Croixstone – Croixstone

Croixstone Welcomes Lisa Cahill as Senior Talent Leader

Croixstone is excited to announce today that Lisa Cahill has joined the organization in a newly-created role as Senior Talent Leader. Cahill will design and execute recruiting strategies to attract experienced professionals for the firm’s consulting and executive search practices.

“Having known Lisa for over a decade, I couldn’t be more excited to welcome her to the Croixstone team,” said Patti Weber, Croixstone’s Chief Executive Officer. “In her new role with the firm, Lisa will apply her advanced relationship-building skills to meet both our business and people objectives as Croixstone continues its national expansion.”

Cahill is an extraordinary connector who builds and nurtures long-lasting relationships that make a positive difference in the lives of people, organizations, and communities. In the early 1990s, she was among a few female pioneers recruited to join global pharmaceutical leader GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in a male-dominated sales organization. During her more than 15 years with GSK, Cahill excelled in building relationships with primary care and specialty physicians, and she served as a sales leader and district sales trainer for several divisions of the company including a new start-up division. Her success at GSK led to additional career opportunities in the pharmaceutical industry at both Abbott Laboratories and Avion Pharmaceuticals.

Additionally, Cahill spent nearly a decade in the specialty healthcare profession as a Physician Liaison for organizations including Southeast Pain and Spine Care, Carolinas Pain Institute, and Fyzical Therapy and Balance Center.

Read our Press Release here.

Croixstone Consulting Turns “6”

The Croixstone Consulting team is celebrating its sixth business anniversary this month! Patti Weber and Mark Weber launched Croixstone as a boutique management consultancy in 2016. Their vision was to offer the world a highly differentiated business model in management consulting that would transform careers and businesses. The two entrepreneurs powered their vision by using their superpowers in strategic networking and relationship-building to connect the brightest minds.

In honor of the firm’s sixth business anniversary, here are six fun facts about Croixstone Consulting.

#1) Our name. Rivers are a hugely important part of life that connect humans in so many ways. The inspiration for Croixstone’s name is the St. Croix River (French: Holy Cross), a tributary of the Mississippi River that forms a border between the states of Wisconsin (the home state of Patti and Mark) and Minnesota (where the firm’s founders each began their careers).

#2) One more thing about our name. The correct way to pronounce the company’s name is “kroy-stone.”

#3) Our garage was a loft. Many of the world’s best known start-up companies were launched in garages. Croixstone launched its business in 2016 in Loft 309 of the former Lance Crackers building on South Boulevard in Charlotte’s booming South End Neighborhood. Not a garage, but a very cool loft to build a very unusual company.

#4) We LOVE constructive nonconformists. Business mavericks. Rebel talent. Call them what you will. One of our core beliefs is that these are the people who drive innovation in companies.

#5) We also LOVE portfolio professionals. We believe portfolio careers are the future of work. And so do many other thought leaders and futurists.

#6) Curiosity. One of our core values. We practice intelligent exploration and intellectual humility. We apply the best of our professional life experience, but always stay focused on what’s left to learn. From space exploration companies to solar farm developers to fintech unicorns, our curiosity has fueled Croixstone’s ability to build a truly unique client portfolio over the past 6 years.

Know This Term: ESG

There’s hardly a day that goes by where the Croixstone team doesn’t hear the term ESG being used by one of our clients.

So what does ESG mean?

We like the following definition used by the folks at Investopedia.

“Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria are a set of standards for a company’s behavior used by socially conscious investors to screen potential investments. Environmental criteria consider how a company safeguards the environment, including corporate policies addressing climate change, for example. Social criteria examine how it manages relationships with employees, suppliers, customers, and the communities where it operates. Governance deals with a company’s leadership, executive pay, audits, internal controls, and shareholder rights.”

Learn more about ESG via Investopedia here.

3 Essential Focus Areas for Your Board

As a boutique management consulting firm, the catalyst behind many of Croixstone’s engagements is tied to priorities established by private company boards.

The National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) is a professional association with a mission to empower directors and transform boards to be future ready. For more than 40 years, NACD has been on the leading edge of corporate governance by setting standards of excellence that have elevated board performance.

The Croixstone team read with interest a recent publication by NACD spotlighting the fact that private company boards are facing increased pressure to both capitalize on and protect against disruption. Whether coming from the environment, rapid advances in technology, the political landscape, and/or regulatory realms, the ongoing threat of disruption demands that directors be flexible, agile, and ready to address these fast-evolving challenges.

NACD recommends that boards prioritize their discussions on the following three areas:

Human Capital: Especially on matters of hiring, retention, and succession planning.
Cyber Threats: In 2021, ransomware events increased by 700%. It is essential that directors understand their company’s vulnerabilities and the board’s role in addressing these challenges.
ESG: The rise in ESG (environmental, social and governance) mandates that boards provide strong leadership in guiding the management of their companies to allocate the appropriate resources and attention.

Learn more here.

Understanding America’s Labor Shortage

Here’s an eye-opening fact that truly captures that enormous hiring challenge facing USA employers of all sizes.

If every unemployed person in the country found a job, we would still have 5.3 million open jobs.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce published research in early February of 2022 that featured this fact along with other data that the Croixstone team found fascinating. The following data points truly help to shape the story of today’s labor market.

We have 11.3 million job openings in the USA – but only 6 million unemployed workers.
As of October 2021, the pandemic drove 3 million adults into early retirement.
The childcare industry lost 370,600 jobs between February and April 2020 – and is still recovering.
Women participating in the workforce is at its lowest rate since the 1970s.
Last year, more than 47 million workers quit their jobs.
A Gallup survey found that 91% of workers in the USA hope they can continue to work some of their hours from home.
3 in 10 workers surveyed by Gallup signaled they would seek now employment if they were recalled to the office.

Learn more about the U.S. Chamber research here.

The seismic disruption in the USA’s workforce mandates that organizations of all sizes reimagine their people strategies. Croixstone’s team of highly-experienced human capital professionals are here to ideate and bring new thinking to your HR organization. Reach out to us today and let’s kick-start a conversation.

The Charlotte Ledger 40 Over 40 Awards Celebration

The Croixstone team is joining The Charlotte Ledger and U.S. Bank on Thursday evening, April 28, to celebrate this year’s honorees of local Charlotte unsung heroes aged 40+ who are doing great things in our community. We are looking forward to a fun night honoring The Charlotte Ledger’s amazing 40 Over 40 winners from 2020, 2021, and this year.

The honorees from 2021 include our very own Patti Weber, CEO and co-founder. Read more about Patti here.

Congrats to 2022’s winners! We look forward to seeing you on Thursday!

Most USA Workers are Open to Leaving

The Great Resignation is a powerful force to be reckoned with, and it shows no signs of easing up.

Case in point…Willis Towers Watson, the insurance broking and HR advisory firm, polled nearly 10,000 USA workers during December 2021 and January 2022 to gather insights for its Global Benefits Attitudes Survey.

The Croixstone team read the survey results last week, and the insights are truly stunning.

Most USA workers (53%) are open to leaving their employers.
44% of USA workers said they are actively looking for a new job and plan to seek new employment in the first quarter of 2022.
4.3 million Americans left their jobs in January 2022, and a whopping 48 million workers left their jobs in the calendar year 2021.
25% of workers feel stuck in their jobs and would leave if they could. The discontent is even higher as you move up the ladder, and it increases to 30% of managers and 55% of senior managers.

Learn more here.

We’re Celebrating our Nomination for 2022

The Croixstone team is in a celebratory mood! The firm and our CEO, Patti Weber, have been nominated for the 11th annual 2022 Charlotte-Mecklenburg Crowns of Enterprise Awards.

The Crowns of Enterprise Awards recognize and honor small businesses that demonstrate exemplary leadership and sound business strategies. Charlotte-Mecklenburg strives to acknowledge and display the hard work and resilient efforts of the community’s local small businesses, illustrating the positive footprint and economic impact they have on Croixstone’s home town.

Winners will be announced during the annual Charlotte-Mecklenburg Crowns of Enterprise Awards Ceremony taking place on Thursday, May 12, 2022.

Learn more here.

LinkedIn is Rightfully Tackling an Archaic Stigma

With the demand for labor at historically high levels and workers continuing to quit their jobs at historic rates to take advantage of that demand, there has never been a better time for employers to break free of archaic rules of hiring.

For a reason that has never made sense to us, employers have traditionally scoffed at job candidates with breaks in their employment. In fact, two of our senior female leaders, Patti Weber (CEO) and Grace Lynch (Senior Manager, Business Operations), have taken breaks during their impressive careers to raise children.

We applaud LinkedIn’s news this week that it is rolling out a new feature called “Career Breaks” to all LinkedIn users allowing professionals to provide more context around breaks in employment.

Learn more about the LinkedIn Career Breaks feature here.

Management Consulting and 5 Trends Shaping Its Future

The first management consulting firm was launched in 1886 by Arthur Dehon Little in Boston, MA. More than 135 years later, there are megatrends (like any other industry) disrupting and shaping the future of the industry where Croixstone practices as a a boutique firm.

Rick Eager, Partner Emeritus at Arthur D. Little, recently shared five trends that he believes are key for consulting firms to embrace in order to successfully navigate the rapidly changing landscape.

These five trends include:

Success demands great senior-level involvement
Open consulting is key
More skin in the game
Connectors and navigators
Embracing new technology is vital

Learn more here via Consultancy.uk.

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