Does Size Matter?

As much as the idea of a linear relationship between organizational size and size of the Talent Management function is an attractive one, the relationship between the two is far from simple and many other variables come into the mix.

As you plan on designing and staffing a Talent Management organization, here are a few questions to consider:

• Would you consider the organization fairly sophisticated in its TM practices?
• Does the organization pursue multiple lines of business?
• Is the organization multi-local, with very different talent needs across regions?

If you answer yes on any of these three, your organization is more diverse in its needs than the average. Therefore you are likely to need more dedicated TM resources than the average. Now consider the following questions:

• Are line managers proficient in and accountable for key TM practices (selection, onboarding, development, succession management, etc.)
• Are there opportunities to share TM practices across business or geographic boundaries (e.g., through a global Center of Excellence or Shared Services organization?)
• Are several of your TM functions “outsourceable” ?

If you answer yes to any of these questions, you are more likely to need fewer dedicated TM resources than the average. Of course, each of these questions also impacts the type and quality of the TM talent you need to build or hire.

Five-point Leadership Development Plan

Given the shifting demographics of the next 10-15 years, organizations are set to face dramatically high attrition rates among senior executive ranks. Some companies are proactively preparing themselves for this challenge and increasing their investments in identifying and developing future leaders. But many are feeling overwhelmed by the magnitude of the challenge and expressing anxiety and frustration over what they perceive as antiquated talent management principles and tools.
Observing and working with some companies at the forefront of leadership development, here are five good practices (who can really say they are best?) worth highlighting:

1. Define what Leadership Potential means
Start with looking for answer to this simple question: what is the individual's long-term career potential and to what extent does he or she appear to possess the drive and capabilities characteristics of a senior leader?

2. Zero in on development
Focus development efforts on the one or two competencies that if successfully demonstrated by candidates would help build confidence in their ability to be successful one or two levels of leadership above their current role.

3. Focus on high-impact development solutions
Clearly communicate development objectives to the candidate's new leader and other managers in the area to ensure that the candidate receives feedback and support, especially in the crucial early months of the assignment. Emphasize the importance of on-the-job forms of development and deploy intensive feedback and coaching which can best achieve significant changes to behavioral/leadership styles. Executive perspective is usually best addressed through frequent new job experiences.

4. Provide support and reinforcement
Ensure that a proactive development approach is in place to support people in stretch assignments by providing “transitional” coaching to high-potential candidates and implement onboarding processes to help candidates connect with their new leadership teams. Cross “sink or swim” assignments from your list; they mostly lead to lose-lose, disastrous results.

5. Assess development and learning agility
Define performance indicators carefully. For example, the magnitude and pace of change may over time render an executive prior experience obsolete. That is why many companies hold an executive's learning agility as the single best predictor of leadership potential.

Succession Management at the Forefront of Boards' agenda

The growing public scrutiny on boards in publicly-traded companies has contributed to greatly increase their focus in several areas of management, from risk management to compensation. Although the responsibilities of a board have traditionally included CEO succession management, their line of sight would have rarely gone beyond the CEO’s heir apparent. Not so anymore. More boards are now extending the scope of their oversight to consider a broader range of succession management issues, well beyond the CEO’s leadership team. There are at least three driving forces for this increased level of board engagement. First, Competitive pressure – as companies struggle to win a competitive edge over their competitors, a strong leadership pipeline remains key to success – an asset hard to build and harder to sustain. Second, CEO turnover and executive mobility - companies compete for top executive talent and transience in the executive workforce makes it challenging for an organization – let alone their board - to know at any time their executive bench strength. Finally, Board oversight expectations – boards are now expected to know – not just believe – that the company’s leadership pipeline is strong and reliable.
To effectively respond to the heightened demand for robust succession management, we advise boards and management teams to consider the following practices:

1. Conduct a robust assessment of your internal executive talent, looking at strengths and weaknesses of executives from the top senior team to two levels down.

2. Define competencies and values needed for where the market is taking your business and assess your talent against these so that your recruitment, engagement and retention efforts are directly helping build the talent needed to lead the future organization.

3. Analyze the size and importance of talent gaps between current leadership and future needs so as to focus your selection and development efforts. Conduct this analysis with a strong knowledge and appreciation of the organization’s structure, ensuring that mission-critical roles are properly prioritized and addressed.

4. Conduct executive assessment in a cyclical way, looking for opportunities for continuous improvement.

Conducting rigorous assessment of executive talent, rooted in a clear understanding of both current role descriptions and future needs is key. Leaders – the CEO and the Board – must also show their use and command of sound critical judgment for discriminating between average and exceptional talent.

Dashboard for High-Potentials Programs

Here is a dashboard template we recently designed for high-potential programs. It includes leading and lagging indicators (respectively on the left and right sides of the dashboard). Click on the image to see the details.

What is Your Executive Development Program Worth?

This question is likely on the minds of many Talent Management leaders and Chief Learning Officers who are charged with bringing the right development solutions that narrow the competency gaps between what leaders can do today and what they must do tomorrow.
Surprisingly, many of them are still uncertain and reticent about deploying mechanisms to confidently uncover the answer with compelling and objective evidence. Instead, they have largely relied on attendance figures or “smile sheets” to determine whether their investments in the development of their executives – which for large Fortune 500 organizations can easily run into millions of dollars – translates into greater performance by leaders and strategic achievements for the organization.
The rationale they offer is often the same: how would one demonstrate with confidence that an executive’s participation in a development program solely accounts for changes occurring in their performance down the road?
Their hesitation is understandable but can easily be challenged with the consideration of simple solutions that, when applied with the proper level of discipline and focus, yield straighforward conclusions.

So how can it be done? Four simple questions provide the foundation of a methodology to evaluate any executive development program:

1.What is the experience of executives going through the program?
Start by asking the program participants how they are experiencing the program and determine how consistent it is with the way it was intended to be. For example:
•Did they attend and fully engage during the entire program?
•Was the program executed according to plan?
•Have participants acquired the intended skills and knowledge?
•Are participants using the newly-acquired skills and knowledge back on their jobs?

This may appear to be quite basic, but even this fundamental level of assessment often gets overlooked. There are a number of ways to accomplish this assessment can be done, including having checkpoints in the course of the program to monitor attendance and engagement in the program activities, knowledge tests, and behavioral changes resulting from program attendance.

2.How are participants using their learning and program’s takeaways to change the way they carry out their work and achieve results?
Several techniques can be used to answer this question including self-report surveys, focus groups, and observational methods. Some organizations have found great success using Behavioral Event Interviewing (BEI), a powerful interviewing technique which solicits evidence or examples of a specific competency or skill from interviewees. These data can then be organized in a dashboard that gets shared with senior management.

3.What business results are achieved by the program?
This is where the rubber meets the road and most organizations will want to know what is the final return on investment of their executive development program. Putting a dollar value on the results of a development program can be a difficult task but not an impossible one. A good place to start is to lay out a simple model showing hypothesized relationships between the executive skills and knowledge targeted by the program and “outcome” measures – those indicators of operational and financial performance that matter to your organization. For example, a Private Equity firm may be most interested in looking at the link between deal partners’ competencies in Risk Management or Analytical Reasoning and their investment performance.

4.What can be done to fix or maximize the impact of the program?
Good program assessment should logically translate into robust recommendations for program enhancement priorities. For example, when we administer a survey to program participants, we look at respondents who provided very high scores or very low scores for the program evaluation (along with their post-program 360-degree competency scores if these are available). We then conduct follow up in-depth interviews about what worked and what did not work for them in the program and focus on these results to determine which program enhancements should be considered.

If you wish to know more about our program assessment methodologies and tools, please contact us as info@fisher-rock.com.

Insights on executive onboarding from practitioners

My friend Patricia Wheeler and I ran a workshop on executive onboarding today with a number of Talent Management professionals in Atlanta, GA. We asked our participants to reflect over their first-hand experience of onboarding –their own or someone else’s – and identify success factors and seeds of failure. Here is a summary of what they had to say:

Success Factors

• There is an assessment of the organizational context prior to the new leader’s onboarding to assess “fit”
• The hiring leader clearly communicated his/her expectations about onboarding to the team in charge of designing and implementing it.
• The onboarding plan is detailed and spells out who is responsible for what.
• The hiring leader made him/herself available to spend time with the new executive.
• The team in which the new leader is coming on is empowered to shape the onboarding experience.

Seeds of failure

• Lack of planning
• Building on false assumptions from all stakeholders involved in the process.
• The onboarding process fails to capitalize on the value that the new executive brings to the role – it can event restrict it by design at times.
• Mentoring is unconstructive and/or absent altogether.
• There is a lack of political awareness among those planning the onboarding process
• Senior leadership fails to listen to opposite points of views

5-Step Approach to Creating a Talent Management Strategy

One of my contacts recently asked for help on how to design a Talent Management strategy/roadmap. I shared with him the following 5-step approach and some notes:

1. Define the business/organizational context for your talent management strategy. What are the precipitating conditions for the roadmap? Growth, innovation, turnaround, M&A, globalization… possibly a combination of two or more?
2. Based on the business need, define which competencies are needed – start with general ones and move to level- or function-specific clusters – focusing on the “mission-critical” roles that need to be filled. Competency model should be short – 7 competencies at most. There are good libraries of behaviors out there so you don’t have to waste weeks on wordsmithing. But the final model should feel “close to home” and use language that everyone can relate to.
3. Conduct an “ideal/current” assessment of your talent management portfolio of processes and programs and based on the results define a few talent management priorities to focus on and link these priorities to key business goals. For example, if your organization is facing a dramatic turnaround, focus on a talent review process and transition management initiatives (e.g., onboarding AND outplacement), working closely with the team leading the business and organizational transformation.
4. Gauge the balance of recruitment vs. development efforts that can be inferred from the talent review process and staff multifunctional work teams to take on the work. Pay close attention to governance of these work reams which can easily get out of hand. Leadership must be affirmed from the start. Make timelines short, check-in frequent, metrics as tangible as possible.
5. Keep a systems view of your Talent Management Portfolio, looking for opportunities to establish linkages between the different areas of work. Here is a list of typical items that form a Talent Management Roadmap:
   1. Recruiting & selection
   2. Performance management
   3. Career planning
   4. Learning and Development
   5. Succession and Transition Planning
   6. Retention
   7. Rewards and Recognition

I would add Social Networking as a discipline which transcends all 7 listed above. This is not about putting everyone on some sort of Facebook or Linked in. Talent Management Officer should work closely with leaders to create networks of professionals that align with the business priorities, and overlay – not coincide - with the formal structure and processes of the organization.

Some additional points about the process:

• Senior leadership - not HR - MUST lead this work. But HR has a strategic role to play as the Steward of this work. The CEO and Key Opinion Leaders have to be on board with this work. Make sure to define who is accountable for what deliverable on your roadmap.
• Don’t try to boil the ocean. Assign different levels of resources to different streams of Talent Management but revise frequently priority level s based on new data.
• Learn a thing or two from your marketing stars. Be planful about how you engage and communicate with internal customer segments about Talent Management. For example, keep the unavoidable complexity of high-quality work invisible to the business partners (e.g., short and focused performance review instrument should still be validated with scientific rigor).
• Measure progress and ROI in creative yet rigorous ways. Brinkerhoff’s “Success Case Method” is a great resource for how to do this.