On The Future Of Business And Why Skills Like Empathy Matter
What qualities and skills must you have in order to build a successful organization and positively impact those working with you?
We are intrigued by what makes a successful entrepreneur…what qualities and skillsets must you have in order to build a successful organization and positively impact those working with you? As we pose this question to the entrepreneurs in our network, we see an interesting commonality:
Some of the most successful entrepreneurs — think Richard Branson (Virgin), Anita Roddick (Body Shop) and Ingvar Kamprad (Ikea) — have non-traditional learning experiences.
Ross Hall, our Director of Education in Europe and a serial entrepreneur with more than 20 businesses under his belt, sat down with Rosaleen Blair, Founder and CEO of Alexander Mann Solutions, one of the world’s leading talent acquisition and management firms, to talk about her learning style — and how we can better prepare the next generation of business leaders and changemakers.
Ashoka’s Ross Hall: Right, off we go. A good place to start might be for you to share your career trajectory.
Rosaleen Blair: Well, I was what some might consider to be unemployable. I realized very early on that I had to be self-sufficient, and that’s why I’ve always started my own businesses. I’ve always known that I had to control my own destiny.
Ashoka: Why ‘unemployable’?
Blair: When I was going through school, I was good at art, and I was a good leader and organizer, but I wasn’t particularly interested in the academic side of things — in part because I was dyslexic. Unfortunately, this was only realized towards the end of my school years, so I didn’t get the sort of support I needed to overcome that challenge.
But this actually turned out to be an advantage. It forced me to figure out ways to compensate for my dyslexia, to work around barriers and to keep pushing in order to accomplish what I needed to do. I learned to be agile and resourceful. I learned how to be resilient and how to overcome setbacks. And most importantly, it really helped me realize how important it is to have a passion in life. And in my view, these are all skills that any entrepreneur needs in order to be successful.
Ashoka: Would you say you turned your dyslexia into an advantage then?
Blair: It turned out to be a huge advantage. I developed the ability to think outside the box and to approach problems creatively. It gave me the kinds of life skills that a lot of people don’t develop until they join the work world. I got them very early on in life, and so they’re really just a part of who I am as a person.
Ashoka: When did you create your first business? And what was it?
Blair: Not long after I finished school, I started a child care business in Dublin. I put ads in two newspapers on the same day: one on the more affluent side of town, saying ‘Available: child minders, petsitters’, and one on the other side of town that read ‘Wanted: child minders, petsitters.’ The next day, my phone rang off the hook and overnight the business was born. It just grew and grew, and months later, I thought ‘I’ve sort of done this by accident and made every mistake in the book!’
That experience inspired me. It showed me what I was capable of doing if I set my mind to it. And the resilience I talked about — the ability to bounce back and learn from mistakes — is something that I carry with me today.
No matter how hard you plan, business will always throw up some surprises. But if you think of creative solutions and don’t let those surprises and challenges overtake you, they can be tremendous learning experiences.
Ashoka: Well, you clearly followed those early instincts and went on to found one of the world’s leading talent acquisition companies. What does the future of employment look like, and what skills will young people most need?
Blair: We’ve built this company over twenty years, so we’ve seen a lot of change in the world of work that is happening across every sector — like increasing collaboration, workforce mobility and the fact that a job for life, or even one career path, is no longer an option for most people.
As a society and as parents, we need to make sure that our kids don’t feel entitled, but that we do everything we can to equipthem with confidence and resilience, and the ability and desire to take control of their future and thrive in this new world.
I’m a firm believer in owning your own destiny. That means understanding when to ask for help, how to ask for help and how you learn from mistakes. It’s also about learning how to support others, both because it’s the right thing to do and because it will come back to you tenfold in the future.
The ability to have empathy and to be a good listener are vitally important skills, and not every leader or manager has them. But I think we all need to develop them.
Ashoka: The cluster of skills you’ve mentioned…. empathy, resilience and creativity….all lead to a certain level of self-awareness. I think of these as powers almost — deep human powers.
RB: It’s very true!
Ashoka: Do you hire for empathy?
Blair: I do, and I think it’s important to do so in most professions and for most positions. We work in a profession that is involved in something that very much defines who we are as people: our careers. Looking for a job, getting a job, or not getting a job and trying again — these are some of the most stressful experiences a person can have in their lifetime. It’s important for people in the profession of talent acquisition to remember that the job-seeker isn’t the only person affected by it — it’s their wife, their husband, their kids, their potential employer, the hiring manager. It’s the whole circle of people around the candidate.
One aspect of what we do at Alexander Mann Solutions is matching the right person with the right job — like I did all those years ago with my childcare business. So the people we hire into the company have to recognize when a candidate has more than just the right skills and experience to fill a client’s need. Our consultants need to find and engage with people who have the right personality and temperament to work for our clients. They need to find people who have a genuine passion for their work and their colleagues. If we can hire people with that combination of skill and intuition — and we have more than 3,000 people just like that today — it’s going to serve our clients well and it’ll serve our company well.
By the way, we also need people who understand how a candidate feels when he doesn’t get the job. We have to make sure we treat him with respect and dignity, and help him move forward to the next thing. So yes, hiring for empathy is vital to our mission.
Ashoka: How do you sustain this, embed it in your company’s core?
Blair: That’s the magic. It’s easy when you’re 250 people, it’s far harder when you’re 3,000 people across 80 countries, which we are now, with many of us dispersed and sitting in client offices or home offices. But we work very hard to practice our values of being passionate, authentic and distinctive, and we endeavour to live them every day. That starts with our leadership team setting the right example for their colleagues throughout the company.
In fact, we added ‘bravery’ to our mission two years ago because it’s what we thought we needed in order to be successful on the next stage of our journey.
For us, bravery is about having the skill to push back, to speak out, to care enough about each other, the company, the profession, and the world, to actively shape it. This is really important because big changes are coming in the future of work and we want to play a role in helping everyone, both employees and employers, make that transition successfully.
