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After the financial instabilities of 2023, there is more positivity in the first half of 2024. Despite ongoing political disorder across the globe, the commercial world continues to drive forward optimistically.
Whilst the Infrastructure Trends highlighted earlier this year are still at the forefront of leaders’ minds, we have seen four leadership piorities emerge in the past six months. Partner Tim Shaw summarises them below:
1. Transformation
A much-overused term! However, after the financial instability of 2023, our clients are now focused on more aggressively driving transformation across their portfolios. Whether centred on people, processes or systems, companies are working to optimise performance across the board. The success of these transformation programmes depends on the people leading them. Since 2022, Savannah has doubled its number of interim CHRO and Chief Transformation Officer appointments. Additionally, nearly half of all interim leadership requests over this period have been for CFOs. One of the most prominent recent examples of this was Helen Cowing’s appointment as interim CFO at FTSE250 Mobico (National Express). This followed a year in which the company warned on profit, suspended its dividend, and twice delayed reporting annual results.
With companies having to make smart decisions, and sometimes significant changes, to enable growth and profitability, interim managers and consultants can often be positively transformational to businesses at pivotal points in their journeys. Here at Savannah we have specialist interim leadership practices in finance, human resources and technology, who are particularly relevant in times of high change.
2. Cyber
In the past 12 months, multiple critical national infrastructure assets and contractors have been hacked, including Sellafield, Capita, and the Ministry of Defence. More recently, global consultancy Arup suffered a deepfake scam where attackers posed as senior executives and earlier this year the FBI said a Chinese state hacker group had targeted US infrastructure. The FBI said the group targeted a broad sweep of the country’s critical infrastructure including water treatment systems, the power grid, transportation systems, oil and gas pipelines as well as telecommunication networks.
Savannah’s Talent Intelligence practice recently analysed senior cyber talent relative to threat levels, by industry, and found that manufacturing, energy and retail sectors will have the largest talent deficits by 2029. You can read the insights here.
Proactive succession planning and pipelining is even more important in this critical area.
3. Operational Efficiency
There is a continued focus from clients on how to drive more impact, with less. Savannah has been retained on significantly more operationally focussed roles in the first half of 2024. We are seeing many clients looking to find individuals with a blend of strategic and commercial competence, and ‘hands-on’ operational expertise. Equally, businesses are seeking people who can bring innovation and best practice from outside their own sector, and with analogous examples of driving business performance.
Savannah’s proprietary executive sourcing and analytics platform – MapX – identifies additional, relevant candidates compared to other tools as well as insights on skills pools. This is proving particularly effective in supporting our teams to uncover a diverse breadth of potential candidates, including from tangential sectors.
4. Customer
Whilst the customer has always been important to industrial clients, the systems and processes used have not typically been as sophisticated as those used in financial services and retail. However, the past 18 months has seen a surge in demand for customer specialists. Breadth of sectoral experience has been important to the clients we’ve worked with. Candidates that can demonstrate a depth of stakeholder engagement with B2B, B2C and B2G customers are highly sought after, versus those that have remained within one sector. In several instances, we’ve had clients look for ‘lived’ experiences, so those appointed can demonstrate an innate understanding and empathy for the primary customer. Capturing and commercialising customer data has been a key theme and therefore the relationship between the Chief Customer and Chief Technology Officer is more important than ever.
Contact: Tim Shaw Email: tshaw@savannahgroup.com
