Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to AINA Insights, where prominent leaders and influencers shaping the industrial and industrial technology sector discuss topics that are critical for executives, boards and investors. INA Insights is brought to you by INA AI, a firm focused on working with industrial companies to make them unrivaled segment of ONE leaders. To learn more about INA AI, please visit our website at www.ina.AI.
[00:00:40] Speaker B: Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of our Titanium Economy podcast series which is brought to you by aina. Today we are joined by a former veteran and experienced executive coach and executive search leader, George Randall, who combines 20 plus years of Fortune 100 and Fortune,000 global human resources and talent acquisition executive experience that enables individuals, teams and organizations achieve consistent and impactful outcomes. You won't believe this, but his teams have actually hired over 80,000 professionals, including 2,500 senior leaders.
Prior to this, George was in the US army for 20 years, serving as a platinum leader and executive officer. He has a proven track record of shaping talent and building high performing teams. George, thank you so much for joining us today and making time for this podcast.
[00:01:34] Speaker C: Thank you. And thank you for having me. I always get a little nervous hearing that introduction.
Hard to believe that that's all that's happened in the past few years.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: No, it's great. It's great. All right, so we would like to get started, George, with your leadership journey and your personal experiences so far. Right. So to start with your military experience, it's the foundation of how you approach talent. And so what would be great to understand is what did leading in that environment teach you about building strong teams?
[00:02:12] Speaker C: Well, just to digress just a little bit, I actually enlisted in the military to help pay my way for school. I mean, there was some patriotism and my father had served in the Air Force, but somewhere along the line I got the leadership bug and then went on to become an officer. And there was. I couldn't put my finger on it at that time. I just knew that, you know, the people around me needed. I needed, you know, good leadership, good mentorship, good coaching, you know, the ability to be a cohesive team.
And when I was enlisted and working my way up, you know, what really struck me and really was just so apparent is the difference between a good leader and a bad leader.
And of course I always wanted to be a good leader.
But the biggest difference that you could see was that when you didn't have good leaders, you never had good teams.
And it didn't matter how good the people on the team were, if the leadership wasn't solid, that had A trickle down effect. And the opposite was true. Which if you have a really great leader, you could have less talented people, but higher drive people. And if they're led properly, if they're mentored, if they're coached in their training, they just become capable of almost anything. And so it really drove home very, very quickly that the better leader you are, the better teams that you can make, and the better teams that you can make, the more things that you can do and accomplish.
[00:03:55] Speaker B: Great. And then George, which of those key lessons, especially on leadership and team building, have you been able to apply in the corporate world?
[00:04:05] Speaker C: I would say every one of them. And the reason is that I consider the US Military the world's greatest leadership incubator. Meaning when you become an officer or a non commissioned officer and you're leading people, you're just in this giant fishbowl and so there's no hiding anything.
You have to be good with your skills, you have to be good with your thinking, you have to be good with your thought leadership, your strategy, all the things that go into running an organization. And you have to be a good people leader.
But if I were to pick out a couple things that always stood out that the military really inculcated in me is number one. And I would tell you, this took the longest when I was a junior officer and I see it all the time in corporate America and that is humility.
Just because you're the leader doesn't mean you're the smartest person in the room. It doesn't mean you have the best idea. You may have a very good idea, but if you don't have the humility to say, hey, we can take this one step better. Can I listen? Can I solicit input from some really talented people that I've surrounded myself with? If you're a good leader, you're building a good team, but you're also really, really listening. So humility was number one. Number two was the ability to communicate clearly and simply is that there's so many things that we do and in corporate America we do them by email. You know, in the military I was in when we didn't really have email. And then you know, you're, you're on the radio, but then later on email came the ability to communicate your ideas and directions and requirements and standards clearly and simply. And also the last thing I would tell you is the ability to communicate the why somebody was doing it and that each and every role was important on the team.
So those are probably the three things that just always stuck with me, there's probably 10 or 12 other traits, but those are the ones that always stood at the front of the line.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: What inspired some of that with respect to your talent acquisition pursuits? Right. How do you use some of those attributes to assess talent versus character? And how do you hire the right person?
[00:06:25] Speaker C: Well, interestingly enough, I got into talent acquisition. It was kind of accidental. I had to relocate, and I was working in a consulting firm after I left the military.
But to fast forward, to answer your question directly, you know, it really clicked in my head that. Wait a minute. What I was doing in the military, among all the other missions that I was giving and the broader mission of wherever we were and whatever we were asked to do at the time, in whatever country was, I had to have a great team and selecting and training and coaching that team. And so I had come from business into talent acquisition, so I kind of had that business perspective.
And what I was noticing very, very quickly was that managers were just like, look, I need two hands. I'm missing somebody. I just need, for lack of a better term, a butt and a seat.
And I realized that when you go into these quarterly business reviews, when you go into meetings, when you're looking at results or you're looking at stock price, everybody's looking about all these different things that we can do. And there was such an absence on looking at people.
And so for me, if I were to narrow down. I really can't narrow down what I look for in a person, because it really depends upon the role.
If it's somebody on the engineering side, I want a very strong sense of curiosity, very high attention to detail. If I'm looking for COO or CEO, I want somebody that's visionary, that's thought leadership, that's humble, driven. Absolutely. Absolutely. Exhibiting leadership attributes. So it really diff, you know, differs by role. And one of the things that I prided myself on and one of the things that companies fail at constantly is before you go to hire somebody, define what success looks like. So that way, when it's myself or a recruiter, we know what attributes that we need to go assess, and we need to look for and use whatever tools and behavioral interviewing skills we have to assess and evaluate those attributes.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: Got it. And, George, that's very helpful context with respect to what inspired you to join the army and then get into talent acquisition. Tell us about your book. What inspired that? And what are some of the. I mean, key learnings or the takeaways that readers could get out of the book? The talent War.
[00:08:51] Speaker C: Oh, well, thanks for asking about that. The funny thing was, is the book was never on my bucket list. There's a lot of people that say they're going to do it. I wasn't one of them. And I ran across my co author after I had kind of gone out on my own.
And he had been a member of the SEAL teams and I had been in the army and then led large talent acquisition teams for some of the largest companies in the world. And we were just starting to talk about search, we were talking about assessment, we were talking about hiring. And it just clicked in the both of us, between the two sets of stories that we had, we had enough for a book. He said we should write a book about this. Of course, my first thought is, it's crazy to an army and a Navy guy writing a book together.
But really, the key lessons that we brought that we discovered, and I don't think that they were super surprising, first and foremost was character. Attributes matter more than skills. And we wanted to really emphasize that point. And how we did was we took all of the special operations and then we took these great companies and really what we were looking for were who are their top performers? How did they select? Well, fortunately, the special operations, you don't come with the skills to be a Green Beret, you don't come with the skills to be an ab, seal, or any number of the other amazing special operations teams.
So character and your attributes matter, and you start with raw material. When you look at businesses, yes, skills matter.
But it's so funny, and this is the example that I give people is that if I'm hiring for you and I give you a bunch of resumes for position, they're not going to be all that different when it comes to skills, but they're going to be wildly different when it comes to character and attributes. So one of the phrases that we hope that people take away is that experience tells you where you've been, character tells you where you're going.
Second, that every problem is a leadership problem, which means people matter. So if you're HR team and you're not putting talent first, you're going to get bypassed. Because talent is the only competitive advantage you can hope to achieve and maintain in your company. Your product, your market, your services, those are all going to change over time. But how you hire and select and train and mentor and coach people and work to retain them and give them ownership and the things that they need to stay, learn and grow, that was. That was another thing that we did. So you businesses need to Put a greater focus on the people that they bring into the organization because that's the make or break proposition.
[00:11:33] Speaker B: So just extending this, George, now to your executive search career. Now that is a high stakes environment, right? And you're very clear in your thesis around attributes versus skills, right? But how do you, with that, with that thesis in mind, how do you build trust with clients to help them then make the right call?
[00:11:56] Speaker C: Well, the first thing I do is authenticity. I don't walk in.
Let me put it to you this way. Let me start with this statement. And I think it's one of the ways that I help build trust, which is people tend to look at me and would call my function a recruiter.
And what I tell people I do is I deliver talent solutions to business problems. And so when I'm working with clients, that's what I want them to understand that I'm doing is that you have a talent, you have a business problem, and I'm bringing a talent solution to that.
What I dig in with the clients is what defines success. Because every client will give me this laundry list of objectives, requirements, these skills. They had to have done M and A, they had to have led X number of people. They have to be in this industry.
Those are all what I call table stakes, meaning things that any recruiter can figure out very, very easily to do the search. But how I build trust is I dig in and I start asking them about their leadership style. With this role, members of the team, what is their leadership style, what is being missed, what objectives aren't being hit? I try to become in that call and portray myself as a student of the business. I've done all my research up front, but I want them to know I know their business and I'm trying to help them make it become more successful by way of providing them the best talent possible. And if they know that I'm in it for their success versus just a fee, that trust comes easier. But you have to maintain it continuously by being authentic and really putting the client and the company first.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: And George, so AI is everywhere. Of course, it's also now taking a bigger role in hiring. So as you're working with their clients, especially as you're helping them, let's say, recruit early career folks, what do you tell them about some of the biggest risks to watch out for in this.
[00:13:55] Speaker C: Era of AI well, the first thing is I remind them that look, with AI, everybody's resume is going to look absolutely amazing. You're, you're certainly going to see less errors on a resume you're going to see gaps that show up. But in a, those resumes will all, like I said, when I present resumes, they're about this far apart with AI. They're getting so, so close and narrowing them down when you do the search. So really the difference comes down to or the thing that I warn them the most is you have to define success in your company above and beyond the skills, what attributes serve your culture or strengthen the leadership fabric of your company. That's what we need to be looking for. And AI hasn't quite reached that part yet. AI certainly can match the skills, they can match the experience.
They can. It's just an enormous and powerful tool.
But when companies don't say, this is the kind, I need somebody who communicates exceptionally well because we have very complex issues. I need somebody that's a, we have great talent, but it's junior. They need to be coaching and mentoring. That's not going to come up through a resume that's been run through chat GPT. Yeah. So I warn that. Not warn them, but prepare them that look, you're going to get great resumes, you're going to have great candidates. But if you don't have a solid defined process that starts with success in your firm and you haven't evaluated your top performers, AI is not going to do as much as you think. It'll get a great match for skills.
But we could have somebody with the best skills in the world for a particular position, but they're really a jerk. They're just not a nice person. And that's a very difficult thing to undo once you make a bad hire.
[00:15:56] Speaker B: Got it, got it. And George, so that's more like on the early career side. Right. But when, when it comes to executive search and you've, you've helped hire plenty of executive professionals as well, what are some of the watch outs on that front? How is that different versus the early career or the traditional hiring?
[00:16:16] Speaker C: You mean what am I really looking for on the executive side or watching out for? Yeah, well, like I said, one of the things that I learned most in the military was humility. So I'm watching for depending on the role. Number one, are they a humble leader?
You know, are they just sitting there telling me how great they are?
Are they able to talk to me and explain the areas that they've been continuously growing in and working in? Are they able to tell me about mistakes and what they've learned and how they've grown? Because as a leader all the way until the end of your days, you're always growing, you're always leading. So I'm looking for humility, I'm looking for a growth mindset.
I'm looking for somebody who wants to, more than anything else, leave a legacy of leadership.
And also, you know, one of the questions that I ask people and it's, it really stumps a lot of people, and that is, can you tell me the top four people that you've coached and mentored that have gone on to do even greater things in their career? I want to see the concrete effects of what they've done with other people.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:17:28] Speaker C: So with executives, it's always about people. No tool is going to solve your problem. It's your ability to work and build cohesive teams, communicate the why and then lead and help and listen and do all the things that you possibly can as a team. Because teams win, individuals don't.
[00:17:47] Speaker B: George, I'm going to make a little bit of switch here to asking manufacturing sector specific questions because that's what we do at Titanium Economy at ina. That's our focus. If you could apply some of the learnings for that sector as well, it'd be wonderful because they're always grappling with the talent question. Right. The first thing that comes to mind is, like I said, in the manufacturing sector, where skilled talent is scarce and retention is very tough, given just the environment that we want folks to come in and work in, what should companies do differently, you think, in order to recruit and then keep high performers?
[00:18:30] Speaker C: Well, the recruiting thing is that's about an hour long answer. And as much as I'd like to go into it, it really depends by industry. But you should be selling a why, you should be selling mission. You should be selling to people the difference that they make. There's this example that I learned of. There was a guy in manufacturing many manufactured highway signs.
That's all he did. And then he installed them. And people are like, well, that's got to be one of the most boring jobs because you're on the highway forever putting these signs, but absent when you explain to that person, listen, you're helping people get to where they need to go. You're keeping people moving day to day. When you start explaining the why and the importance of their work, that's one thing you should be selling. But it's a very broad topic. But as far as retaining people, what's really important is a lot of manufacturing work, when you get past the skills can be repetitive.
But what's very interesting is it does not matter whether it's Manufacturing, it's high tech. It could be the service industry.
It's been said so many times, it's such a cliche. People do not leave bad companies. They leave bad bosses. So again, it comes back to leadership. What are you doing to know your people, their concerns? You know, are you out there on the line listening and. And, and the golden rule that I give leaders and managers at all levels is, are you the boss that you would want to work for? Are you exhibiting those behaviors? So in manufacturing, you know, if your compensation is good, if you're within the market, if you have low compensation, you're always going to have challenges.
But people aren't going to leave your firm for the next competitor for a dollar or two more an hour. If they're working with great bosses and great teammates, if that leadership creates a great cohesive team and explains the why, they're always going to be ahead of the game.
I worked through a company who had. They were doing about 18 to 22% annualized attrition, and we got it down to 2. And it was all it was, was getting the managers out on the floor, knowing the people, knowing birthdays, anniversaries, kids, weddings, other issues with people they knew and cared about their people, and they listened and they took ideas and had everybody contributing to mission success.
[00:20:57] Speaker B: So, Josh, to end this, if you had to advise a manufacturing CEO on one change to make today to win the talent war, let's say over the next decade or so, what would that be?
[00:21:11] Speaker C: Well, I'll narrow it down to a couple. Number one, always put people first. They're your competitive advantage. Number two, be authentic.
Number three, be approachable. And number four, be visible. Do not be the CEO that's confined to an office. Make sure that you're walking around and that people know who you are. It was one of the greatest successes I had as a commander in the military is you have this rank and people are kind of afraid to approach you. Oh, in the military, they call that the old man, didn't matter gender or anything. That was the commander. And people of lower ranks were always afraid. But I was known as a very approachable commander. And it made a huge difference when it came to asking my folks to do the very, very hard stuff. And in business, I find it's the same way. If those leaders are out there on the floor, especially CEOs, and they're talking to their people and they're seeing their people, and they're not just this person up at an office. They're visible, approachable, they listen they ask questions and they know their people.
It's going to make a huge difference. It's going to move the needle and then keep moving it faster and faster and faster because you're the boss that you would want to work for.
[00:22:27] Speaker B: Perfect. Well, thank you so much George for making time and sharing your insights and perspectives on talent, which is a top of mind topic for a lot of CXOs that we speak to. So thank you again for being on our podcast.
[00:22:42] Speaker C: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I enjoyed it immensely.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: Perfect.
[00:22:52] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to INA in the sites. Please visit Aina AI for more podcasts, publications and events on developments shaping the industrial and industrial technology sector.
