another busy exec that had lost their job around the time she was born and what he said changed my perspective on parenting for life. He told me that he had invested the past 27 years of his life in a corporate and they had just cut the umbilical cord. He admitted, crying openly to me, that work had taken hold of his life and he had not only lost his job, he had lost his marriage and his relationship with his teenage daughters. He had been distracted by work and missed out on all the important things in their growing up. This served as a timely message to me; don’t lose your family and your daughter however busy life gets.

I am busy like many others. Yes, I am often away mid-week, but what is key is to make the time to chat, to be and if possible to do the school runs every so often. Time to connect, to listen, to think together, to share fresh insights, to laugh heartedly, to spend doing stuff that is just pure fun and to create memories. I can look back at 2017 and say we have created great memories. This blog earlier in the year speaks about our fun trip to London. https://www.harmonics.ie/what-i-learned-from-seeing-kinky-boots/

Time to reflect

In our business we receive many calls from people who have had time to think over Christmas and want a career or job change. So it’s that time of year for us all to reflect. Here are some questions that may help you to think about what’s really important for 2018 and beyond.

• What were your standout memories for 2017?
• Did they include the really important people in your life?
• What didn’t you get the time to do that you would have wanted if you had more time?
• What memories do you want to create in 2018?

If something needs changing, stop saying I’m too busy, change yourself or change the situation. Take time to think, be and most important of all, have no regrets!

  “This time like all times is a good time if we knew what to with it” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

What Do Talent Really Want?

At Harmonics we are increasingly being asked to talk to Senior Leaders about Talent Management and why they need to prepare a Talent strategy. I wanted to share my insights on how we need to get real when thinking about Talent Management.

Is it all about the money?

Corporate Business Leaders are rewarded by how much money they make each quarter for their shareholders. It’s quite simply a numbers game to succeed. HBR this month profiled the Best Performing CEO’s in the world for 2017. Three metrics were used to identify the best:

1. Country adjusted total shareholder return
2. Industry adjusted total shareholder return
3. Change in market capitalisation

It is no surprise from the metrics used that, for a CEO, their track record in delivering financial return to investors is what matters. There is no mention in the metrics about talent attraction, development or attrition, yet we are consistently hearing that an inability to “get the right people” is slowing down business growth.

Short Termism

Top Global CEO’s now make more than 300 times the average worker, up from a 20-1 ratio in the 1960’s. While the salaries have been increasing, CEO tenure has been decreasing each year since 2000. Fortune 500 CEO’s survive 4.6 years on average. These CEO’s and their Leadership teams are under immense pressure to hit the ground running and deliver the numbers. We see the short termism playing out publicly in the Premiership as Football Managers get a short time to deliver results or they are gone. The HBR Best performing CEOS however lasted on average 16 years and had time to effect the change.

This pressure at the top has an impact on attracting and retaining top talent. This short term numbers game is visible for all to see within the organisation.

Everyone wants Top Talent

To deliver the metrics and business results, the heat is on to find the best talent and have them playing as a united and aligned team. So why is everyone finding it so hard to attract and retain top talent. Here are 4 observations from the work we do:

• Every Organisation wants to hire the “perfect fit”
• Top Talent want continuous “career growth” opportunities
• Younger talent have huge “social power”
• Don’t write off older talent too soon

 Every Organisation wants to hire the “perfect fit”

We have personal experience to relate to this point. In our recruitment division, Harmonics Recruitment, we have noticed that the time it takes Hiring Managers to make hiring decisions is often too long. If the recruitment process slows down, it can send a message to those shortlisted and impact on the organisations ability to attract the best talent. Difficulty scheduling meetings in Senior Leaders diaries can slow down the hiring process but the real reason great candidates are lost is because employers keep holding out for the “perfect fit”. Everyone wants the “highly experienced with specific industry experience and a glowing track record” so they can hit the ground running. In a tight labour market, there needs to be more realism on what is available in the talent market.

We also observe Business leaders reacting to different crisis, spending days in back to back meetings and putting out fires. They don’t have time to coach and mentor new hires. Hence, they want the “perfect fit”.

However, to attract talent, leaders need to commit time to coaching them to bridge the industry or skills gap. Yes, it does take time, but when you hire for attitude and mind-set then the skills and knowledge acquired in the role offers the career growth talented people are looking for. What hiring managers need to realise is that their idea of a “perfect fit” is based on a CV that describes what a person has already done and often not what they want to do next. Those being headhunted will often ask our recruiters where the career growth opportunities lie in a role that looks similar to what they’ve being doing for the past 2 years. So when recruiting, it is important to remember that your perfect fit may not be the candidates idea of a perfect fit for their career future!

Top talent want continuous “career growth opportunities” – When speaking to a Senior Director last week, she described her experience with a past employer. She said “it was a time when there was just one amazing career growth project after another. I never thought of leaving. I had great mentors who created the paths for me to develop new skills. I learned more there than with any other employer”.

Organisations have become flatter and retention strategies driven by ‘promotion promises’ are simply unsustainable. The career up the functional silo is too narrow and does not build out the breadth required for future leadership roles. Career success is not only about promotion, top talent may want to stay and deepen their knowledge and skills in specialised roles critical to the future organisation. Offering hi-potentials a management position without ascertaining a ‘skills fit’ leads to a great career hitting an unexpected crash without any warning. Our career accelerator coaching programmes have been designed to guard against this happening. Great career progression in organisations needs to change to be become more about further developing your strengths which enhance future employability rather than just climbing the ladder to promotion.

Today, there is a dual ownership onus on both employer and employee in making career growth opportunities happen. Roles are constantly changing, new job titles are appearing and new skills are in demand. To use the football game analogy again, the game is constantly changing, it is about adapting and anticipating to these changes. We have helped organisations illustrate changing career paths to paint a clearer picture for employees where they can grow in an organisation that is rapidly changing. The traditional org chart has now become an organic chart that is quickly evolving as new skills are needed.

Younger talent have huge social power – Like-minded younger talent gravitate towards each other. They see what others are doing and want some of that too. They are that stage of life when they are curious and seeking new experiences. They also don’t trust organisations like their parents did because they have seen their parents being made redundant after giving many years loyal service.

Instead, the new loyalty is to look after numero uno. It is about gaining as many varied experiences, skills and knowledge on their CV as possible. The CV today is like a career passport where lots of organisations, roles and achievements are stamped on it. This new approach affords mobile talent entry to new employers and ensures they never go stale.

For organisations, it is being clear from the outset that talent will leave. It is not personal, it is just how the game is now played. But it is just important to learn the preferences of this nomad generation of mobile talent and help them to grow while they stay. They may come for a while and they may boomerang back again at some point on their career journey when they have learned new skills. We also see great opportunities for organisations to help younger talent become teachers of specific skills while they are here. This way they have left a legacy and the organisation has been enriched instead of feeling anger about talent moving on. Younger talent have huge social networks and their word is gospel to their friends in choosing where to work. If they have a bad employee experience, it goes viral on Glassdoor at speed. It is true, social is the new power.

Don’t write off older talent too soon – In our research, the average age when people are getting the tap on the shoulder from corporate employers to take a package appears to be 52. This milestone seems to indicate when someone has become too expensive in the corporate world. It’s leading to a lot of stress in the workplace for this age cohort who feel let down because they have offered such loyalty.

There is a new employer-employee contract required for those talented people who are being pushed out before their time is up. Those who fear they may be at risk need to develop a growth mind-set and demonstrate how they can learn new skills and pitch what they have to offer. This is what is required in the new world of work.

Your career is your business and it is up to employees to keep pitching for work like a start-up would to an investor. I have seen people in this age bracket be reactive and wait for the organisation to tell them what to do. The onus is on the employee to make the business case to their employer.

Employers, on the other hand, need to have development conversations with their over 50 talent. I see talented people over 50 being written off too young because frank and honest conversations failed to happen on both sides. In our opinion, those who are 50 plus need to opt-in to taking on further professional development. By opting out, they are demonstrating a fixed mindset and telling their employer they are closing the door to new internal opportunities. It may be the right time to leave, but the size of the package is only one consideration, how to become employable and marketable in the future is another and this requires opting-in to some form of development.

“Not everything that counts can be counted”

This quote by Albert Einstein was never more relevant in the search for talent. The best performing Global CEO’s list is indeed measured by financial metrics. The best performing talent more often than not do not trust organisations.  They instead trust what their friends tell them and what they read on Glassdoor. This is not so easily counted. Metrics find it harder to identify the manager that is blocking a talented person’s opportunity to make their next internal career move which is the real reason they leave. It is only in hindsight that we hear about the recruitment process that took too long because leaders could not make a decision about a candidate that wasn’t just the “perfect fit”. The busy leader who is still rewarded with their bonus even though they are stuck in back to back business meetings and haven’t taken the time to coach and have career conversations with their talented people who are being head hunted and feeling loved elsewhere. The busy organisation that fails to proactively create “career growth” opportunities for their hi-potential talent and then mourn when they leave.

Attracting, developing and retaining talent is not all about offering better money or office perks. It is, more often than not, about having the time for great career conversations to find out what talent really want both at interview and as they progress in your organisation. It is about taking the time to have lunch offsite and listen, truly listen to what is being said so you can help your talent to grow. Tony Crabbe wrote in his best-selling book Busy. “It’s the first time in history we can work when we want to so we do!”

The above strategies do not cost any money, they simply require attention. They won’t appear in any financial metrics for a Best Performing CEO but they will make a huge difference to your talent strategy. We just need to be more honest with ourselves and take the time to discover more about our great talent before they leave.

“If you need to conceal your true nature to get in the door, then you’ll probably have to conceal your true nature to keep that job” – Seth Godin – Lynchpin

With the recession behind us and the economy growing, the competition for top talent is intensifying. Interestingly, it’s not just the experienced or specialist employees that are in demand but the open-minded, fresh-thinking millennials are just as sought after as our workforce becomes increasingly transient.

They are the much talked about generation fuelling endless tomes of research, studies and reports. And while past reports of job-hopping millennials may have been exaggerated – some companies still struggle not just in hiring millennials but retaining them. They will make up 50% of the global workforce by 2020, so companies need to consider making changes to their organisational structures and management styles – now.

Overall, millennials value career and personal development over money and status. So, strategies beyond remuneration need to be developed. Here are our 5 recommendations for businesses who want to respond to the new world of work and engage millennial talent:

1. Flexible and trusted – Millennials have ambition and drive but this should not be seen that they want to work all the hours to be like the generation before them. Now they are seeking more work-life flexibility. They want to be trusted to work remotely, they want to dress casually, speak liberally and receive feedback to help them grow.
2. Career Growth – They need to see opportunities to grow, where they can join a team working on projects that have meaning and purpose. They may only be around for a few years so don’t speak tradition and legacy, instead redefine the career development conversation and give them time to speak about their career and personal interests.
3. Openness and transparency – Growing up with technology and social media, millennials expect a culture of transparency and for management to be upfront on why decisions are made. Keep them informed and satisfy their sense of purpose by helping them understand how their purpose links to company values. Millennials will be more engaged and committed if they are informed regularly on progress against the company’s strategy.
4. Mentorship both ways – Millennials appear to be more interested in finding mentors than their previous generations. Leaders and Managers can play a key role here (and not just their direct line managers) – helping millennials with their personal growth or demonstrating the characteristics of a strong leader. However, the real opportunity is in millennials offering ‘reverse mentorship’. If Managers are open to accept the mentorship, the reverse mentor-mentee relationships can add significant value for both parties to learn and utilise one another’s strengths.
5. Listened and recognised – Millennials expect a high-touch approach to management – listen to them and give them feedback. Since their early education, they believe their ideas are important and valuable, so listen to them or they won’t respect you. They really desire a great deal of  feedback – which goes outside the normal parameters of a performance management system. Managers must take the time to engage in formal and ad-hoc constructive feedback on a regular basis.

Perspectives from here and abroad

It’s all about Change

In October, I attended our OI Global Partners meeting in Turin, Italy where over 20 European, Australian and US Partners came to share best practice and themes from their respective countries. Harmonics is the exclusive Irish partner firm of OIGP, a global network of independently owned consultancy firms specialising in Organisation and People Change.

There were a number of themes that dominated our discussions that has implications for us all – whether as employers or employees:

Digital Disruption – Each partner firm reported digitisation was disrupting organisations business and workforce planning. Automation, robotics and AI are now rapidly changing the nature of work as we used to know it. D Amazon, Airbnb, Netflix are all examples of Digital platforms offering global market reach and capturing exponential market share at record speed. We are seeing the 4^th Industrial revolution take hold as digital start-up ventures are infiltrating traditional business models.  What will this mean for people at work? In a recent PWC Survey of over 10,000 global members, 60% think “few people will have stable, long term employment in the future”. This means we will all have to adapt to much change.

Adapting to Change – Our own recent OI Global Future of Work study indicated ‘adapting to change’ as the number 1 challenge facing HR Directors. There was consistency across partner firms that requests to design and develop change programmes was on the rise to enable Leaders and Managers to adapt to change. There is also an interesting development in organisations offering “should I stay or should I go?” career planning programmes. These interventions are to help those who need to decide if they want to stay and upskill to meet changing business needs or leave on a voluntary redundancy programme to pursue new external career options. This career alignment support is now forming a critical part of organisations change programmes.

Growing divide between haves and have nots – Each country shared low unemployment levels but also a growing inequality between the highly paid, highly skilled and the lowly paid, lowly skilled. The hollowing out of the middle class, middle age worker is taking hold and there are worrying signs that this will lead to even greater future inequality. Specialism in much sought after skillsets is highly valued by employers. Technology is moving so fast that the highly valued specialist skillsets are changing rapidly, so there is a perpetual need to unlearn, relearn and learn new skills. We are being approached by many of those in their 40’s and 50’s who are now being impacted by this change and are seeking career coaching to plot a new way forward. This is something that we will see more and more of as the huge disruption takes hold for those with previously well paid and skilled jobs. Organisations need to become more proactive in putting career planning and upskilling in place to support this change or fear losing previously talented people who are not prepared for this change.

International mobility – We are seeing a growing rise in coaching to support international career moves. This is predominantly for millennials who have been promoted to a global role and need to hit the ground running in a new international location. They are coming to terms with a promotion and embracing a new culture in one sweep. This can be overwhelming and career transition coaching is being seen as an imperative to succeed in a new country and in a new role

Future of Work Global Research Study – There has been excellent feedback from our clients to our 2^nd Global Future of Work research study. We are seeking to further deepen the research for the year ahead. This added value to our clients is helping them to understand the challenges and skills required to be successful in the highly competitive and changing world of work.

Market saturation of coaches – The number of people becoming qualified in coaching is growing year on year. While this is great for more and more people to have new coaching skills in the workplace, it is leading to oversupply in the coaching market. Many partner firms reported requests from newly qualified coaches to become join their books and become associate coaches. I have seen this first hand and receive multiple requests weekly from newly trained coaches to join the Harmonics team. From our perspective we need to offer our clients qualified coaches with at least 5 years coaching experience, commercial business experience and specialist knowledge in a core area that matches our client’s needs. Many enter the coaching profession because they are passionate about helping others but what each coach needs to learn most is how to commercialise and niche their offering to become attractive to clients and partner firms like OI. It was recognised by clients that our strength in OI is being recognised as the home to quality coaches globally.

Overall a great meeting and an opportunity for us to take time out with our partners to see how we will pivot our own businesses to stay ahead of the change curve. This quote below was never more relevant.

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not into fighting the old but on creating the new” – Socrates