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Transforming Your Business – taking your people with you

TRANSCRIPT

Howard Greenwood: Hello, and welcome to Jump Advisory Group, "Transforming your business and taking your people with you" session. Thank you for joining today. It's been much appreciated. Let's give you an idea of who Jump Advisory advisory are. We're a consultancy business, which helps recruitment agencies grow and scale. The team has inaccessible under 50 years of recruitment management experience of running large multinational recruitment agencies to build and scale.

Howard Greenwood: And we've also helped small SME agencies to actually go to trade sales. In the end, we worked with companies all over the UK and all around the globe. We believe the recruitment industry actually changes lives. And our purpose is to empower the world recruitment leaders to succeed beyond their ambitions and reflect the best of the industry that changes lives.

Howard Greenwood: So with us today, I'm joined by Heather Salway, who is an HR recruitment specialist. Recently joined jump from a distinguished wary queer with the engaged group in the UK. She is leading in development people, strategy and practice recruitment leadership, learning and development, ER, and employment law.

Howard Greenwood: And she's now a coach, a mentor, a non-exec director for a number of companies and obviously a director of jump. It should be Dave Pye with us. Unfortunately, Dave Pay's, some connection problems. Into the system. So if he does get in, he'll join us soon, myself. I'm Howard Greenwood. I'm in my 30th year of recruitment, I've been a director of computer people in spring, which is part of the Adecco IT systems evolution.

Howard Greenwood: Robert Half I branched out on my own to become a coach and mentor for small recruitment agencies after building a small recruitment agency in the UK. In building high-performance sales teams. And I'm one of the co-founders of Jump. And I say, Recruitment agencies grow and scale.

Howard Greenwood: So today we're going to talk about how to transform your business and take people with you. And we think there's quite a bit of things that we need to be looking at to do that. So let's sort of move straight into that first bit, which is we're going to talk about attraction and retention. So let's kick off Heather attraction and retention.

Heather Salway: Thanks Howard. And I hope everybody bears with us as we fill in for Mr. Pye and his bits and pieces too. So, obviously one of the first things that we need to look at with attraction and retention is who are we hiring? So we are in a changed market. I think we know that's true, certainly in the UK.

Heather Salway: It's true in America all around the world. And I think all markets are moving to being candidate short. And we need to be hiring candidate led consultants. I think it's interesting for business leaders to reflect on whether or not that needs a change in approach in terms of. How we structure the jobs that people are coming to do and how we decide who are the right people with the right skills to develop to bring into our organization.

Heather Salway: We're very good in our industry. I think about bringing people into their first jobs by taking school leaders, university leaders, as well as people who are changing careers and training them from scratch. And I think at the moment, transforming our business is really about thinking in the market that we're in and that we're likely to be in for a good period of time.

Heather Salway: Are we really thinking about the jobs that we're bringing people in to do and the skill base that they have when they come into our organization, the skills and talents and the focus. And then in the next question we'll talk about how we develop them. And one of the biggest questions about this, and I'm sure how it's got a lot to say on this subject as well, is really the structure of the role.

Heather Salway: So traditionally going back in the day, you know, consultants were jacks of all trades. It was a 360 role. They were expected to cover all aspects of the job in one person for a unique individual successful recruitment consultants that cover all of the different things that our 360 consultant would do.

Heather Salway: But when moving very much more into segmenting the role as we could become very much more candidate focused in, there are many more organizations that have 180 or one 20 roles for consultants. And that really does mean that we are fishing in a different pool. We are looking at different skill sets. We're looking at different backgrounds, we're looking at different focuses and different ways of attracting and selecting those people.

Heather Salway: I think that's a really interesting change that we need to think about when we are transforming our businesses. Are we bringing the right people in and are we bringing the right people in to do the right jobs? How I did it, if you've got anything you wanted to add to that? 

Howard Greenwood: I think when we're hiring people, I think what we've got to start to think about, and this is the thing that I've been sort of talking to a lot of my clients about, you know, if we look at the UK has got an attrition rate of 4.3%.

Howard Greenwood: You know, and obviously in the first year, it's even more than that. So I think when we start to think we're not recruiting the wrong people, that's what a lot of recruitment agencies say, recruit the wrong people, and they'll have to get rid of them. So what we should be thinking about is changing our recruitment process and having a look at our recruitment process.

Howard Greenwood: In more depth because that's where we're going wrong. So it's not the fact that we're hiring the wrong people, our recruitment process isn't finding the right people for us. So we've got to change how we recruit in order to do that. And I think once we start to do that, then we start to change a little bit, the type of people we get into our business.

Howard Greenwood: And if it changes the type of people that we get into our business and they become more productive for us, then the retention. Becomes better. And therefore we keep people longer. So let's not blame the people that we're recruiting because they were a bad hire process and change our process and work from that.

Heather Salway: And what's your view on the 360, 180, 120 Howard? You know, I think the world of recruitment is changing and I think as we become more candidate focused, we need candidate specialists, consultants and client specialist consultants. But I'd be really interested in it. Well, your perspective on that. 

Howard Greenwood: I had this conversation with a client last week and it was really interesting because they were talking about bringing 360 recruiters in.

Howard Greenwood: And when we're going to talk about in a minute, we're going to talk about onboarding in a minute and with what the question was about, how do we train 360 recruits? And they said, well, we're going to do the mirror and match the usual method synchronously. Bring them in and sit in the next door recruiter and hope that works.

Howard Greenwood: And I just simply said, I said that great. And that worked when I started in recruitment in the early nineties, because we had set prime selling time. So our past nights, 11:30 was prime selling time. You spoke to clients and only spoke to clients and nobody else, but I'm 11:30 to 12:30 when you spoke to candidates from 1:30 to 4:30 back to clients from 4:30 to 7:00, you know, we were back on candidates and everyone did the same thing.

Howard Greenwood: So mirror matching works. And when I turned around and said, so what do you do? And he said, well, I'm gonna be dealing with clients. I'm going to be dealing with this. And I'm dealing with that. And what do you want your person to do when they first come in? Well, they're going to be doing, oh, something completely different to what I'm doing.

Howard Greenwood: I said, yeah. So mirror matching doesn't work. And that hence why, that's why one of the other hire reasons why we have such a high attrition. So we've got to start to think if we're going to bring people in, we need to bring them in. And to me, because we're a candidate short market. I would have them just doing candidates straight away, hitting on candidates straight away and trying to fill jobs that they know that they can fill.

Howard Greenwood: So work on that candidate marketplace. And that sort of leads us on to the bit that Dave was going to talk about, which was onboarding. And I think what we should think about when we start to onboard people, It's we need to make them feel part of the business straight away. We need to make them feel part of the tribe, so to speak.

Howard Greenwood: And what tends to happen is we, if we start to crumb people with loads and loads of information, first of all, first and foremost, they get a little bit panicked. They're a little bit sort of worried about what, whether they're performing right correctly or not. And so we'll just start thinking about that onboarding process.

Howard Greenwood: It needs to be small steps that are linked to each other and growth. So that onboarding would be, let's talk about the business. Let's talk about what they're looking for from the business, but let's talk about how they interact into the mission and the values of the business. And that links back to where we are recruiting the right people?

Howard Greenwood: Do those people have the same values that the business wants to portray the same values of the leaders. And do they understand the mission statement the business is going on because they start to understand the mission and values. Then we can start to grow these people in the appropriate manner. Then when we start to sit them at their desks, that training package I'll be planning out their next 12, 13 weeks of what they want to be doing.

Howard Greenwood: But each week would be a micro session each week. So it wouldn't have a long strategy recruitment process at the beginning where we learned the cradle to grave of recruitment, because by the time week eight comes, we may be doing something that they learned in week one, but they've forgotten all about it.

Howard Greenwood: So me, I'd be taking them and say, right. Okay. Let's take a small micro session. So let's say we're talking with candidates, so it's how to find candidates, et cetera. So you train them how to do that. Put them live on the skills, you get them working on them, how to do that. You coach and mentor them, look at what they're doing.

Howard Greenwood: Well, praise them, look at what they're doing poorly, improve them and change it at the end of the week. Then what I'd do is I'd ask them to present back to me what they have learned and what that understanding of the thing that we have taught. If so then I can start to see how much they've grown and how much they know.

Howard Greenwood: I know how much they need to know. I can start to add to that. So every week we start to see their growth because they don't see that we start to see their growth and we start to capitalize on this. When we start to look at the UK. A lot of the companies I'm talking to, they're saying it takes them normally 13 weeks on a 360 model to get people to make that first placement.

Howard Greenwood: What we're talking about in this model. I normally get people between week four and six making their first placement on perm and on. It's usually between week three and five, that they're making their first placement. So not only now is my improving the capability of the business because we're filling jobs that we might not have filled before.

Howard Greenwood: But now this person is starting to get a taste of what's going on. We start to then move that forward and say every single position, therefore we should have training. Package assigned to it on how you grow that person. So every person, as soon as they see what they're doing, knows how to get promoted, they know how they're going to be trained.

Howard Greenwood: They know what's going to come from the next job. They can start to see their career plan and career growth. Now, not only do they feel part of the tribe, but now they understand the journey that they're going on and they can see the journey that they are actually moving towards so they can see their end goals and they can start to see how they can reach those end goals.

Howard Greenwood: So to me, that. Process is really important. And then the end of that is when we start to look at benefits and commission, we can then start to identify certain behaviors that we want. And we can start to link those behaviors back to the commission plan because we've commissioned in a certain way. It drives certain behaviors.

Howard Greenwood: If we put benefits in a certain way, it drives certain behaviors. So all the time we're driving the right behaviors within the business. And this to me, what we should be thinking about is that when I think about training people on average, 40% of every human's day is pure habit. And we think about these things, it's a genuine habit.

Howard Greenwood: So if we can create the right habits in recruitment, right from day one and train them all the way through, then what we'll end up getting is a better person at the end. And when you think about it, the new person coming into recruitment in the UK, we think great if they're billing between 40 and 80K, but if we've got a 43% attrition rate, that means we're only getting half the people through when really.

Howard Greenwood: Year two And what my view is, we should be getting by the end of year one to have a run rate of 10K a month, if not more, but then year two means we're starting to build 120K plus. If, unless we have a plan for them to get there, how are they going to get there? So to me, that's what we should be looking at and that's what we should be working for.

Howard Greenwood: And that's how we should be going. Obviously, you've been involved quite a lot with training through our HR perspective. Heather, what's your views on. 

Heather Salway: Well, what I'd add to that actually astonishingly comprehensive answer. I think that there were some really great, interesting pieces in there for people to take away.

Heather Salway: What I would add to that is my absolute support for don't forget about your mission, your vision, your values at the beginning. So if we don't set the context in our onboarding process, and I think sometimes as recruiters, we're so keen to get people on the phones, on the desks that we forget that contextualizing this and really start to think about what's our plan.

Heather Salway: Why are they doing what they're doing? What are the values? What are the behaviors of how we're described? And then everything else has to line up with that. As he says, around commissions and bonuses, it really is all about getting that. Getting them plugged into our overall plan and our team. And I think there's a really interesting little addendum to that as well, Howard, from something I was reading this week, we are bringing people back into offices now we're around the world.

Heather Salway: And I think it's really important that as leaders and as managers and as trainers and developers, that we acknowledge that there will be a cohort of people who have been more remote working for. The last couple of years, and some of those people will have joined the workforce from school or college or university during that pandemic.

Heather Salway: And there are a whole host of behaviors that go around being in the office with other people and building relationships and understanding office politics and teamworking. But I think it's really important that we acknowledge as leaders in organizations that. We've all worked in offices before, and we know what that involves and what that's like.

Heather Salway: There actually is an element and a facet of joining an organization and being face-to-face with your colleagues that people won't be used to and being on the phone and things like that. So I think it's important that we acknowledge that change as a result of the pandemic, that is really important in terms of taking out.

Howard Greenwood: So that moves on to the second sort of part of this, the last part of this, when we talk about attraction and retention, it is about attraction and retention. So what is your recruitment strategy and, you know, to ensure your hiring quality and not quantity, then we are going to link that as we said that back to our value and mission statement.

Howard Greenwood: And what I want you to think is why was the last person who left your business? Why did they leave the business? Why did you make people leave your business? And I can always guarantee. They left your business because behaviourally, they weren't aligned to your business because in the value is what we tend to do is we hire on skills and then have fire on behaviors.

Howard Greenwood: And so what we've got to start to think is, if we hire people who actually live your values and mission, and then not be a pain, a mood Hoover, a negative influence in the business, then we can train them in the skills. So we need to review our recruitment processes that sort of set at the beginning. So often I hear, yeah.

Howard Greenwood: The business is going on the wrong for the business. When in fact the catalyst for it all is that poor recruitment process in the first place. So if we start to think about our EVP, our employers' value proposition, how we engage with the candidates that want to come and work for you, we've got to start to think, why will they want to work for you?

Howard Greenwood: We need to develop a better interview structure to make it a harder place to get into, and then create an onboarding strategy that makes it a harder place to leave. So onboarding, what does that look like if we're doing that sink and swim structure, then when a real problem, when I walk through the door, what I'm expecting as a new person is, have I got a career plan?

Howard Greenwood: Do I know where I'm going? Human nature is ingrained in my head. Every five times every second, my brain is going flight or fight. Whereas the danger is fight or flight when the big things that the human can't really cope with, if they don't know where they're going, think what's she like when you're on a journey and you get lost, you get really panicky.

Howard Greenwood: Well, these people are on a journey if they don't know where they go. They're going to start to panic. So a career plan is really important. How are they going to get promoted? What does their career look like this year? What's it career look like next year? How do they fit into the company? So this is where our training and development really starts to come in, because that is what starts to retain people.

Howard Greenwood: So what is your retention strategy? To keep people, not just for 12 months, but for 24, 36, 48 and beyond because a stable workforce is obviously more productive, creates larger profits. The one that is constantly rotating. As we said in the UK, you know, the average builder builds 10K per month. However, if we stated 43% attrition rates start in the first year, you've got to recruit two people just to get one to the end of that year.

Howard Greenwood: So that's a very expensive way of recruiting. What if we can reduce our attrition rate by changing the people that we recruited. So better get a better quality of person. As we said at the beginning, changing why we're hiring. So what, we're not looking for a 360 person, and I always think of this as a soccer term or a football term.

Howard Greenwood: 360 people, they're going to play in goals. They're going to play in defense. They're going to play in midfield. They're going to play an attack. So in American football terms, you know, you're an outliner, you're going to be a quarterback. You're going to be the kicker. You're training these people to do every single position on the pitch.

Howard Greenwood: It just doesn't fit. It doesn't work, train people to do that specialist, but yeah, it's year two and year three, where we make the money. So churn and burn is killing your capacity, your hours. And substantially reducing your bottom line in year two and beyond. The key to retention is initially working to find the right behavior profiles for each position.

Howard Greenwood: And don't compromise just because someone's got some really good skills, if they aren't the right value proposition that, that not the right value proposition for you, then train your people to be better than. Create an environment of learning support and growth lead with passion, enthusiasm, and create those little wins.

Howard Greenwood: Celebrate those little wins, create commitment because if we create commitment and people are proud to work for you, then what we do is we create efficiency and we create a team environment where people are going to move and work for you. So it's all about that. So before we move forward, are there any questions?

Howard Greenwood: From the board at the moment.

Howard Greenwood: Okay. So let's move forward and they've still not with us. So he's still having problems. So managing our people, measuring performance. So.again. Heather 

Heather Salway: We have got a question, Howard. I've just bought it on the board. Just getting the hang of this technology. So what outcomes we've got a question.

Heather Salway: Are we managing in the first 90 days? 

Howard Greenwood: So outcomes do we manage? So to me it's each individual week. What we are doing. So I've been looking at for us talking to candidates, the number of candidates I've spoken to. So I'd want them speaking to a number of candidates then from those number of candidates, number of CV's that I'm generating.

Howard Greenwood: Then I'm looking at the number of interviews that I'm generating and that's interviewing the candidates that I'm looking about, the number of CV's that I can then put forward to a job that I'm looking for, the number of people who actually get interviewed from that job underneath that I'm looking at how many candidates that they added to the system.

Howard Greenwood: How many clients have I been able to strip off those kinds of stuff? See, or haven't seen before, and then I'm starting to build a platform straight away. So each individual week has a different process to make sure. Doing the right things for our consultants. So I measure things in very small micro measures, but I do not micromanage.

Howard Greenwood: I let them get on with it. And I work at, so my daily meetings, which we'll talk about today about creating habits, are more important from that. So when we look at that. Then it's back to how we manage our people by measuring performance, which will also help answer that question, Laurie. Okay. So Heather influences people managing performance.

Howard Greenwood: Okay. David's objectively coming on this bit. So talk to us about how you think we should influence people and manage people's performance. 

Heather Salway: Well, it's interesting, isn't it? Because this is absolutely key to the success of our recruitment businesses. So the first thing for me is we have to have a plan. So we have to know, and it sounds obvious, but I'm sure you, Howard, as well as I come across the recruiting businesses all the time that don't have a written down plan.

Heather Salway: So the first thing is we need a plan and we need a good plan, and we need the people in our organization to understand what the plan is. In some cases, we have included them in creating the plan. So that can be a really important part of getting that buy-in and getting that influence for people to deliver the plan if they've been involved in creating it.

Heather Salway: So they have that belief in the plan they bought into it. And they feel part of delivering. Then you've got to a line that plan with your reward scheme. So, you know, people do what we measure and they do what we reward. So are we measuring the right things in our plan? One of the most important questions for me is that are we putting the right measures in all of those things that will actually enable us to deliver the plan?

Heather Salway: And does everybody understand what it is that we're measuring so that we can do that? And with all we are building commission schemes that will also deliver on our plan. So we've got to build in that's three facets. Really. We have to have really effective communication so that everybody absolutely understands and is brought in to our plan.

Heather Salway: They have to understand what part they play in that. And therefore what the measures are that are going to be put in place to look at their delivery and their part in play. And then we need to align commission structures to make sure that we are delivering and rewarding people who actually work towards achieving our plans.

Howard Greenwood: And I think when we start having those plans, this is where we talk about managing performance. And this is sort of links back to the question that Lori asked about KPIs trends. And then you think about what we've been doing at the moment being, working from home, et cetera. So how do we manage performance when we've got maybe a disparate workforce and things like that.

Howard Greenwood: So we need to build support mechanisms in. So now we think about yeah. How many options our staff have hybrid working, working from home pure office, working now managing that performance is really. Hard. So we need to think about what we can do and why we say what gets measured, can get improved based on what we need, but what I think, what we need to be thinking about more importantly, as we have these disparate sort of workforces now is we need to be creating what we call Keystone habits in the business to ensure everyone understands their journey and how they're getting from A to B and a what speed. And if people don't know where they're going, they are going to panic a little bit, as we've already talked about. And panic leads to fear and fear leads to fight and fight. So creating the right habits are really important to me. When we start managing performance every day, I'd have a sales meeting every single morning, so other people can dial in and zoom in.

Howard Greenwood: Face-to-face and so everyone's in there and what we think about and that sales to meet and meet. Is it boring? Is it boring people? Because if it's boring people, then it doesn't create the right habit to set the day off. So do the meetings start on time, you know, I always say, if I'm going to run a nine o'clock meeting, it starts bang on nine o'clock.

Howard Greenwood: So if I'm going to run an 8 45 meeting, it starts at 8:45, not 8:46, not 8:40, it starts at 8:45. So if I'm gonna run a meeting every single morning, it's going to start at the same time every morning. If I can't make it, then I'll instruct someone to open that meeting and run that meeting. So we've got to start to think about that.

Howard Greenwood: So that's the first thing that I would start working on. I'll talk about that later, but you start to think about them. Do you know which clients you do not want to work with? Can you truly say, which were the clients you have the best relationships on, or which clients you have a second thought with? Do we know which vacancies actually make you money?

Howard Greenwood: Which are the easiest to fill, or we just swamped with lots of vacancies, but we can't fill them. Is our CRM crammed with available candidates or is it simply empty? So are we going to the job boards? Are they working? Yeah, all these things we've got to think about. So is your candidate and your client interview process creating success, or just clogging up your calendar and blocking out time.

Howard Greenwood: So when we start to measure all these things, we start to think about what's going on. So we need to create uniformity. We need to create habits, which gives your employees accountability and empowers them to perform a learning rather than giving them fear from hitting them with a KPI where they hide, lie and eventually leave.

Howard Greenwood: So once these habits start to grow, we start to develop a really strong business. So if you think, as I said, a bit early, 40% of everything we do every day is a habit. So if I talk about just two habits, so let's talk about that morning meeting. So to me, the morning meeting would kick off at the same time every day.

Howard Greenwood: And I talk about three things in that morning meeting. Investigate these three things I'd take offline. So the three things I've really punched sheets everywhere in that meeting, it would be, what's the biggest thing you're going to achieve today. So that instantly gets them thinking about what's the biggest thing they need to achieve today.

Howard Greenwood: I want to know where they are against their KPIs. And they're just going to tell me where they are. It's whether the up where the down makes no difference. They are recognizing that they are up or down on their KPIs. They don't need chastising on it. I then want to know what's stopping them. Once I know what's stopping them recruiting again.

Howard Greenwood: I'm not going to address that, but if I start to see common trends across my business, then I can start to put a training package in to cure that. If it's something really big, I'll take it offline and address it offline. So it's a really quick meeting. I then run the same meeting on a Friday, but rather than it being say 50 minutes, it'd be a team meeting for an hour.

Howard Greenwood: What have we achieved this week? Where are you against the target? What's stopping you. How do we cure that? So now get the team together on how we cure it. They're all talking about what they've won and what they're celebrating this week. And they're all talking about where they are hitting that target. So again, we're developing them in that way.

Howard Greenwood: That meeting would then expand into a larger monthly review. Quarterly review, et cetera. So I'm now getting uniformity all the way through everyday. I'm creating the habits. The first thing people think about every morning is what's the biggest thing they're going to achieve today. They're going to think about what's going to stop them and how we can stop, prevent that from happening.

Howard Greenwood: The flip side of that is when you start to measure KPIs, do you measure KPIs or do you measure a trend? KPIs tend to be. I think it disrupts people because they're either worried and therefore they cheat on a KPI. So if you truly want people to succeed and pass the first 12 months, they need a clearly defined roadmap and a career plan.

Howard Greenwood: That's not just a target. They need to know everything and be able to cross the finishing line. So to me, the number of CVS out every day, the number of interviews every day, the number of temps running every day, the number of contracts is running every day. But what we do is we set a trend line and say, Target is X.

Howard Greenwood: If you have this number every day of these things, then you'll hit your trendline. And what we do is you just watch. Develop their own trendline or that creates a habit. So once they start to understand that they start to see they're in control of that trendline. They can see whether they're below the trend line or whether they're above the trend line.

Howard Greenwood: The only time I intervene is after three days, if they've had three days on the up, brilliant. I want to know how to keep that. If they've got three days going below that trend, I want to know how we can arrest that drop and get back to the trendline because every day, one day. One day I might be down.

Howard Greenwood: So we don't do it on an everyday cycle, because that is just saying to the people we don't trust you. What we actually need to do is do things that actually start to motivate people. And that's what you wanted to talk about. Heather is motivated. 

Heather Salway: Yeah, it is. And I think it's a really interesting place to start from.

Heather Salway: Daily roadmap of where they're going. I think it's really important. And I think we miss sometimes because we're so familiar with the process of developing new consultants and getting them to perform that we miss the value of that roadmap and actually sitting down linking back to what we talked about with onboarding and actually making sure that they have a map of exactly where they're going and what they're going to learn.

Heather Salway: And. Stage and how they're going to be able to see how they've progressed, how it's described in terms of performance management is absolutely crucial and really motivating your people is part of the same thing. It's having a roadmap that is taking place over a longer period of time, and that's linked to their overall success.

Heather Salway: So in organizations, we can create different roadmaps for different types of careers, whether people are following sales roads or account management roles or business development roles and having the flexibility to adapt those roadmaps for each individual and making sure that as managers, we spend time with each of those individuals to understand what their career goals are and that we can create and support them in a map for how they can achieve their own individual career goals. The other part of this, I think that's really important in terms of motivating your people is that whole idea of psychological contract, which goes right the way back to the way we recruit them in the first place. You know, all we create is that bond between the individual and the organization where they know.

Heather Salway: It is in our interest to help them achieve their career goals. And they therefore in exchange will help us achieve our business goals. And I think sometimes that psychological contract pieces are missed slightly. And so that we don't understand that this is a two way agreement, you know, there people give us their discretionary effort in exchange for us agreeing to help them meet their goals.

Heather Salway: And that individual one-to-one is really important. So the career map has to be about how they're going to achieve their goals. How they know when they've got their, what support we're going to offer them to enable them to achieve them. How are we going to mark each of the stages in their development and what salary goes alongside it, and what development opportunities are they going to have in our organization?

Heather Salway: How are we going to decide whether or not we're going to promote them? And for me, all this comes back to the effectiveness of our managers. Too often in organizations, we leave the motivation of individuals to chance. And actually as managers and leaders of organizations, we have huge influence over the motivation and the people around those, by what we put in place to measure what we put in place to monitor how we reward it.

Heather Salway: And it's really important in organizations that we spend time helping managers to understand how they influence the people around them. So helping them to understand what it is that motivates them, what it is that motivates teams. There's some great theory around this that you can help people apply in practice and really upskill our managers to get the best out of all of the people around them, in their teams.

Howard Greenwood: Measuring performance is really important, but having that roadmap. And I remember as a kid, and I've talked about this an awful lot on our, we have a weekly webinar every Wednesday. And I've talked about this an awful lot. 

Heather Salway: The sporting analogy. 

Howard Greenwood: This is the holiday analogy. I remember as a small kid, we didn't go on many holidays.

Howard Greenwood: My dad was a massive worker. Oh, Holly, didn't basically like going on holiday. I don't, I just, I think he just didn't like us full stop, but it didn't like a holiday. And so when we've started to go on holiday, he say, right. Let's plan what we're going to do and where we're going to go. The planning stage was really important.

Howard Greenwood: We all got involved in the planning and we all got involved. What was going on? Yeah. Then what he would do was then say, right, let's have a countdown before when we're going on holiday. And so we have the roadmap, but obviously we didn't go out of the country. So we drove everywhere. So he would say, right.

Howard Greenwood: Okay. We're going to drive from Leads to Scotland. So it's say, right, I want you to find it on the maps. And this is the olden days when you go out and find maps, things that you might want to go and see on the way up. And so we'd have to sort of view what our journey looked like. And we were part of that journey and part of the planning preparation, but also part of the key hub, the key milestones that we want to do 

Heather Salway: So important for us to do that for our employees.

Heather Salway: It's exactly the same 

Howard Greenwood: when we got that, we've delivered our plan and we'd love that. And then what we did on the holiday, we said, what we're going to do then when we got there. And then what was really funny on the way back, guess what we were doing. We were planning in the back of the car where we wanted to go next.

Howard Greenwood: And when we went to go the next my dad was obviously planning what he was going to do for work, and didn't want to relisten to us in the plan for what we wanted to do next. And that's what employees are like. Once 

Heather Salway: they own it as well. They want to own, it has to be their plan. 

Howard Greenwood: So that leads into that sort of final question that we said we were going to cover, which was all about leadership during times of change, because times have changed hugely over the last sort of two years.

Howard Greenwood: So what are we doing at the moment? So let's look at leadership join times of change, and again, you know, I think the question that Dave was going to answer is what changes do we need to make as a leader and to lead our people, to ensure we're leading them in a way that actually motivates and drives them.

Heather Salway: It's really interesting, isn't it? Because for both of us Howard I mean, I'm speaking for Dave, but I'm pretty sure we're on the same page. We're on the same page on this, and we talk about this to all of our clients. That jump is about your vision and your values, and it is about making sure that you have them and that you live them.

Heather Salway: So. During times of change that becomes even more important because we're all faced with having to make decisions on the hoof. And if we don't understand the vision and the values that we, the context that we should be making those decisions in during times of change that just becomes more difficult for us.

Heather Salway: So I think as an organization and as a leader of an organization to just repurpose. Your vision to think about what it is that your organization is for. And I was thinking about this in terms of the panel that we're doing this afternoon in recruitment, especially in the markets we're in now, it's so easy for us to become destructive.

Heather Salway: They buy the next sparkly thing, you know, there is a surfeit of opportunity at the moment. And I think just going back to that plan and making sure that we really are clear on what our purpose is about what our vision is and what our values are, and then making sure that we share that we live it in our organization every day.

Heather Salway: Do you want to add anything to that? 

Howard Greenwood: What do we need to change? And you're right. It's about our purpose and leading from our purpose and having everybody understand that, but that career plan also that business plan and that business roadmap, what we tend to find is when we go in, as you know, I must have done 30 or 40 this year, not this year, but over the last six months with clients setting.

Howard Greenwood: Here is a three-year roadmap. This is where we're going. Let's bring it back down to the next 90 days. So we know where we're going and where we're starting from. It's really interesting is when I do accountability calls, how many of them haven't read it? How many haven't gone back over it, they've sort of gone on a different route, a different idea, et cetera, because you write those shiny things, appear all the time in recruitment.

Howard Greenwood: And then they understand a lot of the things that they are trying to do. It doesn't make sense. And so they've got to have a map and they've got to be made accountable for that map. And this is where lots of business leaders sort of struggle is that they have zero accountability because they are the owner of the business.

Howard Greenwood: And this is where we as coaches, mentors, directors come in, because we will keep you accountable to that plan, but also keep you accountable to your purpose and your vision. And it's important as a business. Leader that you know where you're going. And you can instill that confidence in your staff, that if you come across a roadblock or you come across some roadworks, you know how to get around it, don't just set off in another direction and hope you're going in the right direction.

Howard Greenwood: Way, you've got to have a plan to get there. And so really what it's about then is we've gotta move that plan further forward constantly. And you know, the old adage of here's my plan for the next three years. Well, yes, it's a three year plan, but actually it's not a three-year plan. What it is. It's a three-year goal.

Howard Greenwood: The plan will be forever going. The plan is infinite. It doesn't stop because after the first 90 days that we've done with you, what we then do is plan the next 90 days at the end of that three year plan. The plan is constantly growing and constantly moving constantly. So what we start to do is we start to look at delivering that plan and we start to look at it now and where it's going to be.

Howard Greenwood: Your roots might change, but your destination should always be the same. And whether that destination is a financial destination, a trade sale destination, et cetera, that doesn't change. It's getting to that end point. If you get that quicker, brilliant, then we do it again and we work again. So it's about having that plan in there.

Howard Greenwood: And I think the biggest part of having the plan. And this is where one of your expertise Heather is all about communication. 

Heather Salway: Yeah. Yeah. And the, and that sharing the vision piece is really important. So absolutely fundamental and missing in many organizations is having that plan, having that vision, having that values and making sure they're fit for purpose particularly now, and keeping them under constant review because in times of change, things are going to change.

Heather Salway: So, as you say, next piece is really about effective communication. And this is not just about painting pictures of your vision, your values on the wall. You know, although that is great because it does keep it at the forefront of people's minds. And it's very visible for us to see all the time, but it's really about how we create clarity in that vision for all of the people in the organization who won't have been involved in creating it.

Heather Salway: And so. Being able to spend time with groups of individuals. And I think it starts with your senior management team and it, and then your leadership team and team managers, depending on the size of your business, but it's about helping them to understand your vision and your values. What does that mean in terms of how they behave?

Heather Salway: What does it mean in terms of how they make decisions? What does it look and feel like in terms of the way in which we behave? And so, to be able to, in a classroom setting, we work through real life examples of what the vision and values and mission mean for the organization. In terms of the way we do things around here really helps to bring that to life and live for people in the way in which they behave.

Heather Salway: In meetings, you know, like these daily meetings that Howard talked about and your career reviews and your team meetings and your annual celebration was whatever they are. It's all about making sure that you use your vision and values to theme all of the things that you do so that they become really alive and meaningful.

Heather Salway: Not just words on the wall. 

Howard Greenwood: Yeah. That's interesting. Is it not just words on the wall? And I think when we talk about core question leadership during times of change. And what do we actually want from our leaders? And I think this is where intellectual honesty and intellectual humility become absolutely the cornerstone of great leadership, transparency, and honesty.

Howard Greenwood: To me, it's all about winning the hearts and minds of your staff and working. With your people. So we need to sort of think about a leader in a very simple way. You know, a leader is a person who is brilliant, absolutely everything. A leader has absolute weakness without a shadow of a doubt. Every leader has a weakness.

Howard Greenwood: What great leaders do is they understand where they are strong. Okay. Implement that strength. They understand where they are weak and they recruit people into that business where that weakness is their strength, building strength in that management team and building a process that is based on your values.

Howard Greenwood: So a good leader will have the honesty to admit. Issues and the humidity to hire people who were basically smarter than them and work on it. So the concept really is no leader is an island or. If you want to grow and scale, you don't want to be an island. You want to be on something bigger. So, you know, there's that famous saying, hire smarter people than you when really that's what we should be doing.

Howard Greenwood: But what great leaders do is they get out of their way and let them get on with everything that they should be getting on with. So what we start to think about where we as a great leader, they set their business plan in process. And then what they do is the divide, the tasks within that process, down to the people who have their strengths.

Howard Greenwood: And therefore what we should start to start thinking about. You've got the overall business plan and within it, you've got many little strategies going on constantly all the time. So what we should think about is the strategy. How we execute the strategy, the people involved in that strategy and does that strategy drive cash into the bank that I can then use to carry on growing and expanding my business.

Howard Greenwood: I don't want a strategy that makes me absolutely turnover rich, but cash poor because my clients aren't paying us. So when we think about that process, we could have a great strategy. We could execute it really well, but the people hate it and it doesn't drive cash into the bank. So we need to change the strategy.

Howard Greenwood: We could have a weak strategy that's executed really well. The people love it, and it drives a little cash into the bank. Build on the strategy. We could have a great strategy. This executed poorly. People don't understand it, but it drives cash. So if we can change the execution and how people like it, it's going to drive more cash.

Howard Greenwood: So what we've got to think is primary about our staff, our clients, and our employees. And we need to be honest, we need to live our values and then deliver our purpose to ensure that those three groups, every second of the day, are working in that way. So how do you chastise your staff if they make a mistake?

Howard Greenwood: Is really important, how you develop your staff when they've done something really well is really important. So you need to live your own values and your own value proposition. So when we're giving them a part of the strategy to deliver. We need to be able to be honest and say, this is your part of the strategy, go away and deliver it.

Howard Greenwood: Allow them to make mistakes, allow them to change and allow them to work. What we're doing is giving people that commitment. We're giving people that opportunity to grow. And that means. They're getting that capability to take the business to the next level. And that's all about them winning the hearts and minds of your people to create a really collaborative workforce that is driving for you.

Howard Greenwood: So humility is basically knowing to the extent of the limits of your knowledge, then asking people. Whether it be from inside the business or outside the business likers, business coaches keep you accountable to your strengths and your strategy, because only, you know, what you know, and what you don't know is actually slowing your business down.

Howard Greenwood: So going out and finding people who know more than you. Is really important. So you need to create a really good support team around you, which will be a blended mix of developing a management team, an operational board, but also bringing external experts in to help you with that execution. So you need to value yourself for your strengths and what your gaps are.

Howard Greenwood: Cause I really hate that word. Weakness. What are your gaps? Because a weakness makes you fat sound weak, but if you find what your gap is, you can bridge that gap. Mostly we can bridge that gap, find people in your business who either have the strength to bridge that gap that will empower them and enable them to do things.

Howard Greenwood: Engage them, delegate the work to them and utilize their strengths. If it's known in the business, outsource it, or look for people who can actually deliver that for you. That's all about the people. So we talk about driving cash. If you start to delegate things and empower your people. I trust them to deliver, allow them to make mistakes, create the habits of failure, review those habits and change them to become habits of success.

Howard Greenwood: Then we start to drive cash in the business. So how often we find developing that three year plan. The clients lack the skills internally to deliver it. And that's where we come in and start to help people to deliver that plan. So when we see a project, we start to think of which person's the best person in that project in the company.

Howard Greenwood: Sorry to deliver that project. And quite often it's not. The leader, but if you lead on everything on you, try and manage everything, you will end up on an island and be very lonely as a leader. So what we need to do is start to think about how we grow and scale our business and move our business forward.

Howard Greenwood: So think we've covered a massive amount there Heather. 

Heather Salway: What I would say is I think that is the most common change in recruitment in staffing businesses. They're set up by entrepreneurial individuals who have phenomenal skills to be able to do that. You know, it really is a skill to be able to set up and start a recruitment business from scratch.

Heather Salway: But what happens then of course, is that the skills that you need to then grow and scale that business is different from the skill set that you needed to start it up. And as Howard is quite rightly saying, what you've got to do then is develop the people within the organization or bring people in from outside because.

Heather Salway: Too often, what happens, I think, is that leaders want to carry on doing everything and actually they need a different skillset and they need support and they need to understand and recognize that, because the, as I say, the skills to start a business are not the same as the skills to scale a business.

Heather Salway: And that humidity to say, There are other people in this organization that I can develop to do that. Or there are people that I can bring in to support me. Those are the truly transformative leaders who will not only start their business, but will then scale them, grow them. And ultimately if they want to sell them.

Howard Greenwood: So seeing what we're seeing is that. As always, people who open a business and start business are usually really entrepreneurial people and they have great ideas. And when you start to think about the great boards and the great businesses, what they have is they have an inspirational entrepreneurial leader.

Howard Greenwood: Sat next to them. Is someone high who is highly analytical. You have someone sat next to that person who is a great doer. You have someone sat next to that person. Who's good at challenging, but challenging in the right way. And then what you have is that final person. Who's someone who's great at taking the idea.

Howard Greenwood: And potentially making them better. So when you start to think about those strengths in your business, have you got all of those strengths in the business and do you allow those people to blossom and bloom within your business? And that to me is where we start to think about that intellectual honesty and humility, because if you're forever grabbing everything and say, it's mine, I'll lead it.

Howard Greenwood: I'll do it. I'll do everything then. Yeah. You're going to fail massively 

Heather Salway: You will never scale your business, unless you allow other people around you to develop. 

Howard Greenwood: What we'd like to sort of move on to okay. Is as we've come to the end of our discussion, we'd like to apologize for Dave not turning up, probably having a chat with Mr. Pye About his technical ability to get into the process. 

Heather Salway: This one outstanding question. That was 

Howard Greenwood: An outstanding question. Mr. Kennedy. Onboarding new people and onboarding old people have experienced being recruited from that is, should there be a difference? I would probably suggest it in the first two or three weeks. No.

Howard Greenwood: And the reason why I'm saying that is because I want people to, I want to see those people and see what they're doing. So if I can see what they're doing, I first get them speaking to candidates because I want to see whether they will deliver the values. They said they were going to deliver in the interview and whether they can follow our process, a lot of new recruits come in and they have no experience of recruitment, so that is easy to mold.

Howard Greenwood: So we've recruited on the behaviors that are easy to mold, experienced recruiters come in with habits that they've already formed. You don't know whether that habit is a good habit or a bad habit. So get them doing the same things. You can then start to see where their habits lie. Is it good? Or a bad habit.

Howard Greenwood: Do you have to change that habit or readdress that habit to ensure that they deliver what you want them to deliver? So I would start to say no at the beginning. And once they've started to prove that they can do the right things, then allow them to get on with it rather than what we normally do is sit them at a desk and say, get on with it.

Howard Greenwood: And then it's like, oh my God, have you heard what you said? G did he really just say that to a candidate? Has it, you know, because we haven't actually taken the time to say, this is us. This is how we do it. This is what we want you to do. This is what we train you. Go to great companies. Robert Half does this all the time.

Howard Greenwood: I don't care how much recruitment experience you come in when you walk through the door? The first thing you're going to do is recruit 200 people. You're going to interview 200 candidates straight away. So, you know, your candidate market, you've got a product to take to market then, and you know, your client base straight away.

Howard Greenwood: I think that. 

Heather Salway: Howard, The only thing I'd add to that is to, it's really important to contextualize that because there are some experienced recruiters who will be moving recruitment businesses and don't expect that to happen. I agree with you, it's the right thing to do. And I agree with all your reasons, but I think it's really important that you explain that and that you contextualize what you're doing and why you're doing, because otherwise you'll get some great recruiters who will join your business and kind of go, well, what are they doing this for?

Heather Salway: You know, of course I know how to be real quick. So I think you've got to explain your reasoning behind that and make sure that they get it. 

Howard Greenwood: Yeah. So as always, what we want to offer to all the people who've attended is we would like to offer everybody a free 60 minute mentoring session. So I've just put a link to our website in the chat room.

Howard Greenwood: So if you're going to the chat room, if you've not already had one of these. Please book on a Sunday, going to the email sucks. I can't talk, go onto the website, find the link on a website that takes you form and fill it in, and then we'll come back to you from there. Weekly, we run free webinars, so find and follow us on link and you'll find the post of our webinars.

Howard Greenwood: So every week we do a webinar for business leaders, 11:00. Every Wednesday, UK time. So feel free to join that site once again. Thanks for your time, Heather, it's been much appreciated. I'd like to thank Dave for his time, but he's obviously not turned up. He's having technical issues or Dave's got a Mac that's so old.

Howard Greenwood: It's run on steam. Let me just say that from there that all or at least would say is that we've been Jump Advisory. Thank you. We hope to take you on a journey because our pure. Oh, the drive to goal and our mission is to create a world of outstanding leaders to shape the world of future and modern recruitment, ladies and gentlemen.

Howard Greenwood: Thanks for your time. Hope you enjoy the rest of the World Summit for your information. We're back on again at 2:00 UK time, 3:00 central European time. Sorry, I don't know what the time is in the states. Cause there's lots of different time zones from there. We're on that time. We're having a board panel.

Howard Greenwood: We've got Neil Carberry from the REC. We've got three or four really high-end business owners. Who've created really high growth businesses and the rest of the Jump team will be on. There it will be a really interesting topic, all about strategy and all about how to develop your business, ladies and gentlemen.

Howard Greenwood: Thank you very much. We look forward to seeing you at.

Speakers

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Speakers

Paul Jacobs

Heather Salway

Howard Greenwood

Duration

56

min

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