Executive Insider is a biweekly newsletter designed to help you succeed with Job Search, Career Advancement and Self Development
Issue Dated: November 16, 2009
A. Letter from the Editor
Separating from a company is not only an interruption of income, it's often an ending without a beginning on the horizon. It's natural to rush to fill the void, to find opportunities encompassing the same role with many of the same responsibilities, but from a different desk.
It's great to be motivated and action-oriented, but there could be nearly invisible, emotional impediments to reaching goals. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote about the five stages of grief in relation to death and dying — denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance and depression — and those feelings hold strong correlation for some in career transition. While not as dramatic or painful as the loss of life, the emotions that parallel involuntary career shift can insidiously derail the path to the next opportunity.
Without awareness and reconciliation, these feelings can "come out sideways" and become apparent to family, friends, networking connections, recruiters and hiring managers. I've heard of more than one interview where the candidate has been described as "stuck" and has not resolved the emotional toll of leaving their last organization.
What's the solution? There will always be an abundance of external contributing factors over which we don't have control influencing who we are and what we feel. An important first step is recognizing there is an organic process to resolving the effects of separation, along with allowing for the time to lessen the residual impact and start anew.
An elongated buffer between ending a job and beginning the search for a new one is a luxury many can't afford right now, but the time can be used both restoratively and productively. Job seekers who refrain from widely catapulting their résumés all over the online job listings and instead apply business development principles by researching, targeting and strategizing where they might find the right opportunities are likely to have the most success.
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Thought for the Week
Every day you may make progress. Every step may be fruitful. Yet there will stretch out before you an ever-lengthening, ever-ascending, ever-improving path. You know you will never get to the end of the journey. But this, so far from discouraging, only adds to the joy and glory of the climb.
-- Sir Winston Churchill
B. More Search Firms Consider Adding to Their Own Recruiting Staff
Percentage of executive search firms planning to hire additional professional staff during the next 3 months
Source: ExecuNet
Executive search firms are markedly more confident in the executive employment market than they were earlier this year, and now, for the first time in months, ExecuNet's benchmark Search Firm Hiring Index reveals more of them plan to bulk up their own staff.
ExecuNet's October survey of 172 executive recruiters revealed that 15 percent of them plan to add professional staff in the next three months, up from 11 percent in September and the highest number since roughly 18 percent of responding search firms planned to add staff last December.
C. Communicating Your Companys Value Proposition and Message
Much emphasis is placed on communicating your own individual value proposition as a leader and an employee. However, it's just as important to relay your organization's value proposition to members of your team. According to the newly released Watson Wyatt report, Capitalizing on Effective Communication: How Courage, Innovation and Discipline Drive Business Results in Challenging Times, making such information available to employees can have a strong impact on employee retention and engagement.
The report stresses the importance of leaders communicating to employees how their actions strongly affect customers and company productivity. Fewer than half of the 328 organizations surveyed for the report said they aren't communicating in this manner. The report notes that messages need to get across the "big" picture and also have a more local focus to be effective in sharing information about their businesses. Such messages include helping employees understand the business, telling employees how their actions affect the customer, and integrating new employees into the organization.
How leaders convey information is just as important. Successful communicators are also taking full advantage of social media to interact with their organizations, the report notes. Fifty-three percent of highly effective communicators increased their use of social media as a tool with which to achieve greater connection with employees — including telecommuters, local and global workers. At the same time, face-to-face communication is increasing in popularity as a way in which leaders relate organizational change. In the US, 61 percent of organizations have increased their use.
D. Chaotics: The Business of Managing and Marketing in the Age of Turbulence
The mayhem on an elementary school playground during recess would have once been an accurate picture of chaos. Now, amidst an informational revolution that has given way to information overload, chaos is more aptly portrayed as businesses attempting to keep up with IT advancements that promise declining costs and rapidly increasing processing capabilities. Advances such as cloud computing will allow smaller companies, and even smaller countries, to compete in arenas once closed to them, causing organizations that are not adaptable and specialized to flounder. The chaos caused by these advances is our new reality.
Typically, when economic conditions become unsettled business leaders pull into a financial shell, reducing product and employee development, consumer incentives, overall spending? and marketing. In their new book, Chaotics: The Business of Managing and Marketing in the Age of Turbulence, Philip Kotler and John A. Caslione explain how turbulent times bring decisions which may look good in the short-term but are damaging to the companies' culture and defining values. They say to "never lose sight of your company's core values. Undermining the culture and reallocating resources can have long-term damaging effects. Not only can it weaken the fundamentals of the company, but it may tarnish its brand." They go on to stress that innovation and discovering new ways to better meet consumers' needs are the most effective methods to navigate challenging economic conditions.
The book outlines how executives can build enduring businesses capable of thriving in all economic environments. Their "Chaotics Management System" can be summed-up in an eight-step process:
Identify Sources of Turbulence and Chaos
Identify Management's Wrong Responses to Turbulence
Establish Early Warning Systems
Construct Key Scenarios and Strategies
Prioritize Key Scenarios and Select Strategy
Implement Chaotics Strategic Management Behaviors
Implement Chaotics Strategic Marketing Behaviors
Achieve Business Enterprise Sustainability
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The mayhem on an elementary school playground during recess would have once been an accurate picture of chaos. Now, amidst an informational revolution that has given way to information overload, chaos is more aptly portrayed as businesses attempting to keep up with IT advancements that promise declining costs and rapidly increasing processing capabilities. Advances such as cloud computing will allow smaller companies, and even smaller countries, to compete in arenas once closed to them, causing organizations that are not adaptable and specialized to flounder. The chaos caused by these advances is our new reality.
