Also, I was quoted in a story on MBA Alternatives.  A digital version of the story can be accessed here.   Carlson Executive Education’s Minnesota Management Institute, a trhee-week program targeted to high potential managers and directors, is often viewed as an alternative to a traditional MBA.  The mini-MBA market has been very hot lately.  So much so, that some are overselling what you can accomplish in a very short time (e.g., some mini-MBAs are just 5 days…!).  We have takent the perspective that it is better to offer a strong program to build skills that high potential managers and directors need than to offer a sampler of MBA topics.  Our MMI program is an intensive, three-week transformational program.  You don’t get a “mini-MBA” credential from the program, but you do get a powerful, perspective-shifting experience that can accelerate your career.  Enough said.  you can check it out on our website if you are interested…

1. Strategic Talent Management starts with top management understanding that having the right people with the right skills in the right jobs is vital to the accomplishment of organizational objectives. Now this is nothing new.  Just about every HR, talent, or learning and development person will start by talking about how important top management support is.  Without top management support, it is hard to create a culture that values development of people.  But in the case of talent management, the importance of top management engagement is particularly vital.  This is because it is the only way to get a meaningful linkage between the strategic goals of the enterprise and the talent management effort.  It is usually not enough to “link” to a strategy after the discussion of the strategy is over and decisions have been made.  Unless the talent management agenda is explicitly considered during the strategy discussions, the talent discussion will start out behind the eight ball.  The focus will need to be on trying to fill in essential gaps in understanding about the implications of strategy for specific jobs, skills, people, and timing.

Unfortunately, in many companies, the political realities of the strategic planning process are such that HR (and the owners of the talent management process) have to struggle for a seat at that table with a meaningful voice.  Forward-thinking companies give HR that seat, but many do not. (for an interesting side-bar on this discussion, you may be interested in this article by Bob Bogart, my former boss from Thomson Reuters who published a piece on getting HR a seat at the board room table).

2. There are 2 aspects of “Strategic” when thinking about talent management: 1) the linkage to strategy, which was referred to above; and, 2) adopting a strategic approach in the management of talent once that linkage has been made.  Both meanings of word “strategic” are important.  The second meaning, taking a strategic approach, is all about investing in the development of the right talent.  Which jobs in the organization are the most critical for success?  If you were to invest a dollar in getting the right talent into those jobs, either by hiring the right person or developing an incumbent’s skills, would you get a big return?  I have blogged about this notion of “pivotal jobs” before.  A great concept developed by Pete Ramsted and John Boudreau.  Identifying these jobs requires a segmentation approach.  Then, investment can be funneled into those most important segments.

That is all for now…

Drum roll, please………….

“Companies with Integrated Talent Management Strategies See 26% More Revenue Per Employee and 41% Lower Turnover among High Performers, According to New Bersin & Associates Research.” 

This is a pretty significant result, and came from a sample of 773 HR managers and executives. 

If you dig into the report (or at least the press release, since I am not shelling out $595 for the full report!), development plans were a particularly important indicator of success: 

“Employee development strategies are critical to success. High-quality development planning is one of the practices most highly correlated to reduced turnover and increased revenue per employee. Unfortunately, today this process is very immature. Only about half of respondents widely use development planning and only 8% said plans were effective. ”

If you saw my last post on development planning, you can probably guess that I am smiling.  Without solid development plans, all of the good work done to identify and develop talent falls short. 

I also found it interesting that online systems are increasingly being used to underpin talent management efforts.    Some will say, “it is not about the technology, it is about having good discussions about talent.”  My reponse is that it is hard to have good conversations without good information, and good information means up to date information that is readily available…and that requires a system of some sort to store and manage it.

Once you have a process to identify top talent, you face a key question:  “should we tell high potentials that we see them as high potentials?”  This question is raised all the time by line executives (both those asking for their ratings and by those doing the ratings), and by talent management practitioners.  The question is frequently accompanied by one of several basic rationales (usually revealing the questioner’s intent): 

1) Transparency.  We need to be transparent with our development efforts, so that people understand the process is fair and don’t feel that we are keeping secrets about them.   This rationale carries with it the most intuitive, gut-level appeal.  Who wants to advocate for secretive HR practices…smoke-filled rooms, etc…?

2) Tell them or lose them.  If we keep it a secret and don’t tell high potentials that we think they are great, don’t we risk losing great people? 

3) If we don’t tell them, what’s the point of doing the assessment in the first place?  If we are aren’t telling high potentials that they are high potential, then we also can’t tell all those other people that they are not high potential.  So, how can we help them to develop?

There is validity in each of these views, and many other arguments are usually brought up in the course of  exploring this topic.

My view? 

I am all for transparency, but about the right things.  If the organization is caught up in the debate about the ratings, I see it as a potential danger sign.  The ratings are made in order to help the organization to have a robust dialogue about talent, reach common understanding about each person’s strengths and weaknesses, and, most importantly, to guide the organization’s development effort–espcially for certain top talent individuals. 

Given that actions speak louder than words, the question that we should be debating instead is, “what happens when someone in this organization is named high potential?”  Are certain development experiences cued up? Does the designation trigger a developmental assignment reserved for high potenials?  Is participation in certain learning programs reserved for high potentials? 

If the high potential designation does not trigger clear development actions for individuals, then who cares what the rating is anyway? If it does trigger such actions, then people will figure it out and the rating won’t be important.

The problem is that it’s hard for the organization to walk the talk in this way. Channeling significant development resources toward high potentials also  means channeling  them away from other non-high-potentials.  The unanointed in this scenario don’t particularly care for this sort of approach.   To follow this path, you need to have a pretty high level of confidence in your talent identification processes.   Otherwise, you will lose in two ways–investing in those who don’t have what the organization needs for the future, while disenfranchising those who do, but have been incorrectly passed over by your talent identification process.

Here are a few of my favorite tests for the quality of a talent identification process:

1) Do ratings depend upon the whims and perspectives of individual managers, or is the process sufficiently institutionalized so that it is not dependent upon individual managers? 

2) Do your talent assessments emerge from rich dialogue with senior management about each individual?  If talent assessments don’t get changed as they move up the chain, then the dialogue is probably not as robust or diverse as it should be.

3) Do leaders in your organization own the potential ratings, or are they something that they know HR wants them to do?

If your talent review and identifcation process does not pass these tests, then you might be best off keeping your potential ratings a secret.

If you are interested in this and other talent management questions, you may want to check out the upcoming Talent Management Strategies course (May 19-21 at the Carlson School).  It is a great program that can help you to better frame your talent management approach.

Fast, fun and friendly.  

Jodee spoke about the core values at Target Corporation, and how they are integral to the business.  One of the values stood out to me as particularly evident to the average guest at Target: Fast, Fun, and Friendly.  While she described several other core Target values around leadership, diversity, inclusiveness and caring for the corporate legacy, this one struck me as especially powerful.  And, nice to see “Fun” called out as a corporate value!

Can you imagine what life would be like if all of our work environments could be described this way?  Target has created an impressive organization since its founding in 1962–from $0 to over $65 Billion in 47 years.  To have done it in a way that breeds enthusiasm, fun and friendliness is an impressive feat. 

This value reminded me of my experience working with an incredible IT leader, Charlie Feld.  I worked with him at Delta Air Lines.  He was the CIO tasked with getting the air line ready for Y2K (remember that?), while simulataneously trying to transform the organization into a high performance culture.  One of Charlie’s favorite questions was, “are you having fun?”  In the midst of the challenging task, which he compared to the Apollo 13 recovery effort (failure is not an option), Charlie was always positive, optimistic, and wanted to create an environment where others were too.  This was another way of saying, are you fully engaged?  Charlie insisted that one of the core competencies for an effective IT leader was passion for the job, and what he called being “fun to be around.” 

He created an incredible culture, and went on to a senior executive role at EDS.

Instead, what you hear is, “people are our biggest asset.”  In fact, if there were a hall of fame for hollow phrases, this one would occupy a prime position in the section honoring corporate-speak. 

The reason this phrase sounds so hollow is that hardly anybody means it when they say it. What they really mean to say is that talent is their biggest asset.  In a world of increasing competitiveness, talented people can make the difference between success and failure.  Anyone in the learning and development field can attest to the fact that creating a strong, high performance workforce is something that takes hard work and dedication.  The investment in the workforce can transform the raw people resource into a high-value asset.  Without that effort, however, those “people” can be a significant liability for various reasons.  

For example:

1. “People” that don’t have the skills or experience needed to deliver on the organization’s strategy. 

2. Having too many “people”.

3. Having “people” in the wrong places.

I think you get the idea.  

When organizations lay off workers, they are essentially reacting to one of these or similar realities and, one could argue,  admitting that, for the moment, “people are our biggest liability…”  It just woudn’t be too popular for them to say that!

Clarification: In my previous post I commended companies with the strongest talent management practices in part because they have leaders that “express the belief that talent is their greatest asset…” I was choosing my words very carefully.  The leaders in these companies have moved beyond the empty phrase, and approach talent decisions with this more informed persective.

There was plenty of valuable discussion around the issues that you would naturally expect to be on people’s minds: How can we cut costs without reducing the value that we deliver? What is the business case for continuing to invest in learning and development in tough times? The panel responded to these and many other questions with their perspectives and generated a lively discussion. 

One response to this subject resonated particularly well with me.  It came from a panelist who essentially said, “I’m not doing anything differently now that times are tough—the business case for good talent management and development practices is the same in good times as it is in bad times.”

While the economic environment that we now face a year later is carrying all of us into uncharted waters, I still agree with the sentiment of this perspective.  Truly world class talent management systems are relatively robust in difficult times because they work, and everyone in the organization understands that they work.  I believe that at their root, organizations whose talent management systems are described as world class are described as such because they have done three things particularly well:

1.      Embedded talent management in the organization’s strategy process.  Mature talent management systems play the critical role of translating the organization’s strategic plans and priorities into concrete implications for the current and future supply of talent.  This linkage between business direction and people implications grounds the talent management system in the needs of the business in a way that makes it difficult to even raise the question, “Should we continue to invest in developing our people?”  Everyone in the organization operates with a clear understanding and awareness of how the talent development practices feed into the achievement of strategic objectives.

2.      Institutionalized senior leaders’ ownership for talent management.  The CEO and his or her senior team truly view talent as a key to success, and take personal responsibility for relentlessly developing talent.  Having senior leaders’support goes a long way toward embedding the talent management system into the culture, but it is not sufficient.  Many leaders express the belief that talent is their greatest asset, and many of those leaders are zealous about people development. The best companies have institutionalized a common talent management ethos and apply talent management practices such that the effectiveness of the people development system is not dependent upon any individual leader. 

3.      Strategically guided the expenditure of development resources and effort for maximum impact and return.  When you have created a talent management system that identifies the capabilities needed to deliver on key strategic priorities, it is relatively easy to ensure that your development dollars are being spent to develop the right capabilities in the right people at the right time.  Rather than spending more or less on development, the best companies put their investments into those people who can provide the best return to the company.  That means that they invest less in some individuals and more in others–high potentials, top talent, or whatever you call them (John Boudreau and Peter Ramstad have written a great book that covers this concept well, Beyond HR: The New Science of Human Capital).   As you can imagine, doing this effectively requires well-developed organizational processes and systems.

Sure, there are likely a raft of cost-cutting measures that you can take to manage through the downturn:  expanding virtual work arrangements, better resourcing of vendors and suppliers, leveraging e-learning, etc.  But, if you are working in an organization that is on a journey toward world class talent management, perhaps the best way to develop talent in a down economy is to work at making progress on these fundamentals.  Not an easy task, but making progress on these dimensions in a down economy will leave you that much stronger when things turn around.