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Tom Kosnik, President of Visus Group, On Forging Next-Gen Success in Staffing Leadership
104 Plays1 year ago
A recent study conducted by Resume Builder reveals that a substantial 74% of respondents believe that working with Gen Z, the latest generation to enter the workforce, poses greater challenges compared to other generational counterparts. But, in the staffing industry, where a big part of the new workforce is made up of Gen Z, success is tied into how well you can connect with this next generation of workers. You need to know how they like to work, communicate, and what they want from their jobs.
What strategies can staffing leaders use to effectively engage with this new generation of workers? And how can we provide them with the necessary support to ensure their success as the upcoming leaders in this field? To help shed light on these questions, Christopher Ryan, Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer at Avionté, sits down with Tom Kosnik, President of Visus Group, LLC.
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Transcript
Challenges with Gen Z in the Workplace
00:00:01
Speaker
If you are in staffing, your success is closely tied to your ability to engage the newest generation entering the workforce. But in a recent survey of over 1300 managers and business leaders conducted by Resume Builder, 74% of respondents believe that Gen Z, the newest generation entering the workforce, is more difficult to work with than other generations.
00:00:25
Speaker
49% claim that Gen Z is difficult to work with all or most of the time. 65% say they need to fire Gen Z more often than other generations, with 12% reporting that they fired a Gen Z higher after less than a week on the job. And apparently, being easily offended is cited as the top reason that Gen Z gets fired. While these tabloid headlines grab our attention, maybe we should be asking a different question.
Introduction to Digital Transformation in Staffing
00:00:54
Speaker
What kind of business leaders do we need to engage the newest generation of U.S. workers?
00:01:04
Speaker
Welcome to the Aviante Digital Edge, a podcast series that explores the digital transformation of staffing and temporary employment. My name is Chris Ryan, and I'm the chief strategy and marketing officer for Aviante. If you work in staffing, most of your new talent is going to come from the hump generations, the youngest people entering the workforce for the first time, as well as older workers exiting full-time work who aren't fully set to retire.
00:01:31
Speaker
The staffing industry gets a first glimpse of younger workers before most other industries. And Gen Z, loosely defined with birth dates between 1997 and 2012, are the new kids on the block. And Gen Z has some unique characteristics. They grew up with mobile phones and collaborative software. They watched their parents navigate the Great Recession. They experienced the COVID pandemic, remote schooling, and remote work.
00:01:58
Speaker
and to hear it told, they work and think a little differently than everybody else. But let's be honest, trash talking the newest generation is a time-honored tradition.
00:02:08
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If you're in the staffing business, it's your job to navigate and engage the next generation.
Leadership and Staffing Industry Challenges
00:02:14
Speaker
And here to discuss this topic with me is Tom Kosnik, the president of Visys Group, one of the most prominent business consultants within the staffing community with expertise in business strategy, profitability improvement, and work culture transformation. And relevant for today's discussion, Tom has spent over two decades facilitating the president's roundtable.
00:02:36
Speaker
Tom essentially pulls a bunch of CEOs from staff and companies, matched in size and function, puts them in a room, and they discuss the business challenges of the day. So Tom knows a lot about what the CEOs and business owners of staff and companies are thinking about. And he has an intimate understanding of the relationship between leadership and business performance. So Tom, welcome. And to lead off, what are CEOs and business owners talking about today?
00:03:06
Speaker
Chris, thank you so much for the opportunity to join you on this podcast and what a wonderful topic for us to be talking about. As you and I have discussed before, we have over a hundred C-suite execs.
00:03:22
Speaker
that are in our peer roundtable program. And they get together two, three times a year in person, multiple times on Zoom and things like that in between our in-person roundtables. And we do talk a lot about leadership development,
00:03:40
Speaker
hiring new employees, managing employees, compensating employees. So the one good thing about Gen Zs coming into the workforce is I don't have to hear anybody complaining about millennials anymore. All the complaining is about the Gen Z generation that's coming into the workforce.
00:04:00
Speaker
Why are business leaders so obsessed with Gen Z? And what are you hearing in your roundtable discussions? What I hear is Gen Z's, they don't have the work ethic that they want five to seven jobs in the first 10 years of working. And in fact, I hear they really don't want a job.
00:04:22
Speaker
What they would rather have are three different jobs that they can work when they want to work them. I hear that they don't follow the regular commands of communication within an
Generational Criticisms and Leadership Gaps
00:04:34
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organization. They have no doubt to go directly to the president of an organization. And I should be a manager here. And I'm sure you've heard this too, that what they don't want to make phone calls, they don't want to get on the phone. And so for us, we're talking about doing a lot of
00:04:51
Speaker
contact and a lot of relationship building you gotta spend time on the phone the other big thing i hear is that from a management perspective. That the managers have got to touch the gen z's a lot they gotta cuddle them they gotta mentor them they gotta hand hold them they gotta pat them on the back and the managers are thinking this is too much work.
00:05:16
Speaker
So that's what I'm hearing at our round tables. So essentially they like to communicate differently. They have different expectations. They, at least the way they're being described is somewhat needy. Now I have to say, as I'm listening to this, I have a little bit mixed feelings. Sometimes I reflect on, on what I was like when I joined the workforce in the early 1980s and full disclosure, I am a baby boomer.
00:05:43
Speaker
So I know what it's like to go through college with a Smith Corona typewriter. And when I showed up for work, there were people who thought that perhaps baby boomers were a little bit radicalized. And I was showing up every day in a three-piece suit and wearing a tie and it was very uncomfortable.
00:06:00
Speaker
But now I hear we're trash talking a new generation. So I have very mixed feelings. As a business leader, is the issue that Gen Z is really difficult or is this just more trash talking of the newest generation? What's your perspective on this?
00:06:18
Speaker
Yeah, I think we've complained about every new generation that came into the workforce after the baby boomers. We have a lot of business leaders that are running staffing companies that come through our peer round table program. We also do a fair amount of consulting. My feeling is, is that we do have a leadership challenge in the staffing industry.
00:06:42
Speaker
The industry in general is slow to change. I mean, you know this, working for a technology company. A lot of times I feel like we have to drag the staffing industry through change, kicking and screaming. But I believe that we do have a leadership gap, a leadership challenge in the staffing industry.
00:07:04
Speaker
And we have way too many people that are thinking, well, all these salespeople have to do is make 300 and 400 transactional activities a week and they're too lazy to do it. Or we just need these recruiters to be on the phone for 180 plus minutes and they'll be successful, but they don't want to get on the phones. So it's this old thinking of what worked for us.
00:07:31
Speaker
when you and I were 20 something, doing whatever we were doing is going to work for them. And in reality, the whole world has shifted. So I think that there's a leadership challenge that we have in the staffing industry, and there's a wonderful opportunity for us to work with this new generation.
Embracing Gen Z in Business Processes
00:07:49
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I do have, by the way, Chris, clients that are wildly succeeding
00:07:55
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with the Gen Z workforce and the millennial workforce wildly succeeding. And so I have to ask you why. The firms that are succeeding right now, what are they doing differently than everybody else? And when they show up in your round tables, are they whining or are they keeping quiet and smiling as they watch everyone else struggle?
00:08:14
Speaker
I've got a great story for you, and this is the same roundtable. Two senior leaders, and both those companies at that time were around the same revenue size. There was an enterprise size, so north of $100 million in revenue. But one leader always was whining and complaining about millennials.
00:08:35
Speaker
The other company, the senior leader would come to the round table and say, we're trying to figure out how to give the company to millennials. We're trying to figure out how to let them determine what's the best fulfillment process, sales process, and let them drive the growth of the business. It's amazing, Chris, when you look at the revenue and growth profit growth, basically one
00:08:59
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The guy that was always complaining, his business stagnated. The guy that's trying to give to the millennials, his business, it's a sizable business now. So what are they doing right? It's really moving from a traditional concept of management to a coach. So the managers, Chris, they're not managing how you and I learned how to manage.
00:09:23
Speaker
Oh, okay, you've got to create a certain kind of a work environment. And some of this stuff you still have to do in terms of like compensation and performance metrics and things like that. How can I create an environment where individuals are being coached? So when you think about Reed Hoffman's The Alliance, where he talks about creating a two year tour of duty for an employee, you give them a roadmap,
00:09:50
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and teach them how to network within the organization so that at the end of that two years, they can elevate into a new role within the organization.
Coaching and Development for Younger Generations
00:09:58
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When you think about the Gallup polls and all the research Jim Clifton and Jim Harder had produced titled It's the Manager, another fantastic resource. So when I look from the outside, when I look at those organizations, what those organizations are doing is they are doing management training
00:10:18
Speaker
They're developing their managers to be coaches to their teams and not traditional heavy metric driven managers in the way that you and I experienced when we were young growing up in the space. So the old saw was you manage what you measure, the new saw, you manage what you coach. It's interesting because staffing is a metrics driven business. I mean, at the end of the day, recruiters, salespeople are producers.
00:10:48
Speaker
So there will always be an element of metrics, but it sounds to me like the companies who are doing well have been very intentional about career development and around the style with which they're teaching people in their organizations. And I'm going to address metrics here in a second, but first there's skill development. How do I make a better call? How do I make a presentation? How do I negotiate better? How do I use the database better?
00:11:11
Speaker
That's all, quote unquote, skill development. Then there's human development. How do I become a better communicator? How do I resolve conflict? How do I think strategically with a client? And most folks that are managing Gen Zs, they look at them like they're little kids, that they can't work their way out of a paper bag. But the reality is, these kids have gone through stuff that none of us have gone through.
00:11:34
Speaker
But when you think about performance metrics, the approach is, Chris, you were supposed to make a hundred phone calls last week and you only made 80. Well, why was that? What are you going to do about that, Chris? Hey, you only have five submittals. Why are you going to have them five submittals versus, Chris, you want to be a 20 year old making $150,000?
00:11:55
Speaker
Well, yeah, sure. I'd love to boss. Uh, well here, let me show you how to do that. You need to make X number of connects with hiring managers. These are the hiring managers. You need to make X number of face-to-face encounters, whether that's zoom or lunch. And then off they go. Of course you have a process map on what individuals need to do on a day-to-day basis, but then those one-on-one sessions that the manager has with the employee. I love this when I heard this.
00:12:24
Speaker
One of the best managers in the industry that I know said to me, when I sit down with my employees, I say to them, this is your meeting.
00:12:32
Speaker
Where can we help you? Where are we failing to help you succeed in getting 35 consultants on billing or $3 million in revenue rolling? So, hey, I'm not talking about a semantic thing. This is the way I view the world as a leader and a manager in the business.
00:12:55
Speaker
And it's all connected. So when we think about what makes an effective leader, what makes a good leader, it's not just tools and techniques, it's mindset.
00:13:05
Speaker
Yes. Another fantastic read is The Power to See Ourselves. This article was written back in 1962. And if you read that article, you would say, this article, it feels like it was written a week ago. It's so relevant to a manager's disposition and a leader's disposition to their own development and their own growth.
00:13:27
Speaker
But the big challenge, Chris, the big challenge is that we all, you do, I do, all my clients do, we have assumptions about the economy, about the government, about clients, about temporaries, about internal employees.
00:13:47
Speaker
about the hiring process, about the sales process, the recruiting process. We all have these assumptions in the back of our head on how all this stuff works out there. And here's the challenge is that
00:14:02
Speaker
We never get those unspoken assumptions out on the table. We never get them out of the back of our heads and on a table with a collaborative group of people that can actually challenge the way that I'm assuming how this all works.
Aligning Gen Z with Organizational Needs
00:14:20
Speaker
Why does the leader that, well, this worked my last job and the job before that, you know, why does that leader come and assume that that same technique is going to work in this environment and this culture with these clients? Silly. As I hear you saying that, I'm kind of like, so what leadership practices or as a leader, what can we assume is universal? There are certain assumptions about leadership that presumably don't change over time.
00:14:48
Speaker
but there are other things that do and how do you know the difference that is a fantastic question anybody listening on this podcast is a leader or manager should really sit down and reflect so personality characteristic traits whether i'm an extrovert an introvert
00:15:04
Speaker
Whether I'm conformed to guidelines and rules, I don't conform to guidelines and rules. Whether I like a collaborative team environment, whether I work on my own. So those hardcore personality traits, it doesn't matter if I'm a baby boomer, Gen X, a millennial.
00:15:20
Speaker
a Gen Z, it doesn't matter. Those have not changed because those are built into the brain of the homo sapien and how we operate. Those personality characteristic traits, we know what makes a good salesperson. Somebody who's got good healthy sense of ego strength and can stay in charge of a verbal transaction and doesn't overthink things and
00:15:44
Speaker
has got lower conformance so that they don't take note for an answer. It doesn't matter if you're 75 years old or if you're 20 years old, those hardcore personal characteristic traits have not changed.
00:15:56
Speaker
They are cross-cultural against all the generations. The things that have changed are the work preferences. So I prefer to work in a semi-remote environment. I prefer to work in a highly collaborative. I prefer to work in a very decisive decision-making organization. So those work preferences change. And companies that really are knocking it out of the park, first off, they know how to test for the
00:16:25
Speaker
hardcore personality characteristic traits that make for a good salesperson and a good recruiter. Number two, they understand culturally the work preferences within their organization that are a good match for candidates coming in that are interviewing with them. We've done these kinds of projects for staffing firms.
00:16:45
Speaker
that had these super high turnover rates and we radically reduced their turnover rates by just introducing to them some of these tried and true tools that are out there. So going back to your example of the salesperson, there are certain universal traits that you would find in almost any good sales associate.
00:17:05
Speaker
Presumably there's a certain kind of staffing firm with a very collaborative culture and other staffing firms with a command and control culture. And you're going to look for the talent that fits that culture. And you can find examples of each in Gen Z. Absolutely. There's a lot of Gen Zers out there that want a highly, highly structured environment to work in. And then there's Gen Z's out there that do not want a highly structured environment. They want a more collaborative team decision-making team working together, all that stuff.
00:17:35
Speaker
So instead of making generalizations about Gen Z, we would do a better job of asking what kind of person fits best in our culture.
Adaptive Leadership and Vulnerability
00:17:44
Speaker
And then as we're looking at candidates, ask ourselves, who is this person who's in front of us and do they fit in the appropriate way? And then it's no longer, it's not about generation. It's about the individual. Correct. The individual cultural fit and the individual personality fit. Yes, that's exactly right.
00:18:01
Speaker
So in prior discussions, you often bring up the topic of contingent management style. What is contingent management style and why is it important? Sure. So contingent management style in brief, it's contingent upon the situation, contingent upon the scenario. So sometimes a manager or a leader.
00:18:23
Speaker
is in a situation where they just have got to make a decision and move on. They've got to be decisive in their decision making and move on. There are other times where they have to be collaborative and they know what style of leadership they need to apply in that specific situation. It's contingent upon the scenario, the situation, the outcome that the organization or the leaders is seeking to achieve.
00:18:51
Speaker
So a good leader is decisive when they need to be and they'll take their time and they will listen and they will collaborate when they need to be and they'll know when it's appropriate in each case.
00:19:03
Speaker
Exactly. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And how do you teach that to emerging leaders? Is there an art to that, a trick to that? Hey, I'll tell you, the American Management Association, they have some training programs that first of all, just getting people educated on some of the basic management techniques and all that stuff. But then, Chris, I mean, just, we learn from each other. So getting your managers connected with other managers and they don't even need to be other managers in the staffing industry.
00:19:32
Speaker
There's meetup groups and networking groups and all that, that managers and young leaders can connect with other young leaders. Because the truth is that if I'm a manager and I feel like I'm not performing at my best or I feel like I'm failing, I'm not going to go to my boss and say, boss, I feel like I'm failing.
00:19:50
Speaker
No one's going to do that. So you get them in a group or you get them in an environment where they can safely be vulnerable and say to that, hey, I feel like I'm failing. Well, tell us more about that, Tom. Why do you feel like you're failing? Where do you feel like you're failing? Have you tried this? Have you tried that? Now, that to me is very interesting because growing up, I can tell you that managing or leading other people in the 80s or 90s to display weakness publicly was never a good thing.
00:20:16
Speaker
It was not good for your career. And from memory, I can say there never was a safe space for me to operate that way. It was simply something I had to learn on my own. But what I hear you saying is that there are ways of creating a safe space where younger leaders can actually begin to develop their management style and develop contingent leadership capabilities. Chris, you got to read the power to see ourselves. Obviously, there's 360 tools that we can use. I have a few clients that do that sort of thing.
00:20:44
Speaker
But yes, in the end, and that article is all about how does one become a mature manager? How does one become a mature leader? And the thesis of that whole thing is that they take a great assessment of where they're at. They go gather some data. They find out where the holes and the gaps are. They build a plan to overcome those gaps. And then they have some kind of a regular feedback on are they improving in those gaps, but they own their development.
00:21:11
Speaker
they take charge of their development. And we've learned this over the years, over the last 20 years or so, that if managers cannot be vulnerable in front of themselves, they're never gonna grow. They're never gonna develop.
00:21:25
Speaker
that it's just not going to happen. They're going to continue to do the same thing that they've always done. They might read a book and get an idea here or there, but in terms of, this is what I was talking about earlier in terms of human development versus skill development.
Culture and Productivity for Employee Success
00:21:39
Speaker
You better bet groups that are knocking it out of the park with Gen Z's
00:21:43
Speaker
Let me tell you, not only have they thought this out, but that's part of their culture. You don't come here to hide. Nobody comes here to do the same job day in and day out for 20 years. No, you're here to develop as a human being. There are so many great things that staffing companies could be doing. Let's talk about that a little bit. Let's say I'm the leader of a staffing company and I want my organization to do a better job of engaging and navigating
00:22:13
Speaker
the new generation of workers that we are bringing into our organization, as well as for that matter, the talent that we are engaging because your recruiters and your talent need to be able to talk to one another. So if I'm a leader, what are the important things that I can be doing to develop my personal skills? And then what are the things that I can be doing to expand the EQ, if you will, the emotional quotient of my organization?
00:22:38
Speaker
Yeah, so it all starts at the top. You got to get clear on what difference in the lives our organization makes. No real employee that's going to get engaged in your organization is going to get engaged on some vague, nebulous, this is the mission we have. So it all starts at the top in terms of you got to have a compelling
00:23:04
Speaker
This is the difference in the lives of people that we make. And I hear this stuff all day long about, oh, salespeople, they just care about the money. Recruiters, they just care about the money. Again, back to the assumptions that we have.
00:23:20
Speaker
So you start off with a compelling, engaging mission. What difference in the lives of people do we make? And then it's a lot about culture development. How do we create a culture of engagement, collaboration, people being heard?
00:23:38
Speaker
And frankly, it really is a paradigm shift in terms of the old management style and a new management style. Because what we do is we truly understand as people are coming into the door, where are their greatest attributes? Where are their greatest strengths?
00:23:57
Speaker
And then number one, we make sure that 70, 75, 80% of what they're doing on a day-to-day basis is focused on those things where their strengths lie. And as a management where if somebody starts to drift into doing things that are not in their core competencies of strengths, then it's our job to get them back on track.
00:24:21
Speaker
And then of course the training and the development and those kinds of things. I know you know this, but I'm going to say it anyway. We used to think that satisfaction drove productivity. If I have enough massage therapists on Friday and a beer cart, and I feed everybody five days out of the week, then a foosball table and a ping pong tape, and I make it a fun place to work that people are going to be satisfied and they're going to produce.
00:24:49
Speaker
It's exactly the opposite it's what do i do to increase productivity because if somebody is producing somebody is contributing if somebody is delivering to the mission of the organization that is what drives productivity.
00:25:08
Speaker
So you really want your workers to feel like winners. And how do you make them feel like winners? First off, you got to hire the right people back to the personality test and the culture test. You hire the right people. You got a great onboarding system. You've got some kind of a mentoring program. You got feedback loops where you're communicating them.
00:25:24
Speaker
I mean, in real feedback loops. And you do something with the feedback. Town halls, messages from the presidents, shout outs. Every Friday, you know, you have an all team meeting and you're doing shout outs where you're congratulating somebody for doing something over and beyond. You make sure your comp plans are in line. Again, the companies that are knocking it out of the park with Gen Zers, these are the things that they're focused on. They're
Closing Remarks and Invitation to Subscribe
00:25:48
Speaker
not focused on, how do I hire the next Rainmaker? They're thinking, how can I build a great culture?
00:25:53
Speaker
where employees will run through a wall for us.
00:25:56
Speaker
Well, Tom, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your insights around leadership and the importance of culture and engaging younger workers. I've really enjoyed this conversation and look forward to having you back soon. And to all our listeners, thank you for joining us. If you haven't, you can subscribe to our podcast, Aviante Digital Edge, or if you would like to learn more about Aviante, please visit our website at aviante.com. Until next time, this is Chris Ryan.
00:26:25
Speaker
Thank you for joining us on Aviante Digital Edge.