April 20, 2023
By
April 20, 2023
By
By Rob Andrews
In the age of heightened awareness of ROI on talent, an often-overlooked metric is executive search placement retention. Global stick rates among executive placements are dismal, and the statistics have been consistent for forty years. Almost one in every two executive hires goes bad within two years. That is roughly 45% failure, at a cost that is incalculable.
According to a Chief Executive magazine article titled “What Causes CEO Failure,” “Up to a third of Fortune 500 CEOs have lasted three years with top executive failure rates as high as 75 percent and rarely less than 30 percent.” One major search firm CEO, Kevin Kelly of Heidrick & Struggles, completed a study of 20,000 of his firm’s own placements. Kelly summarizes his findings: “We’ve found that 40 percent of executives hired at the senior level are pushed out, fail or quit within 18 months. It’s expensive in terms of lost revenue. It’s expensive in terms of the individual’s hiring. It’s damaging to morale.”
In another study completed by Harvard Business Review and cited in “Ending the CEO Succession Crisis” by Ram Charan, “[T]wo out of every five new CEOs fail in the first 18 months.” Further research shows the same pattern globally. CEOs and senior executives are routinely hired based on their drive, IQ, and resume. They’re fired for lack of emotional intelligence, poor people decisions, poor financial performance, and being totally out of touch with their workforces and customers.
The way I see it, the executive hiring process typically operates like dating and marriage, with very similar results. Just like dating, we usually start out with a woefully inadequate description of precisely who we are, what we are trying to accomplish, and who we need to get there. World-famous board advisor Ram Charan states that there are four things successful boards do when selecting CEOS that unsuccessful boards do not. First and second, they get crystal clear about culture fit and performance expectations. Third and fourth, they are flexible about where they come from and allow for imperfections.
Hiring authorities usually rely on simple job descriptions and resumes and fail to define critical success factors in advance. Without a clear focus on what matters, the selection process becomes a beauty pageant and a chemistry contest. They hire a new executive because “it feels right”; he or she looks good, sounds good, smells good, and is, oh, so impressive. Then, in three to six months, they start to have that queasy feeling in their stomach which signals they might have made a mistake and things are just not working out. Roughly 50 percent of the time, they know they’ve made a mistake within eighteen months.
Facilitating a match that will truly work and last should be the primary goal of every executive search. We exist for the purpose of enhancing lives and effectiveness through our human capital consulting efforts. We help our clients achieve their business objectives. Our search consultants’ passion is facilitating matches that work for both the client and the candidate. We are deliberate in our approach.
In pursuit of a process that is predictable and minimizes executive hiring failure, I have studied over 5,000 failed executive placements and determined the reason(s) for each failure. Almost 50% of the failures I have examined can be tied to cultural misalignment, and almost 50% can be tied to poor performance. Again, these two factors are rarely addressed in the position or job description. While no process involving human beings can ever be perfect, our consultants seem to have broken the code when it comes to avoiding the most common hiring mistakes, and we are happy to share what we’ve learned.
First, MAKE NO ASSUMPTIONS. Every senior-level search should start with a clean, blank sheet of paper. Relying on the byproducts of recently conducted similar searches to present yet another list of the usual suspects is a practice which should be avoided at all costs. Remember that the “business as usual” approach to senior executive hiring leaves much to be desired.
“Business as usual” questions when selecting search firms include:
Here is a far more effective set of questions to ask:
I have thrown a lot of stuff at you to get you thinking. The failure rate among newly placed executives is alarming, and, unfortunately, it is getting worse. Every time one of these misfires occurs, bad things happen. The most obvious and most discussed is the loss of financial performance at the client site. Somewhat less obvious is the disruption and/or loss of momentum within the client organization. The total cost of mis-hires and/or mis-promotions has been estimated (depending on which study you read) to be somewhere between 5 to 10 times the executive‘s annual compensation. Based on my real-world experiences, I believe the cost to be substantially greater.
We believe retained search should be practiced as it was intended: a specialized form of management consulting, not a transactional exercise of filling seats in a vacuum. Leadership engagements should be delivered with sustainability in mind, rather than selling off-the-shelf products or cookie-cutter solutions that don’t solve the client’s problem. As such, we at Allen Austin commit to the following outcomes:
We sincerely hope this piece has been helpful to you. For complementary resources on ways to dramatically improve your retention, sign up for our blog and explore our website for additional tools.
Warmest Regards,
Rob
Most change initiatives stall because middle managers and frontline employees don’t understand where leadership is going, what is expected of them and why it is in their best interest to get out of the stands and into …
Read moreBy Rob Andrews It has been my observation that the absence of an effective communications methodology lies at the heart of many a dysfunction and missed opportunity. This is no big surprise given the lack of …
Read moreBy Rob Andrews My first real job was in a U-Totem convenience store, where I worked through five different store managers and had an opportunity to observe how not to manage a business. My second job was …
Read more