Rob Andrews, Founder & CEO of Allen Austin Mission, vision, and values flow from purpose. Our purpose is the reason we exist, and it’s not about the money.

Leadership’s primary responsibility in an organization is to articulate purpose, vision, mission, values, and strategy; and then to model the right behavior, mentor emerging leaders to ensure continuity, motivate the organization around values, and multiply the efforts of the CEO and senior leadership team.

A corporation may have multiple skilled professionals with specialized talents and capabilities. Still, it is only through effective leadership practices that they can harness individual efforts toward building a peak performance culture and achieving the organization’s objectives.

When a company goes through a shift in leadership or loses a key management team member, it creates a void that impacts the business on multiple levels. During this shift, a firm may temporarily use an interim leader to fill that void. Interim leaders are usually experienced, knowledgeable, and skilled managers who can fill the gap left by the outgoing manager or leader. An interim leader is usually brought in to help the organization adapt to changes while a new manager takes over at an appointed time.

Finding the right talent isn’t easy, especially when recruiting for specific, niche roles requiring unique skill sets.

So what does it take to recruit and deploy the best talent in the market consistently? How can you be sure you have the right talent to drive the changes you need to make?

That’s why firms conduct a retained executive search for executive-level appointments in contrast to contingency recruitment. An executive search firm is retained in an advisory capacity. It is engaged in all aspects of talent acquisition and hiring from defining the search to candidate onboarding and integration.

Executive search firms not only place leaders but also advise clients on leadership strategies to further an organization’s success. Clients retain leadership consultants for various services—from succession planning to diversification and inclusion programs to assessment and coaching—ensuring that the right leaders are working to build a powerful organizational culture.

There are times when the advantages of a retained executive search outweigh all other options. In such a case, look no further than Allen Austin. Allen Austin is a Top 40 global management consulting firm specializing in retained executive search, leadership advisory, and interim leadership and project consulting. Allen Austin has a highly specialized and expertise-driven team of partners managing client engagements from offices across Europe and North America. Allen Austin’s purpose of enhancing the lives and effectiveness of their associates, clients, and world leaders means you come first. Allen Austin’s solutions are based on Total Performance Leadership™, their commitment to improving the global workplace.

The following excerpts were taken from a conversation with Rob Andrews, Founder, and CEO of Allen Austin

Q. Allen Austin is always focused on “do it better” regarding executive search, interim placement, and providing leadership advisory services. What are the top strategies that Allen Austin practices to “do it better” or remain ahead of its competitors?

Our view is that the hiring process is broken and that poor leadership practices are primarily responsible for a disengaged workforce. Our proprietary trademarked Foresight™ search process and Total Performance Leadership™ architecture has been developed to facilitate matches that work and last and build cultures of peak performance.

Over the last twenty-eight years, we have invested tens of thousands of hours developing the most comprehensive, battle-tested, and effective search process and the most powerful leadership architecture we know. 

We have observed that most professional service providers are transactional, which is not necessarily bad. It’s just not our approach. For us, the commitment to start each engagement with a clean sheet of paper and lead each client through a line of inquiry, questioning, and a process that extracts from the client exactly what they’re trying to accomplish before proposing solutions is our fundamental commitment.

Q. How do you align your organization with your vision and mission?

Mission, vision, and values flow from purpose. Our purpose is the reason we exist, and it’s not about the money. Our commitment to enhancing the lives and effectiveness of all our stakeholders means we are committed to our associates first because we can’t hope to deliver an exceptional customer experience unless we do the same for our employees. It also means we are in business to help our clients optimize their performance and we don’t deliver solutions in a vacuum.

Q. To make a difference in a world where people do not like what they do for a living, what challenges does Allen Austin face in bridging the gap between potentiality and competency?

Our approach is not mainstream thinking. While there have always been organizations that practice the principles highlighted in Total Performance Leadership, our architecture for building peak performance cultures is few and far between. As Jim Collins said in Good to Great and Built to Last, over 90% of corporate leaders have what Collins called a “quantitative bias.” The tendency to rely entirely on financial statements to measure success falls woefully short. Profit %, Loss statements, Balance Sheets, Statements of Cash Flows, and Quality of Earnings analyses are backward-looking instruments that, while important, do not reflect the cultural health of the business.

The good news is that new ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) awareness is influencing boards, CEOs, and senior leaders to look beyond financial statements. The bad news is many business leaders think that DE&I (Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion), Stakeholder Engagement, Purpose Driven Leadership, and other sustainable initiatives can be accomplished by checking boxes.

Whether fundamental or incremental, organizational transformation cannot be achieved by checking boxes. Transforming an organization into genuinely inclusive, socially responsible, or purpose-driven requires a fundamental mindset shift in which few leaders are willing to engage. Developing an individual and collective high-performance mindset, unencumbered by limiting beliefs, is a skill set that can be learned by those willing. We take leaders through a series of workshops and coaching to identify limiting beliefs and replace them with enabling ones. It’s a real game-changer.

Q. What are the most important attributes of successful leaders today?

The most important attributes of successful leaders in 2022 include a high-performance mindset, the ability to build and maintain a unified leadership team, the ability to attract, engage, retain, and develop leadership talent, the ability to engage all stakeholders, including employees, customers, service providers, shareholder, and the community, and finally, the ability to communicate with absolute clarity.

Q. What is the most dangerous trait in a leader’s career?

That’s easy. Hubris. Some call it narcissism. When you think you know it all, you’re destined to fail. There are many Books on the subject, and one of the best is Why Smart Executives Fail by Sydney Finkelstein. Hubris causes otherwise talented executives to chose not to cope with innovation and change, misread the competition, fulfill a flawed vision, cling to an inaccurate view of reality, ignore important data, and alienate their teammates and workforce.

Q. How do you continue to grow and develop as a leader?

In 1981, I attended a weeklong seminar on mind-setting. I learned that a critically important attribute of a leader was a mindset unencumbered with limiting beliefs. Fast forward the 41 years, and mindset is usually the first thing we teach in our workshops, seminars, and coaching sessions. Learning how the human mind works and that our subconscious minds drive our behavior has taught me everything I know about effective purpose-driven leadership, human capital practices, cost leadership, measurement systems, stakeholder engagement, and customer experience. These are the things around which I have great passion, and they are the focus of my consulting firm.

For More Information: 

www.allenaustin.com

randrews@allenaustin.com

Leading Allen Austin to deliver continued success to its clients and reach new heights

Rob Andrews is the Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Allen Austin. Rob leads Allen Austin’s global CEO, Consumer Packaged Goods & Durables Practice, and is also a member of the firm’s Leadership Advisory, Private Equity, Industrial and Marketing Officer practices. 

Rob completed an undergraduate degree in marketing and economics at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas, and a graduate degree in business at the University of Texas at Austin in 1996. He also completed the Leading Professional Service Firms Program at the Harvard Business School in 2007.

“Allen Austin is the world’s premier consulting practice focused on helping business leaders build highly successful organizations that create exceptional value.”