Well, the sub-title for the 2012 summit is ‘the next generation of leaders’ (global, female, net generation and so on) and one of the things I’m hoping to see evidence of is some ‘next generation of talent management strategies’.
I believe that if we’re trying to create something different – and we certainly need to – then we need to think, act and behave in different ways as well. This means we need substantially different HR / HCM / talent management processes and practices to be put in place.
So, this year’s ticket competition, open to all talent management practitioners, is going to be pretty simple – what are you doing / what are you already planning to do (/ I might even be prepared to take a look at what you’d love to do if…) – in order to recruit, manage or develop your next generate talent – that involves a degree of uniqueness, creativity and innovation?
The best two entries get to go along with me to the summit.
How to enter?
Well, you can either email me at: info [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com. Or you can add your entry in the comments below. The advantage of doing this is that other readers may comment on your entries to – and if there’s a sufficient groundwell I’ll decide on the winning entries based upon these comments as well as my own judgements. But I will need to know how to contact you.
No word limits or anything like that, and creativity in how you submit your entries, as well as their content, will be welcomed!
I’ll include the winning two entries as posts on my blog, and if possible, would like to encourage the two winners to add posts on their reflections on the summit too.
The deadline for entries will be 31st May.
Any questions? – ask below.
Oh, and if you don’t win, or for some reason don’t want to enter (and I might add that odds of winning a £1,300 prize, and great one day learning and networking experience, are probably going to be amazingly good!) then do remember that you can still get a 15% discount by quoting SHCM when you book.
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Great challenge Jon. I'll answer with a mixture of what we're doing and what we have plans to do.
ReplyDeleteBut firstly my approach. I don't see the question that we're trying to address changing - i.e. balancing 'what does the organisation need', with 'what's right for the individual'. But I do see rapid change in the available toolset.
I try to triangulate (my favourite word of the moment) across the 'science', 'art' and external best practice in Talent Management to ensure that we continually evolve to have an agile approach.
The Science: we're making good progress on getting the right systems in place. I continue to be impressed by the likes of SuccessFactors and Rypple and we're seeing increased interest in what big data implications are for HR. For me this is about timeliness, accuracy and point-of-need; giving Line Managers actionable information at their fingertips, and reducing noise/complexity.
The Art: this gets to the heart of your question and I think this differs very much company-to-company (depending on that lazy c-word, culture). What is the common Talent language and how are decisions made?. I see a continued tilt towards the 'art' of talent management (as opposed to the science) in more relationship-based orgs, where perception/judgement and the subtleties of influence are more important. I wonder if we'll see roads towards the science of measuring that, perhaps an internal organisational Klout score? I'd also suggest that increased focus on building a truly diverse reflection of global footprint is accelerating the need to answer these questions. When it comes to how we think, the concept of 'unconscious bias' is proving a useful conversation.
Best practice: I've observed, recently, what I think is an interesting trend. The likes of Google & Microsoft have been saying that traditional leadership/talent development programmes haven't been working for them and that they're focussing on 'stretch-assignments', 'planning the next 2 roles', 'global mobility'. This has always been our approach (and has proved very successful from pov of succession/retention) and it's interesting to see other industries moving towards it...
So.... I try to THINK in 3-D (triangulation), ACT quickly, simply, based on timely information, and BEHAVE responsibly, confidently and with integrity.
I'm interested to hear others points of view...???
Hi Jon. We have a few things which I think wouldn't count as very revolutionary (web based recruitment tools, etc) but the thing we are doing which is my 'entry' for your ticket competition is to massively extend the notion of leadership for change to everyone in the company. Its been done before in a few places, but not many. The issue is this - we have 4000 people worldwide. We have lots of things we want to achieve, lots of changes we want to make, but it will be too slow if we try to manage and control everything through some central process. We could spend forever analysing the changes required, assessing who we think our talented people are to go on the teams, creating plans, coordinating thru a programme office, etc, etc.
ReplyDeleteYou know the picture because we've all seen it many times before. It works to a degree, but its inefficient, regularly underdelivers and often creates new management controls which stifle the business.
So we're heading in the other direction. We have a few projects for things like IT systems that need to be built, but almost everything else is up for grabs. There's an overall direction in terms of aspirations for the company, but the changes required are defined locally by people who have the energy to do something about it and can convince other people to get involved. Anyone can volunteer to identify something that's holding us back and get rid of it, or something that's an opportunity and go for it.
This way our talented people are not the ones who pass a conceptual assessment, but the people who step up and move the company forward. Its early days but in a few months we are on the way to millions of dollars of new business, simplified processes and the beginnings of a new buzz in the place.
And all of this is being done with no managers/leaders controlling what we do, no additional budget and no extra resources. It won't stay that way forever, but its an interesting journey as we explore what's possible.
Technically this is not a 'talent management initiative', in that its not being directed by HR and no-one is using the word talent, but it is developing people, it is changing the business, and it is delivering real results in line with our strategy, so I'd argue that counts :-)
Alan, sounds like a compelling talent initiative to drive wider engagement around change. Experian and Cemex have had great results with a similar approach. They've written up really practical case studies at www.managementexchange.com (MIX)
DeleteThanks both for your great comments. Keith, I hope you enjoyed it and that it wasn't too frustrating! And catch up with you both again soon.
ReplyDelete