Guest: Max Hansen, CEO and Co-Founder of Y Scouts, the original purpose-based executive search firm.
Overview: You can turbocharge your hiring results when you combine top talent with corporate alignment–talent who align with your purpose, team culture, values, best practices, and long-term vision.
On today’s show, Max Hansen explains how talent and purpose alignment can Make BIG Happen faster and help CEOs rekindle the passion that drives top performance.
Max Hansen on why purpose matters to younger generations:
“If you go to Google and ask why purpose matters, or put it in an AI and tell it to write you a document, you’ll be surprised at what comes out. Statistically speaking, our younger generations are much more driven by purpose from the products they purchase to where they’re gonna work. If you’re listening to this and thinking ‘Why does somebody need more meaning in their work? Why can’t they just show up like our parents did, like we did, put in the time, grind it out and make money the hard way.’ If you’re having a hard time wrapping your head around this, go look at the data and think about it as any other business decision, like, is this gonna be a better business decision? Whether you like it or not, this is a big decision for younger generations.”
Max Hansen on balancing purpose and profit:
“The purpose of business, for almost all businesses, is to increase their customers. And if you can’t do that, you really can’t live your purpose. So there is something that precedes purpose, which is that profitability to survive. You can’t over-index purpose and profit. There has to be some balance, otherwise companies just don’t survive to live out their purpose. But there are a lot of decisions that companies make where they are sacrificing some profit to maintain their purpose. And in some cases, they might lose out in the short term to earn longer-term loyalty from their team, which in turn will earn longer-term profits in the end.”
Max Hansen on finding alignment on purpose between companies and talent:
“If somebody’s been on an executive search forever, and they like it that way, they’re not a fit for us. We want to continue to evolve, we want to continue to change. We want to make the experience for the candidate and for our clients different and better. And so, we’ll figure out what a company’s purpose is, what their uniqueness is, the drums that they’re beating. And then when we sit with a candidate, the first question we ask in purpose discovery is, ‘What do you most care about?’ And almost every time a candidate will say, ‘Personally or professionally?’ And we say, ‘Both.’ And when you say that, it just opens up the world to get what’s most important to them. It shouldn’t just be on the professional side. And then we have to determine if there’s alignment with what we’ve heard for the company.”
Links:
Why You Should Challenge Your Company’s Core Identity These are the six aspects of core identity within a successful business, along with eight tools that we’ve designed to help companies rediscover what they can be and Make BIG Happen.
How to Hire the Best Talent in a Tight Jobs Market Megan Couch, the Chief Experience Officer at Integrity Staffing Solutions, explains why your total value proposition has to encompass culture, leadership opportunities, hybrid work models, and, yes, a competitive comp structure if you want to attract top talent.
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, CEO Coaching International has coached more than 1,000 CEOs and entrepreneurs in more than 60 countries and 45 industries. The coaches at CEO Coaching International are former CEOs, presidents, or executives who have made BIG happen. The firm’s coaches have led double-digit sales and profit growth in businesses ranging in size from startups to over $10 billion, and many are founders that have led their companies through successful eight, nine, and ten-figure exits. Companies working with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have experienced an average EBITDA CAGR of 53.5% during their time as a client, more than three times the U.S. average, and a revenue CAGR of 26.2%, nearly twice the U.S. average.
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