TRANSCRIPT
Matt
Welcome back to Sound-Up Governance. If you've already listened to the first few episodes, you've probably noticed a bit of a theme: something that honestly kind of surprises me! Even speaking to people who are deep technical experts, or who work in hugely formalized environments are trying to convince me that everything, from authority to accountability to what makes a business good is about people, and personalities. It's all soft and fungible, even if it's simultaneously technically complex. So to start learning more about this people-oriented theme, I had a conversation with my friend, Nick Chambers, a partner at Boyden Executive Search, who focuses on recruiting senior executives and board members for organizations that are publicly or charitably funded. Places that operate in areas like health care, arts and culture or social services. In other words, organizations that are driven by purpose rather than profit. For those of us who don't completely understand the whole executive search thing, why would an organization want to hire someone like Nick?
Nick Chambers
I think there are a few parts to that. One is that most organizations just don't have the capacity to handle the workload involved in doing that, and to distill that a little bit, you know, we will often have organizations come to us who will say, "we tried to fill the role ourselves, and were unsuccessful in doing so.": And we'll say, "Well, what did you do? You know, what was your approach?" "Well, we advertised, and we, you know, we call people in our networks." So we advertise, but, you know, if, if a typical long list of candidates that we present to a client, so that's, you know, that's that list of candidates who've applied, who meet many or most of the criteria, for whom we think there's, there's a strong chance that the client will be interested. Out of those eight, maybe one of those folks has reached out to us through through an advertisement. And so the real heavy lifting is doing the research that allows us to generate a really strong list. We might develop a list of 100 people for a given search or 100-plus, that takes a lot of time. We have databases that that clients don't have. We know the folks in the database, you know, not all of the folks, you know, but we know many of them in the database, we've got notes from our prior interactions with them. So there's, you know, there's there's just a workload that that comes with that. And then I would also say that there's an art to doing our work around the candidate experience around dealing with unusual things that might come up in the process of interacting with a candidate. You know, sometimes there's a little bit of chasing, there's, there's a balancing act between trying to get a candidate excited about a role, but also helping to manage their expectations. And so I tend to take an educational approach rather than a selling approach.
Matt
I found Nick's educational approach really interesting. It makes a ton of sense that it's better for both the candidate and the hiring organization to take time to learn and prepare way before it's time to pull the trigger. But honestly, it's also a bit scary. My instinct is that I'd be more likely to pick up the phone and call a search expert when I'm already at the point where I'm ready to just say, "Hey, Nick, bring me some candidates!" So what does this act-early-educational-approach really look like?
Nick Chambers
So in fact, I have a call today with a client who is thinking two years ahead. And part of the reason that we're speaking to them now is that they want to maximize the chances that folks internal to the organization who may have the interest and the potential to serve in the role, have a development path ahead that would allow them to prepare and be ready for the role or at least ready to compete for the role. Prior to launching a search, sometimes those organizations will call us in and say, "we haven't figured out how to do diversity," you know, or "we haven't figured out how to assess governance capabilities," or "we haven't figured out you know, I read an article, you know, I've heard it suggested that we should go further than say, we need a lawyer, we need an accountant, we need a government relations person, we should be taking something more competency based, how do we assess what we currently have in place? How do we assess what we'll be losing when this next batch of folks roll off the board? And then having done all of that, you know, how do we make sure that we're set up for success when we when we actually start recruiting?"
Matt
So what about an organization that has already done tons of work to develop a specific particular person, and they're like, 99% sure they've got it right? Is it still helpful to hire someone like Nick, maybe just to tell us we did an awesome job?
Nick Chambers
There are also some scenarios that we we sometimes find ourselves in where it's clear that they've already made their minds up, the client has already made their minds up, and they're, and they're going through the motions. And those takes some, those are actually some of the harder ones to do, sometimes we'll turn them down altogether. Other times, we'll try to persuade the client to say, you know, fine that you already have a favorite in mind, but if what you're also saying is that there's, there's a stakeholder expectation that you're going to run a fair and transparent search, let us help you figure out how to how to do that. And, you know, sometimes the clients are surprised and things don't work out the way that they had, you know, assumed or pre-concluded that, that they would, that they would work out.
Matt
Oh, right! It's not only about what I want! There are other people outside the organization for now, let's generically call them stakeholders or individuals and groups that are affected by my organization's actions. Ugh, okay, so obviously, you can never make everybody happy, if I'm pretty sure I have the right person in place to fill an important role, and I want to be responsible and considerate of my stakeholders interests, what then?
Nick Chambers
There are some organizations who have tried to take a yes/and approach, which is to say, the most responsible thing that we can do for our organization is both invest in our own talent, and make sure that we are scouring the market for the best possible talent. And now if we have, if we've done our jobs well, in terms of recruiting, you know, previously recruiting the right people and investing in them and developing them and, you know, giving them opportunities to engage in activity beyond the constraints of their job description, then you might argue that those should be the people who are most competitive for the role, but you won't know until until you actually, you know, go through the process. There are others, other organizations who will argue that if the decision is ultimately going to land in the selection of someone internal, that person will have kind of generated support for their appointment by having to compete with with others to to earn it.
Matt
Ooh! I like that! Even if you've set someone internal up for succession and success, competing with good external candidates can increase everyone's confidence: the candidate, your organization, and external stakeholders. But remember, Nick specializes in those purpose-driven organizations. If I'm one of those organizations, how much does it really matter to hire a search professional who specializes in that space? Couldn't just anyone with recruitment expertise, get the job done well?
Nick Chambers
So it matters for a few reasons. I'll start with the mundane and then I'll build up from there. The organizations that I work with tend to engage in decision making via search committees. And there's an art and science to working with with search committees, everything from the composition of the search committee, to the terms of engagement for the search committee. So is this a decision making committee? Is it an advisory committee? Kind of setting the groundwork to ensure that everyone has a voice and you know, weighing in as early as possible into what it means to engage in evidence-based decision-making versus decision making that's overly influenced by biases and preferences. I'm going to make a generalization here that says that, for the types of clients that I work with, there's there's a little bit more of an expectation of fairness, transparency, equity in the process. So for example, often in private sector searches, the idea is that as soon as you have a candidate, you, you send them over to the client, and they start interviewing them. And if and if the client loves that candidate and chooses to offer them the role, then the search is done. Maybe it takes one or two or three or four, before they get to that point, but the kind of rigor that we apply to ensure that each candidate is given equal opportunity to present themselves, to compete for the role, to be put through the same process, to be put through the same process in parallel, to hopefully not suffer because they were the fourth one in rather than the first one in, and then, you know, by the time we get to the to the fourth one, we've, you know, we're now comparing them to the first, second, third and fourth. So we actually will build to a critical mass of candidates, put them forward to the client, those candidates are compared against each other using a parallel process. And so they so that rigor around transparency, equity in the process is an expectation. I mean, not only do our clients expect it, but we also strongly advise to our clients that they that, you know, this is this is the ideal way to go.
Matt
Wow. So it's getting a bit more obvious to me why it might be better to work with Nick than, say, just relying on my gut, but let's get real, how the heck would Nick Chambers know whether some external candidate would be any good in a senior position in my organization, I'm eating, sleeping, breathing the organization every day, after all.
Nick Chambers
This is getting I think a little bit more to the art, there is the there's the question of assessing candidates, you know, we are interested in the experiences that they bring, the skills that they bring, the perspectives that they bring. You know, sometimes the networks that they bring. But there's also there's also a piece around leadership competencies. That, again, I'm going to generalize here, but there can be a different brand of leadership that's required in public-serving organizations than in profit-driven organizations. It's, they're not completely separate. It's, you know, it's more of a Venn diagram. Whether its effectiveness and communication, strategic mindset, the ability to solve certain types of problems, to be visionary to, you know, etc, etc. There, there are common traits, there are also traits that are either more important, or we give more emphasis in in the, in the social impact scenario. There's a bit of an art and a skill around telling the stories of the types of organizations that we work with to candidates that's different to the storytelling that you engage in when you're talking about a mining company or a bank or, or a tech company. And we know different people.
Matt
Listening to Nick, I reflected on some of the conversations I have with purpose-driven organizations - even ones with huge budgets and fundraising capabilities - and thinking, "they're all obsessed with saving money." Like if in the process of recruiting a new CEO, they found someone perfect: experience skills, personality vibe, everything is like a dream come true. Except that perfect person costs twice as much money as the organization was planning to spend. Honestly, for 99 out of 100 organizations, I think the conversation would be over right then and there. They'd let the perfect person walk! My personal perspective is that great leadership is probably worth whatever the cost. I mean, it's usually easier to find money than great leadership. But working exclusively in that sector, how does Nick deal with that constraint?
Nick Chambers
So when we are at our best, we are anticipating these types of things at the start of a search. So we're anticipating the things that will derail the search from a candidate perspective. And we're anticipating the things that will derail the search from a client, from a hiring organization perspective. Now, you know, it's amazing how many discrete, seemingly unique things can arise that we don't anticipate, and you know, and have to deal with. Which is to say, it's difficult to anticipate everything. But for example, we will do our best at the beginning of a search to try and get the client to commit to a salary range. And if we think the salary range is too low to attract the types of candidates that the organization is looking for, we will provide that feedback and whether it's doing some additional market research for them, or talking through with them the options for making the making the package more attractive, we try to do that at the outset. And then when we start speaking with candidates, we try to get a sense of what their expectations are around compensation. You know, it's 2022, so we're also talking about expectations when it comes to where the work will happen, how often they're expected to show up in a given location, you know, what flexibility there is around where the work can take place. Relocation is something that we're trying to... and in fact, our firm has noticed in the last half year or so, an increase in the number of people backing out at the last minute. Which, you know, is either a reminder to us that we need to do a better job of the upfront work and/or that we need to do a better job at helping clients manage risk. And so, you know, in a practical sense, if conventional wisdom says that we should take two candidates to the final round, but recent experience says, you know, you narrow to two, one drops out, you learn something about the other one that suggests that, in fact, they're not, you know, well suited for the role and not ideal for the role. And then then you've got zero and you're back to, you know, you're back to the drawing board.
Matt
We're gonna pause there for today's episode, in part because I think you'll agree there's already so much to digest. As I explained up front, I spoke with Nick, because my conversations with my previous guests on Sound-Up Governance have all pointed us in the same direction. Even in the formal confines of an incorporated entity, profit-driven, purpose-driven or otherwise, the value those organizations create internally and in the world is all about people: their charisma, compassion, quirks and aptitude. And Nick is literally in the business of matching people with organizations. And I love his message that he takes everything he can into account: timing, culture, compensation, the interests of internal and external people and groups and so much more. And in the end, it's that unpredictable, mercurial, messy human stuff that determines whether it's a match made in heaven, or one that's over before there's even a spark. Our conversation covered a lot more ground so you'll hear more from Nick in the very near future. In the meantime, please send us an email or voice memo to soundup@groundupgovernance.com if you have any thoughts or questions about what you heard today, or if you have an idea or a topic or guest you'd like us to feature in the future. Thanks for listening!
Sound-Up Governance (Ep4) - How can we get the "people stuff" right? Featuring Nick Chambers