High accountability and high empathy is the winning formula for high performance
One of the recent RCSA SHAPE Conference sessions featured four recruitment agency CEOs on a panel discussing the topic Culture Crunch: How culture within our firms is being challenged…and how we can effectively respond.
ManpowerGroup Australia managing director Penny O’Reilly scored my award for ‘most honest moment of SHAPE’ when she lamented Manpower’s recent internal survey, which revealed employees rated the company high on well-being; however, the overall staff engagement result was low.
O’Reilly’s subsequent meeting with her leaders didn’t raise her spirits either. The response, ‘What’s the company doing to go about it?’ indicated that at least one leader didn’t seem to think low engagement was a problem they were responsible for solving.
Earlier in the day, Trudy MacDonald’s session, Remuneration and Incentive Design for Recruitment Businesses, elegantly captured the issue faced by many recruitment agency owners, executives and leaders with a slide of her four quadrant model of a high performance team environment (inelegantly reproduced by me here).
High accountability is cultural. When I started my recruitment career 35 years ago, I had no doubt about how accountable I needed to be. Accountancy Personnel (now Hays) was a meritocracy. You thrived by performing, and you were fired if you didn’t. This kept me totally focused on producing results. I did enough over 18 months to keep my job.
Fortunately, my manager, Kim, provided great empathy and support—probably more than I deserved. I would not have lasted three months without Kim’s leadership.
When I returned to Australia, into the worst recruitment market in living memory (far worse than the GFC and COVID), I was also very lucky to have a leader, Bronwyn, who provided high empathy and support to match the high accountability culture of our team and company.
The explosion of post-COVID growth in the recruitment industry has led to agency leaders hiring too many people who lack the necessary competencies to be successful recruiters in all types of markets. In the current market, which is subdued by recent historical standards, recruiters of recent tenure have no experience dealing with the focus and accountability necessary for long term success.
Those who lack the motivation competencies of achievement drive, initiative & optimism and team commitment are much more likely to desire high empathy and support from their leader but resist high accountability.
The lament I hear from leaders about ‘mental health concerns’ offered up by under-pressure consultants is frequently, but not always, a symptom of the employee’s unsuitability for a high-accountability job like agency recruitment.
Agency recruitment is a difficult and demanding job. Only a tiny percentage of the labour market is suited to such a job. Many jobs and most work cultures have low accountability compared to what is found in high-performing recruitment agencies.
There is no single or easy answer to the dilemma O’Reilly articulated; however all my experience as a recruiter, leader of recruiters and coach tells me it starts with recruiting people with the motivation competencies of high performers, developing their skills consistently, providing them with effective leaders who know how to combine high empathy and support with high accountability and then rewarding them (financially and through career progression) appropriately.
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