Reaching for More

Even when she was fresh out of college, Kimberly Shanahan was never one to leave the office at 5:00 PM. She would watch peers and even superiors clock out as soon as the technical end of the workday rolled around, and would find herself wondering, shouldn’t there be more? “I yearned for the kind of work where you’re really tied to what you’re doing,” she remembers now. “I wanted to be staying late because of some deadline—something important that couldn’t wait. I learned I really needed to reach for more.”

Thanks to this lifelong drive to push the envelope of success, Kim was promoted three times throughout her first four years in the professional workforce. That drive and determination have carried her throughout her career so that now, as the Senior Client Partner and Managing Director of Korn/Ferry International’s Human Resources Center of Expertise, she has accomplished exceptional things, both for the organizations that have turned to her for help and in balancing her flourishing career with her flourishing young family. “I’m tied to our mission and extremely passionate about it, which is what I need to succeed,” she remarks. “And I work with incredibly smart people who want to have an impact as much as I do, which truly allows us to do great things.”

As part of the Korn/Ferry team, Kim places executives in organizations with the full business, personal, and industry impact of those placements in mind. A publicly traded company launched in 1969 as an executive search firm, it has evolved into a broad-based talent management organization specializing in executive search, recruitment process outsourcing, succession planning, assessment, diversity and inclusion, and other human resource strategies. It is now a 3,700-employee global force that garners $812.8 million in 2013 annual revenue, with Kim running its 19-person Virginia office from a P&L standpoint and the HR center from a high-level strategy standpoint. Making critical placements in companies like Western Union, Humana, Macys, and Under Armour, she thrives on the diversity and challenge of the work. “Having to learn the nuance of each business we serve really feeds my intellectual curiosity,” she says.

Kim has thrived off challenge since she was a young girl growing up in Northern Virginia. In elementary school, she ran for student government and launched an enthusiastic campaign, only to be met with unexpected defeat. In middle school, she was bullied. “I hated middle school, but you get through it, and it makes you so much stronger,” she remarks. “I was always compassionate and kind, but it made me even more so.”

Kim ran for class office again in high school, and again, she was met with defeat. “That was tough,” she recalls. “It’s not easy to put yourself out there, especially at that age. But I later ran for class treasurer during my freshman year of college and won. I ran for office again during my junior year, and won again. My personality certainly evolved during that time, but I also just learned from things. I didn’t give up.”

Through her grade school years, Kim always held odd jobs—not because she had to, but because she liked making her own money and the independence that came with it. “When I was in elementary school I always had little businesses,” she recalls. “I’d make flyers for car washing, babysitting, and weed pulling services and then deliver them around the neighborhood.” One year, Kim and her friends put together a small amusement park in the neighborhood, where kids would pay a quarter to play a game or ride a ride. Her first job was in high school at Herman’s Sporting Goods, followed by stints as a waitress and at a clothing store. The self-reliance afforded through earning one’s own income became even more important to her when she watched her parents divorce at age 17. Her mother had been a homemaker, and it was hard for Kim to see her struggle to adapt to a new life of self-sufficiency. “That’s one reason I’ll always work,” Kim says now. “It’s risk mitigation, if nothing else.”

As she grew up, sports, school, and art became her main interests. “I played tennis and soccer and loved the great highs and learning lows you experience as part of a team,” she explains. She developed a strong work ethic on the field that helped her in the classroom as she took AP classes. She felt she had to work harder than others to excel and was shy in academic settings, but she loved her courses and the challenge that came with them.

What she loved most of all, however, was art. She even had her own art class in high school and won the gold key award at the Corcoran, developing her creative side to be just as strong as her analytical skills. With the dream of going into advertising, she was admitted to Vanderbilt but declined so she could attend Virginia Tech instead, believing that a liberal arts education wouldn’t take her where she wanted to go.

Her father, who worked his way up from Staff Director of the Senate Armed Services Committee to Acting Secretary of the Air Force, was upset with her for giving up an Ivy League school, but after seeing how much she excelled at Virginia Tech, he agreed it had been the right choice. Kim connected with the school and the people there instantly, transforming from a shy introvert to an outgoing student with a large circle of friends. “Tech was a perfect fit for me, and I have zero regrets,” she says.

The school didn’t have an advertising major, so Kim instead majored in communications, and although she found some of the courses less interesting than expected, she wasn’t going to give up. Instead, she added a finance major to her curriculum. It meant she would have to retake several math classes, spend a couple summers studying, and stay an extra semester, but she graduated as a double major and was hired immediately by the NRA, where she excelled in financial operations and took the initiative to implement some financial planning strategies that hadn’t been tried there before.

After four years garnering incredible success in that capacity, Kim decided to switch tracks and took a position at DFI, a management consulting company in D.C. There, she worked on market entry strategies and the commercialization of defense products, starting as a research analyst and moving through the ranks to become senior associate. “I loved the diversity, but I was the only person in the company who had started a family and was living in Virginia,” she says. “One year, they discussed using participation in social events like softball as a factor for bonuses, which didn’t make sense to me.”

Kim had met her husband, Patrick, while working at the NRA, and the couple got married when she was 26. “I always liked kids, but I never thought that was my path,” she remarks. “Growing up, I had had friends with working moms, and they always seemed so cold in their business suits. That was my image of a working mom, and I didn’t want to be that. I wanted to be free to always climb and reach for more, but then I had my first daughter, Jordan, at age 27. It was the best thing on the planet, and then we were equally blessed with our second child, Caili, several years later. My kids are absolutely amazing—interesting, beautiful, smart, intellectual, successful. I learn something new from them every day.”

Interested in leaving DFI, Kim’s father introduced her to Korn/Ferry, opening her eyes to an entire industry she hadn’t known existed. “I thought it would be fascinating to take the things I was learning about businesses—where they were going, what the competitors looked like, and where they could go—and blending them with an understanding of people and who would be the right person to take a company to that next level.” Kim had grown comfortable connecting with executives at a young age and was offered a position at Korn/Ferry, but she decided to check out the company’s competition, Heidrick & Struggles. Heidrick made her the same offer, and she decided to accept because the culture of teamwork it boasted at the time held more resonance with her.

With that, Kim entered Heidrick’s technology practice as an associate, and four years later, she was running its telecom practice as a senior associate. “I remember not knowing anything about telecom when I started, and being frustrated in a good way,” she recalls. “We were building the telecom practice during that time, and the partner I was working with had a great network and could readily solve searches. I was desperate to find my way to add real value.” Thus, Kim built a spreadsheet of every telecom company in the world, allowing users to sort by company name, revenue, state, person, and skills. Thanks to this tool, she was able to quickly come up with top candidates, transforming the practice’s business development strategy in the process.

It was in the midst of this success that a senior partner called her into his office. He observed that she was heading down the partner path, which he said would be a very difficult road to travel as a female and a mother. He advised her to really think about whether it was something she wanted to do. “Of course it’s important to be conscious of your path and how you define it,” Kim says today. “But this negative approach was wrong. Shouldn’t I be able to define my path on my own terms? And having seen both men and women achieve balance, shouldn’t he have put me in touch with someone who had done it successfully, rather than trying to plant a seed of doubt?”

Shortly after this frustrating conversation, Kim received a call from MCI, which was about to emerge from bankruptcy and needed someone to build out its global executive recruiting function. Kim hadn’t yet worked at a corporation, so she accepted and spent the next two years learning and building. Having done some M&A work at DFI, she also talked to the company’s strategy team about an acquisition, impressing the leadership team so much that they transitioned her to Director of Strategy, responsible for building out wireless capability. “It was a big fork in the road for me, and while it was hard to leave HR, that move was part of my original plan,” she explains. “I had wanted to go into a role I knew well and then move over to strategy or business development.”

The company’s wireless guys worked out of Jackson, Mississippi, and weren’t used to a young female coming in and pushing the envelope, but Kim quickly won them over. They built out wireless networks and tier 2 markets, and Kim got back into financial modeling. “I have this pattern,” she observes. “I tend to take big leaps, so my first three months on a new job are brutal. I worry to my husband that I’m not cut out for the work, but then I hit my stride and settle in, and it gets fun again. That’s what happened on the strategy team.”

When MCI was acquired by Verizon, leadership asked her to stay on the strategy team, but Kim felt the new environment was too big. Turned off by the idea of being a cog in a wheel, she considered her next move and found herself missing the executive search side of her work, in which she had excelled. “I liked the impact piece, the intellectual side, and not feeling like I was trapped in a bubble,” she says. “You get to learn so much about so many different things, putting it all together to see the fabric of what’s going on in an industry. And beyond that, you develop incredibly deep relationships with people, who become friends and clients. That’s when I made a conscious decision to go back in for the long haul.”

Kim looked at a number of different firms and chose Korn/Ferry, joining the team in February of 2006 as a client partner. She was immediately struck by how welcoming the culture was, and she was promoted from client partner to senior client partner within a year. Though she had started in the firm’s technology area, she saw a considerable need in the HR space and steadily transitioned over, so that before long, it was all she was doing. She made a name for herself and others in the practice, and now, they are considered thought leaders in the field.

In 2009, the head of Kim’s office left the company, and the person she was reporting to asked if she had interest in assuming the role. “I said I would be interested at the right point in time, thinking that point would come sometime in the future,” Kim reflects. “But they ended up promoting me, which again was earlier than expected. The firm has been good to me, pulling me up to new levels before I even have the chance to ask for them. It’s really advanced my aspiration.”

Now, Kim brings a boldness and determined spirit to her work that keeps the company’s strategy pressing forward. She can step back to analyze any situation, keeping her own concerns off the table to determine the best business move. This steely will is coupled with an infectious enthusiasm for the success of her colleagues that makes for an exceptional team atmosphere. “We all genuinely like each other,” she affirms. “We’ve got a really strong group that helps one another, and I’m seriously passionate about rewarding hard work and watching my team succeed.”

This approach speaks to Kim’s leadership style, which is more participative today than ever before. “I like to provide direction and then be hands-off,” she says. “I love to give feedback, support, and credit where credit’s due, publicly and sincerely and in a meaningful way. Some people might say I’m challenging to work for, but it’s just because I want people to care. I want good work product, and I want my team to learn. The other side of that coin is the fact that we laugh a lot, remembering that we can only control so much. When we have an off day, we take responsibility as a team and regroup together.”

In advising young people entering the working world today, Kim encourages the use of contacts—something she purposefully avoided because she wanted to do everything on her own. “That was silly,” she laughs. “Be humble yet confident. Seek healthy mentors early, because people want to help. Be bold but not too fast that you break things. It will all come—just don’t expect it too early.”

Beyond this, Kim’s story demonstrates the power of reaching for something more. “I’ve always had this compelling drive to understand more, help more, and see more people succeed,” she avows. And working for more inspires others to do the same, as is the case with Kim’s daughters. Excelling in school, lacrosse, dance, and singing, the quest for betterment mirrored from their mother extends into deeper pursuits of the soul as well, and reflects back to Kim. “Caili is a beautiful dancer and someone who will practice and practice until she is satisfied with the results,” she says. “Jordan is an amazing lacrosse player and singer. She has also really connected with God, reading the Bible every night and going to church or youth group two to three times a week. My drive may have inspired her, but she’s now inspiring me to ask some important questions about life and what I should be doing right now. It’s a journey, and I couldn’t be more thankful for the family I’m walking it with and the places it’s taking me.”

‍