Succession Planning does not mean getting carbon copies

The SuccessFactors blog talks about a common problem:

76% of all companies in the survey were found to have some kind of succession plan in place, yet 40% of companies lacked any process or capability to identify future talent. You simply cannot identify successors effectively, if you do not have a regular process in place to identify talent within your company. Talent reviews should be the starting point, not the end point of the talent management process. Managers should have plenty of tools to help identify talent. 360 reviews, performance reviews, and competency assessments can all be used to make reasonable assumptions about the potential of an individual.

My view is that successors are identified not by looking at competencies, but who seems more like the current leader. That is a disastrous way to go about it.

Look at people who can get results, and not those who work like the current leader. That is why often a successful CEO when he/she gives way to the successor - the business press usually exclaims "They have so little in common" (like Reginald Jones and his successor Jack Welch)

That's because those who do a thorough succession plan also take into account how things might change - and they know that to be successful in the future they do not need to replicate the blueprints of the past.


Technorati Tags: succession planning, talent management,

Looking forward to work

Erik on the SucessFactors blog crunches some numbers:

For a global financial service company with about 2 Billion Euros of labor cost and 35K employees there is an average cost per employee of 57K Euros. With 6% absent for sick leave that would mean that 2100 employees are absent at a cost of 120M Euro per year. If that sick leave could be reduced to 5% this company would have 350 more people working while directly saving 20M Euro. This example though showing significant cost savings is only looking at the direct cost of this absence, and not at the more strategic impact of lost business opportunities, or the individual human costs. Though there are arguments for fixing systematic problems caused by over generous sick pay, there is really nothing organizations can do about it in the short term… or is there?

To find the answer I turned to one of SuccessFactors Research Thought Leaders Ken Scarlett who has been researching this, and the conversation left us with some very real solutions.

Aggregately speaking, the higher the Engagement level (as measured by an engagement index) the lower the sick leave rates, and there is no better way to predict the likelihood of abusing sick leave than by the responses to the questions “Do you look forward to coming to work?” and/or “Do you feel you work is important to others?” Ken’s research shows that the group who answered negatively to those questions has the highest propensity to max out/abuse sick leave. With the specific questions above, you can actually create a highly accurate forecast within 10% margin of error.

In any country and any industry your job as a leader is to increase the likelihood that your people answer the question “Do you look forward to coming to work?” positively.

Unfortunately while many leaders understand this question they think the answers can be changed by changing the external factors (which is why I understand a Professor in my MBA used to call HR folks the "Managers of Carpets and Curtains"), whereas the basic linkage of a great work and a great boss would be the only way people look forward to coming to work. The definition of great work would depend on a person's innate talents and strengths and this is why even chronic over-achievers can feel burned out and without passion in their work.hr

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CR and not HR?

DubDubs has a very insightful post on how the "resources" in HR are Competencies and not Humans.

My theory is not that we are the resource, but we have the KSA’s (in old school terms) that can be resources. In today’s terms, I think we’re talking about competencies. In general, we can manage the competencies into a master repository (with a decent knowledge management practice), but in practice, this does not really seem to have been well applied in most organizations. We’re still dependent on people to bring competencies to work with them every day.

Not to beat a dead drum, but this is what talent management is all about. It’s about growing competencies to increase the value of a resource within the organization. It’s about keeping those competencies (managing depreciation?) within the organization. And of course it’s making sure the competencies get used. Any asset in the organization that is sitting in the corner or on the shelf is actually costing the company money to hold and not use it. Same with a competency. We hired and pay a person to use all of their competencies. However, if a person is not engaged, they come to work and hold back some of their productivity or some of their knowledge.

The problem (or so corporations think!) is that competencies are made of three different aspects, Knowledge, Skills and Attitude (the KSAs that DD talks about) of which two can be developed (Knowledge and Skills) while the third - Attitude - is what an adult rarely changes, and will not do so merely because the organization asks or expects him to.

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HR Careers on the Upswing

From the Wall Street Journal.

As more employees consider changing jobs, demand has increased for senior HR executives who can help keep them. Most HR searches, recruiters say, are still for generalists -- HR managers who have done it all, from compensation design to organizational development to recruiting.

Meanwhile, talent development and management is emerging as a hot specialty. These specialists, some of whom may have backgrounds in recruiting, help identify and groom high performers for future positions through assessment, development and training. The function previously was handled by organization-development executives, but many companies now are splitting it off into a single role, says Greg Hessell, head of recruiter Korn/Ferry's global HR practice.

Against this backdrop of surging demand, pay for HR executives is on the rise. A 2004 survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting, New York, found that top human-resources-management executives (whose duties don't include managing labor union relations) earned a median total cash compensation of $220,200, compared with $204,900 the previous year.

Among industries, hedge funds are proving a hot HR area, says Dan Kaplan, a partner in New York with search firm Christian & Timbers. These lightly regulated investment pools for high-net-worth individuals and institutional investors are expanding rapidly. Once their staffs reach about 40 to 45 people, they need to hire an HR executive who can help with recruiting and retention, says Mr. Kaplan.

HR needs people today with two complementary skills, the left brained analytical and financial skills and the right brained creative and relationship skills. Having one set means investing time to build expertise in the other.

HR professionals have had traditionally more relationship skills, and they now need to add analytical and business skills.

What we are going to see is also as the article says, HR people specialising in small high value businesses and the skills needed to succeed there would be very different from being the HR director at large traditional organizations. This reality will soon also play out in India. And it will be a new kind of HR professional who will succeed in such organizations.

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