Kennedy Executive Search network meeting in Budapest
The partners in the Kennedy Executive Network meet every year in one of the partner’s cities. Last year’s meeting, scheduled in Denver, Colorado, was canceled because of the pandemic. But in mid-November the partners in the Kennedy Executive Search network met up again physically for the first time in two years. Our partner office Ikelozs led by György Kobelrausch hosted us in their hometown Budapest. Most partners were able to make the trip to this beautiful city on the river Danube while a few partners were able to join us digitally.
Meeting for the first time in real life
The most important goal of our face-to-face annual meetings is to build fruitful relationship between our partners. Therefore, the first item on the agenda was getting to know and share quality time with our partners in real life, particularly with our new members. During the pandemic, Kennedy Executive welcomed new members in Spain, Belgium, and Japan. It was great to finally properly meet Saltor Iñaki – Saltor Talent (Barcelona and Madrid), Veerle Van De Vijver - Tavernier & Van De Vijver (Ghent and Antwerp), and Frank Schulz - Frank Schulz Human Capital Consulting (Tokyo). Off course, there was plenty of time for socializing and exploring the amazing sights of Hungary’s capital city.
Post-COVID19 pandemic business
A hot topic for everybody, as well as for our network, is business in a post-pandemic world. We discussed how the pandemic and its aftermath will influence corporate life in general, but executive talent retention and acquisition in particular. To help us better understand the changes and how to deal with them ourselves, we invited two guests to help us continue providing the best service to our clients. The first was NAME, HR Manager at Nespresso. He acted as the voice of the customer, addressing the issues they face, what the most significant challenges are, and, most importantly, what they expect from a service provider like Kennedy in this new reality.
The second guest was Grey Hollett from ALC Enable; a consulting company specialized in advising Executive Search firms. The session's goal was to help our members assess how future-proof we are and how we can take our strategies, organization, and processes to the next level.
Navigating the great resignation
Key learnings were that companies will need to rethink all their current roles and the need for talent in these roles, to be in the office or not, especially in high demand Digital Transformation, Technology, and Data Science Leadership roles. With the current scarcity of talent and the great resignation, it is more important than ever to adhere to societal changes and demands like the flexibility to look after children, senior parents, or family in general. The pandemic allowed people the freedom or a more flexible approach to work, and they saw that this did not affect business as much as was previously assumed. On the contrary. But it also showed people that the added value of a bigger paycheck is not always worth the commute and long hours away from home. Companies will need to balance their offerings carefully to build a truly diverse, high performing organization.
Diversity and inclusivity – our methodology
We are very pretty proud of the success our methodology and the success it is delivering to our clients since we DE&I became a focused Kennedy Practice Group. Led by Dr. Caroline Frisenberg – Frisenberg & Associates (Monaco and Gothenburg), this group is comprised of members of our network who can look back with decades of experience in D&I, Ambassadorship, and Allyship from international corporations around the world. Our approach starts with mapping the efforts of others. We conduct international benchmarking of peers in the industry, and other, more innovative industries to collect best practices through in-depth interviews. In partnership with internal champions, we then look at the DNA of our client company itself. Internal assessments through workshops allow us to investigate how current D&I initiatives are assessed internally and understand future directions. With the findings from both, we can do a Maturity and Gap analysis, measuring the company against competitors in the local market. These steps combined result in a comprehensive list of recommendations with a detailed implementation plan. The combination of external and internal assessments provides a much more detailed and profound report with insights, results, and inspiration for future plans. It contributes to a stronger commitment from top management, all the way down throughout all the ranks in the company and provides very concrete steps to achieve the company’s vision.
New addition to the leadership team.
The meeting was also the perfect opportunity to appoint new roles. In line with our own approach to diversity and inclusion, Veerle Van De Vijver of Belgian network partner Tavernier & Van De Vijver joined Kennedy Executive Team Leadership team in 2022.
We can look back at a successful, productive, and fun meeting and can’t wait to see each other again next year in Colorado with Eric Pringle and Wayne Redman of Integrated People Solutions as our hosts.
György Kobelrausch, Managing Partner of Ikelosz Kft, Kennedy Executive’s network partner in Budapest, talks with Pablo Perella, president of Kennedy Executive Search.