Right Management

Right Management is the largest provider of talent and career management services to public and private sector organizations worldwide The company’s services include optimizing organizational effectiveness, employee engagement, leadership development, talent assessment and workforce transition and outplacement. Right Management is headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and has 300 offices in 50 countries.

Right Associates: the Founding and Early Days of Right Management, 1980-1989

Right Management was founded in 1980 as a firm providing outplacement services to business organizations and public agencies across the United States. Outplacement describes the consulting and career counseling services enlisted by organizations seeking to reduce their workforces and assist terminated employees make successful transitions to new jobs and careers or to retirement.

The origins of outplacement go back to the period immediately following the Second World War when counseling services were developed to help reintegrate returning US servicemen into the civilian economy Such services were eventually offered to individuals looking to make a job or career change, then to companies seeking to assist key executives facing termination and finally to organizations requiring aid in managing large-scale workforce reductions.

The founders of Right Management were four business associates who started in outplacement working for Bernard Haldane Associates, a firm whose roots can be traced to the GI counseling efforts of late 1940s. Although it eventually did some corporate business, Bernard Haldane Associates was for much of its history a retail operation hired by individual professionals needing help making a job or career transition. In 1980 when Frank Loucheim, Larry Evan, Boardman Thomson and Robert Fish left Haldane to form Right Management (then trading as “Right Associates”), they created one of the few outplacement providers to concentrate exclusively on serving organizational clients and addressing an emerging need for outplacement as a large-scale business service rather than an individualized professional service .

The need for outplacement developed gradually over the 1960s and especially the 1970s as the implicit contract between US corporations and their professional employees that a lifetime of loyalty would be rewarded with lifetime’s employment slowly broke down. By degrees over the decades, changing business conditions meant that it served the interests of organizations less and less. By 1980, with years of stagflation having discredited Keynesianism and with free market and global free trade principles in the ascendant, many organizations were contemplating a flattening of their corporate structures and a substantial thinning of their middle management ranks. The demand for outplacement exploded.

Right Management helped meet that demand. Almost from its inception, it was a national organization capable of delivering uniform services across the U.S.. It was staffed by business professionals, rather than by psychologists, who could bring their direct business experience to the challenges of helping organizations manage large-scale reductions. It divided sales from program delivery so that those charged with delivering programs could concentrate on that task exclusively.

Right Management Consultants: Diversifying and Globalizing, 1990-2003

By 1990, it was becoming increasingly apparent to Right Management’s leadership that, after a decade of significant growth, the demand for outplacement services was likely to flatten. The company embarked on a plan to diversify its business, which culminated in the acquisition of PeopleTech, a Toronto-based human resources consulting firm. This acquisition provided Right Management with exposure to the emerging market for organizational talent management services. To recognize the balance between outplacement and talent management services, Right Associates was renamed “Right Management Consultants”.

PeopleTech was one of over 80 acquisitions the company made from 1992 to 2003. These acquisitions, many of them on the consulting side of the business, lead to increases in consulting revenues from 0% of total revenues in 1992 to 30% by the end of this period. These acquisitions also extended the company’s footprint. After the purchase of Coutts Consulting Group, Europe’s largest career transition and organizational consulting firm, Right Management became a global firm.