CEB #ReimagineHR - The Collaborative Enterprise / Social HR

“To go fast, go alone.  To got far, go together.”  (South African quote shared with us by Brian Kropp.)

The average CEOs tell the investment community that they're going to grow by is 6 to 8%.  The average growth expected in the economy is 2 to 4%.  Where's the difference going to come from?  We need people to go both fast and far.

This means that business is now much more collaborative than it used to be, eg managers are working longer but are spending less time with their direct reports.

For CEB, people generally have the will (unless they do’t like talking to people) and the skill (millennials in particular) to collaborate.   Rather than building new collaboration skills we should focus on helping apply their core skillsets in different ways. 

However people often need to be helped to engage in the behaviours.  Or at least we mustn’t get in the way, as we do when we design our systems and processes for individual performance alone.

This means our (social) HR processes need to built around collaboration too, eg performance management needs to move on from ‘what did I do?’ to ‘what did we do together to achieve outcomes?’

Brian Kropp explained PM system at Herbert Smith Freehills to us (a good example as law firms aren't always the easiest places to get people collaborating).  In this, rather than getting an employee to talk about what they did, they list instead all of the people who helped them.  They also get 10 points which they allocate across these people depending upon the impact of their help.

This means the organisation can add up the number of points each person has been given to quantify the amount of help they’ve provided.  A person’s review therefore provides input to these other people’s ratings rather than of the person who has received the review, reflecting the way in which today’s work gets performed.

HSF also look at the system to see which staff are connecting together eg if white males are only connecting with other white males it would raise warnings.  But the bigger benefit is that this focus on people who have helped them helps to develop a mindset that they didn’t do it all on their own.

CEB think that leaders and employees respond to attempts to improve collaboration in different ways.  It’s also often harder to get leaders to collaborate, as they have loads of responsibility and much of the success in their career to date will normally be down to individual contribution.  Some of CEB’s suggestions for dealing with these people include:

• Not focusing on collaboration, which is just a tool or method, but on what collaboration is going to achieve.  (Personally I think that’s a mistake.  People are never going to optimise their collaboration unless they value the thing for itself.)

• Encouraging them to extend their strengths rather than adopt new behaviours, eg don’t say be more collaborative, tell them they’ve been so great at something that you want them to share this with other people.  Ie start with give rather than with take in the give take flywheel.  Appeal to their ego!

• Talking about improving processes rather than changing people.  And moving from reactive to practice - solving problems before they emerge.  Leaders need self realise the need to change - often when they hit rock bottom unless we can help them do this first.  Eg GE at Crotonville bring in a chamber music group and by having one musician misplay helps people understand the need for everyone to play together.

• And you may need to pay for it.  Financial rewards do matter for business leaders - for the border workforce intrinsic rewards work better - financial rewards are smaller and employees often feel behavioural changes aren’t worth it.  (I think that's a problem - there needs to be greater commonality between employees and leaders for true collaboration to take place.)

• 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

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!

• 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

HR’s Corbyn Option

It’s been a couple of interesting weeks in UK politics since left winger Jeremy Corbyn was elected as leader of the opposition Labour party.

However the party as a whole still seems far from certain about what caused its failure in the election and whether moving to the left is the best way forward, for the party or the UK.  From my perspective, as someone who doesn't usually vote Labour, but am often attracted by some of their proposals, there are several issues to consider.  The charges that Labour wasn’t true to itself and therefore didn’t seem authentic, or that it simply became some form of Tory-lite imitation strike me as being overly simplistic labelling of a number of complex and integrated causes which together led to the results it did.  However there is undoubtedly some truth in them too.  I certainly didn’t feel compelled enough to vote for what I liked about what Labour were offering under Ed Miliband versus some of the things other parties were offering which I found more compelling still.

My own reaction to Jeremy Corby is that he’s very clear about what he believes in and is selling his ideas, or more accurately, engaging people to think differently about them, very well.  His style and approach, allowing disagreement, promoting discussion, and connecting with the electorate, albeit partly determined by the nature of his election, fit current lifestyles and life views very well.  The mainstream media still doesn’t understand how far these things have changed and so attack Corbyn for poor leadership, encouraging even more people to line up on his side.

This isn’t to suggest that everything has been handled well, or that I necessarily expect the new old Labour party to win the next election, whether or not Corbyn even survives until then.  But I do think it has injected a breath of fresh air into the UK and I’d hope that even if Corbyn gets kicked out after his first speech as leader today, that he feels he’s already had a few small successes, in particular challenging the ‘theatrical’ nature of UK politics and helping people see that there are other options to austerity in the way we continue to develop the UK’s economy.

And I think HR can learn some lessons from all of this as well.  Firstly, I think we’ve been playing a new-Labour-like game for far too long - accepting existing business paradigms about managing organisations.  Yes, we need to work within a capitalist economy and help businesses deliver higher returns from their shareholders.  But no business will do this well if that’s their only goal.  Our support for capitalism needs to be complemented by a more social - if not socialist - way of operating.  For example we need to care for and show our care for our people, supporting those on zero hour contracts as well as those we deem to be our talent; we need to design our workplaces, processes and jobs around our people as well as to achieve business goals; and we need to involve all of our people in deciding what we are going to do.  Corbyn’s election and growth in the Labour party membership since he was elected give some indication of the energy which can be unleashed by treating people as people and not simply as workers used to do what a business decides it needs.

A second, potentially even bigger, lesson can be learned from the way Corbyn got elected too.  As all readers in the UK at least will know, Corbyn dispensed with new Labour’s attempt to suggest that we can create a more caring approach to people within the existing paradigms about businesses and our economy.  For him, we need to intervene more and not just rely on the market to always lead to optimised results; we need to enable everyone to succeed and not just accept that growing inequality is a fact of life; and if we enter another recession we need print money not just to save the banks but to protect people and build for the future.

It’s a choice faced by any small part of a bigger system where the part has a different belief system to the larger whole - to either accept and adopt the more general paradigm (like New Labour) - or - to be clear about how you think differently and why these different beliefs would be better (like Corbyn's new Old Labour).  And then to commit to promoting these different views.  I think HR’s been unsuccessful in impacting our organisations not because we’ve not been business-like enough, but because we’ve been too like the rest of the business.  (See last year’s post on Venus and Mars for more thinking on this.)

Thirdly, Corbyn also made an appeal to the whole organisation, inspiring people at the bottom rather than just influencing those at the top.  HR doesn’t have the advantage of Labour’s bizarre election rules but we can still do more of this ourselves - connecting with the employees in our organisations, and using these relationships to show how much we’re valued and needed - though of course this will only work once we’ve changed our perspectives and behaviours, and start focusing at least as much on enabling our people as we do in supporting managers to make people do what our businesses require.

If we start thinking more like this, then I think HR, just like Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, has a chance to be more successful - and by changing the way that organisations run will make our businesses more successful too.

It’s certainly not the prevailing paradigm for how HR needs to operate but I think it could work and I suggest that Corbyn’s success should give us more confidence to try it out.

Jez HR can!

For the sake of full disclosure, I’m not a Labour party member, didn’t vote Labour in the general election or in the Labour leadership ones.  However my political beliefs do often align with the left (see my largely ignored petition / pledge on change.org) and therefore sometimes with Labour’s too.  If there was an election tomorrow, I'd still not vote Labour but I'd be much more likely to vote for them under Corbyn than I was whilst they were led by Ed Miliband.

Oh, and I don't sing God Save the Queen.

• 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
   

L&D Talks, Brussels

I've added one more event where I'll be talking about talent management to my agenda.

This is Stimulearning's annual L&D Talks in Brussels on 8th October where I've stepped in for LukDewulf to present alongside Jos Arets, Vivian Heijnen and Jane Hart.

These are my sessions:

Masterclass - How do we really develop talent?

Talent is becoming ever more important for individuals and organisations but our success rate in developing it is not making that much progress.  Therefore business leaders in many organisations are becoming increasingly frustrated about L&D’s ability to influence potential, progress individuals up the hierarchy or to other positions where they are most needed, and to increase the organisation’s stock of human capital.  We urgently need to address this growing disconnect between the importance of talent and our ability to create more of it.  

The good news is that as a result in progress in neuroscience, behavioural economics and other areas we have access to an increasing amount of rich insight about how talent can be developed, and no longer need to rely on old but often flawed ideas such as learning styles.  We can therefore start to get to the heart of what does make a difference to talent and therefore organisational performance.

In this interactive session Jon will present an overview of some of the key insights we can and need to use to inform our plans and practices to develop talent, and will then open up the debate to all participants to share ideas and experiences and try to come to some conclusions about what we can do differently.

Jon will close the session by pulling these ideas together and suggesting some ways to introduce these ideas into talent development programmes within the participants’ organisations, and also to ensure that L&D practitioners are able to leverage and optimise their own talent themselves.

Keynote - Beyond just development - what else do we need to do to make talent development work?

Making talent development effective and placing it at the heart of a strategic approach to talent management requires more than just being able to develop talent well, difficult enough though that is.

We have a number of other demanding and in fact increasingly difficult challenges to confront.  For example, who, or what is talent? - do we really understand the attributes we need to create and which roles or individuals demonstrate them?  Are we able to identify talent effectively - what are the mechanisms we need to use to assess talent and identify which individuals fit this description?  And how do we ensure that the whole team and organisation is learning effectively?

Jon will provide some suggested answers to these and other questions and provide other strategic but simple and practical suggestions for how L&D practitioners can power up their talent development and broader talent management approaches.

If you're in Brussels, it'd be great to see you there!

• 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
   

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.

• 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
   

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.

• 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
   

Smart Workplace Design 2016

I posted on a couple of case studies of workplace design in Australia last month whilst attending separate conferences in Sydney and Melbourne:

http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/flexible-working-woolworths-sydney.html 
http://strategic-hcm.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/ahrinc-office-design-for-organisation.html
 

Whilst the link between HR and Property seems much stronger in Australia than it does in the UK, the rest of Europe or just about anywhere else I've been, there's clearly more we can do.

Part of the issue is that HR needs to develop it's understanding of workplace design so that we can work with our Property / Facilities colleagues more easily.

And part of it is to be able to link what's possible in these areas to what we're doing in HR.  I think this is more than the suggestion in Melbourne that HR's job isn't to choose the colour of the chairs but to integrate this into the rest of the culture.  As owners of the culture, we do also need some capability to direct and lead what happens in the workplace as part of our broader organisation design.

I got into some of this agenda in Fleming's Smart Workspace Design conference earlier this year.

I'm also back at the same conference in Amsterdam next year, doing two things:

Firstly to present an input on Connecting HR, Property and Digital to Organisation Design and Development:

Human Resources, Corporate Real Estate and Information Technology functions all have similar remits and attributes - the most important of these being that we all need to focus less on what we do than on what we create.  The input to this session will argue that once we have established what we want to develop (for example innovation, collaboration, fun etc), all three functions need to be harnessed and integrated together if meaningful change is going to take place.  It sounds simple but in last year’s conference we found true integration is very rare indeed.  So how can we connect HR, CRE and IT to the outcomes we need to create?

• Recommendations for inserting the workplace into broader organisation design and development

• Examples of organisations aligning their overall designs behind a required culture or capabilities.

And secondly to lead a panel discussion:

• How can we ensure that a workspace reflects the company’s culture and communicates its strategic requirements for example supporting employer branding?

• How do we integrate workspace, IT and HR policies to create an omni-employment experience? 

• What are some practical examples of strategies for enhancing collaboration across HR, Facilities and IT, engaging members of other disciplines in the broader picture and your own part of the agenda?

• The journey is many organisations is to become more human (leave aside those for a moment which just want to reduce their costs).  How can HR, CRE and IT work individually and together to enable people to be people, for example by responding to different national cultures, generational differences and individual personalities etc?

It should be a really good session, and a great conference, so do have a think about whether you're going to be able to join us.  I'm hoping we'll have more HR people than Property people there this year.

Details here: http://human-resources.flemingeurope.com/workspace-design-summit 

• 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
   

Talent Management in Cyprus

I'm also looking forward to speaking in Cyprus in November at IMH / PwC's Human Capital conference, this year focusing on talent management - finding and keeping 'the special ones' within an organisation.

The ATD's Talent Management Handbook will be out the week before, so it looks like I'll have a fairly heavy focus on talent around then.

• 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

ATD Talent Management Handbook

I'm a contributor to the ATD's Talent Management Handbook, due out in November.

The book provides an overview of the whole of talent management, mainly written for talent developers.  My chapter is on reward and as well as helping TD practitioners understand what the reward agenda is about, and their Reward colleagues should be doing, I use the opportunity that the whole area of reward needs a lot more, new innovation:

"The emergence of talent development as a new, more evolved form of training and development reinforces the scale of transformation that has been under way within this area of talent management. New insights from neuroscience and behavioral economics and new technologies (social, mobile, cloud) are just some of the drivers leading to a new focus on creating an environment in which talent can develop. Looking back at the focus on delivering training 10 or even five years ago and comparing this with roles talent developers might be undertaking in another 10 years (learning app designer, content curator, community manager), it is clear this has been a revolution, not just an iterative improvement.

Other areas of talent management reviewed within this book have been through similar levels of change. For example, recruitment or talent acquisition, which has seen a radical shift in focus from recruitment advertising to sourcing, employer branding, and external talent communities. But what about reward—the topic and activity relating to compensating and engaging people through monetary and other exchanges?

Well, although there is a lot of talk about “the new pay", there is not that much difference between the new and the old as of yet.

Other chapters are on: 

Section I: Attracting Talent

• Easy-to-Use Approaches to Attract Top Talent - John Sullivan
• Seven Maxims to Guide Talent Attraction - Jenny Dearborn
• Creating a Magnetic Workplace That Attracts Talent - Roberta Matuson

Section II: Engaging Talent

• Preparing Talent Through Onboarding - Alex D. Tremble Jr.
• Essentials of World-Class Onboarding - Sarah Hagerman, Lilith Christiansen, and Mark Stein
• Designing Inboarding - Sarah Hagerman, Lilith Christiansen, and Mark Stein
• How to Build a Culture of Engagement - Rebecca Ray, David Dye, Patrick Hyland, Joseph Kaplan, and Adam Pressman
• Organizational Culture as a Foundation for Retention - Julie Clow

Section III: Optimizing Talent

• Performance Management: What Is It Good for? - William A. Schiemann and Craig Dinsell
• Engaging Leaders in Performance Management - Matt Peters
• StandOut: Next-Generation Performance Management - Marcus Buckingham
• Talent Analytics and Reporting - Matthew G. Valencius

Pre-order the book now - use promo code TALENT10 for a 10% discount on the price.

• 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

Global Conference for Training and Development, Saudi Arabia

In October I'm back in Saudi Arabia speaking at the Global Conference and Exhibition for Training and Development.

See my post from ATD MENA earlier this year.

• 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