Did you know that senior executives who are both “seen” and “heard” have strong loyalty to their current employer. Strong loyalty can lead to improved results by minimizing the harmful effects of turnover. Read a short blog by our senior partner…
We’d like to ask you, as a Senior Executive, this question: “In what ways can you imagine that an external recruiter would provide a positive impact to your business?” Your answer should be related to the strengths of your management team simply because a motivated, hard-working, talented team will produce better results over a less talented, less motivated, more mediocre team.
Let’s look at your managers:
- Are they consistently being treated equitably?
- Is their work environment rewarding, engaging, flexible, and secure?
- Has micro-management been pushed to the back burner?
- Does your compensation plan provide competitive, fair, and unbiased remuneration?
- Are there opportunities for growth and advancement within the business?
If you can answer in the affirmative to all these questions, it is more than likely that when an external recruiter reaches out to your team, he/she will be less than successful in generating positive candidate energy. In fact, many has been the time, when our team has been advised, “Senior management treats everyone so well here that I’d be crazy to leave this company.”
Summarizing this scenario, knowing that there will always be recruiters calling on your managers, the practice of “good management in a healthy organization” will most often prevail.
Unhappy Employees Increase Turnover
In the contrasting, much less than ideal, situation, you may have a plant, division, or operating unit that is not functioning well, where the cultural environment is toxic, where the employee turnover is digging a hole into morale. This occurs much more than executives care to acknowledge, and the problem continues if bad management practices are tolerated from the top down throughout the organization. (A 2015 Gallup study indicated that one in two U.S. workers have, at some point in their career, felt compelled to leave a job just to get away from a bad boss).
You know that this has happened in your business and you know that the decision to keep someone on, perhaps out of kindness or the expectation of improvement, has drastically hurt the organization. Yes, you’ve not budgeted for the cost of an Executive Search firm, however you’ve also not provided an allocation in the budget for turnover, retraining, high absenteeism, red-line productivity and poor morale.
In summation, an Executive Search firm can improve your business in two ways:
- Prevention. In recognizing that your team is in high demand by other employers. A good, and simple, strategy for thwarting a third-party recruitment effort is a high-performing management team in a healthy, team-oriented, work environment.
- Remedy. In identifying the need for change, by recruiting the leadership needed for the stability and growth of your business.
Consider collaborating with DSML Executive Search to decrease unexpected turn-over of managers and develop a pipeline of strong management candidates.
Doug Seville, Director & Co-Founder – ds@dsmlexecutivesearch.com