Social recognition for more innovation in talent management and reward

I've got a few more comments to share with you from my chapter on reward in the ATD's new Handbook of Talent Management.

These are on the value of social recognition:

One of the main opportunities for transforming reward in many organizations is likely to be to introduce or reinforce the use of recognition using new social and gamified technologies which help organizations focus recognition upon their strategy or organizational values and help draw all employees into giving recognition.

Social recognition supports the need to move towards non-financial and personalized reward and is the nearest reward oriented equivalent to the shift towards informal and social learning within the talent development space.

Of course people and companies do not need these systems to express appreciation for each other.  For example, Doug Conant sent 30,000 personalised thank you cards to his employees during 10 years as CEO of Campbell Soup Company.  But technology makes it easy for everyone, not just the most dedicated people, to do this and can build a culture where a large proportion of the workforce participate in giving and receiving recognition to each other.

Also see:

• Personalised reward

• Reward gamification

• Pay transparency

• Pay ratios

And you may also be interested in my posts on Workstars' social recognition system:

• Core values - moving from laminated to lived

• The benefits of employee voice at work

• The art and science of workplace communication

• Humanising HR using digital technology

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Talent Killers (Speaking in Cyprus and Ukraine)

My main trips for the last two weeks have been to Nicosia and Kiev where I’ve been speaking about talent management.  However I’ve noticed that although much of the focus in the conferences has been around talent, most of the conversation has been around the broader societal factors which constrain or enable talent management.

IMH / PWC - 14th Management & Human Capital Conference

So in Cyprus, a panel following on from my two keynote sessions came up with the problem of what they described as talent killers - cultural practices which stop companies being able to manage talent as they would like.

In Cyprus, the main talent killer was seen to be the family culture of the country.  So it doesn’t matter if a company wants a certain employee to focus on a certain area or work in a certain way, if this doesn’t align with the perspectives and needs of the family it isn’t going to happen.

I enjoyed the conversation, and particularly since my brother in law’s in-laws are Cyrpiot, have some direct experience of the family culture people were discussing.  So I can understand the issue, but still tend to feel there must be some good opportunities for addressing it.  Perhaps by interviewing a candidate together with representatives of the family for example, or by giving a contract to a family unit, reducing emphasis on which member of the family will be delivering it (a bit like McDonalds’ Friends and Family approach built up further for this even more for this more family oriented environment).

Of course you’d also need to avoid any tendency towards nepotism and I’d suggest here more focus on creating the organisation as a complementary family type unit, not to replace the real family but to take on more of its attributes in order to feel more resonant for employees.

PRP / Mondelez - Kyiv Employer Branding and Engagement Forum

Then in Ukraine, the panel following my keynote there seemed to focus heavily on the difficulty getting people to take responsibility for making things happen, especially in government.  One of the panel even suggested the culture seemed almost infantile, with people wanting to have everything taken care of for them.

To an extent that resonated for me too.  Eg I remember when I worked as an HR Director based in Moscow (and covered the Kiev office which I visited several times) that we had a couple of people whose jobs included organising holidays to the Russian sanitariums (and I stayed in one in Sochi myself.)  I always thought that this travel agency function within the HR team, supported by broader Soviet traditions, contributed towards HR being seen in a very administrative sort of way.

Ukraine has clearly developed a lot since I was last there, though there seems still to be quiet a lot which hasn’t, eg there still seemed to be almost as many notary offices around as I remember.  But I can accept a legacy reluctance to accept responsibility could be a significant talent killer there.

I think it’s also a harder killer to deal with than Cyprus’ family culture one.  But I was interested to hear about some of the new leadership schemes operating in the country, taking high potentials away from the broader environment for a year and helping them to develop new values, which it is believed will be maintained through peer pressure as these people progress as business or public leaders within the country.

At home in the UK / in the US etc

These two experiences have got me thinking about the talent killers back at home, and in other Anglo Saxon cultures, too.

I think one of these  is the high pay ratios I posted about yesterday.  (Whilst these are designed to recognise talent I think they play a bigger role in distorting and destroying it.)  

Another is probably a focus on dressing firms up to look more valuable rather than worrying about creating that value in the first place.  The best example at the moment is Pfizer’s planned acquisition of Allergen to enable an inversion into Ireland’s lower tax regime.

Most M&A’s are a diversion away from the true value which could be created by a better focus on talent management.

However Pfizer’s latest transaction doesn’t even try to argue a case for synergies and hence value creation.  As long as we remain more interested in moving bits of business around rather than investing in people and creating new products and services, I think we should expect that talent is going to continue to die.

But moving away from this culture is going to be even harder than addressing Ukraine’s lack of responsibility is going to be.  But perhaps George Osbourne’s new Apprenticeship levy in the UK will be one part of rebalancing the economy in the UK, helping to tilt focus away from easy options to develop the right talent a company needs to build the business for the future?

What about you, what’s the main talent killer where you live, and what needs to be done about it?

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Talent Slicing

As I've being noting on this blog, I'm speaking a lot about talent management at the moment.  Which is interesting, as it's a topic that I tend to avoid, mainly because I don't really know what it is.

I know what HCM is - managing people to create human capital.  But even if talent management is managing people to create talent, that still leave me a bit unclear about what we're talking about.

I've got ways around this of course, so if you do ask me to come and talk about talent, there's a number of insightful, provoking sessions I could give!

My second issue with talent management is that I challenge the prevailing approach within the UK and US at least to focus disproportionately on a small group of people who are supposed to have disproportionate impacts in an organisation (eg Ram Charan's suggestion that 2% of people have 98% of the impact on a business).

I think the reason for differences in performance often have much more to do with the other people in the organisation than on those who are supposed to be talented themselves, and there's research to support that perspective too.

I started talking about that in my People Management webinar a couple of weeks ago and felt a bit odd dissing something I think I was probably meant to be supporting.

So before my session in Brussels last week I did a bit more thinking and came up with an idea called talent slicing.

My suggestion here is that a focus on talent management is generally a good thing.  Any workforce segmentation is good, and a segmentation around some group of people who have a particularly important role or some important attributes, makes particularly good sense.

The issue is of course if this ends up as an exclusive approach in which it can do more damage through reduced social cohesion than it can through improvements in the talent / human capital provided by managing these small number of people in a different or better way.

So why not see talent management as a successive series of developments slicing their way through the organisation, one 'talent' group at a time.  Your executive team and their direct reports are important - great - slice.  And emerging high potentials a few years after graduation - fine - another slice.  What about another group of high performers in mid career grades - slice.  And some technical or functional experts - engineers, analysts or sales people perhaps (depending upon your sector and organisation).  But what about women returning from maternity / shared parental leave?  And members of under represented groups?  Etc, etc, etc.  Slice, slice, slice.

The advantage of this approach would be that it's tailored but not exclusive.  It ensures people management can be adapted to the people who will get to use or be impacted by it.  But it doesn't leave anybody out, even if some people benefit more early than others.  And even if some of these probably never actually get talent sliced at least there's no deliberate policy to count them out.  Plus as the slices progress across the organisation, with many of these involving not just differentiated but also generally better approaches to management, it's going to mean that the general management of people across the whole organisation slowly begins to improve too.

Please note this isn't the same as using something like a 4 box / 9 box grid.  Yes, this slices the organisation into multiple segments who can each be treated differently, but it's still only one group of real talent - those with high performance and high potential (or high attitudes).  So it's still only one slice.  Additional slices would focus on other groups of talent, each focusing on the talent not on the people who aren't included in that slice.  So each of the slices are made based upon something positive and important, which I think is a much more compelling concept that simply being put into a box and in which around 8 out of 9 people (actually more than this given the  illusory superiority bias) are going to be told they're not as good as they think they are.

Anyway, it's now something I'm going to be talking quite a bit about in my upcoming talent management talks in Saudi Arabia and Cyprus.

By the way, although this is a new idea for me, other people have probably already thought of it, and it does actually simply reflect what I know a number of organisations are already doing.

But I'd be interested in your thoughts and comments too!

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Ram Charan's 2% people drive 98% impact

One of the things I talked about in the People Management webinar was the increasing focus on small numbers of talent (eg Halogen's survey showed a clear focus on senior managers and leaders) and whether this is always valid.

I think workforce segmentation is a very appropriate activity, most of the time, and that most organisations do have 'special ones' but I worry that we overemphasise the variances in their contributions.

This relates to suggestions that, eg, the best people deliver 500 x the value of an average employee and to actual responses to it, eg, the ratio of CEO salaries to average employees (183 x for the FTSE according to the High Pay Centre).

That's despite the increasing role of distributed leadership where everyone has a role of leader (so what's so special about those at the top of an organisation?), the growing importance of collaboration (meaning that we need to look at talented teams not just talented individuals) and research suggesting that the performance factors behind those identified as talent is often more about the broader support provided to these people than it is anything about the individuals identified as talent themselves.)

That impact of our focus on talent is ever more marked as we also differentiate disproportionately against those at the bottom or the weakest performance in our organisations (the 'smelly ones' perhaps?).  I worry that the variance in the deal between those identified as talent and those on zero hour or similar contracts is increasingly tearing the social fabric of our organisations.

None of this detracts from the importance of talent or talent management but it emphasises the importance of identifying talent and investing in them very carefully, and that we position these people within the rest of the organisation even more carefully too.

We need to be especially on our guard when respected commentators who should know better say bizarre and inaccurate things such as that '2% of the people in a business drive 98% of the impact' - as suggested by Ram Charan in his recent HBR article and repeated at the AHRI conference in Melbourne where were both speaking.

How does a comment like that get into the Harvard Business Review???  It's easily and visibly not the case in any organisation I've ever worked in, and in any case, if it ever was, the issue wouldn't be talent management but organisation design!

Ie if 98% of your employee population deliver that little value, the issue isn't focusing on the 2% it's about reorganising and restructuring around the 2%, becoming a much smaller but much more effective organisation, with the small amount of additional value provided from outside of the organisation.

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How can your organisation develop future talent?

I delivered this webinar with the CIPD's People Management magazine and Halogen Software earlier this week.  Thanks for everyone who attended and particularly all the questions.

If you didn't attend, then take a look -

http://www.pmindustryinsight.com/Webinars/how-can-your-organisation-develop-future-talent-2

If you've got any additional questions, you can always ask them here.

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Marcus Evans Talent Capability and Performance Development

I'll be running this training session on talent management in Kuala Lumpur on 1st and 2nd June:

It is the people identified as talent who are going to drive their organisations through the current difficulties and beyond. But many of them may not be planning to stay! So how do you retain this critical resource?

Generating superior business performance in difficult times calls for innovated and integrated approaches to talent management (for example, actions to develop talent need to be supported by strategies to reward and engage, so that those we have invested in will stay.) Attend this workshop to learn how to redesign and update talent management for today's context and your organisation s specific challenges and opportunities.

Learn how talent can be developed in a way that helps drive the success of your HR strategy and organisation. In addition to the interactive learning modules, this event will also be showcasing case studies and up-to-date thinking from around the world.

Come along if you can or let me know if you just want to meet up.

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Talent Management in Management Thinking

 

    I thought you might be interested in this post from me on the Economist’s Management Thinking blog, referring back to their Talent Management Summit this Summer which I spoke at and blogged on as one of their official media attendees (and the sole social media one).

It’s great to be involved in the Economist’s great conferences (I’ll also be attending the High Growth Markets Summit in September and the Diversity Summit in December) and now to be featured on their great Management Thinking blog as well!

 

Technorati Tags: The Economist,talent,management,leadership,diversity,summit,conference,thinking,blog

 

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#ECTalent – Net Gen Leadership

 

   I’ve already posted on some of the morning session’s from last week’s Economist Talent Management Summit.

After lunch I was due to moderate a panel featuring Ryan Blair but he didn’t show up, so Lucian Tarnowski stepped into Ryan’s shoes, I stepped into Lucian’s, and Robert Guest, the Economist’s business editor stepped into mine.

The session was designed to consider how organisations can build, manage and retain leaders from gen y / the net generation who are more mobile and eager to self-develop than any previous group.

I’d have enjoyed moderating the discussion but didn’t feel so comfortable inputting - as you can probably tell from the photo, I’m largely unconvinced by a lot of what is talked about gen Y (or in Lucian’s terms, Gen Why?).

In my view, and experience, there definitely is something about gen Y which is different from other generations, and isn’t just about their stage of maturity.  But many of these characteristics are shared by others outside of this population (desire to make a difference, propensity to collaborate, use of social media etc – me, me me!) – it’s just that gen Y are showing these characteristics earlier on.

Eg when I was a junior consultant at Andersen Consulting (Accenture) I had one Partner who made me stay late in the office, sometimes standing up my friends to do so (this was in the days before mobiles)*.  I don’t think gen Y employees would put up with that today and nor should they have to.  However, I do sometimes think that they’re lucky to live in the times that they do.

I also think we have to be careful about talking about gen Y as a global category.  Due to social media etc, gen Y may be more similar around the world than previous generations, but they’re definitely not the same.

I also believe that a lot of gen Y’s more narcissistic tendencies have been reshaped by events over the last couple of years.  Eg, and I felt a bit exposed saying this sitting next to the man from the Economist, but I risked sharing statistics on Greek and Spanish youth unemployment (both over 50%) to suggest that in many ways this is the new lost generation and that they’re not that lucky at all (and we haven’t even begun to consider the state of the planet that Doug Baillie mentioned).

A generation’s characteristics may be mainly shaped by the experience during their teenage years, but you don’t live through the shocks of the last half decade without it leaving an impact on you, whatever age you are.

We also talked about social media and I referred participants back to Doug’s points on the crisis of leadership – if HR leaders want to understand more of the characteristics of the net gen / gen y then registering with Twitter would be a great place to start!**

 

Also see:

• #ECTalent - Strategic Workforce Plannning
• #ECTalent - Next Generation Leadership Styles
• #ECTalent - Repositoning HR
• #ECTalent - Doug Baillie, Unilever on Talent and the Business

 

* Gary Kisler – I’m talking about you!!!

** OK, OK, I know this isn’t where gen y tend to hang – but it’s  better place than most to experience what social media is really all about.

 

Technorati Tags: Net,Y,millenial,lost,generation,talent,leadership,Economist,Summit,2012,Lucian Tarnowski,BraveNewTalent

 

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Interviewing Ryan Blair at the Economist’s Talent Management Summit

 

   Less than a month now until the Economist’s Talent Management Summit on 14th June…

As well as acting as the summit’s social media partner, I’m going to be moderating a panel “THE NET GENERATION—capitalising on unique characteristics” with Ryan Blair, CEO of ViSalus and author of "Nothing To Lose".

Aged 36 now I think, Ryan isn’t quite in the net generation I think we’re supposed to be discussing.  But then he did start his first company aged 21 and became a millionaire soon after, so he certainly capitalised on his own unique characteristics!

Anyway, we’re also supported by Lucian Tarnowski (28?) from Brave New Talent, who as CEO of the social recruiting platform, Brave New Talent, certainly fits the bill.

And of course, both of them lead organisations predominantly staffed by net gen employees.

 

Any thoughts on what I should be asking Ryan?

 

Also, I’m still taking entries for a free ticket to the summit – you just need to submit an idea for an HR innovation.  This can be a big one – a radically different HR architecture would be great – but it could be quite a small one if it’s interesting enough (perhaps like Ryan’s own innovation in asking interviewees to play Connect 4 with him so that he can understand the way they think!???).

More details here: http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/talent-management-summit-how-to-win.html.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Economist,talent management,summit,London,2012,net generation,Ryan Blair,ViSalus,Nothing To Lose,Lucian Tarnowski,BraveNewTalent

 

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The Talent Management Summit – how to win your free tickets!

 

   I’ve been promising you the opportunity to win a free place to the Economist’s talent management summit on 14th June.

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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Challenges & Opportunities for Talent Managers 7: The Talent Management Summit

 

   Right, to finish this little mini-series of posts on talent management, here is further advance warning of the Economist’s 2012 Talent Management Summit, www.­thetalentmanagem­entsummit.­com.

This was one of my favourite events last year, and you can check out the posts at:

• #ECTalent - Recognising Individuals: GE vs. Aviva
• #ECTalent: Leadership Behaviours for the Future
• #ECTalent: Future Proofing the Business (Strategic Workforce Planning)
• #ECTalent: Setting a Talent Agenda
• Social leadership at Cisco
• Social leadership at GE
• Social Business at the Economist’s Talent Management Summit

 

  This blog is once again acting as a media partner for the Summit, meaning that I’ll be back again, posting furiously.  The actual number of posts I’ll do will depend on a number of things – firstly, decent technology (I remember the hotel being rather short of power sockets last year!) – and obviously the quality and resonance of the presentations too.  But that shouldn’t be a problem, as there are quite a few topics which I’m pretty passionate about, and post on quite frequently here, eg:

THE SECRETS OF SUCCESSFULLY INTEGRATING TALENT MANAGEMENT AND CORPORATE STRATEGY
Doug Baillie, Chief Human Resources Officer, Unilever

 

STRATEGIC WORKFORCE PLANNING—insights into what, who, when and how
Moderator: Chris Webber, Senior Editor, Economist Intelligence Unit
Christopher Benko, Vice-president, Global Talent Management, Merck
Sharron Gunn, Executive Director, ICAEW
Melanie Long, Managing Consultant, SHL

 

WORK GROUP: ENGAGEMENT—does your CEO know what makes your organisation tick?
Speaker:
Andrew Kakabadse, Professor of International Management Development, Cranfield University School of Management

 

However, I’ll probably post most on the stuff I don’t agree with.  For example:

PANEL: THE NEW TALENT LEADERS—and re-positioning HR
Sally Boyle, Partner, Head of Human Capital Management Division EMEA, Goldman Sachs
James Cullens, Group Human Resources Director, Hays; Advisory Board Member, OUBS
Budaraju Sudhakar, Chief Human Resources Officer, Tata Chemicals

 

Looks fine, and I certainly agree with the need to reposition HR, but the sub-text is about business-driven HR – and personally, I think there’s a better way!

That’s fine too.  It’s a point I’ve been meaning to make in response to one of the most interesting articles I’ve read this week – which has been a piece by HR Magazine on HR’s evolution.  There are a couple of calls in here for HR to unify its sense of direction, eg Diageo’s Christian Horne suggests: "The more I work in HR, the more I discover a distinct lack of common definitions."  To me, that’s a good thing (see The Head of Talent Role: Challenges and Opportunities for talent Managers /4).

 

I should also mention another two things, in case you’re not yet convinced you need to attend the summit:

1.   This year, I’ll also be on the programme (now, if that’s not a reason to attend!!!…):

INTERVIEW: THE NET GENERATION—capitalising on unique characteristics

Moderator: Jon Ingham, Executive Consultant, Strategic HCM

Lucian Tarnowski, Co-Founder, Brave New Talent

Kirsty Russell, Vice-president, Markets HR, Nokia

 

2.   As a valued follower of Strategic HCM blog you are entitled to a 15% discount. Simply quote "SHCM" when booking.

 

You’ve also got a chance to win one of two free tickets to attend the Summit and I’ll be posting details on this here tomorrow!

 

Technorati Tags: Economist,talent management,summit,London,2012,conference,events

 

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Challenges and Opportunities for Talent Managers / 6: Measurement

 

   Of course in most of the reports I’ve been reviewing, there are also the requisite comments on needing to measure talent better.  Eg the PwC report:

“CEOs are also seeking a better understanding of the scale and
effectiveness of their investments in talent. Productivity and labour cost remain important measurements; these are the tools investors, lenders and businesses use to benchmark progress (or lack of it). They are largely standardised in many industries, and thus easy to implement. Yet for many CEOs, those tools aren’t enough. They are very good at telling a CEO how the business is performing today relative to its peers, but not at indicating whether the organisation is investing enough in employees to generate future growth.

Such measurements cannot isolate skills gaps and struggle to identify the pivotal jobs that drive exponential value; they do not measure employee engagement or team performance, both of which are so critical for investments to foster innovation to bear fruit. These measurements are much harder to make, which is one reason why they’ve been neglected and why today, so many CEOs are frustrated with the issue of talent.”

 

The argument is made clearer in Workday’s recent report, Taking Measure of Talent, published by Harvard Business Review:

“Yet in many companies there has been a lack of understanding and visibility into how human capital is managed — a shortage of analytical insights about where investments are made, what form the investments take, their impact, and how best to shift resources and practices. In a survey by Mercer, for example, CFOs reported that their organizations spent 36 percent of revenue on human expenses, but only 16 percent said they had anything more than a moderate understanding of the return on human capital investment. In a similar study of 3,000 senior managers, executives gave their firms low marks when describing the employee-related data they need for decisions. The gap between the data they needed and actual quality of the data they received, leaders said, was more than 50 percentage points.

Clearly, these business leaders, including HR executives, are concerned that they are not making decisions with the same rigor with which they make decisions about marketing, supply chains or product strategies. And without clear metrics and a deep view into data on the workforce, the organizations have not had business intelligence reporting on their key assets — and have not had access to insights to create strategies to drive better business performance.

There are clear associations between a company’s financial performance and strong talent management practices when they are targeted to real business needs. A global study by McKinsey & Company found that companies that scored highest in global talent management practices earned significantly higher profit per employee — almost 30 percent — than those companies that scored lowest on the human capital measures.”

 

This reads like a problem but the real issue here is simply that CEOs and their Heads of Talent haven’t figured out that it’s not just that these measures are hard to make, it’s that a lot of the more value adding and creating attributes a CEO would like to know, eg on skill gaps and pivotal jobs, simply can’t be measured in ways that would be ‘adequate’ in other business functions, that understanding is never going to be more than ‘moderate’ and that they’re just not going to be able to make decisions with the ‘same rigour’ as for marketing, supply chains and product strategies.

However, the issue about all of this isn’t only that CEOs are going to be disappointed, it’s that the attempt to add rigour is likely to drive businesses towards lower value approaches to talent management – exactly what heads of talent shouldn’t want to do.

How’s that?  Well, in general terms, the easier something in HR is to measure, the more likely it is to be pretty low value.  And the reverse it true as well – the higher the value, the more difficult to measure it’s likely to be.  So the more we focus on measures, the more likely it is that we’ll be drawn to low value approaches because these are the things we can measure…

Take the case of an organisation with a data warehouse.  There are two main challenges here.  The first is in ensuring that all relevant data elements (higher and lower value) are captured in the warehouse.  Otherwise and correlations which are found may just be predictive, not truly causal, with the real cause existing outside of the warehouse system.  But more importantly, as most of the data elements are likely to be lower value, any strategies that emerge from the analysis are likely to be lower value too.  So it is important that these lower value strategies are supplemented with higher value ones.

But these higher value strategies are going to require Heads of Talent to look at areas where data may be less adequate and decision making less rigorous.  Take for example, this quote from the Heidrick & Struggles report:

“We’re a very lean organisation so it’s easy to follow the people in my pool and get a good sense of whether they are happy or not.”

 

And that requires more comfort with this different type of data and analysis – another significant challenge for heads of talent!

 

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#HRD12 – helping people become what they are (challenges and opportunities for talent managers / 5)

 

   In my last post, I wrote that I’d explain more about why it is that I don’t think “commercial savvy and speaking ‘business’ rather than ‘HR’ language” is the way forward for talent management.

And actually, it looks as if a powerful argument for retaining a focus on talent, and speaking a more people centred language, is going on at the CIPD’s HRD conference today (I’m in South Africa so am missing the event this year):

“At Michelin, knowing people, and helping them to reveal and develop all their potential, to “become what they are” at their own pace, is personnel’s primary function.

Vocabulary is important: 'personnel', not 'HR', because people are not a 'resource' to be stockpiled and tallied, waiting to be bought and sold. Each person is a unique and irreplaceable asset, with emotions, capable of making decisions and progressing when given the chance). Personnel’s remit is not only to staff current needs with the best people wherever they happen to be, but also to raise talent for future, often unknown challenges.”

-   Alan Duke, former international career manager, Michelin

 

And then on career development (also see my two recent posts on this - 1, 2):

“People are recruited by personnel, for a career, not a job, and personality comes before competence. An individual’s potential to develop is the cornerstone of all career management. Therefore, careers take precedence over short-term operational needs, and managers do not 'own' their people. They are responsible for managing performance, developing skills and creating conditions for success, including releasing people for the greater good, when required.

Managers cannot manage career development, because their relation with their employees is limited in time and space and they do not have access to opportunities outside their own sphere of influence. The vast majority of managers willingly accept these limitations, because they know their own career progression follows the same rules.

Career managers are independent from line management. They are responsible for rating employee potential, a process which starts at recruitment and is updated annually, for drawing up succession plans and individual career paths, and for brokering every move and making the formal offer to the employee. They have access to all opportunities in the group and actively push employees to broaden out by changing departments, businesses organisations and geographical locations. They select participants for fast-track development programmes.

Naturally, the final responsibility for career development rests with each individual employee: good performance, updating skills, being open and honest with the company etc. But every employee has a clearly identified career manager and is known personally. So there is no need to join the rat race, look around or generally spend too much time worrying about your future. You can get on with being passionate about your work and producing the goods. Your career manager will take care of the rest. Against a backdrop of unrivalled corporate loyalty, he or she will help you, calmly and impartially, to become what you are.”

 

It’s this, talent-centric sort of focus that I think provides the biggest opportunities for talent managers - though I do think the term ‘personnel’ often smacks of too much of an employee focus.  We need to put employees / talent / people first, not just because that’s the right thing to do for them, but because it’s also by doing this that businesses can gain the greatest returns as well.

 

You’ll also find interesting (I think) conversations on a people vs business perspective on this blog, and in the comments to this article at HR Magazine.  And I also love this article on Forbes.com: 10 reasons the human capital zeitgeist is emerging.

 

Contact me to learn more about Careergro – the employee focused career management system (also exhibiting at the HRD conference).

And stay tuned for more on talent opportunities and challenges, and to win tickets for the Economist’s Talent Management Conference.

 

Technorati Tags: Alan Duke,Daniel Boulanger,career management,personnel,Michelin,3 star,***,CIPD,HRD< conference

 

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The Head of Talent Role: Challenges and Opportunities for Talent Managers / 4

 

  As well as dealing with the truth about talent, the need to create value and opportunities for career development, the fourth big challenge for talent managers / heads of talent will probably be their own role.

The key research here is Heidrick & Struggles’ report on strategic talent management: the emergence of a new discipline which I saw presented at the HR Directors Business Summit in January.

H&S suggest that:

• 66% of companies are not satisfied with talent management implementation
• 60% admit talent management is not part of corporate strategy
• 57% fear that lack of talent will hinder growth in the near future
• Only 33% know their companies need for talent in the next 2-4 years
• Only 25% conduct gap analysis concerning age, qualifications and requirements.

 

In the light of these concerns, H&S find that CEOs are increasingly appointing heads of talent to help make talent management more proactive and creating awareness of the importance of talent to corporate success:

“Some senior executives readily understand that talent is a central enabler of strategy and that great talent management can be a source of sustainable advantage. A good number though, still regard talent development as a hygiene factor. Talent management in these companies can become an exercise in gap-filling and tactical
recruiting.”

 

For this reason, heads of talent tend to be viewed as distinct from the rest of HR, even when they report to the company’s top HR executive.

However, the role is full of paradox and ambiguity, requiring heads of talent to be diplomats rather than commanders.  The report suggests that there does at least seem to be acceptance of this situation, rather than a belief, like John Boudreau’s, that everything needs to be done in the same way (in my view, a consequence of talent being recognised as a driver for competitive success has to be that talent management is performed differently from firm to firm - competitive success in any school of strategic management always rests on differentiation, never in doing things the same):

“We discovered great variety in the ways in which Heads of Talent operate and relate to line managers. Some are focused primarily on infrastructure for talent and leadership development – processes, systems, and metrics. Others spend more time on specific development initiatives: business school programmes, projects that involve high potential managers, and the like. Still others spend time ‘walking the floor’, trying to keep high potentials engaged and providing front-line intelligence to senior line leaders.”

 

In addition to these activities, there is at least some evidence that some heads of talent are also / instead focusing on outcomes (talentness) in the organisation.

“If we don’t connect business and talent strategy, we will be nothing more than a typical HR unit, focusing on activities and not on impact and outcomes.”

 

For me, this is the real key which shifts the HR role into something else (though I’d also suggest that talent can’t be optimised on it’s own, so I prefer Ed Lawler’s suggestions about organisational effectiveness to this).  Heads of talent need to focus on talent as an outcome.  The activities which lead to this can be delegated to line managers, HR and elsewhere.  That leads to another point – H&S suggest heads of talent need to take on responsibility without authority:

“CEOs expect their Head of Talent to create consistency between line divisions, but rarely give them direct authority over hiring, promotion, deployment or retention. They were expected to increase consistency (as well as efficiency and effectiveness across business units) to identify and deliver a more integrated corporate talent strategy. But most of the power in the companies we looked at rests with the line leaders. Our Heads of Talent confirmed this when we asked them what made a successful head of talent. Moreover, they told us the winning talent manager operates through influence and suggestion rather than by exercising power. Interpersonal skills were critical, we learned as was the ability to build trust. Heads of Talent explained their need for resilience, tenacity, energy and the ability to deal with setbacks. The Head of Talent must therefore take a lead without formal authority.”

 

I’d go further than this – I’d suggest / have suggested that heads of talent take accountability for their organisation’s talentness / overall effectiveness too. 

I’ll finish with a last paradox heads of talents need to deal with – the requirement to focus on both the business, and on talent:

“We also found ambiguity around the positioning of talent management, with many suggesting that sitting within the HR function impacted credibility and acceptance by the business. Interviewees told us that engagement was higher where they demonstrated commercial savvy and spoke ‘business’ rather than ‘HR’ language. ‘The challenges we face are all internal. There’s a real ambivalence around talent here, the business is just not interested.’ ”

 

I have to say (have said) that increasing focus on business is precisely the wrong way to optimise value from talent.  And I’ll post more about this (again) tomorrow.

I’ll also be posting shortly on the Economist’s Talent Management Summit and how you can win two tickets to come along with me on 14th June!

 

 

Technorati Tags: Annabel Parsons,Heidrick & Struggles,strategic,talent management,heads of talent,emergence,new discipline,HR Directors Business Summit,paradox,ambiguity

 

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Career Development: Challenges and Opportunities for Talent Managers / 3

 

    The other recent report on talent management I thought was interesting is SHL’s Assessment Trends report.  I’m particularly taken by SHL’s third key finding – that companies are giving up on career development:

“Despite the focus on engagement in 2012 and the finding that more than half of companies indicated focusing more on internal talent than hiring externally, just over a third of HR professionals cited career development as a top priority. Likewise, fewer HR professionals are using it as a retention strategy and fewer are offering a formal way for employees to find new careers internally.”

 

The report goes on:

“Providing internal career opportunities can help organizations keep top talent from seeking those opportunities elsewhere. Contrasting our findings from 2011, fewer organizations, nearly 60%, indicated using career development as a means of affecting retention. Likewise, formal career development programs were only used by a little more than one-fourth of respondents.

Are companies giving up on career development? If organizations believe that engagement is a top priority for their companies, formal career development programs are crucial to demonstrating to their workforce that career opportunities exist within their organizations. With only 30% of respondents indicating that career paths exist in their organizations for all jobs, it is not surprising that engagement is low. Best-in-class organizations are offering such programs to their employees, and for good reason, as some experts find that three areas that make the biggest impact on business are development planning, talent mobility and career development expertise.”

 

This last comment refers to Bersin’s analysis which I’ve posted on recently too.  However, I strongly echo the sentiment from a personal perspective as well.   And it’s no wonder that, if organisations are giving up on career development, that in their 2012 Management Agenda, Roffey find that 30% of employees (35% in the public sector) feel their careers are on hold.

 

We know that career paths have changed, becoming much more complex (if they’re still in existence at all).  For example, in their mass career customisation work, Deloitte (Benko and Weisberg) suggest that in the talent age, the industrial age ‘one size fits all’ career ladder is morphing into a series of flexible, personalised, zig zag career paths, or career lattices (and I think that is the positive spin).

 

 

Instead of trying to force nonlinear careers into one career ladder, they urge organisations to embrace and capitalise on these different expectations.

Bersin take the analysis further, suggesting a range of options that can support career development and mobility, and proposing that the key is matching organisational needs within individual needs and desires.

 

 

I agree with this too, though I lean more towards the importance of the individual in this equation than Bersin do (they find that simply telling an employee to manage their own career has a –5% impact on firm performance – “when you tell an employee to manage his / her own career, you are telling them that you do not really care - some will manage well, but most will manage themselves out of your company” - whereas an open, social market for careers has around a +15% impact.)

I agree there are some wonderful examples of firms which use career development to help match the supply and demand of their talent (eg IBM’s workforce management initiative, which I’ve blogged about previously).  And I also agree that use of a broader social networking system to share vacancies and allow people to promote themselves will increasingly become the norm (I’m less sure about the future for separate social networking tools that just support career development – see Taleo’s recent report on social talent).

But I still think equipping the individual to manage their own career within the organisational lattice is the most important thing an organisation can do.  And it’s why I like A&DC’s approach they call career engagement:

“Career development is focused on what the organisation can do for the individual, such as training and promotion opportunities. Therefore the responsibility is predominantly on the organisation and not on the individual. This is a relatively transactional approach as the focus is on satisfying the employee, rather than on what will help them flourish. This means that the potential benefits for both the organisation and the individual may not be as sustainable.

Career engagement is more collaborative and aligned with both the individual’s and organisation’s goals. It is about what an individual can do for the organisation, whilst also developing themselves and their career opportunities. Importantly, it can be achieved without the need to offer employees more financial rewards or necessarily providing promotion opportunities. The impact of career engagement is that these employees will be happier and more fulfilled, which will lead them to be more productive and proactive.”

 

 

 

Career engagement requires that employees:

• Take ownership for their careers
• Know themselves and their strengths
• Know their own organisational impact and purpose
• Knows their future career vision and how they are progressing
• Has a positive mindset and the resilience to maximise their potential.

 

But employees will need help to engage in career development in this way.  For example, in Roffey’s Future of Careers report, survey respondents asked for:

• Career seminars
• Career workbooks
• Career workshops
• Externally facilitated career development/portfolio building events.

 

The problem with these is that workbooks are unlikely to be used for long and workshops, plus coaching etc, are prohibitively expensive in most organisations - hence the need for technology solutions.  And the best technology solution that I know of, and I’m now working to support, is Careergro.

The system focuses on three areas:

• Assessment (3 basic tools on core values, skills and world of work plus advanced tools)
• Development planning
• Socialising career goals (goals, I think, can benefit from a separate social networking system, as having this split reinforces the focus on the individual vs just the company).

 

 

 

Let me know if you’d like to know more about this system.

I’ll also be continuing to post on talent managers’ challenges and opportunities, and will shortly be offering up two tickets to attend the Economist’s Talent Summit in London on 14th June, which I will also be speaking at and blogging about on the day.

 

Technorati Tags: Talent,Careergro,career development,SHL,assessment,Bersin,mobility,Deloitte,Benko,MCC,customisation,A&DC,engagement,Roffey

 

• Consulting - Research - Speaking  - Training -  Writing
• Strategy  -  Talent  -  Engagement  -  Change and OD
• Contact  me to  create more  value for  your business
• jon  [dot] ingham [at] strategic [dash] hcm [dot] com

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