The Evolving Role of Leadership Advisory Services in Executive Search
October 30, 2024 – Leadership advisory services are consulting offerings that help organizations enhance their leadership effectiveness through tailored development programs, coaching, and succession planning. They focus on assessing and aligning leadership strategies with organizational goals while managing change and talent. Ultimately, these services empower leaders to drive performance and foster a positive organizational culture.
Leadership advisory services have gained prominence in recent years as firms like JGA Partners evolve to meet the changing demands of clients. Initially seen as a niche offering, these services have now become integral to the executive search process, allowing firms to provide comprehensive support in areas such as assessment, coaching, and succession planning.
“Leadership advisory has come a long way in the past 10 plus years when global publicly traded search firms began acquiring leadership advisory businesses,” said James Abruzzo, managing partner of JGA Partners. “At first, there were naysayers in the industry and many of the mid-sized search firms used this as a selling point against their bigger competitors, saying things like, we are a pure executive search firm, through and through. But like many innovations with an executive search, many of the ancillary services, including leadership advisory, have come from client needs and competition.”
Mr. Abruzzo explains that after these global publicly traded search firms added that service, medium-sized search firms followed suit, and now you could see the trend trickling down to even the 20 person, single office organization within executive search.
“Unsurprisingly, the smaller the search firm, the smaller the leadership advisory team,” he said. “This can even take the form of a single individual conducting high level assessment and perhaps a stable of strong executive coaches or other individual consultants who operate between their own shingle and partnering closely with a larger executive search firm.”
“It’s clear that over time, nearly all executive search firms will have to have at least some presence within leadership advisory in order to be competitive to their peers, and be able to keep up with the offerings in order to be considered to win big search assignments,” Mr. Abruzzo says. “This is no longer a fad, as we can see by some of the large executive search firms actively promoting their category switch. there are a handful of large search firms, that now no longer consider themselves an executive search firm, yet they are actively promoting themselves as leadership advisory firms or human capital consulting firms in which executive search is one of their offerings rather than the main offering.”
JGA Partners provides search and services for the executive search industry and corporate talent acquisition function. The firm’s clients include the executive search firms, international executive recruitment membership federations and associations, and leadership advisory and management consulting firms.
Mr. Abruzzo is a career international executive recruitment and talent acquisition professional with expertise across all aspects of the executive search industry and talent function. He has worked with executive search and recruitment professionals from each of the world’s top 10 executive search firms, regional recruitment professionals, independent entrepreneurs and franchise owners. Mr. Abruzzo recently sat down with Hunt Scanlon Media to discuss how leadership advisory services have grown and why its important for firms to offer them.
James, how have these leadership advisory services grown with search firms in recent years?
Leadership advisory began primarily by addressing assessment of candidates identified by search firms. This was soon followed by coaching, onboarding consulting, succession planning for high-potential leaders and other services that were directly related to a typical executive search process. As organizations saw themselves becoming more and more integrated across more areas of their clients, more human capital consulting services were added to their menu.
Why does providing this go hand and hand with what search firms provide clients?
To be a successful partner to clients means to understand the client inside and out by spending many hours with them, walking the floor, and meeting key stakeholders. clients would much rather go through that process with one firm that will provide solutions for a number of their talent needs rather than going through it time and time again for each individual service offered. Firms that do this successfully are seen as trusted partners to their clients. The great search consultants are often sought out for their opinion on matters beyond executive search. In many cases, leadership advisory services compliment executive search seamlessly. As search firms identify challenges of their clients in recruiting top talent, many times they’re able to see those challenges more clearly than their client as they have an outsider looking in. the same view a potential candidate might see. It’s the search consultant that can often identify client challenges that sit beneath the surface. Search firms also have an incredible view of clients’ competitors in a unique understanding of what other similar companies are doing in the market to stay ahead. Rather than offering simple bullet points to show their consultative approach, a leadership advisory professional could add depth and actual solutions to those identified challenges.
Anything else?
It was once said that assessment of candidates really came down to the opinion of a single search consultant. With added assessment tools and other professionals involved in the process, additional data points of assessment and integration of new leaders could be added in order to give greater confidence to clients and in theory create greater stickiness of the candidate. Further, as client companies put greater emphasis on their human capital, including diversity, retention, and the proper organizational structure for effectiveness and efficiency, those integrated executive search consultants were positioned perfectly in order to provide solutions by partnering with their internal collaborators within leadership advisory.
Are clients asking for help finding people that specialize in this area?
There is a real mix in that. There are times where clients feel they understand a challenge that they’re facing. Other times they understand something is not working properly, yet it takes a leadership advisory professional to truly assess the problem and be able to offer customized solutions to that particular issue.
Can you discuss the broader trend from just placing an executive to actually being a talent advisor and your thoughts on how that’s impacted his leadership advisory services?
Clients are asking more and more from their executive search firms. They feel that the services offered by search and leadership advisory firms should go beyond the seemingly simple task of adding an executive to their ranks. Clearly that is not all the search firm does and the services that they provide go beyond what a client could do for themselves, but clients want to know how a search firm can ensure success of the placed candidate. They want help making sure the person is onboarded successfully, and want that search firm to go above and beyond the task of simply placing that executive into the role. Clients are also very interested in data. Today search firms are expected to be providing data from a high-up overview of the industry trends, the make-up of the candidate pool for a specific role, all the way down to specific comparable data and metrics on the finalist candidate assessment. Geographic, demographic and psychographic data should be compiled and shared with clients now and in the future.
“Today search firms are expected to be providing data from a high-up overview of the industry trends, the make-up of the candidate pool for a specific role, all the way down to specific comparable data and metrics on the finalist candidate assessment.”
What impact has the ease of candidate identification had?
With nearly every executive being easily identified on LinkedIn and other online sources, the actual identification of candidates has become a commodity. It’s the service of engaging with and recruiting the candidate into the role that has become the actual service. If the identification of candidates has lost value in the mind of the client, the client now needs further justification for search fees that have not come down, despite the fact that the cost and value of candidate identification has come down. Search firms can utilize advisory services to not only maintain strong search fees, but they can actually increase their fees by positioning leadership advisory as part of the actual search process. Each of these needs from a client, as well as competition overall within the executive search world, has identified more and more services to be added to the leadership advisory practice.
What do you think the reason is for the need for leadership advisor services?
There are dozens of reasons for the need of leadership advisory services particularly when integrated with an executive search. The reasons can be put into a few categories. With the incredible benefit to the search firm itself, and the other for the primary benefit of the client. For the search firm itself, reasons for having leadership advisory professionals on their team include a diversification of revenue streams, continued stickiness across the broader function areas of their clients, brand building, strengthening of thought capital, cross selling opportunities, deepening industry expertise, and even greater utilization of captured data. Reasons can even include simply utilizing additional case studies to use as an excuse to reach out to past and potential clients while they’re are less executive search needs. For clients, the benefits of engaging an executive search firm with a leadership advisory team could have immeasurable benefits. Depending on the particular service, whether it be executive coaching, high potential training, org restructuring, identifying areas of improvement within their current or prospective team members, all or any of these services could be true game changers for clients in many ways.
Related: A Look at the Crucial Role of Talent Advisory in Guiding Hiring Executives
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief and Dale M. Zupsansky, Executive Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
