After enough time in professional services, certain patterns become hard to ignore. Across all kinds of business relationships, executive search included, the most persistent challenge is the same: how do you ensure that you truly know your client? Not just what they do, but how they do it. Not what they say about their culture, but what their culture actually feels like.
That distinction is at the heart of how we approach most engagements at McDermott + Bull. We learn what doesn’t show up in a brief and that changes everything.
“Whenever possible, get in the room. You will learn more in an afternoon on-site than you ever could over the phone. That conviction is at the core of how we built McDermott & Bull.” — Rod McDermott CEO & Co-Founder, McDermott & Bull
What Being Present Actually Reveals
There are things you cannot learn from a briefing document or a conference call. The pace of the place. The way people interact in the hallways. The tension or the ease in a room when certain topics come up. The gap between what leadership says the culture is and what you can actually feel when you walk through the door.
An investor deck tells you what the business wants to be. An afternoon on-site tells you what it actually is, what is working and what is not, how decisions get made, where the organization is trying to go and what is standing in the way. It tells you why people choose to work there, and what they are hoping will change.
Honesty Requires It
In-person visits are also a way to be genuinely honest with my clients and with the candidates alike. Organizations don’t always see themselves clearly. That is not a criticism; it is simply human nature. A leadership team can be deeply sincere and still carry blind spots about their culture or the challenges an incoming executive will face. An in-person visit gives us the chance to ask the harder questions, the ones that prompt leaders to think seriously about what it will actually take for someone to succeed in that seat.
It also protects the candidates. When we tell someone, “I have spent time with this leadership team, and here is an honest picture of what you are walking into,” I am giving them something real. At the executive level, that matters enormously and candidates know the difference.
Knowing a Business Completely Changes Everything
When I meet clients in person, it sharpens everything that follows including the profile I build, how I talk about the opportunity, what I listen for in interviews, what I flag as a risk or a strength.
Understanding a client from the inside out: their people, their pace, their unspoken dynamics. If we have an opportunity to meet in person, we’re there
Sachin Sama
Partner
ssama@mbexec.com
416.238.1084
Sachin Sama serves as a Partner at McDermott + Bull Canada and is part of the firm’s Energy + Industrials Practice, based in Toronto. He also brings deep expertise in the Consumer sector, where he partners with clients to identify and place transformational leaders who drive growth and change.