Board and Executive Search

Transcription

1 Board and Executive Search A Market Update Spring 2016 CONTENTS The Growth of Mapping... 2 CEO Succession and Tenure... 3 Women on Boards... 4 Addressing the Executive Pipeline... 5 International Diversity... 5 Age and the Demand for Digital... 6

2 BOARD AND EXECUTIVE SEARCH: MARKET UPDATE SPRING 2016 In this latest of our series of market updates, we focus on several evolving trends in executive search and particularly on two key topics: CEO succession and tenure, and the welcome broadening of the debate on diversity beyond simply Women on Boards. EXECUTIVE SEARCH Overall demand for senior executives remains strong, with good underlying fundamentals across most major markets. However, it varies substantially by sector. Unsurprisingly, activity in energy and resources remains very low, with most companies shedding rather than hiring senior staff and consolidation continuing. In contrast, in the financial services sector a combination of ongoing regulatory pressure, technological developments and significant change at CEO-level has led to buoyant demand. Between these extremes are sectors such as retail, FMCG, technology, manufacturing and business services. Here demand is good, with a focus on digital experience and in particular the rare ability to gain traction for the digital agenda inside a complex multi-national. There has also been a noticeable upturn in the demand for high quality HR Directors. Whether this is a temporary blip or a delayed result of higher than usual Chief Executive turnover last year is unclear. As CEOs seek to control costs and reduce the number of their direct reports, there is a developing trend for several of the key functions being put together under the Corporate or Business Services role. Increasingly, HR Directors are the winners from such consolidation with functions such as Communications, IT, Facilities and Procurement/Supply Chain sitting under an HR Director. We see this trend continuing and creating opportunities for commercially oriented and progressive HR Directors to broaden the scope of their responsibilities. The recent trend for recruiting Chief Digital Officers who sit apart from the day to day operations of the business may be beginning to wane. Whilst there remains a strong demand for digital experience, companies are increasingly keen to integrate it into the body of their business to ensure that the changes are embraced by the business units themselves. Beyond Search: The Growth of Market Mapping Across all sectors, an area of substantial growth that we are observing lies in market mapping, where clients are keen to understand the external market for a particular role, without necessarily planning to contact candidates directly about it. Sometimes, this is designed to help companies benchmark internal candidates and understand more clearly any trade-offs that they might be making by choosing an internal option. However, companies are increasingly using such market mapping as an ongoing succession planning tool, keeping up to date intelligence on external talent. This helps them to benchmark their internal talent against the best in the external market and to focus their development plans in that context whilst also giving them a head

3 start should they need to search externally at any point. CEO Succession Linked to this, it is rare for a CEO succession process today not to involve rigorous benchmarking of internal candidates against the market. This can vary from simply desktop market mapping through to a full external search alongside structured independent assessment of internal options. For Executive Director roles, both Board members and shareholders are understandably keen that internal choices have been tested against the best outside the company. But this does not mean that the proportion of external CEO appointments is rising. More than half (53) of the current FTSE 100 Chief Executives were internal appointments. Interestingly, though, it is rare that people are brought into a company with a view to them taking over as CEO in a year or two. Of the 53 internal appointments, the vast majority (49) had spent more than three years at their company before being appointed Chief Executive. In addition, there are four current FTSE 100 CEOs who were previously Non-Executive Directors of their companies. Whilst companies should look wherever they can for top executive talent, nomination of independent members of the Board remains an unusual route. CEO Tenure There are some commonly-repeated myths about CEO tenure in particular that the average tenure has now reduced to about four years. It is true that this is the median current tenure of the FTSE 100 CEOs but this is a misleading and largely meaningless statistic because many of these CEOs will continue in their roles for many years to come. Therefore, the more appropriate analysis is to track the average tenure of CEOs when they step down from their positions. The mean figure from this now stands at 6.9 years, which gives a very different perspective of the time horizon that a CEO can expect to have on appointment. Interestingly, the median figure calculated on the same basis is somewhat different from the mean, at only 6.1 years. This reflects two important realities. The first is that nearly 20% of CEOs prove to be unsuccessful appointments and move on within three years; it is clear that Boards still get too many choices wrong, for a variety of reasons. The second is that about 25% of CEOs end up staying in role for more than nine years; 15 of the current FTSE 100 CEOs have already passed this milestone. Many of these continue to be highly successful. But Boards need to be alert to the dangers that come with CEOs whose tenure reaches those sorts of levels and to ensure that such CEOs don t overstay their welcome. Our research paper Taming Narcissus explores key lessons on this topic, and we are currently working with a number of Boards on embedding mechanisms to enhance their management of this vital challenge

4 NON-EXECUTIVE SEARCH DIVERSITY: BROADENING THE FOCUS Whilst media attention over the last year has largely remained focused on the drive to improve gender diversity in the Boardroom, the underlying challenge has broadened into a more sophisticated and wide-ranging effort to enhance diversity and quality in both Boards and senior executive ranks. Women on Boards encouraging progress, but more to do In the UK, the Davies Committee was set up in 2011, at a time when female representation on FTSE 100 Boards stood at 12.5% and on FTSE 250 Boards at only 7.8%. It set a goal of doubling the proportion of women on FTSE 100 Boards to 25% by the end of 2015, through the voluntary actions of individual businesses. Since then, as the recent Davies Update Report has concluded, progress in improving Board diversity has been significant. As of October 2015, the proportion of women on FTSE 100 Boards stood at 26.1% (ahead of the Davies goal) and on FTSE 250 Boards at 19.6%. This progress reflects the growing acceptance of the value of diversity by Boards, and the efforts of Chairmen and their Executive Search partners to find and appoint wellqualified female candidates. At MWM, we have been fully committed to this effort as one of the five firms that drafted the Voluntary Code of Conduct for the industry, and as one of the eight firms awarded accredited status last year by the Davies Committee for the quality and quantity of work we have done in helping the appointment of women Directors. Further work is needed, however. Even in the FTSE 100, there are many Boards still well short of the 25% level, whilst the FTSE 250 continues to lag behind (although the gap is narrowing), despite the greater availability of highly qualified female candidates for these Boards. The target that the Davies Committee has now set of achieving at least 33% female representation across FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 is achievable. In parallel with this, attention now needs to turn towards increasing the prominence of women on Boards; key leadership roles continue to be held predominantly by men. Women hold only 3% of the Chairmen and 11% of the Senior Independent Director roles in the FTSE 100; the percentages are almost identical in the FTSE 250, at 4% and 11% respectively. The figures for key Committee leadership roles are a little more encouraging in the FTSE 100, 33% of Remuneration Committees and 13% of Audit Committees are now chaired by women; the FTSE 250 figures are similar at 25% and 12% respectively. A concerted effort now needs to be made to equip strong female candidates with the experience to become Chairmen over the next few years, and to appoint them into these roles

5 The real challenge: addressing the executive pipeline The overall progress in improving gender diversity on Boards masks a more worrying statistic: the stubbornly low proportion of female Executive Directors and Executive Committee members. In the FTSE 100, 31.4% of the Non-Executive Directors are women, compared to only 9.6% of the Executive Directors. The problem is even more acute in the FTSE 250, where women represent 24.8% of the Non-Executive Directors but only 5.2% of the Executive Directors. Whilst progress is being made in 2011, women held only 5.5% of the FTSE 100 Executive Director roles and 4.2% in the FTSE 250 it is markedly slower than with NEDs. Not only does this serve to restrict the pipeline of Board-experienced future female Non-Executives, more importantly, it reflects the lack of diversity in the Executive Committees of our leading businesses, and the substantial loss of talent represented by consistently higher levels of female attrition through the management ranks. Whatever the public and client pressures, there is only so much shuffling of the cards that head-hunters can do. Whilst we may be able to identify women with potential which may not yet have been noticed in their existing company, the only sustainable answer must come from companies themselves. This is a subject on which we have long been focused. Back in 2012, we completed a major study of the issues and potential solutions: Cracking The Code. This highlighted not a glass ceiling but rather a slippery ladder, with attrition occurring at a steady rate up the corporate ladder, driven by a complex mix of supply and demand issues. Our conclusions were that making progress requires: Unambiguous and sustained top management commitment, led by Chief Executives, to address this problem, including setting defined companyspecific targets and developing comprehensive programmes to drive progress Creating a supportive eco-system for women including targeted recruitment plans, more flexible working practices, enhanced mentoring, better-managed maternity programmes, and greater use of technology Ensuring change is embedded by tackling the underlying mind-sets and behaviours that create unconscious gender bias Enhancing gender balance through the Executive pipeline will be a complex, multiyear journey and will not be susceptible to simple, politically-motivated prescriptions. But it is a challenge that every CEO and every Board needs to face. International Diversity Whilst all eyes have been focused on increasing gender diversity, it is equally important to promote diversity of thought and experience by ensuring adequate international breadth at the top of multi-nationals. This is an area where the UK has long been at the forefront of performance, helped by the prevalence of English and by the appeal of London as a location for international talent

6 The figures (see table one) are striking. At the very top of the British corporate world, international talent predominates: 55% of the FTSE 20 Chairmen, 70% of the CEOs and 55% of the Board are non-british; even across the whole FTSE 100, the figures are 25%, 40% and 40% respectively. This compares very favourably to other major markets, with only the Swiss, Dutch and Scandinavian markets at a comparable level with the latter somewhat distorted by the presence of other Scandinavians, more than individuals from further afield. Table One: International Presence on Boards Country Exchange Chairman CEOs Directors UK FTSE 20 55% 70% 55% UK FTSE 50 40% 50% 48% UK FTSE % 40% 40% UK FTSE % 28% 24% Switzerland SMI 65%* 50%* 58% Netherlands AEX (27) 30% 31% 49% Denmark OMX-Copenhagen (18) 37%** 37%** 34%** Sweden OMX-Stockholm (28) 24% + 41% + 30% + Germany DAX 30 10% 23% 19% France CAC 40 8% 8% 28% Spain IBEX 35 3% 6% 17% USA S4P 500 8% 7% 9% USA Nasdaq 7% 7% 11% *excluding Germans and Austrians, figures are 40%, 40% and 46% respectively **excluding other Scandinavians, figures are 11%, 16% and 15% respectively + excluding other Scandinavians, figures are 18%, 29% and 19% respectively Source: BoardEx For British businesses, the push in particular now is on finding Board members with strong emerging markets expertise (in particular from Asia), recognising the need to ensure that individuals are able to manage their logistics to play a full role on the Board. Many Continental European and North American businesses find themselves at an earlier stage of evolution, needing more fundamentally and broadly to inject a truly international mind-set into their Boards. This is an issue to which many newer, more progressive Chairmen are now paying real attention and we are increasingly being asked to help find appropriate international candidates for such Boards, even in previously conservative markets such as France and the US. Age and the demand for digital Boards continue to de dominated by individuals from their mid-50s to their mid-60s. The average age of people on FTSE 100 Boards has in fact increased from 57.6 years at the end of 2010 to 58.2 today. In the US, the ageing of Boards is even more marked, rising from 61 years in 2007 to 64 in

7 In the UK, this reflects a number of factors: the effect of the reduction in the number of (usually younger) Executive Directors on Boards; the increased emphasis on depth of experience in Financial Services, encouraged by regulators; and the willingness in a world of significantly increased life expectancy to appoint Chairmen or Non- Executives to roles beyond the age of 65. Indeed, 14 of the current FTSE 100 Chairmen were appointed to their roles when 65 or over. There is nothing wrong, in principle, with any of this at all. It does seem counterintuitive, though, at a time when many industries are being transformed by technology and the digital revolution, that the proportion of FTSE 100 Directors in their 40s (or younger) has declined over the last five years from 15% to 12%. Boards who are keen to strengthen their digital expertise and this is the most frequently requested profile at the moment will need to be prepared to embrace candidates in their late 30s and 40s who are true digital natives ; they may not always have the same depth and breadth of big company experience as other Board members, but this can be more than compensated for by the different perspectives they will bring and the diversity of thought that they help to engender. Recent appointments such as that of Sebastian Thrun (former Head of GoogleX) to the Board of Credit Suisse show what can be achieved. MWM Consulting MWM Consulting is a leading international Executive Search and Board Advisory Consulting firm that acts for a broad range of clients, principally Fortune Global 500 companies. More information on the firm can be found at 12 Charles II Street, London SW1Y 4QU Tel: +44 (0)