Chief executives ‘not interested in staff'

Chief executives are not interested enough in their employees, a corporate communications consultant told delegates at the International Recruitment Conference last week.

Mike Johnson, managing partner of Johnson & Jones, said the key reason was that today's MBA programmes produced executives who were not team players, were obsessed with their share price, and whose response to losing good staff was to "go out and buy some more".

Johnson said the financial priorities of chief executives often excluded a human interest in staff.

Nevertheless, many ambitious young managers wanted to take MBAs even though this was not encouraged, the conference was told.

When the 25-year-old food and beverage manager at Le Méridien Piccadilly, Ajaz Sheikh, told senior executives at Le Méridien's conference that he wanted to complete his MBA before he turned 30 because it would give him the choice to change careers, many of the 150 senior executives present dismissed him as an "impudent upstart", said Le Méridien's human resources manager Tim Savage.

Savage said the great risk in sponsoring such professional development was that employees would go elsewhere, particularly into banking.

"The biggest challenge I've had is that, quite rightly, once they have the MBA they want to be the CEO. And there's only one CEO," he said.

by Ben Walker