Corporate Culture
Block and tackle
How Kevin Kelly grew Heidrick & Struggles by focusing on business fundamentals
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business Chicago | February 2009
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Kevin Kelly isn’t a know-it-all. It would be easy to assume that Kelly, CEO for senior-level executive search and leadership consulting services firm Heidrick & Struggles International Inc., could tell you some intricate strategy about running just about any business. After all, he spent a good portion of his career as a senior executive overseas, he wrote a book on being a CEO, and he makes a living talking with some of the world’s most important people about who they should hire.
Despite all that, Kelly likes to keep things pretty simple. He does-n’t want to hit you too hard with numbers or strategy. Instead, he often shares stories about some of the gaps in hiring, retaining and growing senior talent that people just don’t think about. He has one story about the importance of knowing what your senior employees want.
“I was working in recruiting in investment banking,” Kelly says, “and there was a head of a hedge fund business who resigned, and when he resigned, his managing director said, ‘Why are you resigning?’ He said, ‘I wanted to be head of the desk, and I’m nominally head of the desk, but I’m not the real head of the desk,’ and the manager said, ‘Well, we can make you the real head of the desk,’ but it was too late. This other firm had already offered this other position, and a week later, they found themselves without an $85 million business, which is a huge gap to have.”
Kelly thinks about stories like that all the time — both for external customers of the executive search industry firm and his own direct reports. So while he probably could have come up with some mind-boggling strategies when he transitioned from president of Asia Pacific and Europe to CEO in 2006, a year Heidrick & Struggles did nearly $502 million in revenue, he instead focused on the blocking and tackling so many companies ignore. Rather than trying to give daily help to all 1,800 employees, his strategy was about touch points he could hit to influence the whole company, doing more work on recruiting and hiring senior talent, and creating processes to build a company culture that understood and satiated those employees to ensure that he never had any first-person, $85 million gap horror stories.
