Talking Transformational Leadership with RRA’s CEO Constantine Alexandrakis

Call them change makers. Call them rule-breakers. We call them redefiners. Join us in conversation with daring leaders who are creating extraordinary impact and driving change from around the globe. Each episode gives you a fresh perspective on your leadership and career journey. I'm Hoda Tahoon, a leadership advisor at Russell Reynolds. I'm Clark Murphy, the former Chief Executive Officer and a leadership advisor, and this is redefiners. Hello everyone and welcome back to redefiners. This is our first episode in 2025 and the kickoff for season five. I'm Simon Kingston. Hoda is unable to join me sadly today so I'll be flying solo on today's episode which for reasons that will become clear is slightly terrifying. However you celebrated them I hope you all had wonderful holidays and have had a fantastic start to the new year so far. Before we get started today just a quick reminder to our listeners that you can find all the episodes of redefiners and the leadership lounge on YouTube. And if you're currently watching redefiners on YouTube just hit the subscribe button below so you don't miss an episode. For our audio listeners don't forget to rate redefiners wherever you get your podcasts we really want to hear your feedback. Today we've got what is in many respects a unique conversation. We're going to talk to somebody who knows first hand what it takes to hire and develop the best in class leaders, both CEOs and of the C-suite across a whole range of industries and someone who is himself a true redefiner. He's redefining the executive search industry because our guest today is none other than our own Russell Reynolds Chief Executive Constantine Alexander Arches. Constantine also serves on the firm's Board of Directors. Prior to taking on the CEO role Constantine held numerous leadership roles across the firm, latterly as head of the America's region. Now in addition to leading the firm he continues to advise a host of boards and CEOs for both public and private companies on the most significant leadership issues they face. But he's also practiced what he's preaching at a corporate level in the provision of advice on leadership development and assessment to those leaders too. And he has expertise in corporate governance, board effectiveness and succession planning as we'll be discussing in the course of the next 30 minutes. Constantine, welcome to redefiner. Thank you Simon, great to be here. Now people will understand as we enter a bonus season just how unfair it is for me to be left on my own with the boss having this conversation and and Hoda. Hoda owes me for abandoning me in this situation. But before we kick off and get into the serious meet of what we're going to talk about, can you tell us a little bit about your formation not as much as a leader but as as Constantine and as a clue to what might be interesting perhaps as you unpack that and your early formative experiences maybe you could explain to our listeners the Philotimo concept. Well happy to Simon and you know I think you might be able to tell from my name that there's there's a there's a Greek heavy Greek influence there and both my parents were raised in Greece. My mother was born in Egypt and but raised in Greece. My father was born on the island of Crete and they you know live very interesting early lives and kind of difficult lives at that time of the Greeks were kind of exiled from Egypt when she was a young child and they were refugees in Greece and my father lost his father and his grandfather in the Second World War they were executed by the Nazis when their village was invaded. So I mentioned that because I think part of my formative elements and literally DNA has been around the importance of family and helping your neighbor and doing good for others which my parents had to experience as they grew up in those environments and as they came to the United States for education and subsequently becoming university professors. So one of the things I was raised on was this concept of the Greek word Philotimo which if you google it you'll see there's no real translation but the meaning of it is around helping others giving of yourself generosity, kindness and treating others with respect and that's a key element of the Greek culture. It's a key element of the culture that I was kind of raised with and it's a key element of how I like to work with colleagues and and lead our organizations and our clients. And that idea of deep cultural formation is fascinating because it comes through that sense of solidarity that was clearly bred into you from a very early stage. We'll get into this a bit later perhaps but to what extent can that be taught and replicated in a business context or are you born and raised with it? It's a good question I mean I think everyone no matter what culture you're raised in there are you know values associated with that positive values and ways of interacting with fellow human beings that shape one as they go through school and life experiences right? I think that the way that's translated into organizations is through organizational culture and every organization most organizations have a culture and it's it's a combination of the shared values of the people in that organization and the sort of the emotions and the way that communities formed in that organization the way work gets done in that organization. So and I don't think any of those things Simon if I'm answering your question correctly are static I think they're pretty dynamic and they they can certainly evolve as organizations evolve and they certainly evolve as the people within that organization change or as the as different people come into that organization but also as those individuals grow and evolve their leadership styles evolve their their ways of working so I I think for anybody it's a pretty dynamic experience throughout their careers and for any organization it's a pretty dynamic activity. I think we're gonna loop back to that both as it relates to us here at Russell Reynolds and the wider industry but reverting for a second to you from that really rich family background how do you think your time in law school shaped you what did it give you that you then took into your career? Law school was interesting law school is academically it's a very challenging experience but it's also it really helps you think and I think in my career it's helped me cut through information or issues or topics you learn that in law school how do you figure out what the key pieces of information are in a cluttered set of data and information and how do you build results on those key pieces of information so it's actually probably it's probably about the benefit and a curse the benefit is that training allowed me to really learn how to get to the bottom of things and to kind of slice away the noise and get to the heart of problem solving the curse is probably that sometimes it can help me get to that in a way that may not look at all the noise in the system and I've had this sort of I've needed to learn how to balance that and that was going to be a question I had because I think among colleagues you're really respected for the clarity of your analytical capability that almost forensic legal training coming through perhaps is that how you see yourself as a leader as somebody who leads through persuasion and force of argument now I could see that stereotyping out there but no I see myself more as somebody who kind of listens considers and then tries to help the team get to the get to the conclusion although I will say that that style has definitely evolved through many years of different jobs different levels of responsibility and so on to Nate I'm sure you've read Ty Wiggins' book the new CEO he talks a lot about the CEO transition and how does one sort of evolve their approach in a completely different job which is what being a CEO is so I think there are a lot of parallels in how he describes that with the journey that I've been on and I know that the journeys that many other peers have been on and let's talk a bit about that you became our CEO in 2022 unlike some of the other people we've interviewed on redefiners it wasn't in the context of an emergency it wasn't suddenly it was it was planned and with that in mind I mean how did you think about the things that you chose to do and the things you chose not to do early on in your time as CEO look I was as you sort of said it's I was very lucky to come into a role where the firm was very successful doing great work for its clients day in, day out around the world. And the situation was more of a build on the greatness versus do a turnaround or a transformation. But the complicating factor, which I think is true for many CEOs today, is the challenges, the macro challenges outside our doors were multiplying at a significant pace, whether it was global geopolitical unrest, which had been, you know, not really been an issue for many, many years. Social upheaval rapidly advancing technological opportunities and challenges were and are moving very quickly and advancing. And any enterprise today needs to hit those head on. So to answer your question, what I did quickly was I felt like we needed to hit the ground running. And as a result, I had, well, I had the benefit of having a six month transition period. But during that time before it was even enrolled with the team, we kind of designed what the team structures in your leadership team structure would be going forward and named it and put it in place. So that January 1st, we were off in running. So that's, that was a big thing of what I did when I came into the role. I wasn't going to wait for a year to kind of evaluate and decide. I'd been in leadership for a while and kind of have a good sense of where we should take things next from a leadership team structure perspective. I think what I didn't do, which was the other part of your question, was really want to upset the Apple card in terms of how we serve clients and how our clients saw us. I wanted any leadership change at Russell Reynolds to be really seamless to our clients. So that was, that was, that was super important. And knowing the organization as you did, were there any surprises when you became CEO with the things that you hadn't anticipated about about the farm, about the, the task that awaited you as CEO? The surprises were the number of surprises that there were. And it wasn't really surprises so much about the organization, but it was surprises about the job, which is especially surprising when you've been a consultant to CEOs and boards about CEO topics for many years. But one of the CEOs quoted in Thai's books as a perfectly, I think many of us, and I've heard this from other CEOs. I'll, I'll, I'll mention that in a second, but many of us thought of the CEO role as a bigger job than our previous role. But the reality is that it's not a bigger job. It's a completely different job. The way you think about things, the way you get things done, the things that you get done, those are all very different. And you know, perhaps naively, that was a surprise for me. But it's also something I've heard from many, many other CEOs across industries who came into the role from not having been a CEO before. So that was a big surprise and not led to many other surprises in terms of the types of things I chose to spend my time on how I did that, the ways of getting things done. We also had the benefit of being a brand new leadership team, but also there were difficulties with that in that many of those people hadn't led before at that level. So we were all sort of learning on the job. And if you will pick, pick out a couple of those, the differences in the way you are a CEO now from how you began and how you expected, what are some of those things in terms of how you do what you do? Well, I think the biggest thing was, and there's quite a bit of literature about this, but I think it's mostly false, which is that there's a lot of thinking out there that says that the most successful CEOs are the ones that drive execution of the strategy. And I think the concept may be accurate, but those CEOs aren't really driving execution. What I've learned is that those CEOs are sort of inspiring others to drive execution or to inspire others to drive execution. That was a big learning for me. And I think it's especially hard for, and I've heard this from CEOs who came through operational roles into the CEO role, or similar capabilities. You have to completely shift your thinking, your communication toolkit, and the way you interact with your leadership team to kind of enact that. I'm coming to the kind of business that we are. I mean, ultimately our product is the the advice, the expertise that we offer to our clients. So we are the quintessential people business. What in your experience is distinctive about leading that kind of business, distinct from a manufacturing business or another sector? I know, Simon, I made this just disagree with this question. I think, you know, 10 years ago, our business, which is most of its assets are people, people and proprietary information, but people at the heart of it certainly is a people business. But I think in the last decade or so, manufacturing businesses, other sort of hard asset businesses, though the importance of people and the importance of human capital in those organizations to actually differentiate them and drive growth, I think is increased. So I think to a large degree, all of us have become people businesses in the last decade, but certainly a professional services firm like ours has people at its core more so than other organizations that have other assets that they work with. But I think the tenets of that are the same as another businesses where people may not be the only key to it, which is we are nothing without our people. Our people are what drive our culture, which is one of our greatest assets. And the reality is that those people need to be nurtured every day. By me, by the leadership team, by their peers, every day the issues are different, but the level of nurturing, the level of support, the level of trust building, the level of community, the level of fun, all those things needs daily nurturing. But I would say again, I don't think that's necessarily unique to a business like ours. I think it's unique across all types of organizations. You've been at Russell Reynolds now for nearly 20 years. It's not nearly. You said nearly at first, it's exactly 20. Exactly 20 years. What I was going on to say, because I have to bear in mind you are my boss. You joined in your early teams. Yes. And of course, in that time, as we mentioned right at the beginning, you've led searches for some of our most prestigious clients and at the most senior levels. But you've also pioneered some of the other things that we do as leadership advisors. And assessment in Russell Reynolds was something that you helped create. Can you talk about why that was important to you then and why it's so central to the farm strategy now? Well, I'd say assessment is a piece of it. But our industry, which for many, many years, where 55-year-old business was characterized by executive recruiting, executive search, head hunting in some societies is evolving. And it's evolving because our clients want more things from us and different things from us than they've wanted in the past. They don't just want the person to be found and put into the seat. They want us to help retain their people. They want us to help improve the effectiveness of their leadership teams, of their boards of directors. They want us to help them develop their succession pipeline. And as a result, we're having to redefine our industry. And we're actually defining a new category, which includes the search pieces of what we do, which will always be important. And these other things around search that are also increasingly important to our clients. And that category is the the leadership advisory category, which has sort of been nascent or dormant or whatever you want to call for many years. But our legacy search category is moving into that new category of leadership advisory. And our objective as Russell Reynolds is to define that category and to be viewed as the best firm in that category. And as part of that, there must be a shift in some ways from a focus on individual leaders to teams of leaders. Clearly, we're never going to abandon that focus on the most senior leaders. But groups of people that we help to identify, to develop, to plan succession for. Can you talk a little about that about best in class groups of leaders? Yeah, I want to say there's a shift in focus, but it's an add on focus. Yeah, and our business for many years has been focused on the individual and still is and will be. But the additional focus of how those individuals interact within an organization and on a leadership team on a board of directors is certainly something that our clients are asking us about increasingly. And just realistically, the way leadership team works together has always been important. But when you think about some of the technology that is starting to appear as an opportunity for companies to really advance their businesses, generative AI is not technology that sits in a particular part of the company, it's a tool across the entire organization that can really enable teams and especially leadership teams to think about the business in new ways and how work it's done within that business, what the opportunities are, how quickly you get to those opportunities. We've worked through our CEO AI labs with CEOs around the world on this topic and all of them say that leadership teams need to kind of transform how they work from a collection of vertical silos to truly working together horizontally across the enterprise in order to really take advantage of the new opportunities that technology presents today. We'll be right back with Constantine Alexander Druckers, but first we'll hear from Aaron Zolner, a managing director in our New York office. Aaron will outline our latest research on the skills that leaders need in a fast-changing world. We all know the world is changing, but what does that mean for leadership? It's clear many executives are struggling to keep pace with growing complexity. Across the world turnover is in an all-time high and ten years at an all-time low. Clearly, the skills that have traditionally helped leaders ascend to the sea suite are no longer enough to help them stay there. So how does leadership need to evolve? In our research, we reveal the seven capabilities that leaders will need to navigate in ever more uncertain world and unlock their full potential. Find out what these skills are and more importantly how to develop them in our paper via the link in the show notes or visit Russell Reynolds.com. And now back to our conversation with Constantine. We had the opportunity to participate in one of those AI labs for the social impact sector and it was fascinating both the potential for transformation, but also to be with a group of leaders who were humble enough to be learning together at once and be confessing in a way what they didn't know to each other and discovering the potential of that technology amongst other things together was a really fascinating part. I think of the access that we have providing those sorts of advisory services to people who are shaping the way the world has led. It's always fascinating to get into a group of peers and hear the frustration, the vulnerability, especially on a topic like AI which for the past couple of years has been everywhere has almost become a cliche, but now we're in a period of really entering what does it actually mean? How can organizations really thoughtfully leverage it and where is it going to take organizations, companies and industries going forward? And there are no easy answers to any of that and CEOs and other leaders really appreciate being able to get together and brainstorm that in a way that helps them move the ball just a little bit forward each time. And you talked compellingly about that evolution of our firm into our leadership advisory business. When we think about the other parts of the body, Russell Reynolds, what else have we added? You talked about Ty Wiggins book and the CEO transition insights that he's helping us bring to clients. What are the other tools that we've added as we make that move ourselves to being truly the leadership advisory firm that we want to be? So our mentor is one where we've partnered with esteemed and storied retired CEOs and CFOs in many parts of the world to bring them together with newer CEOs or CFOs who might need a mentor who's walked in their shoes and can serve as a sounding board for them. RRA Artemis is another effort where CEOs have nominated female leaders from their organization who are potential future CEO successors have nominated them to be part of a one year program that's a development program for future CEOs designed by women for women and has really brought to the market something that has not existed before. Our top team effectiveness consulting work is helping leadership teams large and small really improve the way they work together and how they support their organizational needs. There are many other examples like that, but those are just those are three of them. This week the leaders of the world or many of them are going to be meeting in Davos and amidst our cacophony of challenges and disruption and volatility in the world. This question is it's not so much cheeky as unfair because if you knew the answer to it you wouldn't need to go, but what do you think is going to be on the agenda? What do you think is going to be foremost in the minds of that group of leaders? I don't think the topics are going to be too surprising if I had to kind of predict what the informal conversations are going to be. I think geopolitics and alliances, terrif regimes, the impact of new leaders in various countries around the world. I also think what's been true the last couple of years will probably be true again in terms of technology innovation, the opportunities that come with it and both the opportunity and challenge related to generative AI integration and digital transformation will be important. This might be the most important one of all, the notion of trust across organizations, across entities, trust in ones, government, trust across societies, cross border trust. That's probably one that is also going to be talked about a lot, not only from a societal and government perspective, but also as organizations come together with their customers, how do we reinforce trust in a time of geopolitical uncertainty and diplomatic roadblocks in certain parts of the world? On that, because that links in a way to this idea that we live in an era not just of misinformation, but also active disinformation in some places. What's your advice to senior leaders about how far they can go to a gender trust that is beyond their immediate business? Because on redefine, if you've heard two very distinct views when we've talked to senior leaders about social issues and whether they should be engaged with them. Some say yes, we have to be because it's a basic principle of doing business. Others say no stick to your swim lane. Given that, as you say, trust may be the rarest and most valuable of assets in the current environment, what would your advice be to leaders about how far they should go to try and engender it? I don't necessarily have the answer to that, but I do have a sense from having talked about it with many leaders around the world. So there's trust inside your organization, and there's trust, as you say, outside in your communities in the customers you serve and beyond. I think at the end of the day, each of us through our actions build trust indirectly, and yes, there's this debate all the time about how vocal should leaders be about social issues and issues outside the walls of their organizations. At the end of the day, if you're demonstrating your values within your organization, you're demonstrating your values to your customers and to your communities, that says almost as much as any specific proclamations you might make. And that's an important element, I think, of how socially responsible organizations function. One of the other things you mentioned is the geopolitical one, and the sense that we live in a slightly fracturing world at the moment. One of the things that leads to is kind of hyper-regionalization, a move away from global norms and global assumptions about how businesses and governments interact with each other. Does it seem like that to you at Russell Reynolds? I mean, how do you think about our business, which is a global one, but where we operate in markets that can sometimes seem to be moving apart quite dramatically, politically? What's been the approach that you've taken to thinking about that and what it means for our strategy and how we empower leaders in the regions of the business? Look, I think we're lucky. I just get a warm and fuzzy feeling every time I walk into a Russell Reynolds office around the world, whether it's in Melbourne, Australia, or Warsaw, Poland, or Dallas, Texas, we're lucky because we have a very strong culture and a very strong common sense of purpose in terms of improving the way the world has led and dedication to our clients. And we're lucky in that that is something that is replicated around the world consistently. And as I said, I love getting that feeling every time I go to one of our distant locations and meet with colleagues there and meet with clients there. But I think what you're asking is how does that get impacted by the world and countries perhaps drifting apart in geopolitical ways? The reality is I don't think we've been impacted because our culture binds us. We do always have to drive good communication across borders, across continents in order to make sure that we're sharing information, we're sharing stories about our clients, we're We're sharing ways to help our clients, we're sharing successes of our teams and new ideas that our teams have generated so that we can apply those to other clients and other places. But I think when you have a strong culture, you can stand together regardless of some of the geopolitical nuance that is floating around you. Now, is that something that becomes particularly difficult as those geopolitical pressures grow and get into something that we may not have encountered yet, possibly, which is why as a leadership team, we have to be nimble and we have to be always be ready to react and support our teams through anything unexpected that happens. Constantin is our regular list, as we'll know. We ask every guest on the podcast to tell us about their redefiner moment, an experience or a decision that shaped them critically. What was yours? Before I came to Russell Reynolds, I was a management consultant and was pretty young and inexperienced, but was trained by some great senior consultants and was given a lot of responsibility early on to contribute to significant efforts at clients. And there was this one project we were working on helping the CEO of a business reorganize his team and his organization and plot a new strategy for the group together with the leadership team. And I remember vividly sitting in his office down in Oklahoma late one evening and he was laying out some of his plans and I took the leap of faith and told him that I thought he was completely wrong and that he needed to be thinking about things in a different way and describe that. He was pretty taken aback for a moment and then quickly pivoted in the direction that I had suggested. And so redefiner moment for me because until then I felt like I was a cog in a wheel and a helper. At that moment I think I really started to become a true advisor and shed any inhibitions I had about speaking my mind to clients. If I truly believed in the data for believing that the direction they were taking could use another perspective. So I think for me that kind of had a lot to do with the course I took since then. We like to end these podcasts with a series of rapid fire questions. So I'm going to ask these and ask you to answer as quickly as you can. Are you ready? These are optional, right? You can refuse to answer. I'm ready Simon, let's do it. Come on. Since this is the first episode of the new year, what are you most looking forward to in 2025, Constantine? I am looking forward to you said rapid fire, right? I'm looking forward to spending time with our people and with our clients. I'm a thing you've answered this one already, but to remind everyone what was your first job? My first job, I was a cashier at the Windixie in South Miami. Do you know what a Windixie is Simon? I have no idea what a Windixie is. Oh my God, Windixie is amazing. It's a supermarket chain, mostly in the South. And I was a cashier and it was just when scanning items at the cash register and come up, so I didn't have to learn how to key in everything, but it was a great customer service job. Looking back on your leadership path, possibly including Windixie, what do you wish you'd learn sooner apart from scanning? Everything. I learned everything sooner. I mean, I'm still learning. I think that's a key part of, I think, all of our journeys. What do I wish I had learned sooner? I think communication is so key to leadership. And I think, as I said, I think I'm still learning how to be a good communicator, but I wish, you know, I see some great communicators in wish I had been able to learn how to communicate effectively earlier in my career, for sure. That's one question you often ask when hiring people. You asked me for my secrets. It's, well, I love the misperception question. What's a misperception about you? What is one subject you'd like to learn more about? Maybe because of my upbringing, I'm a sort of archaeology, history buff. So I'd love to spend more time really learning more about ancient civilizations and ancient history. I've never formally been on a dig, but I'd love to do that at some point. I can recommend a very good history festival. Final question. What advice would you give to someone with C-suite aspirations? I would say, don't worry about your aspirations. Focus on doing great work, living by your values, delivering innovative ways of doing things for your customers and your colleagues and always bring a little filotimo on everything you do. Constantine, thank you for those responses. And as I think back over the last 30 minutes, there are a few themes that emerge. The first one that runs as a golden thread through a lot of this is that sense of solidarity, that sense of filotimo, as you described it, right at the beginning, the culture that's so important to you in your family background and that you bring to the way in which you think about leadership for yourself and for others. The communication of that was also something that you talked about consistently, as well as the evolution of our business, a move away from a focus on a transactional approach to executive search, to something that is a much more holistic support for leadership at decision making, development, both for individuals who lead businesses and other organizations and for teams of leaders. And that was fascinating to hear how that evolution is continuing. But I was also really struck by your rejection of my question about whether leading a people businesses somehow different in type from leading other kinds of businesses. In your view to paraphrase, we're all leadership businesses now and a really important insight into the way you lead and the way some of the most significantly as we advise lead. So thank you. I think you have lived up to the advisory standard that we set ourselves in the advice that you've given to our listeners today. Thank you for finding the time and joining us on Redefiners. Thank you Simon, the privilege of being here. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Redefiners. For more compelling insights from leaders across industries and around the world, listen to Redefiners wherever you get your podcasts. And to learn more or to get in contact with us, visit our website at russellrenals.com, find us on LinkedIn and follow us on x, formerly known as Twitter, at RRA on Leadership.