Carolyne Savini, Head of North America at Nolan Partners - S1E5

In this episode, we spoke to Carolyne Savini, Head of North America at Nolan Partners, a global executive search firm with a focus on sports and entertainment. Carolyne spoke about the current landscape in sports, her thoughts on hiring trends overall and specific to Covid-19, and she also touched on the cultural differences between working with a sports team versus a consumer-facing brand. Carolyne also spoke about the importance of diversity and inclusion, and why having multiple perspectives is so important.

 Podcast Highlights

5:45 – Dealing with uncertainty and looking for opportunities: “I think the corporate community will feel a lot better if we feel like we have a handle on the pandemic and for what comes after that is a lot of opportunity. So I am actually quite optimistic about what the future holds.”

6:39 – Turnover at the C Suite level: “I also predict turnover at the C Suite level. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 to 30%. And I predict that because I have observed over the last couple of months, some leadership teams being overly reactionary as opposed to proactive and the proactive organizations and the leadership groups are out in front.”

11:36 – Change in ensuring diversity: “My personal opinion, I think the pandemic enabled the social change that we’re seeing now. So there they are not mutually exclusive.”

17:23 – The NBA’s leadership in taking the next steps: “The NBA is going to be the one I think to set the pace and the way to do it.”

19:10 – Sports Organizations vs Sports Brands:  “The sports organizations may have multibillion dollar valuations. I think all of them pretty much do, but they’re mostly small companies. Several are owned by media companies, which would make them a large company owned, but for the most part, they’re small companies with a couple of hundred employees.”