Category Archives: Talent

The SSON’s Top Ten Tips for Talent Development

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The ultimate key to supply chain success is having a great team. More than anything else, supply chain is about people who implement the processes, use the technology, and use the physical assets you have to create value that consumers will buy. That’s why this blog keeps hammering on the importance of talent and why you should at least browse this article on the “top ten tips for talent development” from the SSON because, more than anything else, top talent is what is going to get you through this downturn.

So let’s get to them.

  1. Hire With Development in Mind
    The great thing about top talent is they want to be top talent, and they recognize that this means continued development and proving themselves every day (because Shift Happens). If you show you’re committed to workforce development, you’ll attract a much better pool of candidates from the start.
  2. Observe and Encourage
    Identify the star performers who are already within your organization and offer them the training and opportunities they need to shine.
  3. Provide the Bigger Picture
    Not only is the whole greater than the sum of its parts, but an employee who understands the whole will create a much better part.
  4. Create Uniformity throughout the Organization
    Make talent development an organizational effort, not just a spot-effort by individual managers.
  5. Create Development Centers
    This institutionalizes development in your organization.
  6. Acknowledge the Benefits of External Development
    Not all expertise is within your organization, in fact, most of it is outside the four walls. Taking advantage of external expertise is what really allows your organization to shine.
  7. Encourage Participation in Industry Events
    Not only will your employees learn, but they’ll meet people who can help them keep learning.
  8. Leverage Internal Events
    This gives more junior employees the chance to increase their skills and abilities and eventually take full advantage of the opportunities external events have to offer.
  9. Have the Right Trainers in Place
    The right trainer makes all the difference.
  10. Don’t Forget the Incentives
    That’s what incentivizes your employees to learn as much as they can and excel at their jobs … which is what provides the most value to your organization.

Get Noticed and Keep Your Sourcing or Procurement Job

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SupplyManagement.com recently ran a good article on “10 ways to get noticed” and lift your profile during this recession. Most are pretty obvious, but it’s still a good refresher article.

  1. Cut Costs
    Even though best-in-class procurement is about cost avoidance, not savings, in troubled time, cutting costs is what gets you noticed. So attack those sacred cow service categories with strategic sourcing and decision optimization, save big, and be an organizational hero.
  2. Engage Colleagues
    The best results come from cross-functional teams who work together to identify not the best price, but the best overall value for the company when all factors are considered, and the most recognition goes to the procurement professional who can organize a team and lead them down a path to success.
  3. Demonstrate SRM Skills
    When times are tough, they’re doubly so for your suppliers. To get the most from any supplier relationship, the relationship has to be managed. That takes a special breed of procurement professional who can work with the supplier, and not just beat them over the head demanding cost reductions.
  4. Consider Cash Flow
    Right now, the CFO likely only has one thing on her mind … making the next payroll while keeping the lights on. Anything you can do to help her will make you an instant organizational hero.
  5. Eliminate Risk
    Chances are, your organization is currently facing more risks than any one individual can count, let alone keep track of. If you can eliminate just one major risk, you’ll get noticed.
  6. Innovate and Be Flexible
    Smart organizations are starting to realize the same-old, same-old isn’t good enough any more and that they need to innovate. This means that they’re looking for innovators to lead the transformation. It could be you …
  7. Be A Leader
    There are lots of followers out there. But not enough leaders to lead the transformations that will be necessary for most businesses to survive.
  8. Stay Up To Speed With Training
    Your company needs someone who can thrive in today’s marketplace, not yesterday’s.
  9. Know Your Strengths
    Leverage them and stick to them.
  10. A Little Self Publicity Goes a Long Way
    Be sure to publicize and capture your successes. A hint of modesty is good, but too much will find you lost in the crowd.

What You Really Need To Know About Workforce Optimization

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A recent Industry Week article on “what you need to know about workforce optimization” did a great job of summing up what you really need to know in one sentence.

Sustained commitment to employee training and development counters downturns and results in long-term growth and recovery success.

You don’t need “workforce optimization” software. You don’t need a Big 5 HR review. You don’t need predictive indices. You just need to focus on your people, make sure they have everything they need to succeed — which includes regular training and development, and stay out of their way when they’re getting the job done. That’s the key to a great company … and since great companies achieve long term growth … it’s also the key to success even in these troubled times.

The Top 10 Myths of Workforce Development

Industry week recently ran a great piece on “the top 10 myths of workforce development” that is worth repeating since there is a big difference between effective workforce development that will increase the productivity of your staff and ineffective workforce development that will decrease the motivation of your staff.

  1. If you build it, they will come.
    Tell that to the manager who spent a million dollars on a “smart” toilet paper dispenser that insured no one could take more than the allotted number of tabs per trip to the toilet.
  2. When times are tough, cut training first.
    When times are tough, you should double the training budget as you have to get lean and mean. If you really need to cut, fire the moron in management who is the first to suggest you cut training.
  3. Just build e-learning courses. It’s cheaper.
    You need customized content development by an expert, which is costly, and then customized IT development, which is costly, and then controlled testing to make sure your students took the course and grasped the material, which is costly. If you add it all up, you’ll find that custom e-learning course development is not cheap at all.
  4. All training must be done in an instructor-based classroom setting in order to be valuable and convey important knowledge.
    Uhm, no. Some training can be pre-defined cookie-cutter web-training. Some can be on-line multi-media delivery. Some can be classroom.
  5. Once learners go through training, the manager never needs to find out how they are applying what they learned … that’s why they went through training.
    The first thing the manager needs to do is find out what they aren’t applying that they learned and how he can redesign processes and remove roadblocks to help his employees apply that knowledge.
  6. It is always better to look for your own local vendor.
    You need the experts, regardless of where they are located.
  7. Sending people on a training course will solve all performance problems and development needs.
    Sending people on a course will help them identify all the performance problems that are likely your fault. Until you eliminate those, there will continue to be performance problems.
  8. It will be obvious to a skilled trainer what each class participant needs so there is no need to discuss it in advance.
    As a former Professor and Professional Trainer, I love this one. I’m supposed to know the difference between a student who is staring blankly because he doesn’t know the prerequisite material from one who has trouble with the language of the course from one with an attention deficit disorder from one who finds the material too remedial if he won’t talk and you never discussed the goals and individual learning needs with me? HA!
  9. I’ve done presentations. Professional trainers make out that it is far more difficult than it really is.
    There’s blowing your own horn and actually conveying knowledge to another person. I would contest that many “presenters” don’t know the difference.
  10. We don’t need a university — we have a learning management system.
    If you hear this, be sure to follow it with a “and we don’t need you either” because if that kind of thinking is allowed to fester in your organization, you can forget about ever achieving any innovation whatsoever.

The Worst Cut You Can Make

Times are tough. Your sales are dropping. Your costs aren’t. And your balance sheet is bleeding red. You have to cut. I get it. But you DON’T have to cut resources – especially A level and B level talent! As yet another recent article (in Material Handling & Management) points out, cutting talented staff is a desperate measure that diminishes value in the long run.

Not only does it have a severely negative impact on productivity (the drop in morale decreases productivity across the board, which is a double whammy as you no longer have enough resources to get the job done right), but it greatly increases the risk of a major supply chain failure which could bankrupt you. Consider the recent highly publicized peanut recall. According to media reports, Stewart Parnell, president of the bankrupt Peanut Corporation of America, told employees that quality measures were too expensive and time consuming. If you have a sufficient number of high quality resources, you can do quality control in-house cost effectively — but only if you have a sufficient number of high quality resources, which you won’t have if you go around indiscriminately cutting your workforce without regards to the total cost to the business.

Furthermore, I’ve never encountered a situation where there wasn’t a better option. Not that long ago I was talking with a colleague at a consultancy who spent weeks working out a 500,000 productivity improvement that would be realized over the next 12 months and cost the company less than 50,000 to implement. Instead, the company chose to reduce costs by cutting a 45,000 resource (which prevented them from undertaking the initiative). All I can say is where’s the logic in that? Especially since the company *guaranteed* the savings and was offering a contract where they wouldn’t get paid until the savings were achieved. (Save 4K a month at the expense of 40K a month? That’s just dumb.) And I hear this story day after day and week after week from consultancies that identify 500,000 to 5,000,000 (or more) but the customer won’t pull the trigger because it will cost them a few thousand of expenses up front. (And I mean a few thousand, most of the bigger consultancies these days, and even some of the SaaS solution providers, are willing to offer results-based pricing where you don’t pay consulting fees until the contract is completed or until you realize the savings necessary to cover the consulting fee.)

So don’t cut head-count. Use them to tackle 3X, 5X, 7X, and even 10X ROI opportunities that will help you get back to the black before you bleed to death.