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.

Talent Management in a Downturn Economy

By Michel Buffet & Joanna Rock

The turbulence and uncertainty that characterize today’s business and economic environment is forcing organizations and their leaders to manage two opposite forces: reducing costs in any way possible and making significant investment in resources (talent included) both to stay afloat and also to build for longer term viability and growth. One key implication for internal Talent Management professionals is a stronger imperative for working in close partnership with leadership on the following set of priorities:

Reassess
First, Talent Management professionals have to equip senior leadership with the data they need to manage priorities and make key decisions. To achieve this objective, they must:

• Lead the charge on identifying the critical competencies needed to not only survive the crisis, but also maintain healthy performance and prepare for future growth.
• Engage stakeholders in defining competencies, analyzing current and potential talent, and linking back to the core business activities.
• Work with their business partners to decide which activities and competencies need to remain in the organization or be shared between business units or geographies. This implies that Talent management inevitably connects to organizational design considerations and requires that Talent Management professionals collaborate effectively with their colleagues in OD and Strategic Planning departments.

Rebuild
The current economic crisis is in fact a unique opportunity for Talent Management professionals to show their unique value and to win - or to further establish – their place at the leadership table. Beyond working to define and evaluate talent, Talent Management professionals must play a role in the transformation and rebuilding of the organization. To achieve this transformation three key activities are necessary:

• Recruitment. Periods of economic turbulence create opportunities to pick up talent that may otherwise be out of reach in times of greater stability. For some organizations for example, it may be the right time to recruit specialists in finance and strategy coming from investment banking or consulting. These executives, hired from industries most impacted by the crisis, would enrich the strategic function of the company or upgrade talent across the board - particularly at the more senior leadership level.
• Transformation. Talent Management professionals must be active members on transformation teams so that their thinking is factored in when opportunities for mergers, acquisitions, alliances, outsourcing contracts are being discussed. Talent Management must be able to provide to leadership a clear Talent Map for each stage of the value chain.
• Engagement. We can’t stress enough the importance that effective internal and external communications play in times of crisis. Communications must simultaneously be honest and coherent. Talent Management professionals have an integrator role to play in bringing together their colleagues from Corporate Communication and from Learning and Development to ensure that solutions are proposed that guarantee good levels of information and engagement. Among these solutions, social networking tools are garnering greater attention as they can help decentralize information, encourage initiative and innovation, and transform the “social contract” between employees and their organization. Organizations are also well-advised to turn to innovative recognition solutions to keep employees positive about their role and their future in the organization. Last, we can’t ignore the importance of dealing with employees being let go in a fair and respectful fashion. Reputation is the most treasured possession individuals and organizations can enjoy and there is nothing like a botched wave of layoffs to leave an organization with an unsightly public image.

Re-Invent
While these times are quite challenging, there is a silver lining. The current downturn provides another opportunity for organizations and their leaders to look for deep paradigm shifts. Organizations have to reevaluate their vision and their relevance in the context of our “hotter, flatter, more crowded” world - as Thomas Friedman would describe it. The capacity to reinvent is paramount to the ability to survive:

• Talent Management Professionals must find their place at the table and propose coherent strategies, aligned not only with the organization’s change efforts but also with the critical forces shaping the environment - economic, demographic, and technological.
• Graduate programs geared to develop Talent Management professionals must encourage a diversity in experiences, propose a business savvy curriculum if they seriously intend on providing to their graduates desirable career opportunities.
• Talent Management professionals must continue to sharpen their knowledge and their functional experiences and embrace the idea that their career trajectory could take them beyond Talent Management or Human Resources towards operational and management roles.