We made a comparison a while back of executives who were going through outplacement and those who were still employed. The differences between the two groups, while not dramatic, were consistent. In general, those who were on the market were not as strong as those who were employed. There are, of course, many exceptions, but in general when a company is deciding who to retain and who to let go, it is the less effective executive who goes. While the reasons that executives become ineffective in their jobs are numerous and diverse, there are some common themes that lead to redundancy in management ranks.
Below, a list:

• Limited Ability: Due to favourable circumstances some individuals are promoted beyond their ability and the well-known "level of incompetence" is reached and exceeded. Sometimes those responsible for promotion lose sight of the fact that the skill-set needed for success at one level may be different from that at the next higher level.
• Losing Touch: It is easy for an executive to get out of touch with the market and the employees in the organization. As someone said to a friend who had just been made CEO of his company, "You have heard the truth for the last time!" An executive has to work at keeping in touch, because, in most companies, the system works against it. The executive who doesn't listen or who becomes isolated by others in the company is asking for trouble.
• "I know" Syndrome: The executive who knows it all will discourage any contribution of new ideas from other levels of the company and eventually will hear nothing that challenges.
  "If it ain't broke don't fix it": In some ways not a bad precept, but like all such rules, one must know when to break it. Anticipating problems and circumventing them will often win the day. The executive who waits until the problem is obvious to all has waited too long to maintain the momentum of the organization.
• Over-loading: Everyone knows that if you want a job done right you should do it yourself - or should you? The non-delegator becomes a bottle-neck in the organization because no one else solves problems or makes decisions.
• Tunnel Vision: Failure to grow beyond one's area of technical expertise. A good vice-president does not necessarily make a good president. The vice-president usually is highly qualified in some functional area of the business. The president, on the other hand, needs to understand all of them, and how they interrelate. As individuals reach the top of their functional areas they should make every attempt to broaden themselves and to gain an overall perspective of the business.
• Over-dependence on a mentor: Some individuals have the advantage of a mentor who encourages them and creates new opportunities. As long as the mentor survives, the subordinate can advance, but those who neglect to create their own credibility run a double risk of failure – on their own and if their mentor loses power by retirement or replacement.
  Inability to adapt to change: If your competitors are changing their way of doing business and you aren't, trouble will soon arrive. Sometimes individuals don't change because they fail to comprehend the problems.
• Failure to staff effectively: Most successful executives hire the most effective subordinates they can find. Those less secure see strong subordinates as a threat, and hire individuals who are not strong. This creates a number of problems for the boss: it will tend to produce an over-load of day to day problems taking time and attention away from the longer view.

Everyone still calls us Headhunters and probably always will, but many in our industry insist on calling the business, Executive Search. The title is certainly in keeping with our rising prestige and importance in corporate affairs. Search firms such as ours have been getting more and more involved in recruiting top executives for major companies. Hundreds of highly paid and prominent businessmen – and increasingly (finally!) businesswomen – have been placed in their jobs through the finely honed techniques of search firms.

We attribute the growing demand for our services to a healthy and welcome trend in business: the decline of cronyism. It is now an exceptional event when a qualified executive is offered a job just because a friend or acquaintance is in the right place, for example, on the recruiting company's board of directors. Business has become too complicated, and the stakes too high for a board chairman to rely on friends or friends' recommendations. He wants the best president available, not the best president visible.

Among those who subscribe to this thesis are the directors of many Canadian companies. Increasingly, these large firms are using search services to identify prospective candidates for their own boards. Recently, one of our Clients came to me with a list of six potential board members.

They had narrowed their own search down to a select few and now wanted professional assistance in the selection of the finalist. I provided background and reference checks, screened and narrowed the list to two candidates, either of whom would have been a first-class addition to the most discriminative of corporations.

The rising demand for talent has coincided with a falling supply of talent, and this too has brought more business to executive search firms. Because of low birth rates during the depression and early forties, the pool of executives is unusually small. Competition for these executives has become so ferocious that more and more companies have been turning to search firms for help. This same competition has also encouraged firms such as ours to move away from advertising to some extent and concentrate on the headhunting aspect of the search.

For individuals in business, the growing use of search can only be a boon. Competent executives everywhere whose performances are under-rated and unrewarded stand a better chance than ever before of being noticed and courted by someone else.

New snooping technology is leading to more frequent and foolproof spying. Employers are bugging and taping workers, monitoring them at their computers and tailing workers.

On the other hand, not just employers are snoops One U.S. employee (age 52) taped his supervisor as he was being advised of his demotion. Fired for that, he sued for age discrimination, among other things.

A jury gave the employee $350,000. The Judge threw it out, only to be reversed by a higher court.

It seems all's fair when it comes to snooping.