Diversity in Executive Search and Leadership Consulting Diversity has long been a cornerstone of the profession, but something changed in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. “It was almost like a sledgehammer to the head, a wake-up call to the opportunity we had as a profession to truly be leaders.” Karen Greenbaum, President and CEO of the Association of Executive Search and Leadership Consultants (AESC) describes what happened within the leadership of AESC. “Clarke Murphy, the CEO of Russell Reynolds, sent me a text at 7:00 am on a Friday. I won’t forget it, with the headline ‘Black Lives Matter’ saying, ‘can we talk?’” Greenbaum immediately called Clarke back, and within a few days, they were convening a meeting of the CEOs of some of the largest and most influential search firms. “We had eight CEOs who came together, all competitors, all CEOs. We had some of the largest firms in the world represented. We had the largest woman-led firm represented. We had the largest Black-led firm represented. And we decided that what we wanted to do is begin by creating a CEO pledge, pledging the commitment of our member firms to diversity and [...]

Leaders And Organizations Ready For Change In a fast-changing world, we have to look past our work-based identity, move beyond the comfort of our current knowledge and skills, and prepare ourselves and the organizations we lead to adapt continuously to a rapidly changing future of work. Renowned future-of-work strategist Heather E. McGowan is co-author with Chris Shipley of The Adaptation Advantage. Adaptability, they argue, is the most significant determinant of success for individuals and organizations, now and in the future. What is adaptability? For McGowan, adaptability is the skill to handle ambiguity, to both learn and unlearn in a changing environment. “In work as in life, evolutionary success belongs to those who can most readily adapt.” Adaptability as an advantage is more than theoretical. In the context of COVID-19, McGowan reflects on the near-immediate shift to working from home, telemedicine, and online learning. “That was five years of digital transformation crammed into a week, and what that says to me is nothing more than we’re a highly adaptive species. We’ve got to look at this period and say, wow, look at all that we did when pressed. Now, what could we do going forward? How do we reimagine work and [...]

The STEMM gap is the employment disparity in the science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine fields between men and women. There is also a racial imbalance in STEMM that aligns with the majority-minority challenges in many cultures. So why focus on the STEMM gap for women? Savannah Maziya is the Executive Chairperson of The Bunengi Group, an international mining, infrastructure, agriculture and investment corporation headquartered in South Africa. “So, I always talk about the one culture that the world shares. There’s American culture and English, Jamaican and Indian, whatever. But the one culture we all share is discrimination against women and always thinking that women are a lesser-than.” Maziya points out the irony. “Women can be pregnant and give birth to people, bring them into the world, raise a full human being. But if you just say, ‘operate this heavy machinery,’ it’s ‘oh no, they can’t do that!’ For some reason, it seems difficult to see women operating in various commercial operations, especially STEMM-related ones.” Quoting global figures from 2016, Paola Scarpa, Director of Client Solutions, Data & Insights at Google Italy says, “We start off having just 35% women in STEMM at university. We move to 25% women in [...]

EMBARKING ON THE NEW ASIAN CENTURY As the 19th century was led by Europe and the 20th century was led by North America, in the 21st century the question is no longer how quickly Asia will rise but how it will lead. Oliver Tonby is Asia Chairman at McKinsey & Company, and co-author of Future of Asia, which is built around a series of reports by the McKinsey Global Institute.“ The center of gravity is shifting towards Asia in many ways,” Tonby says. “Asia is increasingly central in the growth of global consumption that is happening in the world. It is increasingly central in the trade flows that are happening. It’s increasingly central in the innovation and technology development that is happening.” To illustrate his point, Tonby references some of the conclusions from McKinsey’s analysis: By 2040 more than 50% of the world’s GDP is going to be in Asia. Between now and 2040 more than 50% of the incremental growth in consumption is going to be in Asia. More than 40% of venture capital investments are in Asia. Asian entities own more than 65% of the world's patents. More than 36% of unicorns today are Asian. Some of the [...]

The value of inclusion is irrefutable, from innovation and business outcomes to thriving communities. And still, genuine inclusion has yet to be achieved at a broad scale. In the recently released book INdivisible, authors Alison Maitland and Rebekah Steele introduce a new, whole-system approach to bringing measurable inclusion into the strategy and operations of organizations. With concrete action for people at all levels—senior leadership, middle managers, teams and individual employees, Maitland and Steele present a foundation for building more inclusive, higher-performing organizations. Q. Diversity and inclusion have been prioritized for years, yet we don’t seem to be making much progress. Why? ALISON MAITLAND I think we can say that there has been some advancement in some areas, but also worryingly little in others, and many organizations are really frustrated about the lack of progress. We see several reasons why this has happened. The first one is that diversity and inclusion are very often disconnected from business goals, priorities and the outcomes that the organization is trying to achieve. So that means that they don’t receive the kind of focus, resources and accountability that other business drivers do, like marketing or finance or strategic workforce planning or safety. Inclusion is absolutely [...]

Andy Shapiro, CEO of executive search software provider The Cluen Corporation, sat down with AESC’s Chief Marketing Officer, Joe Chappell, to share insights on how Cluen’s clients are managing technology, relationship management and business development during the COVID era. JOE CHAPPELL: Andy, thank you for speaking with us. Cluen is a long-standing partner of AESC, spanning two decades. In your words, how do you feel the missions of both AESC and Cluen align? ANDY SHAPIRO: One of the things that we love about our partnership with AESC is, like AESC, we’re so focused on advancing the needs of the retained executive search industry. Cluen is hyper-focused on having the best tools and technologies for retained executive search. And it is really rare to find a similar organization dedicated just to executive search. There are plenty of organizations in the world that focus on recruiting, but that’s very different from what executive search is all about. So we’ve been able to prove our dedication to executive search over this time span, not only in our continued partnership with AESC but also in our actions for our clients and for the industry. We’ve really been able to prove our focus here, just [...]