Category Archives: Talent

CBTM #4: Mind the Gap – Training vs Competencies


Today’s guest post is from Crystal Jones of The Mpower Group and is the fourth in a series of seven posts on Competency Based Talent Management.

In our previous posts we talked about designing your talent management program and implementing a recruiting plan. However, these are only parts of a larger Competency Based Talent Management (CBTM) program. You have hired the people you needed. So what? How can you make sure they are integrated into your organization and are able to hit the ground running, creating the optimum amount of impact? Not only do you need to look at training your existing team, you need to create a training program for new recruits as well.

This sounds well and good (and perhaps a bit easy). However, it is not as easy as it sounds. We have heard from many of our Sourcing / Supply Chain peers, particularly at our last NPX, that they are struggling with their training efforts. Training is completed, but the learning is never adopted. So what can they do to change the results?

Adoption brings us back to our vowels (AEIOU). In the past we have talked about the importance of Adoption, Execution, Implementation, Optimization and Utilization in any organizational effort. However, training is just not about the act of learning (a consonant); it is about adopting and implementing that learning to drive business results. Using the vowels ensures that the people being trained start applying what they learned. Implementing the vowels is the key difference between training people and developing competency.

To effectively turn a training program into competency development, you must have a good understanding of your desired needs. This requires that you start with the strategic direction and objectives of the company and what role your organization will play. This will show you which organizational competencies you need and will give you an understanding of the gaps you have within your organization. Now, the closure of those gaps can be tied directly to the company’s strategic direction and the role your organization will play, adding value not just for individuals, but for the company as a whole. Sending 2-3 people at a time to some public seminar designed for the masses may develop individual competency but it is never going to develop organizational competency.

Your gap closure strategies must follow a multi-faceted approach (coaching / mentoring etc.). Make sure your entire approach is rooted in Adult Learning Theory and has experiential learning as its basic tenet. Making people sit through day long lectures with no ability to actually practice the new behaviours and competencies in a safe learning environment is of little value. In addition, the curriculum must include the strategic competencies found during the initial gap assessment. A program consisting of functional or process skills alone is doomed. The strategic competencies must also be integrated into the core process modules so that people know how to actually deploy the new process.

Your training strategies must look beyond the technical skills and focus on the strategic skills needed to be successful like change management, communication, collaboration, and decision making. Oftentimes these skills are overlooked when training, although they are the most important to organizational success. Anyone can learn to use any process and those are the skills most organizations worry about when hiring and training. However, developing strategic skills can take your team to the next level and have more lasting effects on the group. It takes your group from Best Practices to Next Practices.

Developing the right competencies within your organization is not easy. It takes a lot of thought and energy to train and develop your team. Sometimes closing the gap can make you feel like you are trying to build a bridge across the Grand Canyon. If you start by looking at competency development in terms of AEIOU and strategic alignment, you will no longer need to build a bridge across the gap. You will find that your organization will soar.

In our upcoming posts we will continue to address Next Practices associated with the Competency Based Talent Management lifecycle.

If you are interested in getting involved or would like to follow this topic further, here are a series of critical activities coming up:

  • Release of the results of the Executive Forum we just facilitated at the IACCM Global Forum for Contracting & Commercial Excellence on Talent Management.
  • A major research project to not identify the problem one more time but to identify Next Practices to solve the problems.
  • A webinar with IACCM on CBTM.
  • A White Paper to focus on Next Practices in CBTM.

Please contact Crystal Jones at crystalj <at> thempowergroup <dot> com for more information.

CBTM #3: Help!!! Recruiting Next Practices Needed!


Today’s guest post is from Anne Kohler of The MPower Group, co-founder and COO.

We have been hearing about Sourcing / Supply Chain organizations which are looking for up to 400 people. How does any company find themselves in a situation where they need that many people all at once? I guess one could blame an ill managed recruiting function but I suspect that the entire Talent Management program (if there is one?) is broken. As noted in our last post, Talent Management has five phases, all of which must be integrated and treated individually and collectively as a system in order to be effective. We advocate that a talent management program MUST be competency based (“CBTM”) to be sustainable and must cover ALL phases of an employee’s journey through a company. In addition, each of these phases must be supported by:

  • A clear understanding of the role the Sourcing / Supply Chain organization will play for the company
  • A definition of the Intended Consequences the Sourcing / Supply Chain function is trying to achieve for its customers / internal business partners
  • Clear goals and objectives for the group which are tied back to corporate goals
  • A clearly defined competency model to support the defined role, intended consequences and goals of the organization

Let’s begin with the first phase which is Recruiting. Keep in mind that having a strong recruiting function is absolutely useless unless you can retain and grow the talent you bring in. This is why CBTM MUST be viewed as a system. Any weak link in that system can find your best people returning to the job market out of frustration. Think about a high potential that is told they are an asset of the organization only to find themselves in a position where they are given little to no training or development, no clear goals or metrics, no career development support or no clear path for advancement. Some asset!! How long do you think that “high potential” is going to stick around? Keep in mind, bringing new people into an organization can be a VERY expensive proposition if they end up leaving in a short time. For recruiting to yield a positive return on investment, the other phases of CBTM must be in place to ensure employee retention.

Some organizations are constantly trying to “find” the right people. In many cases this is because:

  • they didn’t define the right requirements (competencies) up front
  • the defined requirements were not tied back to actual needs
  • they did a poor job marketing (selling) the position and / or the company
  • they found the right people but couldn’t keep them
  • the screening process was conducted by individuals that did not have subject matter expertise (HR perhaps)
  • candidates were not a good culture fit for the company

Constantly trying to find the right people is expensive, as is on-boarding and training new hires. Here are a few Next Practice tips to strengthen your recruiting practices:

  • Understand the role you are expecting your Sourcing / Supply Chain organization to play — Tactical executor? Strategic business partner? Change agent? The role (whatever it is) will determine the competencies required and those MUST be defined
  • Clearly defined requirements that are tied to customer needs / intended consequences and are supported by required competencies
  • A marketing plan that allows you to present your company in the best way to attract the best candidates
  • A screening process that ensures the right functional and cultural fit
  • A rotational program for new hires that may be high potentials but who do not yet know where they fit
  • A process that closely matches candidate competencies with the open position — putting a high-powered Sourcing professional in a tactical buying position will do nothing but frustrate everyone involved (and vice versa) and cause the employee to leave
  • An on-boarding process that gets the new hire off to a strong start
  • Ensuring the other phases of CBTM are in place and being utilized

If you are interested in getting involved or would like to follow this topic further, here are a series of critical activities coming up:

  • Release of the results of the Executive Forum we just facilitated at the IACCM Global Forum for Contracting & Commercial Excellence on Talent Management.
  • A major research project to not identify the problem one more time but to identify Next Practices to solve the problems.
  • A webinar with IACCM on CBTM.
  • A White Paper to focus on Next Practices in CBTM.

Please contact Crystal Jones at crystalj <at> thempowergroup <dot> com for more information.

CBTM #2: Our People Are Our Key Asset


Today’s guest post is from Dalip Raheja of The MPower Group, who declared that Strategic Sourcing is Dead last year, and who has returned to stir up a new hornet’s nest.

Our people are our key asset! How many times have you seen this on the walls of major corporations? If this is true, then should we be applying some sort of asset maximization strategy to this key asset? I would assume that any expenses (training, coaching, recruiting, etc.) associated with maximizing this key asset have a very high priority and are one of the last items cut from budgets? By the way, how much of your capital dollars are you allocating to this asset? To truly embrace this thinking, you have to adopt a mental model of viewing your organization as a consulting company whose only value producing assets are the employees. In our last post, we laid out the case for Talent Management. In this post, we will address Competency Based Talent Management (“CBTM”) and then talk about some of the key issues in developing and executing a CBTM strategy.

The first step is determining the Intended Consequences (“IC”) of your Sourcing/Supply Chain organization. These ICs need to be directly derived from, and tied to, the overall corporate objectives and strategy of the company. Are you an organization measured by the year-over-year price savings that you get from your supply base while reducing lead time and improving quality? Or are you an organization that is measured by the impact you have in reducing sales cycles, increasing margins on existing deals, and streamlining the time to market of new product introductions? Think of this as defining the market you are trying to serve as a consulting company. Are you aspiring to impact tactical and operational Value Drivers or are you also looking to directly impact the overall corporate goals and strategy and therefore be a direct part of the elusive CEO’s agenda? That will help you determine the required characteristics of the asset base you will need to deliver on the Intended Consequences. This role definition then becomes the foundation for your desired competency model. From there, it’s on to determining where you are today, the gaps between where you are today and where you need to be, and then making sure that you have an asset maximization strategy in place that is funded for the next 3-5 years to close the gaps. Voila! All done! Obviously it’s a bit more complicated than that and we will be happy to share a very detailed model and an approach to getting it done. Here are a number of challenges that you should be aware of:

  • Commit only when you can deliver to expectations.
    CBTM will raise the expectations of the employees so make sure you are ready to launch and deliver.
  • Designing the solution is only a start.
    Focus on the adoption issues and invest as much in them as in solution design, if not more.
  • Competencies are applied skill and knowledge towards the Intended Consequences.
    The focus has to be on demonstrated application whether you are recruiting or promoting.
  • Shortage of talent is a symptom, not a cause.
    Apply systems thinking to the entire life cycle of Talent Management (recruiting, training/development, performance evaluation, career development and succession planning). Otherwise, you will always be recruiting.
  • Hold your direct reports accountable for success of CBTM.
    Ensure it’s in their goal sheets in a meaningful way.
  • It’s not a tactic — it’s a strategy.
    Account for appropriate time for the strategy.
  • Think asset portfolio maximization.

In our upcoming posts we will address some of the Next Practices associated with each of the five phases in the Competency Based Talent Management life cycle.

If you are interested in getting involved or would like to follow this topic further, here are a series of critical activities coming up:

  • Release of the results of the Executive Forum we just facilitated at the IACCM Global Forum for Contracting & Commercial Excellence on Talent Management.
  • A major research project to not identify the problem one more time but to identify Next Practices to solve the problems.
  • A webinar with IACCM on CBTM.
  • A White Paper to focus on Next Practices in CBTM.

Please contact Crystal Jones at crystalj <at> thempowergroup <dot> com for more information.

Are You Strange Enough? (Repost)

This post originally aired four years ago (on Nov 30, 2007) and is being reposted because it complements Monday’s post by Dalip Raheja on The Difficulty of Finding Qualified Supply Management Candidates very well. In Dalip’s post, he noted that you will never find a good candidate if you can’t define what qualified is. And, if you want a successful organization, qualified needs to capture the skills you want talent to possess — and these skills are highly dependent upon the outcomes that you want. In this classic Wharton article, which excerpts part of chapter four of Daniel M. Cable’s book, Change to Strange, we are told that to get the best results, companies have to build a workforce “that is extraordinary in a way that customers care about” and the only way to do this is to build your organization around measuring and gaming performance drivers . In particular, around metrics that define what you want to capture. These metrics will define the skills you want your candidates to possess, which will in turn define what qualified means, and, ultimately, help you find the right candidate. Plus, in today’s crazy economy, how can you possibly hope to win if you’re not a little strange?

Browsing through the Knowledge @ Wharton site, which is another one of those sites (like the Economist) that is just as important as the supply and spend management sites you visit every day, I stumbled upon an article published this summer that asked “If Your Workforce Is Strange Enough to Guarantee Competitive Advantage”. It’s a very good question.

The article excerpted part of Chapter four of Daniel M. Cable’s book, Change to Strange that notes what characterizes successful companies these days is a “strikingly different, obsessively focussed” workforce, one that — compared to competitors’ workforces — is “downright strange”. More specifically, to get the best results, companies have to build a workforce “that is extraordinary in a way that customers care about”.

In the excerpted chapter, the author argues that a successful organization is built around measuring and gaming performance drivers – and this is what results in a strange workforce. The development, measurement, and enactment of the performance drivers is what provides the required insight into what the organization is creating, and not creating, that is required to differentiate it from its competitors, attract customers, and, most importantly, win.

The process starts by identifying the outcome metrics that provide a valid reflection of what you think your organization exists to create. Then you find a way to make these metrics move in a way that your competitors are not willing or able to pursue. For example, if you’re a procurement outsourcing organization, you might decide that what customers value most is spend under management and spend put through the system. If this was the case, then you’d find a way to integrate best of breed on-demand SaaS technology into your offering so that not only could you put every purchase you make on behalf of the client through the system, your clients could also put every purchase they make against the contract through the system. Then, used meticulously, your customers would find over 95% of their spend against a contract you cut on their behalf would be in the system and that their spend under management goes up as a result. If your competitors think that the most important metric is total leverage-based purchasing power, you’re in a unique position if you’re right as to what customers want.

It’s also important to answer each of the following questions when you believe you have identified an outcome:

  • What produces the number – and what makes it go up or down?
  • What are the two or three most important beliefs our customers need to have about us relative to our competition to affect this outcome? How do we measure our progress toward our goal of having these beliefs accepted by the majority of our target market?
  • How can we influence the outcome in a way that is valuable, rare, and hard to imitate? What are we willing to do that the competition is not in order to drive this outcome?

For example, if you were a procurement outsourcing organization, you might come up with the following answers:

  • Spend through the system is calculated as total dollars on contracted items spent through the system divided by the total dollars spent on contracted items. It goes up when maverick spend is down, and down when maverick spend is up.
  • The two most important beliefs a customer has to have is that we mean what we say and we eat our own dog-food. We do all of our spend through the system. We measure our progress towards this goal by determining the percentage of outsourcing deals we are getting invited to bid on versus the total number of outsourcing deals that are currently happening in the marketplace.
  • We can adopt an open book policy on our own spend, and let prospective clients (under NDA) access the system and verify that our claims are valid – and this is something our competition might not be willing to do. We can also offer an on-demand spend analysis solution to our clients as part of our service offering so that they can calculate for themselves how much spend goes through the system, how much maverick spend is happening in their organization, and what commodities or categories we should be handling for them.

Thus, even though it might be a little too academic for your tastes (as the book was written by an academic who used a Business School as the example – ick!), the article had a very good point and asked some very good questions once you isolated the core of its message. If you want to be the best, it’s not enough to just work harder and more productively than everyone else … you have to be just a little bit different … and maybe even a little bit strange.

CBTM #1: The Difficulty of Finding Qualified Supply Management Candidates


Today’s guest post is from Dalip Raheja of The MPower Group, who declared that Strategic Sourcing is Dead last year, and who has returned to stir up a new hornet’s nest.

“Difficulty of Finding Qualified Supply Management Candidates” is the headline of a major research project by CAPS Research. I am glad that they are bringing renewed attention to this issue. My problem is that if you go back in the history of our profession, this issue has been in the top three issues of EVERY poll, research, think tank pronouncement, conference, etc. for close to two decades! My history goes back over three decades in the world of Supply Chain and I can remember in the early 90’s when this started to become a critical issue. And yet, here we are gathering insight yet again. We started this conversation by first defining who YOU are. Clearly not a scientific analysis but close enough for government work. We then drew some insights from the profile that was created.

Let me take the liberty of using the title to develop my call to action. Let’s start with DIFFICULTY. The question we need to ask ourselves is why are we dealing with difficulty? Clearly we are facing difficulty as a result of whatever we did or more importantly did not do in the past. We have never identified talent as a top priority in our organizations. And before you quickly pull out your strategic presentation to point to the slides, my first question will be to ask for a history of your training investment over the last five years. In fact, take a look at your total investment over the last five years in supporting your Talent strategy and compare it to other investments that your corporation has made. I bet it is nowhere close!!! How does your new hire program fare under that scrutiny? Has it been increasing over the last five years? Is the leadership in your Supply Chain organization specifically measured AND incented on the maximization of Talent? Are your people specifically measured AND incented on acquiring new competencies (not skills, not training . . . . . more on that later)? These are but some of the things that would explain the inclusion of the word DIFFICULTY in the research. At our last NPX conference and a recent Gartner event, numbers like 50, 100, 200, and 400 were being tossed as the current need of some major Global corporations in their Supply Chain organizations. I will let you digest those numbers for now and we will come back to them later. By the way, once you decide to invest in your Talent, there is an incredible amount of lead time that is required to make that happen. Those companies that are looking to hire 50 to 400 new people should have started 12 to 18 months ago.

If you are still defining FINDING as developing a job description and handing it off to your HR rep and waiting for the candidates to roll in … good luck! You need to step back and understand what your real needs are in terms of competencies for the roles that you are looking to fill. Because FINDING is also a function of what you define as QUALIFIED. You then need to develop an aggressive, comprehensive approach to attract and retain the right candidates. And unless you have thought your way through that entire life cycle, you will never resolve the issue. Let me illustrate with an actual case study. We were asked by the CFO of a major bank to help figure out why they were not able to attract any candidates to even show up at the campus job fairs for their New Hire program. We helped them realize that their brand name was not enough to attract candidates anymore. The real issues were that the prospects did not know what they wanted to do in banking yet and did not want to commit so early in their life. We redesigned the entire New Hire program to include structured six month rotations for the 1st two years (and their selections would be considered), a leadership member assigned as a formal mentor (and feedback provided by mentored to CFO on mentoring), internal job fairs by senior executives of various organizations in the bank, a “friend” assigned from the previous rotation “class”, formal group meetings where the entire “class” would get together to provide feedback, etc. And then we redesigned their marketing strategy (yes, you need to have a marketing strategy!). They had lines forming up at the campus job fairs!

As I mentioned in the last paragraph, ALL of these issues are intertwined and tied together (but I’m jumping ahead of myself). For example, if your definition of QUALIFIED does not really match your needs, you will always have DIFFICULTY FINDING candidates. The definition of QUALIFIED has to be based on the real needs of your “clients”. One of the constructs that has proven very powerful as an image that we use with our clients is to think of your organization as a consulting company. You would quickly realize that your ONLY asset that delivers value to your clients is your organizational competency and talent. Therefore, you must match your competencies to the needs of your clients, both for today and tomorrow. Otherwise, you will always be FINDING because developing organizational competency has a significant lead time.

Case in point: We just had a conversation with the CIO of a Fortune 20 client leading to the conclusion that his organizational competency was geared towards new solutions that his group had been rolling out very successfully. His problem was that his clients had not yet “adopted” the solutions yet … meaning that they had not been fully deployed. The Intended Consequences of the clients had not yet been realized. What he quickly realized was that he needed to immediately develop significant deployment competencies. Think of it as surveying your market to understand what their needs are going to be so that you can ensure that you have the right organizational competencies to deliver the value when your clients need it. Ideally, you should be a step ahead.

Finally, what do you define as a SUPPLY MANAGEMENT CANDIDATE? I guess we first need to decide what Supply Management is. Because if your definition is focused on the Supply Base and managing costs and lead times and someone else is looking at the entire value conversion process, then your SUPPLY MANAGEMENT CANDIDATE is going to look rather different from your competitor. If you think the role of Supply Management is to run an efficient process to ensure lowest cost, then you are probably not looking for candidates who can look upstream and downstream and start maximizing the entire system as opposed to the tail of the dog (supply base). If you think that Supply Management is all about the process of defining requirements and negotiating contracts, then you are probably don’t want candidates with all those so called soft skills (collaboration, teams, problem solving, etc.). Now you can see why we seem to have DIFFICULTY FINDING QUALIFIED SUPPLY MANAGEMENT CANDIDATES.

Stay tuned for our next post where we discuss Competency Based Talent Management (CBTM) as a platform for solving some of the issues we have raised here. If you are interested in getting involved or would like to follow this topic further, here are a series of critical activities coming up:

  • Release of the results of the Executive Forum we just facilitated at the IACCM Global Forum for Contracting & Commercial Excellence on Talent Management.
  • A major research project to not identify the problem one more time but to identify Next Practices to solve the problems.
  • A webinar with IACCM on CBTM.
  • A White Paper to focus on Next Practices in CBTM.

Please contact Crystal Jones at crystalj <at> thempowergroup <dot> com for more information.