Is It Time To Re-Own Your Career?

As an executive, you have encouraged associates to own their careers. You reminded the people around you that an employer is not responsible for career development. You’ve quoted Covey, Ziglar, Blanchard, and Robbins to encourage people to aim high, plan well, and work hard to achieve their goals.

What about you? After a decade or two of success, what are you doing to position yourself for the best possible career outcome, in your current leadership role or with another organization? How committed are you to owning and driving your career?
Commitment to your career demands an intentional and consistent evaluation of the path ahead, and actively defining and demonstrating your value to your target market. Effective brand managers maintain a relentless focus on the product, it’s look, the price, packaging, and what the target market says about the product. An executive who successfully manages his or her brand, maintains the same focus.

Defining and enhancing your personal brand includes:

• Maintaining your career resources (resume, executive biography, social media) consistent with your capabilities—and your aspirations.
• Dressing for where you’re going—not where you are. Make the investment and get the coaching you need to “package yourself” at the top of your peer group–every day!
• Seeking out and taking advantage of executive assessments, coaching, feedback from people you trust, and targeted executive development programs.
• Resisting the temptation to create a public “image” that is more—or less than who you are. Reality always trumps rhetoric.

Veteran business leader, Tom Peters captured the power of branding when he said, “All of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called you.”

At a company, in an industry, and among your peers, owning your career enables you to define your value, communicate your differentiation and demonstrate your relevance in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Call us today to explore how you can enhance your brand, and advance your career.

Contacts:

Your Brand Isn’t What You Do. Your Brand is the Impact You Bring.

Companies aren’t buying what many executives are selling.

In a cut-to-the-chase, hyper-competitive, globally uncertain business environment, Boards of Directors, and CEOs pursuing exceptional talent are looking for people with a history of creating results, not people doing the things that should create results.

If you compile the findings of surveys querying CEOs’ biggest concerns, top executives consistently state their angst is linked to:

• Leading Digital Transformation
• Creating Disruptive Innovation
• Securing Global Data
• Finding Critical Talent
• Ensuring Organizational Alignment and Employee Engagement
• Navigating Geopolitical Uncertainty

Driving revenue growth, increasing cash flow and profitability, creating client loyalty, and improving shareholder value come with the job. If a CEO isn’t achieving these, he or she will quickly add to the statistics about rapid CEO turnover.

This means executive branding isn’t about creating awareness and market perception about what you do. Executive branding is building a reputation, crafting a powerful message, and clearly communicating your impact on what matters to CEOs and Boards, and how effectively you engage with the people around you.

Your brand is:

• Knowledge – What you know or the answers you can get.
• Relationships – Who you know or who you can connect with.
• Results – How what you do produces results that impact what matters.
• Reputation – Your history of delivering outcomes that drive corporate success.

A scan of executive resumes and LinkedIn profiles reflects a gap between what many committed and successful leaders are talking about and what the people hiring them care about. Whether you want to advance in your current company or are considering outside opportunities, if it’s time to refresh your brand around your results more than your activity, we welcome the opportunity to talk with you.

Contacts:

New Personal Branding Service for Senior Executives

NEWS RELEASE

 New Personal Branding Service for Senior Executives

 Dallas/Fort Worth, TX  (June 15, 2017)  Leapfrog Executive Search, a boutique retained search firm, today announced the formation of  Leapfrog Executive Services,  a new division dedicated to helping senior executives enhance their personal brands.

In response to a market demand by currently employed, C-level executives wanting to pursue new leadership roles, Leapfrog Executive Services will provide resumes, marketing biographies, LinkedIn profile optimization, and social media enhancement to help executives create greater differentiation, increase visibility, and gain personal credibility in the marketplace.

Jim Hess, Founder and Managing Principal of Leapfrog Executive Services and Leapfrog Executive Search said, “In conversations with sitting senior executives, we learned that a C-level executive wanting to initiate the pursuit of a new career opportunity needs a trusted, quality resource, that can provide personalized, confidential, and timely branding and marketing assistance. Unlike outplacement, our services will help executives proactively advance themselves in a market without waiting for opportunities to come to them. We are excited to offer this valuable service and become an organization to which others can confidently refer executives.”

About Leapfrog Executive Search:

Founded in 2001, Leapfrog Executive Search provides retained search expertise that is focused primarily on HR leadership roles.  The company is uniquely positioned to complete searches for talented performers who impact bottom-line performance. Organizations choose to engage Leapfrog Executive Search because of a demonstrated commitment to building relationships with HR leaders, functional leaders, and vendors, giving the firm unparalleled access to talent. Leapfrog Executive Search brings clients broad industry knowledge and solid domain expertise that ensures candidates are aligned with each client’s business challenges, strategic opportunities, and organizational culture.

Media Contacts:

Jim Hess                                                                     Joe Jordan
214-435-5409                                                             214-714-3987
jhess@leapfrog-services.com                                 jjordan@leapfrog-services.com

Gone to Texas

The Texas Talent Grab

As scores of people (including a few outlaws) pursued opportunity in Texas in the mid-1800’s, the phrase “Gone to Texas” or GTT would frequently appear nailed to the doors of abandoned houses or on fences beside vacated property. More recently, the Texas Governor’s Office of Economic Development gave GTT a second life by attracting new businesses to the Lone Star State with the promise of “Texas: Wide Open for Business.”

This 21st century GTT invitation is working! As home to 54 Fortune 500 companies, Texas ranks No. 2 in the U.S., ahead of California and Illinois. In the past six years, 75 major corporations have moved to Dallas/Fort Worth. Start-ups, company expansions, and corporate growth in DFW generated over 119,000 jobs between February 2016 and February 2017. An accelerating business environment creates an exponential competition for talent.

The Dallas Business Journal recently detailed the talent grab spreading across north Texas. None of the companies moving to Texas have announced an interest in candidates from the bottom half of the talent pool. The best companies are implementing ways to find and hire the top ten percent-and they are getting what they want.

Toyota announced their move from California and in a few months received 19,000 resumes aimed at the 1,000 openings the automaker is bringing to Plano. Tractor manufacturer Kubota’s move to Grapevine is driven by the need for innovation, efficiency, and talent. On a smaller scale, private equity firms are considering the talent in an acquisition as carefully as their quantification of a company’s financial results.

More than ever, human capital investments are being analyzed, quantified, and measured for impact to the business. In designing themselves for the future, companies must address the need for visionary leaders who can build a culture, anticipate the impact of workplace automation, and facilitate the on-going demand for employee engagement. These challenges become opportunities for differentiation when the leaders charged with resolving these realities are the most talented people the market offers.

How well is your executive leadership equipped to excel in a market where talent, technology, and transformation are driving forces in every organization? For over 16 years, Leapfrog Executive Search has leveraged our vast network of established relationships, our highly selective screening process, and our thorough knowledge of client needs to accelerate each client’s ability to select the executive talent required to lead their organization to new levels of success.  Give us a call to discuss top 10% talent!

Blaise Pascal, Candidate Parades, and Your Next Hire

What do 17th century mathematician Blaise Pascal and your next executive search have in common? Probability. Pascal created a perfect analogy for an effective search process when he stated:

Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
I made this [letter] very long, because I did not have the leisure to make it shorter.

Pascal knew that time and targeted effort are required early in any process to separate a desired outcome from the world of random possibilities, to the narrow scope of a desired result.

• The Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM) found it may cost up to five times a wrong hire’s annual salary to replace the person. The higher the position and the longer the tenure, the more it costs to refill a role.
• A U.S. based manufacturing company reported to PWC that turnover in one executive role, after just two years, cost the firm $2.5 million.

While considering a large candidate pool and executing an extensive search process sounds like a solid strategy for finding the best talent, this strategy carries significant risk:

• The time required to narrow a search from a large candidate pool to one person creates a needlessly long process during which in-demand leaders lose interest and take other positions.
• Extended searches require that senior leaders invest large amounts of time away from other priorities.
• As a team reviews many candidates, differentiation is lost in the sea of options.
• An extended search process makes a company look administrative-heavy and difficult to work with-damaging the brand.

Choosing a boutique executive search firm ensures the investment made by a hiring company is focused on quickly reviewing and narrowing the number of potential candidates, so executive interviewing time is invested in the highly-qualified few, not a parade of potentials. A high quality boutique firm like Leapfrog Executive Search will invest deeply – before beginning the search – in understanding the business, the unique culture, and the key people in the process, aggressively driving the search to a timely completion. Often this means we present fewer, but more targeted . . . and ultimately, more successful candidates.

Peter Drucker once commented, “Of all the decisions an executive makes, none are as important as the decision about people because they ultimately determine the performance capacity of the organization.” Talent investments determine your company’s future. Engaging a firm like Leapfrog Executive Search ensures your investment is applied to finding the best fit in the most efficient way. Your attention stays focused on engaging the right talent and growing your business, not on a parade of second tier candidates.

Pecking Order Theory and the Search for the Super Candidate

If pecking order comes up in a business conversation, the discussion generally goes one of two directions. Most often, visions emerge of dominant leaders and less-assertive followers trying to engage productively (often without success) in a winner-take-all watch-your-back environment. Less commonly, an interaction about pecking order moves to the business financing model where companies prioritize their financing sources based on which is easiest to obtain first.

When you couple these trains of thought together, a common approach to finding talent emerges.

First, many companies approach a search for talent by unconsciously mirroring the results of Purdue biologist William Muir’s intriguing study in productivity. Knowing chickens are social creatures, Muir selected one flock and left it alone for generations. A second flock was populated with individually selected “super chickens” from which he carefully chose the most productive to continue in the brood.

After six generations, Muir discovered the first group was full of plump and happy birds that had dramatically increased egg production. The second group did not fare so well. Only three survived the experiment. In a quest for dominance, they pecked the rest of the flock to death.

When a company launches a search for a senior leader, the list of qualifications, requirements, and professional experience often becomes a description for a “super candidate.” The quest for a candidate that can leap any business challenge in a single bound, drives companies to then engage in the financial pecking order—choosing whatever search firm is “easiest” to engage, without considering the process followed during a candidate search.

A well-recognized, multi-national retained search firm often has the name recognition that draws the interest of an impressive list of “super candidates.” But the behaviors that secured a leader’s place on that coveted list, might be the style of interacting and working with others that Muir observed in his experiment—highly productive and extremely destructive.

A boutique firm like Leapfrog Executive Search uses a highly-personalized approach to every request for talent. We’re easy to work with—the difference is in how we approach each engagement.

We invest the time required to gain a complete understanding of each client’s organization, culture, goals, and candidate requirements. We then launch an equally-personalized approach to connecting with candidates—many that we already know from our extensive network and targeted relationship development across industries and roles.

The next time you need senior talent, call Leapfrog Executive Search. We will go beyond looking for a super candidate to finding the right candidate, the person who can deliver results while developing both the people and your organization around them.