The new world of succession planning | with Roopesh Panchasra

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of Social the Shortlist. This is episode 70 and you might have noticed that I am not Social Talent's CEO and co founder, Johnny Campbell, but instead I'm Holly Fawcett. I'm the director of content here with Social Talent, and I'm delighted to take the mic today to take us through today's podcast as Jonny is away. The best news is that I get to take this episode with a topic that's question close to my heart and I'll be joined by a guest who is really experienced in this area, so I hope it'll make for an interesting discussion. This week we're focusing on the new world of succession planning. And I think when we think about executive recruiting, the model often follows a very traditional route. It focuses on headhunting talent outside the organization with the experience that's always been deemed necessary to fulfill a role. They have to have done the role before. But there is an element of this process, I think, that's often overlooked and it's really at the detriment of success of executive recruiting, which is internal mobility and succession planning. So joining us on how to join us on the show today to discuss executive succession planning is Rupesh Panchasra, the global head of Executive TA at Uber. And according to Rupesh, we need to put more emphasis on looking at our internal executive communities. So today we're going to chat about the importance of international intentionality in this sphere, especially when it comes to developing internal talent and thinking about ahead to those future roles. We're also going to deep dive into the area of leadership currency, where transferable skills and in particular behaviors as well should be targeted in internal employees who could be on track for promotion to these positions. So, Rupesh, welcome to the shortlist. Can you introduce yourself to our audience and tell us a bit about yourself?

Absolutely. Hi, Holly. And nice to meet everyone. Yeah, I'm Rupesh Panchasra. As Holly said, I am currently the talent acquisition leader for our leadership community at Uber and I've been here, this is month seven and yeah, enjoying the ride, having great fun.

Thrown into the deep end, I'm sure.

Yeah, thrown into the deep end. Thrown into, yeah. Very, very deep.

What was your background before going into Uber?

Yeah, so I've been in recruiting in the talent space for, gosh, 20 plus years. I started off in executive search, so spent 10 years on that side and then I moved in House in 2006 at a company called VMware that many will Mention many will know and then. Yeah, and some really well known brands. I've been extremely fortunate to work at companies like Expedia, Workday and more recently at SAP where I led their executive search teams and their employer branding teams. And then yes, at the back end of last year I got contacted by Uber and my ex CEO from Expedia, Dara is now the the CEO at Uber and my ex Chro, Nikki is the Chro. So that was my connection and I'd worked with these incredible people before and we put the band back together.

So is it just that it's a very, very small community, do you think, within those types of organizations where people kind of get picked from everywhere and to build this sort of dream team or the band together or.

No, no, I mean I would love to say Dara and I were best friends and he whatsapped me that that wasn't, that really wasn't the case. I'm working on it. No, I mean I just like with anything else, I think discussions are had internally, aren't they in terms of who have you worked with and who would you like to work again? And let's build out our sort of list of names of possible people that we can reach out to and I must have appeared on a list somewhere and then yeah, ten interviews later I find myself going from stop calling me, I'm not interested to where do I sign. And that whole courting experience is one that the team help candidates with every day, but you find yourself on the other side and it was an incredible experience.

Do you mind if I ask you a little bit more about that experience? Did it give you insight into how great can't experience works for that kind of white globe experience in exec recruiting? Did you find, oh actually this is different or I've never experienced this before. This was like in real life. Was there anything completely new that you thought really I need to adopt?

Well, I, it's interesting because like you, you during the course of the process I sort of identified, even though everyone was incredible and very friendly and gave me everything I needed. You identify gaps in the process or you identify opportunities to make a difference or improve upon or help sort of evolve. And that's the role I'm being interviewed for. I'm being interviewed for someone to run executive recruiting and it gives you one side of it is wow, you still do it like that. And the other side is wow, we can make a good process incredible with a few tweaks. So you see firsthand what you're expected to come and help with which is really insightful.

Yeah, I understand. And also you see where you know immediately where you can make impact to drive those brands forward. That's interesting. Okay, so I want to bring in the news because I think there is a lot that we can talk about from our news articles around succession planning. Just a quick note for those of you who are watching live on LinkedIn and on YouTube, the chat function is turned on and it's open. So please do send in your comments and questions. It'd be great to take the heat off me for a little bit as well, I think, but certainly is there. Let me roll the news, George. We're going. So in the news today is the high cost of poor succession planning. From the Harvard Business Review. This article was quite interesting to me actually. I think it was very detailed in terms of its statistics on the cost in the trillions of dollars of a poor executive, in this particular case CEOs hires and throughout what they were looking at in this particular article. What did you think, Rupesh, of the data presented inside in this article?

Yeah, I mean it would resonate to everyone that's on this call that has either been part of a succession process, are responsible for crafting one, or you know, been been involved with helping to evolve a function. I mean it's, it touches on a lot of points that were relevant today and were relevant 10 years ago because how a lot of companies handle and look at and craft succession really hasn't changed. It's a very archaic process. You may have different tools and lovely technology, but in terms of how we put the data together, how it's crafted and how it's interpreted may as well be on a spreadsheet. And I think it touches on a few points around simply the failure to pay attention to strong pipelines, the failure to pay attention to the importance of succession early on than is absolutely needed. And again, it's what I see every day wherever I've been. And I think, you know, there are varying degrees of organizations that put more emphasis on it than others, but generally speaking, it's an area that not many companies do well.

So knowing that not many companies do this well, and I suppose if everyone's doing it wrong, maybe there's, there's hope for, for everybody to get something right, I suppose out of all of this. But it's, it's really, really interesting, particularly from this particular article where it focuses on such a massive organization that is Microsoft and the executive recruiting process to hire a successor to Steve Ballmer, like as an organization. Microsoft has only had 3, 3 CEOs including their current one, Satya Nadala. But it took so long to get a replacement for Steve Ballmer after his, I think Vanity Fair described it in 2030. 2012 was the, the lost decade of Microsoft based under his leadership.

So right.

Was nobody thinking about his poor performance long into this tenure of this 10 years going, gosh, it really isn't working. Should be, should we line up somebody else?

Well, you know, I, what, what they were thinking is it's difficult to sort of predict but just from, from, from what you read, Steve Ballmer was hey, an incredible individual, highly capable. But is he what Microsoft needed? With the industry and the environments and the space that they were in, moving so fast. And just like with any CEO, you have to, you can't do everything all at once. And there's an element of luck, there's an element of guidance and advice that you get in terms of where am I going to invest, where am I going to focus my efforts, where I'm going to focus my recruiting and what are the big bets. And from much that you read, Steve sort of went in a direction and most of the industry in the market were going in another. So I think that's where you read a lot about maybe he wasn't perfect for Microsoft at the time. But hey, look, you know, anything could have happened and those bets may have seemed right at the time. But no, I mean the process that they followed, you can't question it because most companies even now would probably do the same thing. Given the fact that there was so much criticism over what Steve did or did not do meant that there was even more emphasis and even more desire to say now we need to think big, now we need to go and go out to market and look at all of the companies that we admire, irrespective of the industry sector. I mean they, they moved out way out of technology, they looked at fmcg, they looked at retail, they looked at manufacturing, pharmaceuticals. To go and find that perfect product profile and to send a message. And, and this is what a lot of companies feel the need to do. Like if, if, if we're a prominent company, surely we should have a prominent, well known CEO, CFO wherever it may be. And, and that's, it acts as a brand, a branding vehicle and if you are a well known name in whatever industry, in theory you should have followership. So all of a sudden there's a bit of a domino effect. And so the assumption was at the time, because we're being criticized for the work that we are, are doing or have not done, we now need to send a message to the market to say we're intentionally wanting to make a difference. So what they did and, and it was really interesting article is go out to market and speak to like almost a stack rank of seat global CEOs irrespective of industry and let's take the top 100 and I think they approached them all. Many companies would do exactly the same.

Thing today and yet eventually they finally turned inwards and looked inside the organization for who would eventually be their Steve Ballmer successor and such in Adala. So why did they go out to market first rather than look internally first be the process.

Yeah. And this is it. And I think if we're going to talk about recommendations at some point during this conversation, I mean like we, and we'll talk about internal talent but you, it can't be sequential, it can't be let's look in the US and if we don't find anyone there we'll look in Europe. It can't be, let's look external and if that doesn't work we'll look internally. I mean it needs to happen concurrently and surely all it's, it's about the best candidate rather than whether they're internal or external or whether they live in Canada or, or South Africa. I mean at a certain level location shouldn't be an issue and whether you're internal or external should be an issue. But that's what the assumption is. In order to get the caliber of person that we need in order to send the right message to the market in order to get a brand that people will admire, surely that person cannot be sat internally. So what happens is you go externally and look, we know what happened. They spoke to many well known names, they had a lot of people that they thought they would get over the line and for whatever reason it didn't happen. And I think what happened was. Sorry, I can hear a noise behind me. I think what happened was they tried and failed. So then they started looking internally and hey look, we know I, I'm a true admirer and a follower of Satya. He, what he's done for Microsoft has been absolutely incredible. Not in terms of just share price and direction. He's taken the company from a technology standpoint but morale and brand and what seemed like an old fashioned company absolutely doesn't now.

Oh totally. I can, I 100% agree. I think the culture of the business has changed as well from being like oh no, it's Microsoft or die to. Oh, it's Microsoft plus, you can join us. Right? It's a partnership, I think, and that's very much the culture that they're going with. So, I mean, obviously that article is great and I would recommend everybody to do read it. We're going to put a link to this particular article in the chat for those of you who are watching live, but also into the show notes of the podcast too. It's a very, very, very interesting case study, not just of Microsoft and their executive search, but but of executive search and succession planning in general. Was there any part of this particular article that you didn't agree with Rupesh or didn't really see in the real world?

Yeah, I did actually. I mean, again, I sort of touched on it where the article describes how a company went externally and did a thorough search and didn't get the outcomes that they were looking for. And, and then again only then decided to look at their internal talent. Those that have been very loyal to the company, that had the, you know, the intellectual capital, that had grown up at the company and knew how to navigate it, was not deemed to be a priority. And so I think the article sort of implies internal first and external only if you absolutely have to. And I don't believe in that. I think if you're going to progress as an organization, if you're going to constantly reinvent yourself, which many organizations in the tech space that I'm in, it moves at such a pace that unless you're going to attract people to the organization that have worked in organizations that have moved at that pace and have done the kind of technology evolutions that you're now looking to do, and unless you're going to bring those ideas and a fresh breath and a new lens to the organization, there's only so much you can grow organically. And so I think for me it's a combination. It's not a failure. If you go externally, I think you need to know your organization well enough to know where you have the talent, where an internal executive would make the absolute sense, and then go to market looking at, you know, all areas and decide upon the best talent, providing you have an understanding of the skills that are needed. And I think the article sort of implies internal first and that's something I don't agree with.

Well, I mean, obviously the priorities, the prioritization of internal first is so as to maintain as much integrity in the institutional knowledge that individuals in the organization have right to maintain it as much as possible. Because once that, once that's gone outside of the company, there's a huge value. And that has been calculated in terms of a dollar figure as well, which is included in that article. It's in the billions of dollars when institutional knowledge leaves the company at that scale. And so keeping it as much as you can is important. But I think there is a bias, I think, for organizations to do that hiring externally. And as you say, it's to send a message. It's a branding exercise, you know, and if we're doing it concurrently while doing an internal search as well, maybe that. Do you feel maybe the board might be intentionally going, do you know what? Let's just do an external hire. Because it'll be, somebody's tried and tested, somebody's done this before, somebody's been enrolled already before. Do people have to have done the role in order to take that top job somewhere in the level?

You're going to take me down a path and I'm going to get really passionate about this because I'm a, I'm a true believer in, you know, above a certain level. I ask my leaders and my teams this all the time. And it's, and it's designed to be controversial. You know, do you have to have done the job to get the job? And then you pause because it does make people think. I mean, there's lots of analysis out there and lots of articles to, to, to describe whether past experiences are a predictor of future success. And a lot of research that you, you'll come across means like your past experiences give you the right and the opportunity to go read for the part. That's what's the qualification criteria to be able to come and audition. But the success that you have once you're in the role, it's almost like whatever you've done in the past is, is the past. Now it's about moving forward and having the right instinct and intuition and the ability and the will and the skill to be able to succeed. And quite often, even if you've done what seems like the exact same job at another organization, we or anyone that's worked at more than one company in their life will know there are no two jobs that are the same. The speed, the people, the technologies, the infrastructure, the support. If, if none of, if all of that is inconsistent to where you've been before, the job's completely different. And so, so no, I, I, look, there are certain skills you wouldn't want a surgeon to be, you know, to, to be with you in an operation situation who hasn't done the job before. Right. There are certain things that you would almost expect an engineer, you know, our, our most senior engineering leaders, our cto. I mean these are functions that you probably need to have done before. But there are many senior level positions in most organizations that for me, I believe that there is more to that selection process, that assessment process than have you done this job before. So yeah, I think the whole process of determining fit is so much more than what your job title was before you got here.

I 100% agree. I think the past performance as a predictor of future performance is a crutch that we use all the time in recruiting. Right. It's definitely not just at exact level, but we do this all the time. So how would you recommend that evaluation for any type of candidate, external or internal, to evaluate whether they could do this job before? Even if it's somebody who will be, you know, externally stepping up into a CEO level or some or C suite executive who's never done this job before, how would you be able to predict logically that this person could do it?

Yeah, there's no exact science to it. Right. Otherwise there'll be no need for people like me and the work my team does. But I think if you think about the traditional way of making an assessment, the traditional interview process is irrespective of who's part of that process, it's very much a Q and A exercise. It's very much sort of focusing on the experiences and the environments that you've worked in and maybe sort of touching on how transferable some of those skills are. But you can rehearse for an interview. You know, you can make sure that you say the right things. And again, I'm generalizing here slightly, but you can, you know, you can prep, prepare for an interview and even if you don't have the depth of knowledge that is seems like is needed on the job description or what's being described, you know, if you, if you go there fully prepared with the kind of answers that you think want to be heard, quite often you can sort of develop this illusion of things that you may or may not have done. So for me, a good leader and the leaders that I've worked with and alongside and for, there's so much more to them than what I've done before. There's, you know, if you look at their behaviors, their personality traits, what drives them, how they lead, their followership, how they develop employees within their organization, how they interact, how they information, take pride in seeing other people succeed, there's, there's traits that I've seen with leaders that I've worked with, that again, so much more than what you did in a previous company. And again, I believe there's a direct correlation between success and achievement and some of the skills and traits that I've just spoken about. They're the kind of things I think companies probably need to focus more on when they're determining fit.

For sure. So this is less about the tell me about a time type of questions and more about this concept of what you're describing. There is your concept of leadership currency. So you know what, all of those behaviors and values that people have as a leader that really do earn you a place at the table when it comes to leaders. Going back to Microsoft's example, the leadership currency, I think that Satya Nadala has in terms of as exactly as you say, the followership, the leading and, and being the backbone for the organization in terms of pushing everybody forward and rather than demanding that people do xyz, I think that type of leadership style is definitely something I think that he has in spades. He has that leadership currency.

But I wonder whether. I'm going to interrupt you. I'm sorry, but I wonder whether. And it'll be great to be a fly on the wall during that process where a committee of very senior people have gone, this is not working. Like, we need to look at other people. And I don't know, Satya may have happened to be walking past. I don't know what, what criteria they went through to determine whether he was a fit. Look, we've seen lots of examples of people being promoted internally that didn't work. It could, unless they went through some kind of scientific assessment process of who he was and how he does things and how he makes people feel when he's there as their leader. Unless that happened, which I don't know, I'm hoping they did that. But maybe they just got lucky because he's an incredible leader. But how much of an. How much of him did they get to know before he was chosen? I don't know.

I mean, obviously also not having been a fly in the wall during that particular scenario. And so I can only hazard a guess as to, as to how it came about. But look, having been involved in so many hiring processes and, you know, having the absolute pleasure and joy of working with organizations through social talent and how they're transforming ta. How they're transforming assessment and evaluation of talent all the time and really trying to make it as fair and equitable a process as it possibly can and as accurate and predictive a process as we possibly can, you know. Oh my gosh. Can I tell you that most of the time organisations who strike a really good hire do so purely on luck. It is that one worked out rather than it being like yep, knew exactly that she was going to perform like that.

Yeah, I knew that was going to happen. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. So replicating that type of success I think is, is important to, to carry throughout the organization. So what about, I mean obviously Sachin Nadal is a wonderful example of that internal candidate, the kind of the little known internal candidate who kind of worked away in, in his silo, in his part of the organization that suddenly became a massive part of the profitability of the organization too. Don't Don. I'm certain there are lots of people inside organizations who are lining themselves up or have been lined up on other people's behalf. Maybe their manager or another member of the executive team who have been lined up as going. There's a lot of leadership potential, leadership currency with this individual. I think we should nurture that. Walk me through some of the processes that you've worked in the range of organizations you've been in where that kind of succession planning at a manager level, working up towards VP directors, president and.

Executives, how that's worked in terms of how it works in certain organizations, how.

It'S worked, how it's gone wrong as well. Don't forget.

Ok, well let me, let me sort of outline and again every company works slightly differently but there's, there's so much commonality in terms of what companies do wrong and the traditional way. Traditional almost implies what it used to be like. But this is what happens today at most organizations. I call it traditional because it hasn't changed for decades. Is. So Holly's the global head of a function within an organization. We look at Holly's direct reports. Let's say there's five direct reports. I'm normally the HR leader for that specific line of business and I'm tasked to provide, build a succession plan for these five leaders. So I'm working with Holly, who's the overall leader, who has five direct reports. And what do I do? The company has thousands of people in it. Surely I should have a lens on all of our people across the breadth of the organization to determine who's worthy to be able to get on this list. That unfortunately doesn't happen at most companies. It's who's within their circle of trust. So if Holly leads a finance function and there's five leaders across the finance Function quite often. More often than not. The people that are plotted on this chart all work within Finance today because they're the people we know. If Holly doesn't know them and me as the HR leader doesn't know them, how are they going to get on the list? I mean, there's no way. So I would only put people on the list that either you know or I know. And quite often the only people you know or I know are people that we're working with. So you have lists of people that are already within the finance organization that are known quantities. So that's one mistake. We're only looking at people. No one's feeding names in. We're only looking at people that we know. Number two is many companies now do this readiness level. So, okay, we've got 25 names on this list. We're going to go. Rupesh is definitely ready now. Yep, he's a ready now candidate. But Sonia, she's 12, I'd say she's 12 months away. Would you agree, Holly? Yeah, Holly. Yeah, I went on one meeting with Sonia and she's definitely 12. I mean, now I'm exaggerating, this sounds like exaggeration, but this happens a lot. Yeah, she's definitely 12 months away. And. And John. Oh, John's 24 months away. He's only just joined, so he's 24 months. So now you've not only got a list of people that currently work in finance, you've now segmented them by readiness. How? I don't know. Like the subjectivity bias here is through the roof. But that's a list. It's a list of people that are now been. Oh, can you hear me? Am I back?

Yes, you're back. Sorry we lost you. You now got the list of people who are.

Yeah. So you know, you got this list of people who are plotted on this chart. Now, firstly, who makes the decision that you're ready now and I'm 12 months away, and guess what, in 12 months time, if I was determined as being 12 months away, in 12 months time, I'm still 12 months away according to your ideas, because nothing has happened for me in my development. Nothing's been identified as here's the gap between where Rupesh is and where the leader is, and therefore some kind of development methodology needs to be put into place. So how I progress in 12 months by no learning, I don't know. But this is how it's done. So as if that wasn't bad enough, the people on this list are quite often not even told they're on a list. So you've now got 25 names. They're all within finance. Somehow we've determined their readiness level. And, and you know what? We're not even going to tell them they're on the list because we don't need to tell them because the person that we're doing succession for is not leaving yet. And so, and, and that, and replicate that by all of the lines of business in the organization. And look, companies may feel that they're far more advanced to what I've just described and it sounds very archaic, but that is honestly how a lot of companies that seem very advanced to the consumer inside those closed doors, that's how succession is done. And, and there's lots of repercussions to that around bias, right? I mean, if I have only ever worked with males in my environment, in my team, well, the only people that are going to go on the list are the people that I know. If there's no underrepresented leaders or people from diverse backgrounds on, in finance, and if the only people on the list are within finance, well, guess what? You have an unrepresented community of people. And you know, when the time does come and that person that you're doing succession for either decides to leave or move on to another role, you're now approaching people that had no idea they were on the list. And as an organization, we don't even know whether they have any ambition to move up in this direction. And guess what, you decide to go externally and I've sort of wound the clock forward in terms of steps there, but this is what forces your hand to not give our internal slate of people the, the right opportunities because of the way succession is not done.

But what's the, I mean, is there a risk though, if you were, let's say, for example, if you were to tell some of those individuals, maybe the ones who we felt were higher up in that readiness level, maybe the 12 months out, ready now. Hey, look, we think you should be on this succession plan list and here is why, and are you interested, etcetera, in taking an opportunity if one were to become available? And they say, yep, oh my gosh, Rupesh is a wonderful opportunity. I really love this, I'm ready for it. But it goes for an external candidate. What's the risk to attrition on your managers internally who were effectively teed up there because they had, the organization had that conversation with them. But in the end we went with an external candidate or even a completely different Business unit candidate who you know was unknown to the leader at that particular point came from marketing, say.

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think. Look, if you think about how succession works and how internal moves happen, quite often if I'm looking to progress within an organization, it's an aspirational step. I'm not many people make sideways moves and I'm a true fan of sideways. People like feel that I need to move up a level in order to progress. Progression is all about learning and skills in my opinion. You can move at the same level into another organization and you are progressing because the breadth of your skills is great. But yeah, look, there's always going to be more candidates than jobs. There's always going to be more directors than senior director post. There's always going to be more, you know, senior directors than there are VP posts. It's just the way organizations work. They don't have as many VPs because of the way structures are built. So people are going to be disappointed. Of course they are. But I think what the byproduct of not being transparent and the byproduct of not being open about how succession lists are done and not being open about folks being on the list means that disappointment is exaggerated because I, you know, if I was given a fair crack at something and if I was told these are some of the skills that we've identified that you don't have and there are learning opportunities in place quite often, you know, self progressing learning rather than it being fed to me. But if there's learning opportunities, opportunities to be mentored or shadowed, opportunities to have external coaching if those opportunities are presented to me to help me bridge the gap, if I'm being advised upon, you know, honest advice on where, you know, where some of the feedback has been about me in order to determine whether I'm a fit or not and I've worked hard towards bridging this gap and then I'm given an opportunity to re apart and I'm not getting the job. Look, obviously there's disappointment that I didn't get the position but I think the transparency and the honesty and fairness in the process doesn't necessarily mean I'm disheartened by my employer. It doesn't necessarily mean I'm now going to leave because it was very transparent, it was very open and I'm given constructive feedback when I'm unsuccessful in the position. And that's the danger. I think it's far easier to not have to have those difficult conversations with your executives if I can plot a succession list and get a tick in the box saying, succession is done, and I haven't spoken to anyone on the list, then it's far easier than having to be honest and having to be open about. Holly would love to consider you for this role, but here are some of the areas that we think you need developing and encouraging Holly to develop herself and then ensuring that you're going into an interview process and providing really fair, honest feedback as to why you didn't get it. I think it's hard work. You need skills, talent, you need resources to be able to manage those conversations. And, hey, look, it's far easier not to do it.

Yeah, absolutely. And nobody likes doing painful things. Right. We all put them off. We're. We love procrastinating of things that are dreadful. Like when you're in college. Yeah, exactly. When you're in college, an exam coming up, your bedroom probably will never have been as tidy because you do everything but study for the thing you're supposed to. I think, I mean, certainly from my experience, and I mean, you and I talked about this briefly yesterday as well, when we were preparing for this particular conversation about where individuals aren't told they're on the list and they aren't having those conversations with their managers, they're not getting that feedback. And they themselves go, well, look, there's. There's clearly a ceiling here that I'm going to be broken into. And if an external candidate does come in, you know, in one respect, it's wonderful. It's a wonderful opportunity, I think, for that internal person to learn from that individual because they bring so much different perspective and ideas and information to their space that they could really learn from and gain a huge amount of experience in a short amount of time from this new source of information in this external candidate. But sometimes the perception of that individual is, oh, gosh, well, now there's an external person come in, which means I'm never going to get that job. I'm going to have to go externally. And so what? Like that. That's a. That's a massive risk, I think, for, for your talent. Slightly lower down the chain. Especially the fact that we've been working really hard at getting diversity into the organization as a talent acquisition function. And usually we're having to start lower down the chain because they don't have the experience because they were never given it. They don't have the experience at the higher levels. We're having to bring them in lower up or so lower down, but we're not bringing them up at the same time or giving them those learning opportunities?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think by not affording that transparency and honesty, you know, it's obviously going to attract attrition. And quite often you have incredible people at an organization that have earned the currency. And the currency is sort of a term that we described earlier. And my definition of currency is sort of what I've alluded to, that most companies now are moving at such a pace and the competitive landscape has changed so much. I remember doing some analysis at my previous company and we'd looked at, hey, how many executives have left? You know, I don't know what time of year it was, but year to date, how many executives have left and how many different companies did they leave to go to? And we've done the same analysis a few years earlier, and there was a handful of companies. You saw trends there. You know, large, you know, groups of leaders had been attracted or been allured by a handful of usual suspects that we knew were in the competitive landscape. When we done that same bit of analysis years on, it was like organizations that would never have been on our radar, who would never have been in the competitive landscape. And there lies the issue. If your leaders are now being targeted by not just the organizations that compete in your space, the organizations that use your technologies, the organizations that admire who you are and what you've done, the organizations that enterprise software is what I came from, organizations that may be in the consumer world that could benefit from hiring people from the enterprise world because it adds a different flavor to the work that goes. Everyone's a competitor. And if that's the case, then your leaders are being targeted by far more companies than they ever have before. We owe it to them to ensure that we understand that they've earned a currency in that currency. Meaning like you've, you've been successful here, you've been here for three, four, five years in your role. There are just, there's a distinct before and after you've learned how to navigate this organization, you learn about our competitive landscape. You've, you have relationships up and down the organization. That wealth of experience and know how and that ability to be able to get things done is your currency. You may. And so therefore, if you learn that currency and you've been successful in an organization that's damn difficult to be successful in, surely that's worth, like, that's worth something. And there lies. Do you have to have done the job to get the job? Because just because you've been successful in marketing, it shouldn't mean that only if a marketing opportunity presents itself, you have the opportunity to progress. We should be able to say what are the transferable skills? What are the overlaps that we have across the organization? And we should map the organization. If you've been successful in marketing, here's the driver's skill competencies, behaviors that you need to be successful. In which other parts of the organization would these behaviors be of benefit? And it may well be that we see by moving into, I don't know, a strategy and planning role, you've the currency you can move from one role to the other and then you think about putting an ecosystem in place of people that know that domain in order to help with that person's to get up to speed and there lies the challenge. You know, if you're only looking for people that have done the job, which is what most companies do and how they build their succession lists, you don't take into account that currency.

Yeah, 100 agree. And I'd love to know. Actually I don't think either of us have this statistic to hand. Maybe there isn't even. Maybe those numbers haven't really been crunched.

I'm surprised you don't have stats to anything so high. Yup, there yeah man.

I have some statistics in my head but there's. I would love to know, you know all of those different functions within an organization what have to get the top, top, top job. Right. To get the CEO or to get the CEO or co. Or co CEO role. What other or functions in the business have they come from? My perception of this is that the majority of them have come from finance as in the chief financial officer sub role or they've come from the kind of core backbone of what the organization does. So may they might have been the chief technology officer for a technology company, the chief engineering officer for that type of engineering company. For example. In other words, they have the domain experience of the of what the company does or they are in it because they're doing the accounting. And so that's my perception of it so far. But please correct me if I'm wrong and if anybody does have a statistic on what other functions in deceased they've come from. Has a chief marketing officer ever become CEO of a big of a, you know, of a Fortune 500 company, for example, a chro, to my knowledge is only one CHRO that's become a CEO in a Fortune 500. You know that that kind of diversity of experience is great but we're not really getting that. We are absolutely rocketing through time. I can't believe this chat has already been about 42 minutes.

Yeah.

Oh, totally. But if we were to boil this down to, like, one more added piece of advice, perhaps, that I haven't asked you, what piece of advice would you like to add into our bucket of our shortlist.

Advice, as in for those that are listening, maybe advice on how. What succession should look like.

Yes, it can. It can be absolutely anything. But I. If you want to tie it into succession planning, or if you want to tie it into recruitment, recruiting or leadership. Leadership currency, for example. Yeah, anything at all.

Okay, so if. If your organization has an executive recruiting function, then this is what I suggest you do. But even if you don't and you use external suppliers to provide your time, I think the tendency is. If you have internal capability like Uber does, then our focus is all external. We're talent brokers for those that we identify at our competing companies or companies that we admire. Well, who's your talent broker for your internal candidates? And I think as you're building the focus of an organization, I think there should be an equal responsibility. So, you know, we go after people that aren't looking for work, that are at great companies, that have RSU handcuffs on, that don't want to speak to us, and we convince them, Uber or whoever else you're working for is an incredible opportunity to consider, well, why don't we do the same with our internal folks? Why should we wait for Holly to be open to a new position? We should be speaking to you about opportunities that you could be right for, that we can help you build the skills for and put you on a succession list after you've gone through an assessment to determine fit. We should be the talent brokers of our internal executives as well as our external executives. And for that, that takes planning. So don't do it at the time you need it. Planning for succession should be done as a core focus of your role, not in addition to your core role, which is the mistake too many companies make.

Absolutely, yes. Sow your seeds before you're hungry.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You put it far better than me.

Not at all. Wonderful advice. And Rupesh, this has been a really, really interesting discussion, and as I said earlier, I think we can talk for hours and hours and hours on this particular topic. As I said, it is close to my heart and you are an absolute subject matter expert when it comes to this stuff. So thank you so much for your insights and for your advice and for the chat. Thank you so much for joining us and as we wrap up for this particular episode, I will draw attention to next week's episode, which will be with the amazing Torren Ellis, who has just released content on the social talent platform in the last week called Diverse Perspectives on Hiring. And Torn is going to be sharing his particular perspective on race and colorism, and it's going to be, again, a really, really, really interesting conversation. Torren Ellis has always brought such an interesting conversation to the fore, but so much of his passion really comes into this as well. Jonny will be back for that particular episode. You won't see my beautiful face. But thank you so much again for everybody for joining us live on LinkedIn and YouTube. If you're catching up on the podcast. Again, thank you so much for listening and we'll see you in the future. Thanks so much everyone.