Greetings from CarterBaldwin and welcome to Spotlight on Search, our quarterly e-newsletter. We’re extremely optimistic about the year ahead for our company, your company and your personal career.

Demand for executive talent rose sharply in 2006. According to ExecuNet, executive recruiters reported a 23% increase in the number of searches that they received from corporate clients during the year – a figure that represents the largest increase since the height of the dot-com boom in 2000. Looking ahead to 2007, ExecuNet indicates that search firms are forecasting a 26% increase in executive-level job opportunities.

That marries up well with predictions from Merrill Lynch. According to their Survey of Fund Managers for December, institutional investors predict the global economy to land softly in 2007 and are positioning themselves for a year of growth that, like Goldilocks' porridge, is neither too hot nor too cold.

So as the year gets off to a start, now is a great time to evaluate your 2007 executive talent requirements.

Visit our website or view our interactive brochure to learn more about how we can help you strengthen your executive team to catalyze success throughout the year.

Thanks for reading.

By Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones: Harvard Business Review

Leading Clever People

In an economy driven by ideas and intellectual know-how, top executives recognize the importance of employing smart, highly creative people. But if clever people have one defining characteristic, it's that they do not want to be led. So what is a leader to do?

The authors of this article conducted more than 100 interviews with leaders and their clever people at major organizations such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Cisco Systems, Novartis, the BBC, and Roche. What they learned is that the psychological relationships effective leaders have with their clever people are very different from the ones they have with traditional followers.

These relationships can be shaped by seven characteristics that clever people share:

They know their worth--and they know you have to employ them if you want their tacit skills.
They are organizationally savvy and will seek the company context in which their interests are most generously funded.
They ignore corporate hierarchy; although intellectual status is important to them, you can't lure them with promotions.
They expect instant access to top management, and if they don't get it, they may think the organization doesn't take their work seriously.
They are plugged into highly developed knowledge network, which both increases their value and makes them more of a flight risk.
They have a low boredom threshold, so you have to keep them challenged and committed.
They won't thank you--even when you're leading them well.

The trick to managing these individuals is to act like a benevolent guardian: to grant them the respect and recognition they demand, protect them from organizational rules and politics, and give them room to pursue private efforts and even to fail. The payoff will be a flourishing crop of creative minds that will enrich your whole organization.

CarterBaldwin Partner Maggie Bellville explores how to get the most out of performance reviews.

Upon Further Review…

Every year thousands of employees across the country undergo performance reviews, but too often managers are unprepared or underestimate the amount of time and effort required to conduct a review properly. As a result, many performance reviews are colossal wastes of time where neither the employee nor manager comes away with any meaningful insight that may lead to a more productive relationship. So what can managers do to ensure performance reviews are the productive engagements they were meant to be?