"Where do you think executive search goes wrong"? Great question from a CEO -- who's had a few turns (some good, some bad) and has spent time in PE (we talked about the high rate of executive turnover from searches.) Many search firms and talent partners point to "a supply problem" and it's true -- there aren't enough proven executives to go around and that talent deficit projects to get worse, not better. But the root cause is further upstream. It's a "sync" problem. The underlying problem behind poor outcomes is lack of clarity, alignment and buy-in around what the CEO and/or Investors are trying to accomplish and how they're going to do it. As one CEO who's interviewing for a role said "that investment thesis is 90% bullshit - what do I do?" There may be surface agreement on broad outcomes, but that surface agreement often masks large underlying conflicts based on differing assumptions -- if these aren't made explicit and debated ahead of time, the diagnosis of need can only be correct by serendipity (dumb luck) -- the result is poor search and business outcomes. ?? When we've administered our business model alignment tool to investors and executives -- on average there's high agreement on only ?? 10% of the business model. So, think about the repercussions. That means, whomever you hire into whatever senior role, is going to spend most of their time dealing with the 90% of the model that's in conflict and all of the interpersonal problems that result. And then you're going to blame the search process and lack of supply. And an investment thesis is a "hypothesis" made with highly imperfect information. It's not uncommon for execs and investors to actually battle through their unspoken misalignment through the search process. ?? Step one in our process is to drive alignment between leaders and investors to gain holistic clarity on the to be state, the personality profile of the investor and makeup of the senior team. That's a little more involved than a "kick off" call. But we're baking that into our process because 1. Lack of clarity leads to poor/loose definition of true client need and 2. We want to "radically derisk" the hire. And this approach widens the target pool and fast-forwards the learning/ calibration process in search. Most search firms bake in a calibration period for you to use candidates and interviews to understand what you truly need. And, for us, the search doesn't end when the search is completed, the key step after placement is speeding alignment and clarity to get moving fast. ?? So we bake in our senior team accelerator (ridiculously high NPS) process to quickly integrate and align the new executive and team, give them a common language to approach the business and tools to make it happen. It's usually not a search problem, it's actually a sync problem.
I would assume this then requires a lot more advocacy by search firms before marketing a role. It shouldn’t be for the candidate to solve the misalignment (not the search firm either) but search firms need to point them out.
Executive Search - Interim and Fractional CXOs - PE Executive Accelerators
1 个月https://www.synccxo.com/executive-search