Talent Management Archives

Do you say “you can only manage what you measure”?  (and then do the opposite with your people)

October 20, 2014/in Talent Management/by Jon Windust

Talent management sounds boring. But it’s really just how you measure your people

I get told all the time that talent management sounds like HR speak. That executives don’t believe it has substance behind the buzzwords.

But have you ever been caught saying “Our people are our most important asset”?

Or uttered “You can only manage what you can measure”?

I think both are fantastic statements on management. And let’s face it, we’ve all probably said both at some stage.

To really understand what talent management means is just to understand these two quotes. Don’t get caught up on the buzzwords.

Despite more investment in talent management, still not enough operational managers actually understand why we do it

ManpowerGroup conducts an annual survey on executive attitudes towards talent management. Over 37,000 employers were queried about their talent management challenges. You can find the results here.

Here’s two numbers that sum up the results for me:

Only 40% of senior management ‘get’ the connection between talent management and the impact on business.
And only half of respondents feel ‘somewhat confident’ their talent management strategies are paying off.

Can you imagine if a survey said the same about the accounting function? Or finance? Or sales?

In a well-run business talent management is as critical as the accounting function. But clearly this isn’t the way that many executives see it today. Far too often, talent management isn’t seen as business critical. It’s perceived as something that we do in HR to keep ourselves busy.

If you think talent management is a HR only activity, you’re doing it wrong

When talent management is just a HR responsibility, you hear statements like those above.

In these businesses, managers typically fail to make the connection between measuring your talent today and delivering on your business plan next year. They don’t understand just how quickly a ‘soft’ competency gap translates into a ‘hard’ profit miss.

The other issue that arises is a real misalignment around skills and competencies. Regardless of how good your business partners are, there’s no substitute for your operational managers engaging in the process. There’s such a difference in new hire success when managers set out exactly what the skill requirements are in their own words.

If a team misses their budget, we don’t blame accounting. In the same way, if a team doesn’t have the talent they need to succeed, we can’t blame HR. At its core, talent management is an operational responsibility. It’s essential strategy work that every manager needs to be doing.

Don’t risk talent bankruptcy

As I’ve written about previously, we’re facing a serious talent crunch. And it’s going to hit Australian businesses hard. Don’t let yourself get caught. Make sure you’ve quantified the talent you have, the talent you need, and the talent you’re going to have to grow.

How have you been able to convince your senior management team on the value of talent measurement? I’d love it if you could share your tips below.

Photo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_measure#mediaviewer/File:Measuring-tape.jpg

Guest blogging opportunity – Thought leaders in HR, talent and performance

October 15, 2014/in Talent Management/by Jon Windust

If you’re a HR blogger and would like to reach a large Australian audience interested in talent and performance management, then this is your guest blogging opportunity.

The Cognology blog is a great opportunity to reach a large Australian audience of HR and talent professionals. Every month we reach c.10,000 unique monthly viewers, so it’s a great platform to increase your profile in the space.

We’d love to see interesting and edgy submissions that touch on all areas relevant to talent and performance management. You definitely don’t need to be a published or recognised author. Your experience and passion in the space is enough!

Interested? Send a short pitch describing what you’d like to write about to tom.wade@cognology.com.au. We’ll get back to you within 72 hours letting you know if it’s a good fit. That easy!

Talent management and the looming workforce crisis

July 10, 2014/in Talent Management, Workforce Data/by Jon Windust

The elephant in the room

There’s an elephant in the room. But don’t worry. The experts say it’s not going to get temperamental for 10 years or so. That’s my three sentence summary of “The Global Workforce Crisis: $10 Trillion at Risk”.

The report was just released by Boston Consulting Group (you can read the full report here). It’s full of interesting predictions for the state of the global workforce over the next 15 years. If you’re in workforce planning for a large multinational, it’s a resource to bookmark. You’ll get great value out of the workforce benchmarks for all major developed economies (hidden away in the appendix).

But let’s get back to that elephant. The picture for Australia isn’t pretty. We just don’t have enough workers. By 2030, this modelling puts the labour shortage at nearly 20% of the entire workforce! Only Germany, South Korea and Brazil are set to experience greater shortages.

Whether you believe these exact numbers or not, it’s hard to argue that we’re not facing a very real talent crunch. Our economy continues to grow faster than our population. We’re leveraged to any uptick in growth in the global economy. And we just don’t produce enough graduates across the Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths professions. In the medium term, there’s a crunch coming. And it’s going to be very disruptive.

What to do?

Use this research to get in front of the C-level ASAP. It’s a fantastic opportunity to make the case for why best practice talent management is so important.

Here’s my recommendation. Print off this BCG report and find a large highlighter. Emphasise the following :

“If [Australia] continues on this trajectory and maintains its GDP growth of above 3.0 percent, Australia will likely experience a severe labor shortage by 2030.”
Then flip to the back and highlight the extent of the expected shortage in 2030.

You can see I’ve got things started for you!

It’s easy to connect the dots to what these numbers mean for the C-level. In this kind of environment:

It’s so hard to hire experienced talent, that there’s no choice but to grow great people.
Recruiters are calling every single week, so a lack of development quickly turns into to an exit interview.
Time to fill for specialised roles is astronomical, so poor retention translates to a significant P&L hit.

This is why great talent management can be such a competitive advantage for your company. In an economy that’s suffering from talent shortages equivalent to 20% of the workforce, the only companies that will thrive are those with best practice talent management.

In an economy this short on talent, best practice talent management isn’t a nice to have. It’s a requirement for being in business. Start getting your C-level to recognise this now. Because as we all know, it’s not quick or easy to build these competencies through the organisation. And by the time there’s a real crisis it’s going to be too late.

Are you concerned about the upcoming talent shortage in Australia? Jump into the comments with your thoughts and let’s start the conversation.

Photo Credit: Mike Scott (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Talent Management in Not For Profit Organisations

March 25, 2013/in Not for profit, Talent Management/by Jon Windust

Should Not for Profit organisations spend time on Talent Management initiatives or should they put all of their effort towards the people they are trying to help? After all, time spent on the people in an organisation is effort that could go towards the people the organisation is trying to help.

Last week I attended a Community Housing conference in Sydney supporting Cognology partner Natalie Carrington from Blooming HR. Natalie provides HR services to the Community Housing industry. It was a great opportunity to get an understanding for the sector and the people within it.

Natalie Carrington speaking at the Community Housing Conference in Sydney

Organisations in Community Housing are typically small, but their task is large. Community Housing provides rental housing to disadvantaged people in society. They typically look after hundreds of rental houses and some more than 2,000. And they do this at a typical size of less than 50 employees.

The people I met within Community Housing are socially minded and typically working in the sector because they believe in what they are doing. The conference was an opportunity to learn from each other and ultimately improve the services they are providing to the disadvantaged in society.

So is Talent Management a waste of time for these people. Should they just get on with the job and help the people they are serving? The real problem I believe is how to make sure that people are being helped in the best possible way. So the question is, how to do that?

The answer is that just like any organisation, for a group of people to achieve something, they need to be as effective and productive as they can. Productivity is an issue for Australian organisations at present and Not for Profits are no exception. Ernst & Young estimated the annual wastage in Australian wages at $109 billion due to productivity. That means the potential for wasted money in NFPs is high.

At the end of the day, the goal of the Community Housing organisations is to provide housing to disadvantaged people. If they are ineffective and unproductive organisations, they won’t do this well. They need systems and processes in place to run an effective organisation. They need effective people who are well trained and developed. The people within Community Housing need to be working towards a strategic plan to deliver outcomes. This is what Talent Management is all about.

Utopia doesn’t run itself. The passions and good intentions of the people working in Not for Profits need to be put to use in an effective organisation structure, otherwise their energies are wasted.

Is HR resisting social technology?

January 30, 2013/in HR Technology, Talent Management, Technology/by Jon Windust

I believe social and HR technology is helping to bring about a new world of work. But is HR itself getting in the way of this happening?

Sometimes it doesn’t take that long for big change to occur. When personal computers started to arrive in corporate life during the late 80s and early 90s secretaries and typists were commonplace. It wasn’t uncommon for a manager to draft a communication, send it to a secretary, who would then type it up and send it back for review before sending. Amongst other benefits, inexpensive and usable personal computers provided a great opportunity for organisations to save time and money by getting managers to type their own communications. PCs were implemented at a rapid pace along with organisational edicts for managers to do their own typing.

Despite the obvious advantage of using computers to draft, edit and produce communications, many managers were highly resistant to the change. Computers were things they didn’t understand. What you don’t understand, you fear. But by the end of the 90s you would be hard pressed to find secretaries typing communications anywhere. Today it only survives in limited areas like law firms who seem to love dictation as a form of creating a communication.

I believe the vast majority of managers who were resistant to the change that occurred in the late 80s and early 90s would not want to go back to the way things were. They wouldn’t want to wait for a secretary to type something. Nor would they want to be without the easy way to get their ideas into a document, then edit and perfect them before communicating.

Social technology is changing the world today. And talent management technology is becoming increasingly more important in organisations. Now we are starting to see the two combined. It makes great sense, we are social beings. We operate in a social way, even at work. We aren’t automatons.

So is HR resistant to social technology in the workplace? Undoubtedly many are. This is understandable though. Social technology is relatively young. Many people still believe that Twitter is used by people who want to tell everyone inane things about their cat and what it does all day. Add to that the potential legal issues of using social technology. For example, bullying via social technology. It’s understandable that HR would be resistant.

The change is happening though and won’t be stopped. Not for any other reason that the new world of work is just too compelling.

Combining social and talent management technology makes a lot of sense. HR can elevate its importance in the organisation by embracing it and driving its adoption in the workplace. If HR doesn’t do this, someone else in the organisation will.

Just like the managers of the late 80s and early 90s, I don’t believe HR will want to go back to the old world in ten years time. People talk about removing organisational silos meaning departments and teams that don’t communicate. I think we have something more problematic. We have individual personal silos. The new world doesn’t have those silos. People, their work, needs and achievements are more visible to others. Once you’ve reached this new world, would you want to go back? I don’t think HR will want to go back.

To be human is to be social.

Today we rescue the working world from tyranny

January 23, 2013/in Social, Talent Management/by Jon Windust

Organisations can be tyrannical places in a sense. Very different to the world we live in outside work. In the morning we arrive at work and step into an older hierarchical world. At the end of the day we leave work and step back into our democratic lives – for those of us who live in a democracy. But are we on the brink of a new world of work?

Tyranny is a pretty strong word. I’m certainly not using it in the same sense experienced by many people in the world who still suffer under tyrannical rule and have little if any freedom. I mean the way that some managers can exercise power or control within the organisation. There’s an old world nature about it. Organisations can be very hierarchical, bureaucratic and pretty dreary for many.

Managers are in positions of power. They can hire and fire. Anyone beneath a manager in the hierarchy is subordinate to that person. The manager can control that person (to an extent). This is necessary to organise a group of people to achieve something, but the question is a degree of control versus lead.

I believe a new type of workplace is emerging. You can see it in the tech startups for example. Their people are more like partners in a sense. The culture of equity in these organisations is testament to this. A local example is Shoes of Prey. It only takes a little familiarity with their blog to understand that working at Shoes of Prey is different.

In the new world of work organisations rely less on hierarchical power and more on leadership and partnership. This change has been happening for some time now to be sure. Picture work now compared to the 50s for example. The big difference though is that in the new world people may still need to be organised to achieve things, but by having more visibility and understanding for what each is doing, they need less control. They can have more autonomy in the way about which they achieve things. People can be more like collaborators. Technology is making this possible.

Step into a government department and you might wonder if this new world could ever possibly happen though. They can be the very embodiment of bureaucracy and control. Is the new world a possibility for all or just for those who work in the likes of the tech startup? Some days I think this is possible, some days not.

History gives us some hope though. This sort of thing has happened in the past. There are a number of examples, but perhaps one stands out amongst the others. In the 6th century BCE, the Greeks brought about a new world with democracy. At the time you could have been forgiven for thinking this not possible – the Athenians lived under tyrannical rule. So how did it happen? Was it high minded thinking by great individuals? Will it take this sort of effort to bring about a new world of work and can this happen now?

The answer is that democracy and the new world came about in part because one man named Cleisthenes saw an opportunity to gain power over rivals by giving the people rights and a say in things. He may have been high minded as well, but the point is that this isn’t a requirement. To say that the people gravitated towards Cleisthenes is an understatement.

In our day, organisations like the tech startups and others are our Cleisthenes. If talented people gravitate towards new world organisations, which they surely are, great change can occur.

How long can the old world organisations last, if talent gravitates towards the places where they can be their best?

For our part, we want to help make the new world possible in 2013.