S2E21: The Great Reflection

‍Episode Summary:

In this episode, we speak with Claire-Louise McSherry, Managing Director within the Technology Sector at Russell Reynolds Associates.  Claire-Louise talks about what she is calling the great reflection on the current work landscape, including changes to recruitment and retention. She explains how factors related to technology, culture, sustainability, and social impact have affected those changes.

Claire-Louise is a managing Director within the Technology Sector at Russell Reynolds Associates. She is a diversity and inclusion advocate, with a passion for hiring diverse Board and executive leadership teams and building succession pipelines of female and underrepresented minority leaders. Claire-Louise chatted with us about what she calls the great reflection, assessing the current work environment landscape and how recruitment and retention has changed in recent years. She explains how technology, workplace perspectives, corporate culture, sustainability, and social impact have affected those changes.

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‍3 Takeaways:

The job market has been extremely dynamic. There's a huge demand for technology skills all around the world, in many leadership and advisory roles. There has been a shift behaviorally and culturally in workplaces. There is a greater focus on how to retain great people, and more of an emphasis on things like the use of technology and who is filling different roles, to the makeup and dynamic of where people are working and when they do their jobs.

Technology is the differentiator today for many corporations. There is a much bigger focus on having tech savvy leaders than ever before. There is also a much greater expectation that most major corporations have cyber security experience on their board.

The complexity and the intellectual challenge of trying to resolve the legacy operations with the new, and driving that transformation at that scale with that degree of complexity, is very much in focus. Leaders are being required to straddle both, understanding how to mix the old with the new, creating great products or platforms, while maintaining a good customer experience and getting the most from their IT budgets.

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Key Quotes:

“The markets have changed significantly since the pandemic. There’s this digital acceleration with a razor focus on customer centricity and hyper personalization. We are all used to consuming product services platforms more easily than we have done before. That's driven quite a lot of change in the industry. And, as a consequence of that, we've seen quite a lot of CEO board movement, then CIO and COO movement.”

“Great talent will always be hired, no matter the economic situation. We need to be thinking about succession planning and retention of great talent so that we are not losing great technology leaders and technologists to competitors or even to different industries. This is actually something that we're seeing quite a lot of at the minute.”

“I think people are continuing to be motivated by how do I develop as an individual? What is an organization doing for me in terms of my career prospects? But, equally, I think there's an acknowledgement that you want to work for an organization that has meaning and is having an impact on society. I think that has changed.”

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Best Career Advice:

Make sure that you build relationships and that you network. Sometimes those relationships are not inside your own organization or even actually inside your own industry. Keep an open mind and make sure that you network to create opportunities to meet others and put yourself out there in a deliberate fashion.

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Bio:

Claire-Louise McSherry

Managing Director - Technology Sector at Russell Reynolds Associates

Claire-Louise McSherry specializes in helping financial services companies find technology leaders. She is passionate about building succession pipelines of diverse leaders in CIO, CTO, CDO and CISO roles.  Based in London, Claire-Louise has deep experience across the financial services industry, capital markets, consumer banking, transaction banking, wealth and asset management. She is member of the Technology Sector at Russell Reynolds Associates. Claire-Louise joined Russell Reynolds from McSherry Brown, a boutique search firm she founded in 2008. The company primarily focused on recruiting and developing diverse leadership in the cyber, digital and technology space – with a particular specialization in financial services. Much of Claire-Louise's career has been spent advising international clients in the financial services, FinTech, payments, private equity and technology industries on their recruitment strategies and hiring, as well as offering career coaching to senior executives in global institutions. Prior to founding her company, Claire-Louise was a director and head of the technology practice at the Trafalgar Partnership. Claire-Louise holds a BA with honors in geography and environmental policy from London South Bank University.

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For more information:

https://www.russellreynolds.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cmcsherry/?originalSubdomain=uk

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About the Hosts

Matthew O'Neill is a husband, dad, geek and Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO at VMware.

You can find Matthew on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveler and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.

You can find Brian on LinkedIn.