To an extent, and at a high level, there are some clear commonalities between these three themes, but digging a bit deeper there are some interesting tensions between them too – particularly if you see talent as something that is differentiated and exclusive.
So I talked about these tensions – about how a focus on competition vs collaboration can influence the implementation of talent management, change the focus of learning, and make it much less likely that people will spend discretionary effort on things like new / social media.
To support my points, I referred to a recent, excellent article in Business Week, “Can GE Still Manage?”. The article asks whether GE’s highly regarded leadership and people management practices are now outdated.
So for example, it notes the role of Crotonville, GE’s 53 acre leadership development campus – somewhere GE’s 191 most senior executives will have spent a whole year at during their first 15 years with GE.
Business Week notes that GE thinks this is a virtue, but asks what if it’s not.
It compares GE with IBM:
“Like GE, it is old—dating back a century—and big. But it's nimble and transparent as well. While GE posts vignettes of selected employees on its Web site, IBM offers a full 400,000-employee directory. It has been an innovator in connecting its people via an internal social network where workers post photos, CVs, and a list of professional skills… While it offers classroom training, the company increasingly favors social networks… and "any other tools that enable peer-to-peer learning."
And it asks:
“Who is the pioneer of peer-to-peer learning, or what executive coach and author Daisy Wademan Dowling calls the "leaders teaching leaders" model? A company called GE. The main difference at GE is that much of the peer-to-peer learning takes place in front of an audience at Crotonville.”
The interesting thing here is that, to me, the article seems to suggest that the difference between the two companies is the use of social media as opposed to physical facilities and that this is the key factor which leads to the two companies difference approaches to leadership
I don’t think it is. I think the difference is about the companies’ difference approaches to differentiated talent management.
We all know about GE’s focus on differentiation – its Session C process and rank and yank approach.
And actually IBM differentiates it’s workforce too. In fact IBM is the main case study in Dick Beatty’s book on this subject. And I suppose also the basis for Tim Ringo’s remark at the CIPD HRD’s conference last week that the company might reduce its workforce from the current 400,000 to 100,000 people by 2017 (also see Ringo’s comments on focal jobs).
But this is a different sort of differentiation too. BW’s article refers to its full employee directory and I’ve posted previously on its W3 intranet as well. And then you’ve got its Value Jam and other activities it has conducted to increase the inclusiveness of its whole workforce.
OK, GE has got its own ‘SupportCentral’ users have created over 50,000 communities with over 100,000 experts signed up to answer questions and manage information. But I doubt this system gets the same level and type of social usage as IBM’s.
I just don’t believe that IBM’s activities would work at GE, where the culture strikes me as simply too competitive for managers and employees to want to devote much of their time and discretionary behaviours to collaborative activities like contributing to new media.
Where is your organisation on a spectrum from competitive to collaborative culture, and what does this say about your approach to talent management, learning and new media?
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GE's SupportCentral is in a class by itself. Nothing in IBM even comes close. I doubt IBMs system is the top critical system in the company- GE's SupportCentral is.
ReplyDeleteGE employees visit SupportCentral more than they visit Google. Go check it out, I am sure GE will be open to show it to you.
That said - GE is 400,000 people and there are more than 4,000 who have never heard of SupportCentral.