You’re planning an important business trip to a foreign country, and you’re not that familiar with the city where you’ll spend most of your time. The travel agent asks for your hotel preference and you stop to think for a minute. Important trip. Expect to be meeting customers and vendors at the hotel; will want to host a lunch or dinner meeting; likely to need help with some business entertainment arrangements; and, it would be prudent to have a local contact in case of last minute changes or minor emergencies. So your answer basically comes down to this: “Who do I trust to help me in the event I get into trouble?”
I suspect you’d choose the
Pudong Shangri-La, or a similarly excellent Shanghai hostelry. Because the Shangri-La offers 24/7 concierge service staffed with some of the most connected, knowledgeable and trusted China business and culture experts in Shanghai Province. And you’d be safe and secure in knowing you could rely on their expertise and help whenever the need might arise.
In our daily personal and professional lives we rely on trusted advisors to guide us through a myriad of both mundane and complex matters (in the case of my income tax return, simultaneously mundane and complex). Many of these individuals strive to develop their relationships with us in order to earn that honor and privilege of becoming our trusted advisors. Think: CPA, attorney, rabbi or minister, teacher, concierge (as above) stock broker (sorry, “financial consultant”), personal physician, investment banker (somewhat lacking, recently), Othello’s Iago, and so on.
Well, if you consider this for a moment, I suspect you’d quickly agree that it would be to your personal and professional advantage to have it be so. Because, after all, trust is about relationships and the values of trust, according to
Charles H. Green, are often a critical factor in delivering high economic performance. In your business. And in the outcomes (results) of your executive search engagements. As Green clarifies, and what you might seek out in a trust-based executive recruiter relationship, the four key values or
principles of trust are:
- “Customer/client focus for the sake of the customer/client;
- A habit of collaboration;
- A focus on the medium-to-long term, on relationships rather than transactions;
- A default stance to transparency, except where illegal or injurious…”
So what might this look like in terms of the day-to-day interactions you have with your (trusted) executive search advisor? Ask yourself these questions:
- Does my executive search consultant (ESC from now on…) focus on me and my needs – professional and personal – or on himself? How do I know that?
- Does my ESC seem motivated by his internal drive to do the right thing by me, or instead by his firm’s internal metrics and performance carrots and sticks?
- Is my ESC competitive and innovative in that he’s constantly looking for better ways to deliver service, as contrasted with simply competing with other search providers for my business? Is he continually bringing new knowledge and fresh insights and experiences to me?
- Does he demonstrate a belief that continued focus on defining and solving my problems is more important than just filling in boxes on my organization chart?
- Do the ESC’s systems, processes, procedures and operational models effectively meet my needs or requirements ( a means to a successful recruiting outcome), and if not, are they discarded or reformulated until they do? Is he continuously learning and improving his own professional skills and expertise in order to be able to do that?
- Perhaps most importantly, does he listen to me, seek to clearly understand the issues I’m facing, and deliver strategies for creating solutions that will positively impact the growth and profitability of my business?
I could go on…
Please, comment with your insights and questions. And that’s the way I see it. Adam Zak
