Category Archives: Talent

The Talent Innovation Imperative

Any company that competes on the global stage must, in light of today’s changing workforce, rethink the way it manages people.

Too many companies are wasting their resources — their people and their financial leverage — by perpetuating outdated approaches to talent management. They structure jobs rigidly, forcing many people to work a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, workweek. They focus their training on functional skills, not on aligning employees’ capabilities with the strategic objectives of the business. For leadership development and career advancement, they rely on long-standing training courses that don’t reflect the contributions that people can make in today’s flat, flexible, and entrepreneurial organizations. And their compensation systems do not adequately link to performance or hold managers accountable for developing the talent of their staff and their direct reports. In short, the talent management in these companies is not arming them with the decisive, experienced, globally minded visionaries that they need at every level.
  DeAnne Aguirre, Laird Post, and Sylvia Ann Hewlett in The Talent Innovation Imperative

This opening paragraph from the Autumn issue of Strategy + Business is, in a word, AWESOME! Creativity and Innovation doesn’t work on a 9 to 5 schedule, there are millions of people in India and China with the functional skills in demand in today’s knowledge economy, and you never get anywhere if all you do is stand in line. So why are you queueing your employees instead of helping them reach their full potential? And more importantly, why are you putting talent management innovation off? The midst of a global economic crisis only heightens the need for talent at the top of their game. Furthermore, the commitment of employees is most needed in a crunch, and it’s not likely to be there if they feel you don’t respect them (and think they’re lucky to have a job). And if you think you’re not losing their loyalty, think again. As quoted in the article, as per surveys conducted by the Center for Work-Life Policy, between June 2007 and December 2008, the number of employees expressing loyalty to employers plunged from 95% to 39% while the number trusting their employees fell from 79% to 22%. Surveys in 2009 were even more dismal. Voluntary attrition has spiked by as much as 31% — among the people you need most to get you through these troubled times.

So what can you do? Embrace new employment structures, differentiate capabilities, accelerate performance, develop leadership, and foster a talent culture.

Embrace New Employment Structures

Allow for highly responsible part time work, telecommuting, contracting, and lots of flex time. Retain your aging workforce with their experience — who don’t want to work full time any more but don’t want to completely retire either, and use them to mentor your junior hires. Let people work from remote areas and maintain their community links. Let people work contract until both parties are comfortable and ready for a direct relationship. And let them work on their schedules as well as yours.

Differentiate Capabilities

Understand the key capabilities, not functional skills, required for competitive advantage, determine the skill gaps in your current workforce, and develop talent strategies to close them. Then develop new and diverse attraction and retention values that include competitive compensation and benefits packages, innovative job designs, flexible schedules, career development opportunities, strong leadership, a distinctive culture, and a welcoming work environment. Furthermore, you should pursue a workforce that is global, diverse, and gender balanced, with discontinuous career progressions, in which high-potential employees may take time off or work for different types of organizations along the way.

Performance Acceleration

Organizational success hinges on the collective daily decisions and actions of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individual employees. To ensure that the decisions are in tune with success, reinforce meritocratic pay and promotion decisions, follow through, and measure outcomes.

Leadership Development

Leaders today must be able to master enormous complexity, but too few leaders have the right combination of skils and experience. Companies that want to improve their leadership development must evolve the leadership competencies model, promote and develop people who match the competencies (and who cultivate a team that performs well), and build the leadership bench, because one leader is no longer enough (and a bench will be needed to seat them all).

Talent Culture

A talent culture is made up of the value, beliefs, behaviours, and environment required to attract, engage, and retain committed and competent employees. A great culture is not accidental, it is the result of engagement, proper organization, and a commitment to the “talent brand” and a visible “talent culture”. Engagement is key, as more than 100 studies have demonstrated the correlation between employee engagement and business performance. Right now, at most 1 in 4 employees is “engaged”. If you want to lead the pack in today’s economy, getting employees engaged is the surest way to do so.

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“You’re Lucky to Have a Job” is NOT a Talent Retention Strategy

While reading “The Talent Game”on the SSO Network (membership required) Panel Discussion transcript, I was horrified to read that one participant said that many employees are being told they are lucky to have a job — that is one form of retention. Simply put, it’s disgusting. Not only does it show an utter lack of respect for the employee, but it also shows an utter lack of competence in talent management.

Even if you recently went through a layoff, presumably the employees you retained are those employees who were best at the jobs you needed done. These are, by definition, the same employees your competitor would also keep in the same situation. And since these are the best employees, these are the employees that companies who didn’t have the same talent pool to draw from before the recession are desperately seeking in an economy where they need a workforce who can do more with less. Maybe your employees are lucky to be making a high salary, or to be receiving above average benefits, or to be working at a company that challenges them on a daily basis in a job they like, but they are not lucky to have a job. Even if she has to make a sacrifice in pay, benefits, or flexibility, a good employee can always find a job.

So if you still think that your employees are lucky to have a job, you better wake up and smell the coffee before they do. Otherwise, you might find that your best employees are leaving for your competition as soon as the economy recovers.

The Best Supply Chains are Flexible in Design and in the Office

A recent article over on Discovery News that headlined that “Employees With Flex Time Put In More Hours” is a must-read. Consider the headline findings:

  • working the usual nine to five may not be the ideal schedule for employees or employers
  • workers with flexible hours are not only more satisfied with their jobs, they also work more intensely
  • the findings also apply to remote workers and employees with reduced office hours

Basically, as those of us who work flex, or who have worked in flex environments know, it’s a boon to your business if you’re in a knowledge industry. And it has nothing to do with the quoted theory that the “intensified work effort given to employers is reciprocity for the relaxed schedule”. It has to do with the fact that not everything about life can be scheduled and, as a result, some days, nine-to-five will not be the best time for your employee to work.

Consider the following:

  • your employee gets a 24-hour virus at 1:00 pm on Wednesday
  • your employee’s toddler is ill and his partner is not available until noon on Thursday
  • an accident Thursday morning shuts down the main highway between your employee’s house and your office and triples commute time

If your employee comes into work Thursday morning, how productive is your employee going to be if he comes in

  • sick,
  • worried, or
  • stressed out from road rage

vs. waiting until Thursday afternoon when he’s well, not worried, and not stressed?

If you’ve hired the right employee, who likes his job and believes in the company as much as the company should believe in him, he wants to do a good job and will happily put in the time it needs to get the job done right, even if it means going (significantly) beyond 40 hours once in a while if it doesn’t (significantly) interfere with his life. Instead of 9-5 on Thursday, he’d probably happily do 1-10, or a few spare hours on the weekend. And if he can do it at home, and not have to waste an hour or two on an office commute, he’ll find it easy to find those hours. Most of what we do is not grunt work, it’s brain work, and that work gets done best when we are at are best and not distracted, plain and simple. And when your employees are allowed to control at least some of their schedules, you’ll find that they’ll organize said schedules so that you get their peak productivity times. So loosen up. You’ll be a better organization for it.

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Yet Another Feather in Private Equity’s Cap

A recent article in CNNMoney.com on best places to work pointed out that if you look at Fortune’s latest list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For, you’ll note an interesting trend: you can’t buy stock in four of the top five. In fact, 9 of the top 20 best companies are privately held and 40 of the top 100 do not have stock you can buy and sell on the NYSE or Nasdaq. There are also 15 non-profits, 2 partnerships, and 1 cooperative. In all, only 42 companies of the top 100 are public.

What gives? The author’s theory is that without having pesky shareholders to satisfy, these firms can probably worry more about keeping employees happy than satisfying the whims of Wall Street. And, more importantly, these employees can, in turn, worry more about keeping the customers happy, which generally boils down to better products and better services, which they can focus on instead of trying to meet artificial sales numbers or profit estimates. After all, the “over-promise now, make up later” strategy generally only results in under-delivery, which triggers cancelled contracts or bad publicity, which lowers profitability, which in turn demands layoffs, which stresses out the people who are left, who either leave or perform worse, which exacerbates the situation and puts the company into a funk it might not recover from.

So when you’re upgrading that platform or looking for world-class consulting services, remember this: just like bigger is not better, public is not necessarily better either. In fact, this recent survey on “the voice of experience” in the McKinsey Quarterly indicates it might actually be worse!

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Winning the Talent War in China

The McKinsey Quarterly recently published an interview with Emmanuel Hemmerle, a principal with Heidrick & Struggles, on “Winning the Talent War in China”. It had some great information for those multi-nationals who are looking to expand into China or who are having problems finding the top level talent they need.

It had a number of good points that you should not miss. These include:

  • Top Talent is NOT Cheaper in China
    Packages for top talent — with experience, skill sets and responsibility equal to their counterparts in Europe and the US — are often higher.
  • Strong and Weak Performers Have to be Differentiated
    Failure to do so will seem unfair and may lead to resentment.
  • You Will Need to Invest In China
    In some areas, the market economy is quite new, like luxury goods which really started ten years ago. Senior talent just isn’t available. You have to instead look for rising talent and take them the rest of the way yourself.
  • Talent in China Looks for Careers
    They are very sophisticated and, like their American and European counterparts, are looking at the long term impact of any offer on their career.
  • You Need to Localize
    A majority of the management team of the China operation should be mainland Chinese as this supports localization by showing that you see them as your equals, which they are if you have sought out and hired their top talent. (With a population that is more than four times that of the US, they have four times as many geniuses. Remember that.)
  • You Need to Seek Out the Best
    You should not only know who your top competitors are, but who their top people are and try to recruit them. Even if you don’t get your first choices, it shows your commitment to identifying and hiring the best talent.
  • You Need to Embrace the Culture
    You need to provide them with an environment that is attractive to them. This will include the fostering of a relatively non-hierarchical environment with growth opportunities for each individual, opportunities for each individual to get promoted to the top, and socially responsible activities.

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