How - Dov Seidman [106]
Great companies and leaders today know that their reputational capital is as valuable to their success as their physical capital. A recent LRN study of purchasing behavior revealed that half of Americans who own stocks independent of a 401(k) say they decided not to purchase stock in a company because they questioned its reputation.12 Positive reputation binds you more closely to your stakeholders, be they customers, employees, or, most critically, recruits.
Joie Gregor is vice chairman of one of America’s top executive recruiting firms, Heidrick & Struggles. Gregor recruits executives, CEOs, COOs, and board members for major corporations, and many consider her an expert in building global leadership teams. I worked closely with Joie on a recruiting assignment for LRN. She knows, before she takes on clients, that their reputations precede them into the marketplace for talent. “The great candidates or top talent look at companies and ask, ‘Are they a great company?’ ” she says. “And it’s almost never about just making the numbers. It is about the culture. I don’t know that I’ve ever met any great executives who would go to a company that doesn’t value their people, that lives on the edge of ‘is it right or is it wrong.’ They will ask those questions. They will investigate the reputation. And if they can’t align, they don’t join.”13
In the working world today, most of us see ourselves as freelancers. We stay with a job or an organization as long as its goals—and the benefits we can accrue in the pursuit of them—remain tightly aligned with our own. It’s harder to keep the best people solely by means of salaries and perquisites; there’s often a better package just over the horizon. In this way “carrots” like compensation packages become very expensive to maintain. You can pay someone $20 to participate in your Wave, but they’ll do so only as long as it seems worth it. The best people, as Gregor made clear, are looking for something more, a relationship built on stronger values than money and success.
“Reputation is who you are,” Jeff Kindler, CEO of Pfizer, told me. “It’s your character, it’s your brand, it’s your identity. Why work for one company versus another company? Really talented people who have lots of opportunities are not, in my experience, ultimately moved by an incremental difference in their paycheck. They are inspired by a couple of fairly simple things: (1) working in a place that gives them ample opportunity and resources with which to grow and develop as a person and make meaningful contributions; (2) working for and with people who share their belief system, their professional aspirations, and their objectives for what the enterprise can accomplish; and (3) working in an enterprise that is somehow making the world a better place in some dimension that is important to them. That is what inspires them to go the extra mile. To create such a place, you have to have a distinct culture, a distinct character, and a distinct set of values and objectives that resonate against that spectrum of motivations.”14
Paul Robert came up through the ranks to become associate general counsel and director of contracts and compliance at United Technologies Corporation (UTC). In an age where talented executives like him are in high demand, Paul has spent nearly 20 years working at UTC. Mindful of what Jeff Kindler