Published in The Technology Headlines. January 2019
In an era of changing business requirements, organizations are looking to build a strong and agile team to support their digital transformation initiatives. While product and engineering teams take over the development side of the work, it is also important to drive new ideas and innovation across the organization. This is where leadership development and building a striving corporate culture becomes essential for an organization’s continuous growth. Alder Koten, an executive search and recruitment firm is an expert in helping organizations respond to innovative business practices and new technology implementations through authentic, adaptive, and transformative leadership.
Alder Koten is currently involved in the defense & aviation sector, helping the industry better understand the strategic, cultural, financial, and operational issues that clients face. The company is playing a key role in applying agile and innovative principles to every single function in the organization. However, the defense and aviation sector is one of the toughest industries to be in, slow to adapt to the pace of digital transformation and often reliant on legacy practices, embedded behaviors and culture. To be successful, a company must have the vision, tools, ways of working, organization, and partnerships needed to achieve a culture shift, which is as important as building the engineering capabilities.
The defense and aviation sector needs to make significant changes and improvements in the way organizations view, analyze, and develop leadership and talent. Jose Ruiz, CEO, Alder Koten, says “The defense & aviation sectors are surrounded by command and control structures that contrast against agile cultures that promote and nurture experimentation. There is no room for mistakes or errors in defense and aviation. Lives are at stake.” Defense and aviation companies generally invest in costly technologies, and build products and services that require obsessive planning and impeccable execution. Jose adds, “Adaptive, and transformative leadership is critical to reconcile what appears to be two contradicting approaches and philosophies.”
Alder Koten has been able to find a consistent approach to solve some of these challenges. Alder Koten’s focuses on leadership training and creates an agile mindset that allows companies to nurture innovation early in the development of a product and across functions. It enables a three-pronged approach to help companies build highly agile and innovative teams. The first is through advisory services that focus on the structure, dynamics, and culture of the organization. The second is through recruiting to support unpredicted needs or to help accelerate transformation efforts. The third is through the development of individuals using assessments, coaching, and leadership development to increase their impact on team performance.
Founded in 2011, headquartered in Houston, TX, Alder Koten helps its clients in the defense & aviation sectors to use technologies like business intelligence, and targeted market mapping to identify the right talent at the right time Jose shares, “We are convinced that technology will augment our ability to visualize factors that play a big role in predicting successful leadership and talent.” Alder Koten’s in-depth knowledge about the industry and experience in solving specific operational challenges helps the company during organization shaping and recruitment services.
It’s becoming more and more evident that the traditional approach to interviewing is very limited in predicting success. Hence, Alder Koten has developed a structured search strategy to redefine how organizations access talent within and outside the enterprise. This includes defining target organizations that typically have the culture, business model, industry, and process and product expertise most suitable to their clients. Alder Koten then proactively reaches out to individuals in the targeted organizations and positions to gauge interest in clients’ position and organization. Once at that point, they dig deep into the individual’s personality, knowledge, skills, and capabilities to assess their potential contribution to the client’s team.
In an era of AI and big data, Alder Koten’s current focus is to make substantial investments in those fields to develop capabilities that currently don’t exist in the market. Jose says, “We expect that applications that leverage neuro analysis, big data, and artificial intelligence will be game changers.” As an experienced service provider, Alder Koten aims to be at the leading edge of change and innovation in the defense and aviation sector. Its advisory services are crafted to be collaborative, responsive, and results oriented. The company wants to empower individuals to take charge of their career leveraging neuro analysis, big data, and artificial intelligence. Jose concludes, “We don’t just look at the problems that clients face today. We influence customers’ business processes to help shape their culture and support business transformations.”
