Global Talent Management

Speaker A I'm going to talk quickly here about global talent management. And what I'm dealing with here is a system that's been derived in work with clients over about six or seven years. And just to give you a sense of how that's happened, graham Construction and Engineering in Calgary, we started with their senior 50 or so managers about six years ago. And like so many of you have said, what are you going to do with all the data? And so we found FileMaker Pro as a sort of a basic starting point, very robust cross platform database system that's easy for people like me who are sort of I can run the computer, but I'm not an It person can work with. And that's where we started. And the thing has been refined over the years with other clients. Soft Choice in Toronto, which is a software reseller, tembec, which is Quebec multinational pulp and paper company, and Swiss Herbal Remedies, which is a Richmond Hill manufacturer and reseller of Vitamins and Thompson Gordon Group, which is a global specialty manufacturer. So you can see that it's kind of fits across a series of different industrial applications. And the whole thing is addressed to the statement somebody made yesterday, that when you get the organization in place, then what you need to do is to get the human resource systems aligned to support what you're trying to do organizationally. And so inside the front cover of your book, there are the questions which this tries to answer for people in the organization. The CEO who says, I need to know where my business unit heads are coming from seven years from now. And the vice President who says our young engineers are getting into middle management without the basic skills in people management. And the general manager who says we need bosses and the boss's bosses to come to a meeting of the minds about what young managers and professionals need to develop fully. And it's tough where everybody is moving around the way they do. And the high flyer in the organization says career visibility is important. I need to know that how I'm doing and what I want to do is on the screen of the powers that be. If not, I'll go somewhere else where I'm seen. And the VPHR who says our tendency in appointments has been to grab the closest warm body and get on with it, to have managers consider a broader group, including people they don't know, they need a simple way of getting the information, which should include track record judgments on potential and developmental needs. And the COO who says, I've got accountability for nine direct reports and I've got manager once removed accountability for 47 others. I can't stay on top of this unless I've got all the information at my fingertips when I need it, including salary and incentive options. So this is what this tool is designed to address. And because of our work with Tembec, which is a multinational company, a global company. We've got this web enabled so that it can operate from anywhere in the world or because people sometimes executives traveling sometimes like to do this on their laptop while they're flying. There are carry with you packages that you can do. So that's the overview of it. And inside on exhibit one you'll see there is a sort of overall answer to the CEO's question where are my business unit heads coming from in seven years? The little chart there shows in total that this mythical company here has 46 people from in Stratum Four and up in 2005. And that with the existing Cadre that we've got in the place, we expect there'll be as many as 49 by 2017. And you can see where they're likely to be in the bands, in the strata. And so then we can go to the Senior Executive Group. These are Stratum Six and up and you can look at specific people and where they're predicted to be where they are in 2005, the Stratum Six and then 2009, 2013, and the group that will be there in 2017. Now this presumes people don't retire and people don't move on. So it also presumes you're not bringing somebody in and of course can't keep track of that in this basic thing here. But you can start to see where the developmental problems are.

Speaker B Glenn, this particular graph, I've tried lots of different kinds of feedback and something equivalent to this is always the ones the managers come back and say that is the most useful piece of information.

Speaker A That's interesting. Yeah. Otherwise it's just lost anyway, this particular.

Speaker B Set of information, they come back and say, yeah.

Speaker A Then the bottom part of that chart is the Stratum Five contingent, which is the CEO's question here where are my business unit heads going to come from? So here's who they are. Here's who they are in cognitive capability, potential. And of course a lot can happen here between an assessment of potential and the ability to actually take on a job. So I'm going to switch here to the software itself, which I've got set up. But the things we're going to look at are basically in your book. This is a mythical person by the name of Donald Vernon, who is a young director of Systems Implementation. And we can see here that we're picking up all kinds of things, a lot of it right from the payroll systems or whatever, the basic HR systems that are running in the company. And then the next frame is horsepower, which is phrase the engineers like for cognitive capability, basically. And you can see here we're looking at a number of different opinions here the manager's estimate, the manager's once removed estimate, and the interview opinion in the case of where a consultant is used. And it's often the case that we're asked to kick start this process and managers and managers once removed don't have the ability to make these assessments. So you got to start somewhere and then proceed by successive approximations. So we might do an assessment interview and come up with an opinion here. And then we're trying to confirm that with mor and manager estimates and whatever processes we can get going in the organization that refine that and change it from time to time. A similar assessment overall on the current applied capability of the individual. And then whatever the chart, whatever the formal organization now says about the role that the person is in. There's a little routine here that allows you to calculate the potential value today because the assessment or the last reading in the file may be three years ago. And so this updates the current applied potential at today's date and also says where this person is likely to be in three years. And the idea here is you want to pick up people who are on the turn or potentially on the turn from one stratum to another so that you can make sure they've got what they need to make that turn. Now, we use methods here aimed at getting a fair bit of information on personal style. This is a little departure from Elliot's work where he focuses just on minus T. But we're saying we're interested to know about the sort of style nature of the individual. We're using the Ades, producer, administrator, entrepreneur and integrator. So this particular individual is a big P, big E. And then we're using the Enneagram personality system that gives us the sense of this is an individual in one of these nine styles. We're not wanting this to be used as an assessment technique to see about promotion, but more about feedback to the individual on development. And so the idea here is the more the individual knows about themselves, the better off they're likely to be in maximizing their potential. The file also picks up information on skilled knowledge and experience. And we want to get managerial judgments on managerial practices on a scale of one to five. And demonstrated effectiveness is the records from the assessment system, the performance assessment system, whatever the client organization is using. The example here is Jax friendly or Ro friendly, and then information on career history before the individual came to the organization and what's happened to the individual since. And remember what I said at the outset, that what we're really trying to do here is make this as a tool available to the manager and the manager once removed, as they're doing the jobs they need to do in developing the people. And think about the guy getting on the plane with his laptop under his arm Friday night and he's heading back out to Vancouver. He's got a few hours here where he could sit with us and play with the people that he's responsible for. And the idea here is we really want to have all the information that managers, managers once removed need to have at the fingertips where they need it and when they need it. And out of our assessment interviews comes sort of an overall sense of the individual and what we see as developmental needs. And in the organizations we work with, we often run across the CEOs who say well, I can see that person is bright and I understand what you're saying about style here and I think the track record indicates that maybe this person can't actualize that. And so what we're really asking is that the manager and the manager once removed come together on a judgment of where this person can go. This isn't as simple as taking the mode curves and saying well, as in this case, the person will end up as a mature potential capability of Stratum Five. We want them to actually say, yeah, we think that that person can apply. That actually down the road. So this is a managerial manager once removed judgment of what we think this person can do in this company. And then out of this flows a developmental set of developmental recommendations that are very specific. And in this particular case, this guy needs to improve his people skills and we want to get him off to the MIT People Management Program in the fall of 2005 and he needs an international assignment. So the mor is to watch for opportunity in 2005 and the target date here is before 2008. That should read and the person is interested in an executive MBA. And we either think or don't think that's a good idea. And so that should be something in the plan down the road here. And this is a thing that should be signed off by the manager and the manager once removed and then forms a part of the feedback back to the individual. And it depends on the nature of the organization, how this is done, the feedback. And our general approach here is that the idea is that everybody should have access to what's in their file and we try to get companies to go along with that, so that anything that's here people can see. So people can see their file from anywhere in the world. We want the individual to take the initiative in their own development. So the last thing I want to show you here, which isn't actually in this particular version of the software that we're looking at, is the compensation module, which is at the last nearly it's the last exhibit in the book. But the idea here is that there's a felt fair pay system and it's got three components. It's got salary, short term incentives and long term incentives. This particular individual is a Stratum Three is not eligible for long term incentive. But you can see the compensation record of the individual on screen and what the total direct compensation for the Stratum Three in the organization is what the salary bands are and what the STIP targets are the short term incentive targets. And the idea here is that this is a part of the decision making process and this is something that the manager is using and giving feedback on performance and on reward. And once again, the idea is it's all together in the package so that managers can do their job as they are going on. Now, depending on the organization, there may be times when people get together manager once removed groups or whatever they might be to look at talent pool in a block of the organization. And we do produce reports that fall right out of the software. This one on exhibit eight is a sort of a one pager that sums up this individual as the system sees them at a point in time. So you can get a sense of what might be in a book that a dozen managers once removed might sit down with and look at a cadre of maybe 50 or 100 people. So that's the thing.