Growing Pains & Solutions - Q&A on Building & Scaling High-Performing Recruitment Sales Teams
Alexander Beckett Edwards
Managing Director at SGP Technology - ?? "Delivering The Experts Behind Digital Transformation" ???
Whether opening a new office, delving through LinkedIn to scour for the perfect candidate or taking the many steps needed to build a high-performance culture – scaling teams who can match your ambition can be an elaborate & knotty mission as a leader.?
Leadership is difficult and there is never enough time in the day, but great leaders make it seem so simple.
Alex Beckett-Edwards?&?Matt Lang?are two Hamlyn Williams Directors who do just that. Matt moved from working in our New York office to building our San Diego team from scratch. And Alex has created an incredible team culture in the London office, with the team continuing to grow year on year, whilst retaining 80-90% of staff, a huge achievement in recruitment.?
Whether opening a new office, delving through LinkedIn to scour for the perfect candidate or taking the many steps needed to build a high-performance culture – scaling teams who can match your ambition can be an elaborate & knotty mission as a leader.??
In this chat, we talked to Alex Beckett-Edwards, UK Managing Director about what he has learned on his road to senior leadership.?
In this chat, we talked to Alex Beckett-Edwards, UK Managing Director.
What makes a project exciting for you?
The potential of creating something that is truly high performing – and being able to build something where I can see the individual success stories of the people that come on the journey with me. I’ve seen so many people’s lives – from consultants to candidates we’ve placed and companies we’ve built relationships with. It happens time again in recruitment over the 6 years I’ve been here and it’s the most rewarding part of my job and what gets us out of bed every day.
What are the most obvious changes in the office & staff since you started?
Going back 6 years ago when I started, we were in a forming phase & still in a start-up mode. The business was being built on some excellent individual operators at the top that got us moving. Now we are fully formed and able to provide a platform for instant and rapid high-performing success & together have built a machine that isn’t just solely reliant on individuals. From nicer, bigger offices, to the best in tech tools and incentives, people who start now have an environment that supports them to perform their best.
What made you join HW to build out an office & region?
I was inspired by the pure ambition of the business from the very top, with top 1% industry aims & a clear vision as to how that would be achieved. I was confident in my ability, and with the plan the business had I thought it could be executed. Fast forward 6 years and being the MD of the UK Business, I’m really proud, and more bought into those aims, goals and business objectives than ever.
What soft skills should aspiring leaders focus on??
There are 6 key areas for me.
Active listening:
Being an active listener is massively important to understand your team. It’s easy to frame other people’s problems within whatever projects you’re thinking about. Finding a quiet space and giving people the time to share their struggles & motivations is important in a busy environment. It’s a chance to show true empathy and will give you a deeper understanding of your team & its dynamics.
Sharing clear messages & making complex ideas easy to understand
Your team are busy and focused on what’s in front of them. Making new information easy for your brain to digest means they will consume more ideas!
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Strategic thinking
For me Strategic thinking is?a long-term thought process. This means having the capacity to anticipate, the discipline to prepare now, and the ability to position yourself to compete against the competition and win in the future. I think of 5 qualities that feed into this part of being a leader;
Creativity
The recruitment industry is affected by so many outside anomalies, so being creative in your leadership allows you to find innovative solutions, especially in the face of structurally complex or changing situations.?Those leaders who, when all is shifting and new approaches are yet unknown, can still create clarity of purpose for their teams, will gain maximum buy-in, especially within sales environments.
Inspiring & influencing others
Individual commitment to what your team are working towards is what makes good team work. So you need to inspire buy-in to your mission on a deep level. People with goals get to them because they know the path they’re going down!
Flexibility
Your team need clear goals but helping them achieve them means you need to be agile as a leader. Whether that’s modifying your leadership style to suit different people or being open to new ideas, most importantly it means being able to recognise the best-laid plans need to change if the situation does.
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How has senior leadership supported your growth and the shape of the growth of your teams?
I would say the owner really helped shape my initial career within Hamlyn Williams when I was brought in to run the London office, our Non-executive director also played a strong part in that phase too, with a lot of mentoring and support and guidance from both. More recently, our CEO Brian has a different style which I’ve felt has allowed me to flourish and do what I do best to then take the business to the next level. Hamlyn Williams has always built itself on an entrepreneurial mindset?& that has not changed, hence the level of growth we have achieved.
Has adapting to client needs, been a reason that we’re expanding as a business? If so, how?
I would say, we have now evolved into where we always want to be in terms of our client offering, with room for more for sure, but we were very niche initially, which you have to be, but our aim, even within our niche specialist capabilities was always to get to a point where we can offer a whole service offering to our clients and candidates within each of our niche markets, so the evolution has been more around building and growing a business truly capable of providing that whole end to end man power solution , as opposed to necessarily having to adapt to the client.. we always knew who we wanted to be and how.
What is the most successful candidate you ever placed – and what are they doing now – did you know they were destined for big things when you met them?
I think the best story I have was winning a project in Iraq of all places & not the Iraq of now… where I sent a group of ex-pats out to what was a secure compound in the Majnoon region protected by forging legion and armed forces for a 5 year project.
One of them was particularly nervous – he had a young family and was a software engineer about 5/6 years into his career. It was one of the world’s largest companies though and they took the security element very seriously – but that said, it was still a war zone.
He sent me a very strong email after his one week’s military training before getting on the plane - ?that email was full of expletives (a hint of humour) whilst he was sitting ready for taking off. However, on arrival made a fantastic impression on the project, was moved to a leadership role and was able to put all his children through private school and it turned out fantastically for him. We built such a strong relationship that he’d include me on email threads to his friends and I even placed him in his next role where he’s been for another 4 years – nearly a decade in total!