The Opportunity to Build Relationships

By Chad Delligatti, InnoSource CEO

InnoSource Chief Executive Officer

In my experience, success in business is one part knowledge and two parts intuition. Knowledge and the objective facts are the bedrock, but a well-honed instinct will get you to the right decision before the facts arrive to back it up.

That might be true of me, individually. Our company, InnoSource, runs on a ratio that is much more heavily weighted toward knowledge. We’ve been solving staffing challenges for more than two decades, through a proven process that identifies the right candidates for the right jobs. Yet that longevity also means I have thought long and hard about how important knowledge and intuition are when it comes to hiring and retaining the right people.

My intuition tells me that difficulties with attracting the right talent and managing employee turnover carry a significant cost. These challenges can have a major impact on our businesses. They distract us from working on our strategic initiatives, disrupt the normal flow of business, slow growth, affect employee morale, have an impact on culture, and burn leaders’ valuable time and energy searching for the right person to fill an open role.

That’s my intuition. I am fairly certain we’d all agree that we don’t need data to know this to be true. I can’t tell you how heavily recruitment and turnover weigh on your company’s bottom line. However, the data says that the cost is high and the issue is big, and whenever there is an issue that is big, that’s an opportunity to improve so you can reach your goals.

Now that we are into Q2 and reevaluating both the personal resolutions and business goals we set heading in to 2023, I am thinking a lot about those opportunities. I’m asking questions to help our clients succeed, but they are questions that could be asked of any business.

Do you have the right people in the right places within your organization to achieve the goals you’ve set? Do those people have the tools they need to succeed?

If you don’t feel confident in your answers to those questions, there is a better than average chance that opportunities to grow are passing you by. And to get to the right answers — ones that will help your business succeed — I suggest you start with evaluating your relationships.

When I find myself struggling to answer those questions, I often start by evaluating the strength of my relationships, both inside and outside our organization. As leaders, we are often focused on our external relationships, making sure that our clients are being taken care of and that our prospective customers know about us and our capabilities. Although in the staffing industry, we also know that internal relationships deserve focus, too.

The relationship between employee and employer might be one of the most important ones we cultivate.

That relationship is often the key to addressing the big issue of turnover and retention, and it is just as business-critical as the other important relationships we develop. Understanding this is truly powerful.

The key is to really listen and to provide the best answer you can for the issue that person might be looking to address — even if it’s not your business or your company that answers it.

Besides, not only do relationships help us succeed in business, but they help us succeed as human beings. And isn’t that what we’re all here to do — to be the best we can be?

This month, as we crunch our numbers from Q1 and reexamine our 2023 goals and progress, I’d encourage us all to take a moment to think about the opportunities coming our way in Q2 and the rest of this year, and about the relationships we value the most. How can we help each other succeed, not just in business but in our communities and in life, and not just across leadership levels but up and down our organizations? I’m looking forward to exploring that more in the coming weeks, and I welcome your thoughts on how you plan to do that as we head into the rest of 2023.