Should I stay or should I go?

The topic of counter offers is an interesting one. I am sure you have seen articles and thoughts about the subject and they are usually one person’s perspective on the topic. For a somewhat different approach, we’ve reached out to people in our network to gain their thoughts and perspective on the topic.

We asked:

You have just received an offer to join a new firm. You are giving notice to leave your current position and your employer makes a “counter offer” to keep you from leaving. You start to think about whether or not to take that “counter offer.”

Why would taking a counter offer can cost you more in the long run?

If I know someone is looking to leave or has done that already, I might offer them a counter to stay if the engagement they are currently working on would be hit hard by their departure, but I can guarantee that I will remedy that situation as quickly as I can by making sure that others are up to speed on tasks this person is doing and that multiple people in the organization have a comparable skill set.

This person would not likely get extra consideration (at least in the short-term) regarding training or new project work, etc. as I am still fully expecting them to leave at some point in the future.  The reason they started looking to begin with was likely not related to money, but rather something that more money won’t fix in the long term.  People can “stand” a lot of stuff when the money is good, but all of the things that caused them to look will likely still be there and sooner rather than later those same issues will bubble back to the top.

Now they have just one less company to get a job with because they burned that bridge.

I would rather have someone leave and want to come back because the “grass wasn’t greener” then offer a counter.

In the one case where I did that, it only took the person about 3 months before they were back in my office resigning again…but this time we were prepared and wished them well.

                                                Mark Anzmann, Executive Vice President, SYSCOM, Inc.

One persons perspective:

Why to Accept an Counter Offer

– Your reasons for contemplating a move are clearly understood by your firm

– Your reasons for contemplating a move are respected by your firm

– The firm has come to the table with the right terms to make you want to remain

– You prefer to stay, have not checked out mentally, and believe you have long-term opportunity

Why Not to Accept

– The firm doesn’t clearly understand why you are entertaining a move but throw $$ at it

– The firm grudgingly admits to your contributions knowing they will have something to lose, but still not truly valuing / respecting you

– You have burned some bridges along the way with people that matter – that never ends well

– You are mentally checked out and not happy with the firm, role, your boss, etc. regardless of the $$

                                                                                    Bill Beck,, Client Partner, Conduent

I’ve been in that situation years ago and also recently, but this time as the jilted hiring manager.  Here are my thoughts as to why accepting a counter-offer is generally a bad move.  For the employee to seriously pursue the new job, one or both of two things must almost always be true:  1) The new job must be really good in ways that are important to the employee, or 2) There must be something significantly wrong with some aspect of the old job.  So to give up one or both advantages by reversing course and accepting the counter-offer is logically a negative for the employee and must be at a minimum offset by something positive.

The easiest scenario to imagine is that pay was the problem with the old job, that the new job would have cured it, but the counter-offer now also cures it.  There are two reasons why the employee doesn’t want to go there: First, do you want to be working for a company that knows they’ve been underpaying you (which they acknowledge by making the counter-offer) and wouldn’t fix it until you threatened to walk?  Will you have to keep doing that every year?  And second, now the old employer feels that you are being paid too much, which will surely have a dampening effect on future raises.

Or suppose the problem is non-cash, something like the employee wants to work from home or needs flexible hours and the old employer says no but the new employer is fine with it.  If the old employer gives in and agrees, human nature says they will hold that against the employee.

An analogy in this political season would be the politician who makes a lot of promises around election time, and the voters wonder, “Gee, you’ve been in office for four years now and you haven’t done any of this for me.  Why did it take you so long to start talking about it now.”

Almost always best to be sure you want to leave the old, and know why, before searching for the new.

       Hack Heyward,  Partner and Practice Lead – Energy, ISG

 

We hope you find these perspectives interesting. If you would like to share your thoughts on this for future blogs, please let me know.

Larry Janis, Managing Partner, ISSG, janis@issg.net

Sr. Manager: Global Business Services- Outsourcing & Shared Services

 

Achieve the next level of Performance!  Leading businesses are now using Global Business Services (GBS) to create alignment among their business units. Instead of operating numerous shared service centers and managing outsourcing vendors separately, organizations can integrate governance, locations, and business practices across the enterprise to achieve transformative performance improvements. In this way, GBS serves as a single enterprise organization or network that can drive collaboration and sharing to improve delivery efficiency, effectiveness, and business outcomes.

Work you’ll do

You along with dynamic colleagues will help organizations create a single enterprise organization or network of Shared Services and Outsourcing relationships.  As a Senior Manager, you are expected to contribute to the firm’s growth and development in a variety of ways.  You will be responsible for engagement management: Lead engagement planning  and budgeting; mobilize and manage engagement teams; define deliverable structure and content; facilitate buy-in of proposed solutions from top management levels at the client; direct on-time,  quality delivery of work products; manage engagement economics; manage engagement risk.  Senior Managers manage day to day interaction with executive clients and sponsors.  You will be expected to participate in Business Development, develop and maintain contact with top decision makers at key clients; organize and lead pursuit teams; participate and lead aspects of the proposal development process; contribute to the development of proposal pricing strategies.  Senior Managers must contribute to Practice Development & Eminence:  Develop practical solutions and methodologies; develop “thoughtware” and “point- of-view” documents; participate in public speaking events; get published in industry periodicals.  We invest in our people, as a Senior Manager you will be responsible for people development, performing the role of counselor and coach; provide input and guidance into the staffing process; actively participate in staff recruitment and retention activities; provide leadership and support for delivery teams and staff in local offices.

 

Qualifications

Required:

  • A minimum of 10+ years consulting and/or industry experience is required
  • Must have subject matter expertise and project experiences in Shared Services, Outsourcing and/or Offshoring industry, or multiple back-office functional optimization
  • Shared Services Feasibility Assessments, Implementations, and Optimization
  • Ability to analyze and apply outsourcing trends
  • Practical experience with the full lifecycle of functional optimization, BPO and/or shared services programs
  • Core vs. Non-Core Assessments
  • Understanding of vendor landscape
  • Ability to interact at all levels of the client organization
  • Business Development and Delivery experience
  • Bachelor’s Degree

Preferred:

  • RPA experience
  • Ability to work independently, manage small engagements or parts of large engagements
  • Strong oral and written communication skills, including presentation skills (MS Visio, MS PowerPoint)
  • Strong problem solving and troubleshooting skills with the ability to exercise mature judgment
  • Willingness to mentor junior staff
  • An advanced degree is preferred

If this opportunity sound like a great fit, please reach out to:

Larry Janis, Managing Partner, janis@issg.net

or

Jeff Bruckner, Partner, bruckner@issg.net

 

WHAT IS TOP TALENT AND HOW IS THAT IDENTIFIED?

As a part of our talent acquisition engagements, we ask our clients how they define “top talent” and how they would assess those traits in the interview process. Reflecting on the insightful comments we hear every day, we thought there would be great value in a new blog in which senior executives/thought leaders share their “Take on Talent.”

This is the seventeenth in a series of blogs/interviews with senior executives who are thought leaders in the areas of Talent Acquisition, Career Development and Leadership who will share their perspectives on this ever present question.

 

 Paul is the President of Thirdbridge, a high growth, private equity backed disrupter in the research space. Third Bridge provides institutional investors like private equity firms, hedge funds and mutual funds with the information that they need to make better investments.

Before joining Third Bridge, Paul was President of Axiom Law, the leading disrupter in the corporate legal industry, where he scaled the business and oversaw a six-fold increase in size. He also held senior roles at American Express and BCG, and has a wealth of experience across the US, Asia and Europe.

Paul has a Masters of Business Administration from Melbourne Business School.

Find out more about Paul on LinkedIn.” Continue reading

In search of a better stretch target

By Ryan Davies, Hugues Lavandier, and Ken Schwartz

Aggressive goals can dramatically improve a company’s performance. But unachievable goals can do more harm than good. Here’s how to stretch without breaking.

The urge to improve is innate in most companies, where better service, stronger performance, and faster operations are inextricably tied to earnings, bonuses, and shareholder returns. The impetus is so strong, in fact, that the practice of setting stretch targets for a company’s performance has become emblematic for the grit and aggressiveness expected of a modern executive. Managers take pride in seeking to achieve the unthinkable.

Sometimes they succeed, surprising even themselves with how much stretch targets can improve performance. But there are limits to how far they can push. The wrong metrics can sap motivation and undermine performance.1 Targets set along one metric without regard for the effect on performance elsewhere can destroy value. And broad-based aggregate measures of profit margin, operating profit, and earnings per share are only loosely linked to valuation. One CFO recently admitted to us that his multibillion-dollar global company would hit its quarterly goals for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA), but only at the cost of reducing its operating cash flow. Signs of unhealthy stretch targets can be quite clear—and any of them can lead to poor behaviors, distracting senior managers and having no impact on value.

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SAP S4 HANA Finance Technology Consulting Senior Manager

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 As an SAP Finance & Enterprise Performance Technology Consulting Senior Manager, you will have the opportunity to:

  • Advise upon, lead and work on high impact activities within the systems development life cycle
  • Provide advisory work for the IT function itself
  • Design, implement and deploy SAP solutions to achieve defined business goals
  • Maintain skills in SAP applications process design and configuration; SAP application design, development, integration, testing and deployment; and SAP application technical architecture

Responsibilities:

  • Provides solutions to complex business problems for area(s) of responsibility where analysis of situations requires an in-depth knowledge of organizational objectives
  • Involved in setting strategic direction to establish near term goals for area of responsibility
  • Interacts with senior management levels at a client and/or within our client which involves negotiating or influencing on significant matters
  • Has latitude in decision-making and determining objectives and approaches to critical assignments.
  • Decisions have a lasting impact on area of responsibility with the potential to impact outside area of responsibility
  • Manages large teams and/or work efforts at a client

Continue reading