Five years with Clements United plus ten years with Miller Dallas and voila, fifteen years of providing career transition services to executives! Here are 400 words on what I’ve learned and what it means for my clients and the firms that engage me to help them.
Fifteen years of one-on-one career transition consulting with executives has flown past so quickly that it is difficult to believe we are more than halfway to 2030! Here are a few things I have learned this century:
1. Career transition at the executive level is a highly personalized experience and executives want to be able to build a relationship with the person providing the service. This means that they want the opportunity to have conversations that go well beyond how to create a resume or sit through seminars on networking as they often want to talk about their fears, challenges, disappointments, dreams, opportunities and strategy.
2. Executives in transition want to work with someone who has focused on working with people just like them. Experience matters. Strong executives don’t want “yes” men; they want people who can add to their thinking.
3. It can take time to recover from being let go. People need time to absorb what has transpired. In my experience, they are better off taking time to reflect, benefit from input, consider what it is they are trying to achieve, determine their positioning and prepare to go back to the market before doing so.
4. There is an opportunity for executives in transition to evaluate what they have been doing, why they have been doing it and whether or not it retains its allure. Some people truly are ready for a change in direction, some people are happy to be able to recommit to the path they have been on. Both groups benefit in the long run.
5. It takes a confluence of events to find that next opportunity but isn’t that just like everything else in life? Executives in transition need to be clear about what they are trying to achieve, able to articulate it, able to ask for help and able to recognize opportunities and it doesn’t hurt to have some luck.
6. Executives are people first and people are more than their office or title. I have worked with more than 600 executives and one of my great satisfactions is having the opportunity to get to know them. This is a privilege.
In wrapping up, I am, as my clients tend to be, an optimist, so I am hoping that I can send out a similar note in 2030 focused on what additional things I will have learned about helping executives in transition!