Why Tariff Wars Are Forcing a Talent Rethink
07/04/2025
Alex Martin explains why talent location is now central to decision-making.
Alex Martin explains why talent location is now central to decision-making.
Peter Cabrera talks to Anna Foden, Head of Sustainability at Permasteelisa.
Interim executives offer a flexible and cost-effective solution to guide businesses through restructuring.
Alex Martin, Managing Partner, Talent Intelligence explains how TI can be used as a competitive tool
Our CEO Katrina Cheverton explains how and why Savannah Group is prioritising Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
Talent mapping is a key tool for companies to hire quality leaders quickly and efficiently.
Paul Mendelssohn examines why more companies and private equity funds will opt for interim CFOs in 2025.
We explore the key trends shaping the future of HR.
We explore the the 10 most common signs that finance leadership change should be considered.
For lessons in leadership under stress and against the odds, we spoke to Claire Williams, Deputy Team Principal of the Williams team from 2013 to 2020.
To meet the demands of tomorrow, the industry must continue to address key themes surrounding talent acquisition, development, and retention.
In response to the demands of an ever-changing world, several key trends are prominent in how companies are approaching leadership hiring in 2025.
What is the most effective way of managing succession? And how can organisations
continue to identify and develop leaders for the future?
We’ve summarised Ten Tenets that define Next Generation Leadership in an increasingly challenging business environment.
Savannah Group’s Next Generation Leadership Institute is examining how key board roles are evolving
Humility and vulnerability in leadership are increasingly being heralded as crucial traits for modern leaders. Is humble leadership truly practical in reality?
Ali Palmer and Clancy Murphy discuss the actions leaders can take to ensure seamless, successful leadership transitions. Four priorities emerged.
Talent Intelligence is being used to support our experts with tangible benefits.
Savannah Partner Richard Ashton gives his guidance to candidates considering their next move.
With 75% of CEOs predicting that AI will significantly change their business in the next three years, where is the talent who will realise its potential?
Katie Chevis and Alex Martin discuss how organisations are benefiting from the relatively new discipline of talent intelligence.
Savannah CEO Katrina Cheverton sits down with Senior Advisor and Former FTSE CHRO Clancy Murphy to delve into the solutions for ensuring sustainable diversity.
Savannah’s Talent Intelligence team set about taking a closer look at recently appointed CEOs’ gender diversity and the proportion of women at senior levels in different industries.
Savannah Group’s Next Generation Leadership Institute is examining how non-executive board roles are evolving.
Savannah Group announces that Clancy Murphy has joined as Senior Advisor. Clancy will work with clients to operationalise their business strategies through leadership and talent.
Study objectives In the context of a difficult hiring environment for technology talent, we set out to answer a series of critical questions. Download full
Savannah has become a Founding Member of NiB to help ensure greater workplace inclusion of the neurodivergent community.
When it comes to leadership, the modern military does not rest on past laurels but is constantly evolving to embrace technological advances and new strategic thinking. As a result, today’s business leaders have much to learn from the armed forces.
Get to know our CEO Katrina Cheverton in her interview with City AM. She talks about a broad range of topics, from her favourite city haunts to the potential role of AI in moving the diversity dial.
Savannah Group announces that Alex Langridge and Nick Davies have joined as Partners in the Digital & Technology Practice. This integrated team of four partners work with principals and researchers to deliver executive search, interim management, transformation consultants and talent intelligence services.
We are delighted to launch Savannah Group’s evolved brand.
We have updated our brand to reflect what we now offer to clients.
The right leadership is fundamental for business success. Yet traditional methods of finding talent have not changed for decades.
CFOs are crucial for business survival but appointing the right financial guardian has never been more challenging. Partner at Savannah Group, Richard Ashton explains what skills are vital for CFOs and where technology can aid with recruiting the perfect CFO.
Want to be a next generation leader? Here are three things you need to know.
Interim leaders are critical appointments. They might revive a failing business or lead a project that enables an organisation to transition to a better future. Yet interims typically do not count towards diversity targets in pay gap numbers or other diversity reporting. Is diversity in this pool less important?
Savannah Group is proud to announce that they have formed a strategic partnership with Tech She Can, a charity focused on driving equal opportunities in technology.
Diversity isn’t a numbers game – it’s a power game, and one that most companies are losing. Strong representation of women on boards has been achieved thanks to the rapid ascent of female NEDs. But for a company to be truly gender diverse, diverse groups must hold a healthy grip of the executive decision-making pendulum. Clearly that can only happen by gaining a more critical mass of such talent in the most powerful C-suite roles. So what’s holding companies back?
The dynamics of the talent landscape has been upended over the past two years. Despite predictions of mass unemployment throughout the pandemic, what transpired was a fierce war for talent and an even greater drive towards transformation and organisational change. In parallel, the COVID crisis prompted a major mindset shift from employees both in regard to what they seek from their employers and realising their own value. One thing has become crystal clear: candidates now hold all the cards…
Amid the continuing shockwaves of pandemic, war, economic and political turmoil it is reassuring to know that there are business leaders who positively thrive in periods of crisis and chaos
The Government backed Davies Review in 2011 followed by the Hampton-Alexander Review in 2016, successfully encouraged a voluntary effort to substantially increase the number of women on the boards of the FTSE 350 listed companies and this effort has cascaded down through AIM listed and the largest privately held companies. In 2012, only 12% of the FTSE 350 non-executive directors were women. Today, it is close to 40% and still increasing. While this success needs to recognised, it also masks a deeper problem. If companies can’t get on top of gender diversity, will they be able to succeed with other forms of diversity?
Imagine that you have a new supply-chain leader starting next week. You hired her to do supply-chain transformation before the crisis took hold. But now she is joining remotely and inheriting a remote team, and her short-term, urgent priorities are very different from what they appeared to be before the pandemic. As her manager, how can you make her onboarding experience a productive one? What can you do to support her so that she’ll hit the ground running?
With 6.3 million furloughed workers in the UK and an imminent tapering of the scheme, I have been speaking to many senior HR leaders about their plans for re-engagement of staff and the challenges that may bring. These conversations have revealed hugely complex organisational design issues to contend with as businesses work to try to understand the many different iterations of what the “next normal” could look like.
Mark Zawacki (Business Strategist and Founder of Silicon Valley based 650 Labs) unpacks the issue by taking us through a variety of reasons as to why innovation and digital transformation isn’t working, why innovation theatre is rampant, and what organisations need to do in order to remain relevant in the decade ahead and to ignite new double-digit growth, particularly in light of the challenges we’re currently experiencing and the impact on the economy globally.
Why do clients value diversity and why is it so difficult? Our clients are continually asking us to focus on diversity – and within technology, particularly on gender diversity. Focusing on diversity just to box tick won’t get you very far, but an authentic, full-hearted commitment at the most senior levels of leadership will reap significant benefits for your company. We’ve compiled some practical advice on how organisations can address this ongoing issue.
The world is in a very peculiar and surreal place at the moment and there are profound impacts across all organisations. This global pandemic has shown how utterly critical a CIO/CTO is to a business’ ability to operate, grow and flourish. Now is, therefore, a fantastic time to reflect on future career goals and decide what you want to achieve. Ensuring that you have a compelling CV is an essential tool in your arsenal to help you land the opportunity of your dreams.
Despite the accelerating pace of technology developments and the exploding number of digital natives emerging in virtually every sector, large incumbents appear to be slow in responding to such existential threats. Digital leaders such as CIOs, CTOs and CDOs are making every effort to mobilise innovation initiatives within their respective organisations. Equally, the CEO community is under increasing pressure to demonstrate how it can generate billions of dollars of new value through genuinely innovative activities. Despite these valiant efforts, the FTSE100 in the UK remains at similar levels to 1999.
Being a sponsor for high potential talent within your organisation doesn’t just benefit them – it also helps you further your career. Research shows that senior managers with protégés are 53% more likely to have received a promotion. Despite this, many executives are reluctant to take on a sponsor, seeing it as an additional burden on their already stretched time or are unable to differentiate between sponsoring and mentoring.
With this in mind we invited Sylvia Hewlitt, economist and author of fourteen critically acclaimed books to speak to an audience of Senior HR leaders on how to use sponsorship to drive business results.
Up to 40% of business leaders onboarded into new roles will leave the organisation within 18 months. Successfully managing career transitions is an area that warrants investment. At our event in partnership with the Harvard Business Review and Sova Assessment, Michael Watkins, author of Master Your Next Move: The Essential Companion to The First 90 Days, explained the eight common transition challenges leaders face, how to set up leaders for success during onboarding and how to successfully manage your own career transitions.
Analysis of FTSE 100 & 250 appointments through 2018 showed that 62% of FTSE 100 board appointments in the second half of 2018 were women. But simply hitting a diversity target isn’t enough. Diversity requires diverse thought, experiences and opinions. With 10% of the workforce estimated as neurodivergent, and talent scarcity among the skills that some neurodivergent individuals excel at, for the organisations that are brave the potential upside is huge. So how can organisations build a more inclusive environment?
What we all suspected is now fully backed by all the stats – having diverse teams not only makes the workplace happier, but more productive and successful; your customers will feel a positive difference and ultimately, so will your P&L. What is equally true is that, whether our clients fully embrace the overwhelming evidence or whether they are simply following instructions from somewhere on high, gender balance is hugely important to them.
Considering a potential future career as an NED? You’re not alone! Many executives start to think about a potential transition from executive roles into non-executive roles once they reach a certain point in their career. With that in mind, we recently welcomed over seventy executives to an event run in partnership with PA Consulting on the topic of advancing your NED Profile.
When it’s time for a career move, many high-calibre candidates often have a number of job offers and will ask our advice on which to take. Sometimes the opportunity to prove yourself by sorting out ‘a mess’ is a sure way of adding some sparkle to your CV. But how do you distinguish between the role that will shoot you to even greater glory and the one which turns out to be a career killer?
In this piece, we speak to three of our senior partners about how to launch a successful plural career. Between them, they have more than fifty years’ experience in recruiting senior executives and Board level directors for large listed businesses and PE backed private businesses and have helped many executives follow the path to a plural portfolio career.
Organisations in the UK have work to do if they want to keep up with digital-native competitors. That’s according to early results from the National Digital Benchmark survey, created alongside Management Consultancy PA Consulting Group and award-winning speaker and author Professor Venkat Venkatraman. The interim results from the survey, which several hundred senior executives have responded to so far, suggest that digital transformation is slow within UK organisations, however awareness of a need to evolve and embrace digital is increasing.
With AI being such a topical subject, we’ve put together a report with the help of IBM, PA Consulting, Forrester, Bioss and a number of other thought leaders in the space to help simplify and summarise the key areas that senior executives should be thinking about when it comes to AI and their business.
Diversity matters. It is important for humanity, for education and, most notably, for business. Diverse leadership teams ignite more creativity and innovation, with a range of backgrounds, experiences and mindsets all contributing to business, customer and product development. This, in turn, encourages and promotes more inclusive attitudes, which attract the top talent that every business needs for fast financial growth.
Savannah Group and Leading Edge Forum recently hosted a breakfast briefing at Savannah’s offices in London to discuss “The Future of the IT Organisation”. Bill Murray of LEF presented key findings from a recent LEF research report, with a subsequent roundtable debate with fifteen CIOs/CTOs and CDOs on whether there will be an IT Organisation in the future.
A decade ago, virtually every CIO role focused on one thing: large scale ERP experience. CIOs marshalled small armies of people and large budgets, whilst being perceived by the business as a back office function whose sole purpose was systems optimisation. Skip forward to today and the vast majority of CIO roles are a hybrid of classic and new; dealing with the challenges of a legacy environment and “digitising” the business.
We recently welcomed a number of CIOs, CTOs and CDOs for a breakfast discussion about the latest technology devices and their current and future business applications. Lewis Richards from the Leading Edge Forum led the discussion and brought with him a number of these devices, giving the senior leaders in attendance the chance to have a hands-on experience.
At Savannah Group we work hard, take pride in what we do and are diligent and honest in our assessment of candidates. We know better than most that finding real talent is hard. Finding real talent with increasingly narrow parameters in a highly competitive market is even harder. Finding the rare individual who is willing to move from the company in which they are in and (no doubt) well looked after is even more difficult.
Digital disruption is a much-discussed topic, but what does a leader do when the industry they have succeeded in begins to erode beneath their feet? Can their skills, experience and deep industry insight transfer to the new world of challenger businesses, or do the skills that helped make them a success actually work against them?
In a rush to bring diverse talent to an organisation, few stop to ask themselves why they are actually doing this. What is it about the sex or race of a particular candidate that makes them the best fit? What does the company hope to gain by seeking out a more diverse group of candidates in general?
Answering those important questions holds the key to unlocking the potential of a diverse organisation, and that requires redefining what diversity is.
The purpose of this document is to help you understand in greater depth what a headhunter is generally trying to get out of an interview and to give you some hints and tips on the do’s and don’ts of what and how you present at that interview.
I attended an incredibly engaging talk by Mark Shayler towards the end of 2016 that concerned the current age of disruption that is occurring globally. In this article I discuss and highlight five of the key power shifts he outlined.
Recent studies have highlighted how male-dominated FinTech boards are, with some studies finding that as much as 69% of FinTech firms’ boards are entirely male. These findings coupled with a significant amount of research suggesting a lack of racial and gender diversity at Board level in Technology and Finance should create a cause for concern among FinTech companies.
When meeting boards to discuss their need to hire a CIO or CTO, the first question my colleagues and I always ask is whether they need evolution or revolution within their technology function. Clients are often reluctant to admit they are seeking a slower tempo of change since they fear seeming complacent or lacking ambition, but no organisation thrives in constant chaos so should not feel uncomfortable aiming for a gradual approach to change.
Cybersecurity continues to make headlines, with a recent breach at Tesco Bank and the Chancellor unveiling a £2bn plan to “strike back” against cyber hackers. It is clear that public institutions, businesses, and our national infrastructure are being attacked on a daily basis by a mix of nation states, cyber spies, criminal gangs, hacktivists and “kids in bedrooms”, using in many cases, easily available and affordable tools.
For modern knowledge-based organisations, it is talent and not capital and raw materials that have become the most important asset and the key to competitive advantage. This elevation of the talent agenda means that the personal traits and leadership styles of the best HR Directors are increasingly converging with those of their CEOs.
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