Category Archives: Talent

The Talent Series X: Personnel Best

Talent location, acquisition, and retention is a big problem for many companies across the board. It’s not just restricted to the Spend Management Talent Game. Given my inclination to blog about the talent deficit, and my recent proclamation that You Will Lose Your Top Talent, it’s no surprise that the recent Supply Management article “Personnel best” caught my eye.

In the article, the author discusses some steps that you can take to insure you retain the talent you are lucky enough to attract. The steps start on day one, upon the induction of a new recruit into your corporate culture. According to the article, you should:

  • ensure a new recruit clearly understands what you expect from them
  • listen to your new recruit’s expectations
  • establish the skill sets necessary for the role
  • based on a mutual ranking understanding of their competency in each skill set, develop a career development plan and help them identify the appropriate training, experience, and knowledge they will need

Furthermore, once the induction process is over, its critical that you continue to make sure that they feel valued and empowered and that you remain involved in their career development. The article recommends that you:

  • review their progress regularly, encourage them frequently, and ensure your rewards and remuneration package keeps pace with their increasing value to your organization
  • provide leadership
  • insure any managers or supervisors that report to you share the mutual goal of advancing the careers of your underlings
  • project a positive image of the company and their role in it
  • insure workloads are fair and that your team members can maintain an appropriate work/life balance
  • give something back to the community

This is sound advice, especially considering the statistics quoted by the article:

  • 43% of top employers reported a shortfall in the graduate market last year (Association of Graduate Recruiters)
  • 86% of young people want progressive management to inspire them (Institute of Leadership and Management)
  • 52% think their manager is not helping them to develop (ILM)
  • 40% do not get along well with their manager (ILM)
  • 27% would leave an organization as a result of poor management (ILM)

We may be in a Talent Crunch, but not everyone has to lose the Talent War.

The Talent Series IX: You Will Lose Your Top Talent

In my last update, I told you how Aberdeen had raised the alarm and that rumblings were starting to appear over on Supply Excellence [WayBackMachine] and the Purchasing Certification Blog [WayBackMachine].

Now that a new year is upon us, it appears my fellow bloggers have finally accepted that a Talent Crunch is upon us and that an all-out Talent War is about to break out.  Just in time too.  Even CNN is reporting that employers cannot find the skilled workers they need.  (The article quotes Jeff Summer of Deloitte Consulting who says “I’m hearing across the board, across industries, companies indicating they can’t exploit market opportunity because they can’t find people with the right skills” and Mark Vitner of Wachovia who says “With this level of unemployment, the only way they [companies] can find the workers they need is to hire them away from someone else“.)

Over on Spend Matters, in “Assessing and Building Spend Management Talent”*, Jason lets us know that the talent question is popping up first and foremost in every discussion he has these days and that Supply & Demand Chain Executive just ran a piece bylined by Anne Kohler (The Mpower Group) on talent development, which includes a tactical approach you can use to develop and manage talent within your procurement and supply chain organizations.

Over on Supply Excellence, Tim outlines his five top challenges that supply managers will face in 2007 and one of these challenges is that you will lose your top talent. According to Tim, his personal interactions with supply management executives validates Aberdeen’s finding that recruiting and keeping top talent is the top risk facing CPO’s (Chief Procurement Officers) today.

And over on Eric Jackon’s Breakout Performance blog, he tells us that even highly successful companies are realizing that their continued success depends on being able to select, retain, and motivate great people, but that these companies acknowledge that they don’t really know what to do.

So what can you do? Eric tells us that you that you have to develop sophisticated programs that actually address the problem of keeping your best people and finding more to further accelerate your growth. Tim gets more to the point when he tells you that you have to pay competitively, provide a clear career path, provide ongoing training, and invest in technology and my previous posts in the talent series compile a host of recommendations for you to chew on.

However, by now you’re probably so overwhelmed that you’re wondering Where do I begin?. The first step is keeping your best people. Improving your chances of holding on to your top talent is really a lot easier than you might think. In many cases it comes down to simply ensuring the following three conditions hold true.

  • Your pay scales are *very* competitive.Today’s surveys that tell you that money is not the most important consideration in the minds of today’s top talent are a double edged sword. They are good in that they open your eyes to the fact that money alone will not solve your problems and that having deep pockets no longer guarantees success, but they are bad (very, very, bad) in that they lead executives into a false sense of security that “paying market average” is enough to keep your top talent. They’re right in that if you are paying market average, it’s not likely to be the number one source of disgruntlement (or the problem you need to fix to keep your top people), but they overlook the fact that it is still, more often than not, the top reason your people will go somewhere else. Let’s say market average is believed to be 70K – 80K for a commodities purchasing manager, you’re paying Bob 70K, and Bob’s not complaining (or even asking for a raise). You might think Bob is happy with his salary, Bob, who sees the survey, might think he is relatively happy with his salary, but then Joe comes along from your competition and says “Bob: we desperately need you. We’re prepared to pay you 82K a year.” Do you really think Bob’s going to say “Sorry, I’m happy with my 70K a year” and turn down a 15% raise, especially if his perception of the job offer and overall benefits package is roughly equivalent to what he’s getting now? I don’t think so. Since today’s talent wants more than just money, the surveys are right in that its true that your failure to pay more than your competition is not going to be in your employees top “pet peeves” with their current job, but ultimately wrong in that an offer for significantly more money will not lure them away. (“For 20% more a year, I can buy my own health club membership and add a golf club membership on top.”)
  • Every employee has a rewarding job.This will mean different things to different employees. Some employees will want to be challenged daily. Others will want to feel a continual sense of accomplishment. Some will want a detailed career path. Others will just want security. Make sure every manager in your organization spends time listening to each of his or her reports and working on ways to increase their job satisfaction. Too much paperwork? Invite them to brainstorming sessions. Too many long term projects with no chance to feel a sense of accomplishment on a regular basis? Let them substitute for your resources that normally work on “the little things” when they go on vacation. They don’t feel challenged? Brainstorm a new initiative and let them devote one day a week to it (like Google) and see if it pays off. Get creative. Let’s face it – most surveys agree that the number one factor that keeps an employee on the job is “they like it”. If they like the job, and your pay is ultra-competive, it will be very, very hard for your competition to lure them away. That being said, there’s still one more quality you should have.
  • You are generous and creative with benefits.Let’s face it – everyone wants perks, and many perks are a lot cheaper for you to buy than the employee (especially group plans). The key here is to not offer what you think the employees want, but what they tell you they want (so don’t be afraid to ask!). Of course you need to have the basics covered (health, disability, and life), since it is still the case that most of your employees will want or need these, but beyond that, understand that there might not be an across the board solution. Just because the sales guys want a club membership doesn’t mean engineering will. Just because your your purchasing guys like the gym doesn’t mean finance will.

    Create a benefits fund and be prepared to sponsor those activities that significant groups of employees want, and make sure that every time you add a benefit for one group, you add a benefit for another group. Create categories, and let employees manage them. For example, a professional development category and a health category would be a great start. Developers can go to tech conferences, sales and marketing can go to seminars, and your purchasing managers can take training courses and have them partially sponsored by the professional development fund. Some employees can get gym memberships others can get massages and have it sponsored by the health category. Also, be sure to work out corporate discounts for any activity that a significant portion of your employee base wants (if a lot of people want a gym membership, arrange with the local gym for a corporate rate). Help your employees with their personal needs that affect their work life and, in addition, if you are a mid-size company, consider hiring a concierge in HR to do just that. If you are a large company, then you could have a significant number of employees with children who often need help finding daycare. You could maintain a register of local day cares, and if you are large enough, reserve a certain number of slots at the local day care for your employees.

    Let’s face it, paying top dollar and making each and every employee’s job rewarding is a great hook and line – since it will be tough for many of your competitors to beat that – but flexible and personalized benefits is the sinker, since this is usually the trio that attracts someone to a job, or causes them to leave it.

    * All posts prior to 2012 were removed in the Spend Matters site refresh in June, 2023.

The Talent Series VIII.V: Boarding the Bandwagon

I’ve been bemoaning the talent issue for months – ever since I realized that it was a lot worse than just about everyone* would like us to think that it is. With the exception of a few brilliant posts on the Spend Management Talent Game (Part I*, Part II*, and Part III*) by The Prophet, and a few posts back in September on “Attracting Great Talent the Jack Welch Way” by Tim Minahan on Supply Excellence [WayBackMachine] and “Behaviors Correlated to Performance” by THE BLOGGING THUNDER FROM DOWN UNDER on Vendor Management (renamed Contract Capital Management, [WayBackMachine]) it seemed as though I stood alone in my belief in the criticality of The Talent War and my continual efforts to convey to you the extreme urgency of The Impending Crunch.

Fortunately, Aberdeen has raised the alarm and both Supply Excellence and the Purchasing Certification Blog [WayBackMachine] have taken up the cause.

Now you can be confident that I’m not just echoing the cries of the recruiting agencies (whose profits are highest when your needs are most desperate) and go out and attack the problem before it attacks you. I still recommend the Talent Acquisition Strategies I laid out previously and would also recommend that you use my other posts in The Talent Series as a starting point for your research in your efforts to define winning strategies.

* With the exception of the 3rd party recruiting agencies, of course – but they’ve been crying wolf for so long, it’s often easy to ignore their cries.

* All posts prior to 2012 were removed in the Spend Matters site refresh in June, 2023.

Scott Adams, A Supply Management Guru?

Regular readers of this blog or Spend Matters should recall Jason Busch’s post on “The Spend Management Talent Game”# where he indicated that when seeking out talent, an organization should value generalist skill sets, raw intellect and EQ (emotional intelligence) over industry and domain knowledge. Spend Management professionals need to understand the world around them and possess general problem solving skills that go beyond functional — or even technology — knowledge. Technology skills can be taught. It’s far harder to find someone with the analytical skills to navigate complex total cost decisions and the emotional maturity and interpersonal skills to sell such analyses both up and down the company.

In simple terms, if you want to be a better supply chain professional, you should focus on improving your general problem solving skills and EQ first, since domain knowledge is much easier to learn and can be readily absorbed from an appropriate expert once you have the raw intellectual capacity to absorb it. Furthermore, since EQ is required for general problem solving skills, and since general problem solving skills can be improved through repeated application using tried and true problem solving methodologies as guides (some of which I have discussed here in this blog or in my summer series over at e-Sourcing Forum [WayBackMachine]), it should be clear that your number one goal is to improve your EQ.

So how do you improve your EQ, which is not the same as improving your emotional range? (i.e. Sitting around watching chick-flick movies all day won’t help us guys.) I’ll admit that I struggled with this for a bit until I realized the answer was obvious – learn from the best, and if you can find one, a guru. But where do you find an EQ guru? One who will happily share his or her wisdom, and preferably, share such wisdom with you regularly simply for the satisfaction of knowing that he or she may make you a better person? (After all, a true guru is one who readily shares his or her knowledge, not one that sells you snake oil until you’re broke and then vanishes.) After all, the world of business is littered with “finance” gurus or “real estate gurus” or “M&A gurus” or “management gurus”, not EQ gurus. So I was back to square one – no idea on where you should go to improve your raw EQ (since my strengths are in problem solving and application of such techniques to the supply chain domain and imparting sophisticated domain knowledge in the areas of math, computer science, and logic) since I wasn’t sure where to go to improve mine.

Then it dawned on me – the answer was under my nose all along! (Literally, since today I’m smelling sweet Bay Area California air, and since I live in the real NorthEast, at this time of year my nostrils would normally be too cold to smell anything!) I was already absorbing great advice from an EQ guru everyday, and didn’t even know it! And for you non-observant, that Guru is Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert Blog (and the Dilbert comic strip, and four of the best business books ever published, etc.).

Moreover, some of his advice is so good, that I would say he could even be proclaimed a Supply Management Guru! Furthermore, I am going to present my case solely on the insights that he has shared with us in the past month alone!

October 24, 2006 Good News Day
Scott proves that optimism is a powerful tool and that just because no one else has ever recovered from a seemingly hopeless situation or solved a problem before does not mean that you can’t be the first! Furthermore, I would like to add a corollary to this that just because someone says you cannot do something, it does not mean they are right. Usually it means that they cannot (or believe they cannot, but that’s the same thing.) There is a chance that they may be right, but it is often a (diminishingly) small one. Furthermore, a failure is always relative to certain conditions or assumptions. So next time someone says something like “We tried that ten years ago, and it didn’t work.“, don’t accept it at face value. Find out precisely what they tried, what precisely they did, and precisely what the assumptions and market conditions were. If the conditions have changed, if the project was managed poorly, or if the arrangement was arms-length, maybe a different arrangement or management structure will work today.

October 25, 2006 My Day as a Neanderthal
Scott tells us that he feels cut off from the world when his primary means of communication and interaction goes down, and points out that we are at our best not only when we use all the resources that are at our disposal, but work with others whose knowledge and skills can complement our own.

October 28, 2006 I Got Your Free Will Right Here!
Scott asks “If free will exists, why do the tallest candidates with the best hair usually win elections?” and points out that the correlation is incredibly strong despite that the most poorly informed voter understands that neither hair nor height have any correlation with competence. He also points out that you can see the same bias in favor of tall, good looking people in business too and that there are plenty of studies showing that tall and/or attractive people earn substantially more than short, ugly people and they get promoted faster too. Furthermore, there are tons of similar examples where companies can manipulate customer behavior by altering colors and music and odors at stores and that none of those things change the quality of the products, and yet they change people’s buying decisions.

In other words, we’re naturally very illogical people and we have to work hard to make sure that logic is the basis for our decisions, not just gut instinct.

November 2, 2006 Stem Cells
Scott says I don’t debate with advocates. An advocate says that everything is right about one position and everything is wrong about the other side. You might as well debate with a doorknob. I only debate people who say, in effect, “There’s an argument to be made on both sides, but here’s why one side seems more persuasive.” That person could theoretically be swayed by new information or a better argument. Simply put, you can’t be logical with the illogical. Don’t butt heads – it’ll have the same effect as pointing out the inconsistencies in the bible to a Jehovah’s Witness. If you can, work around these individuals. If you can’t, you’ll either find a creative way to make your position more attractive to the irrational nitwit or consider a job change. (Otherwise, you’ll just stress yourself out for no good reason.)

November 7, 2006 My Search for Clarity
In a clear demonstration of his wisdom, Scott says as regular readers know, I am too ignorant to have opinions on most big issues. It does not matter who you are, you do not know everything. This also means that you cannot be an expert in everything. The only way to grow as a person and improve your skills is to admit what you don’t know and then seek out that knowledge.

November 14, 2006 Are Smart People Dumb?
Scott asks Why would I limit the quality of my advice to people who don’t know any more than I do? In other words, just because someone is famous, your superior, or your mentor, it does not mean that they will always have the right answer. Just like the rest of us, they have their areas of weaknesses as well as their areas of expertise. When you have a tough problem, go to the experts and see what they have to say. And the s is bold for a reason. You should seek multiple opinions, and explanations therefor. Experts are people too, they don’t always agree, and they will occasionally be wrong. (Just significantly less than the average person, as that’s the definition of an expert.) Furthermore, Scott also points out that genius alone does not a smart person make, especially when it comes to a (specific) real world problem.

November 16, 2006 Who Can’t be Hypnotized?
Scott deftly points that we are all in the business of influencing people and outlines the technique of hypnotic induction that you can use to help calm the tense individuals who will be reading and judging your work and ease them into the relaxed state of mind that they will need to be in to make a fair assessment.

November 17, 2006 Aging Brains
Scott tells us that we should release all knowledge of complicated explanations for the world whenever simpler ones will do the trick. The KISS rule is universal. Don’t forget it!

November 18, 2006 Philosophical Brevity
If you want to get your point across, be smart and brief.

November 24, 2006 Complicated Decisions
Scott points out that he often makes a decision on the easy to predict and important factor(s) and ignores the impossible to predict factors. This is because while you can’t know the RIGHT decision, you can know the RATIONAL decision. Although you can’t always ignore the unknown, the reality is that the unknown should not be the basis for your decision. After all, there will always be unknowns. Let’s choose freight. The airplane could crash. The boat could sink. The truck could be stolen at gunpoint. It doesn’t matter, there is always risk. If you’re worried, take out insurance. However, the airplane will be fastest and cost the most. The cargo ship will be slowest and cost the least. If speed is of the utmost importance, choose air. If cost is of the utmost importance, choose sea. Strike possibilities, terrorist attacks, etc. etc. etc. are always there, regardless of method, so don’t base your decisions on these unknown factors. Simply have a backup plan in place to mitigate risk, insurance to mitigate loss, focus on what’s important, and get the job done. Otherwise, you’ll be a hypochondriac before you know it.

And if that does not convince you that Scott Adams is an EQ and Supply Management Guru, I don’t know what will. Furthermore, he also doles out great advice on a wide range of topics on a regular basis. In the last month alone, he has told us how to Avoid Obscenity in our Documents*, select Comic Assess we can safely post on our cubicle walls, and be featured on 60 Minutes. What more could you ask for?

* If you don’t get it, you should use bullets, not asterisks.

It's too bad Scott Adams had to take these classic posts down on request of Portfolio Hardcover when they published Stick to Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain that was a collection of his blog posts through part of 2007.

# All posts prior to 2012 were removed in the Spend Matters site refresh in June, 2023.