Talent management strategies at Graham Group: Matching capacity and challenge

SPEAKER A

First off, thanks to everyone for the opportunity to spend a little time with you today. It's a pleasure and it's enjoyable. And I'm not sure I can speak coherently. My head is full of whole list of ideas and I've been trying to scribble them down as opposed to having them bang around between my ears and get confused. First thing is I just want to sort of take a minute to focus my discussion. What I decided to do was so as to not trip over #####. #####'# done a great job of talking about sort of a recent transformation. What I wanted to do was just go back a little bit and aim some comments, particularly at those of you who I feel for and identify with, those of you who are working at considering adopting these principles. It's a big step. It's an important step. I don't see any other way to go, but it's still a difficult, very, very committed plan for an organization. So I wanted to talk about those early days when we got going and some of the things that happened around those initial decisions and some of the key drivers in the front end of this for us. And I think that avoids some redundancy and maybe talks a little bit about the importance of our relationship with ### and some of the messages that we sent to our people and so forth and our clients in those early days. So I've been with the organization I guess now going on 17 years. So when I joined, we were very small and we were very informal and grant referred to the collegial element of our business. I joined a group that was extremely appealing to me. I'm a bit of an adrenaline junkie and I came across this organization that was full of incredibly committed people, passionate people, very high levels of ownership, very, very intense bunch. And to start off with, I thought I knew a few things. It was a bit like joining a motorcycle gang. First you had to go and knock off a liquor store before anyone would talk to you. So off I went to the bush. And after a whole number of years in northern Saskatchewan, bumping around uranium mines or a refinery row in Edmonton, or work at St. Coral mines in the south, a lot of interesting work, pulp and paper, I, from a personal angle, had an opportunity to move to Calgary. The reason that little personal detail is important is it was at that time our CEO had decided that he was facing a couple of problems. One of them was scalability. He looked at the organization and said, I don't think we have what it is going to take to go to the next level here. He had a very strong gut, as ##### mentioned, and so scalability was an issue. And the second thing was that he had a prime sort of concern about institutionalizing ######'# knowledge and finding a way to standardize those things that we knew so we could develop the capability to train and to share and to not be reinventing the wheel every morning. So from those two decisions, he took a strong, hard look at our organizational structure. And at the same time, he started what became the matrix at ###### and what ##### referred to as 15 or so expertise teams that were going to take on all the specialized bits of knowledge in the organization to try to enable more time and latitude for our project managers to manage projects and so on and so forth. So we undertook those things. And I think it was a bit confusing at first, but we were fortunate enough to have ###. We gathered our managers together at our annual meeting in Banff. And ###, I don't know, it was probably about a two or three hour process, but ### walked through all the fundamentals. And so I was thinking back to new organizations, organizations thinking about adopting these principles. And I thought, I'm going to go back to those original principles and just look at those with fresh eyes for a minute and just use them as a bit of a skeleton and sort of weave a little meat on those bones and weave our own story around it for a few minutes. I think it's an effective way. It was helpful for me to remember, I guess, what it is we've been trying to achieve and maybe to be a little critical of our own path and some things that might provide you with some assistance. So if you read the little bit in the folder, it's a fairly standard story, and that story will repeat itself for all of the participants. Here, you'll see that we began with a job of assessing people. And from assessing people, we went to assessing work and trying to learn the concept of CIP, and I think ####'# called it CMP. At any rate, the issue of complexity. And from there we went on trying to assign levels of complexity to projects, and from there we went on trying to assign levels of complexity to business plans and later to strategy. So it's a flow where we started very small looking at the individual, and ended up looking at our strategy and saying, what are the implications of a plan like this, of a set of aspirations like this? All of those have implications. And so ultimately, my punchline is our end goal was to try to take that arc that is the aggregate talent in our organization, and align that ARC, which is the aggregate sum of our aspirations as a business. So the natural development curve that an individual follows, if you get it right, will follow with some stretch and some tolerance. The arc of strategy as a company grows. If you can get those two things aligned, you manage risk. And I think that's what most business is about, other than making money. So I'm just going to jump into the first little package here that was facing us. That was part of what ### put on the table. And at first reading it wasn't all that impressive, I guess. And the reason it wasn't, I thought, well, that's just bloody common sense. There's not a whole lot of work to do. It's just common sense. But when you really think about the implications of this, what you have to do is ask yourself whether you are ready. It's sort of like going on a diet and exercise plan, and it's very easy to talk about. But when it's time to get out of bed at 05:00 in the morning and go running, no one feels like doing it. What happens if somebody doesn't do it? Are there consequences? So taking this on is a deep, deep commitment. If you just bump through a few of those bullets. Employees, a resource that belongs to the company. What a concept. You know, where you work, people have teams, they own those teams. Those teams are tight. Unfortunately, if you're going to unplug the pipe and manage careers, you need to provide mobility for people through various parts of the organization. The best path for an individual may not be up through your group, it may be off somewhere else. Maybe that's the exposure they need to have a career breakthrough. Organizing around work. ######'# a culture of commitment. We're an employee owned culture, and we have and continue to value our people very, very highly. So to put them aside and to look at the work feels disrespectful to the people in your group. It really does, because you ignore them in that exercise and you look at what the company needs. So that's a difficult thing to do, but it's a necessary thing to do. The CIP piece, it seemed fairly straightforward. We were a little iffy when #### started working us through the fundamentals of an assessment. But once you start to get your head around, you know, some of the tools that are foundational in the assessment process, and, you know, not just the declarative cumulative serial process piece, but that is the thing that needs to become actually a core competency for your management team. And like it or not, if you commit yourself and work with this they will start to recognize that they may not have the tools to do an assessment, nor do we want them to, but they instantly started. I think ##### referred to that this morning. People just start to think they see something or they see somebody. They listen to them talk, they watch them work, they see the business results. They instantly know where they are. The work that follows up to define roles and clarify accountabilities and authorities, people themselves start to see where they fit in the organization. As a number of you mentioned, the Mor structure was critical. I think when you put an assessment process in place, people are initially wary of it. And I'm not sure what you have experienced or will experience, but the most negative of them will immediately see it as a pigeonholing scenario. Well, someone's pigeonholing me now. They said, I'm a level two. I'm screwed. I can never run the place. When you explain to them that, a, this is about where you find yourself at this time, and we want to help you grow. We want to understand where you are so that we're not going to set you up to fail and that we're going to work with you to prescribe a path of development. And furthermore, it's not just you and your boss who you may or may not get along with. There's three people in this relationship. Ultimately, as an employee, you're responsible for your output, you know, for focused work and speaking up about your own learning, and your manager is responsible for your output and, and setting context. But that Mor is really responsible for managing the talent pool beneath that individual and providing potentially some balance in an assessment where there's personality conflicts. So employees initially began to understand that it was consistently applied and it was a relatively fair process. The assessment piece, I just can't say enough about that. It's a cornerstone. It's an absolute cornerstone, and it's a tremendously powerful bit of information. So that information has the ability to empower and to engage people and to cause them to resign if you treated improperly, you have to be very, very careful. That's not public knowledge. It's not a, you know, it's not a widely disseminated bit. It's for a very, very tight piece of senior management and the individual, and that's part of their plan. It's very, very personal information, and it has to be dealt with very carefully. So the piece about aligning our aspirations with the horsepower in the organization, that takes a little longer. That is something that happens at the executive level, where you begin with help to plot sort of the sum total of your horsepower and place that up against your plan. That is a longer process. And I just lastly, want to echo something that ##### wrote up, and that the cross functional relationships, they're the most tricky part of the equation. And I would suggest that oftentimes we started out explaining to our folks that cross functional relationships are tricky and that issues are solved through elevation. And initially, people see elevation as tattling, and elevation isn't tattling. What we've tried to say to people is that if you don't have the tools or the resources or the authority or whatever it is, to solve the issue between yourself and some other group, you have to elevate that to someone who does have the authority or the resources or whatever it happens to be to solve that. And that may go, too. So tricky. Cross functional business often will bump up two levels above the problem, not just one. It's often difficult, so don't underestimate that next slide. ###. So I just have a generic. I went and shamelessly pilfered a graphic from some of our early work when ### ### trying to explain to us how you go about plotting those core individuals, those core sources of horsepower in an organization. And one time, when I was a young manager, we had some things disappearing from a branch office. We had a fellow come in and install a surveillance camera so we could figure out what was going on. And one thing he said to me stuck with me. He said, when you put up surveillance in an organization, make sure that you're prepared for what you might see. And the assessment process, this process is a little like that. You can scare the hell out of yourself, because what you're going to see is things that make you feel great and they validate your thoughts, and it will ultimately also show you yawning gaps. So in the old days, we had a very, very strong leader. And when things got tough, he would leave boot marks on behinds, and he would peel the paint, and people would go harder and faster and things would get fixed. And when that stopped working is when we started looking at this, and it hit him like a ton of bricks. I literally mean that when he saw, I have to stop yelling at this guy. He can't understand what I'm saying. It's not fair to him. And it really exposed some of the issues that we had with structure, with gaps in the structure, with training and development that might have been required or with changes that might have been required to achieve the kinds of things we were hoping to. So very, very important process. One of the reasons. I don't know if you have a minute, Google high performance work systems. It's a sort of a sidebar, but I didn't know it at the time. But ###### was a high performance work system. And high performance work systems are characterized by transformational leadership. They're characterized by high levels of transparency. They're characterized by low status differences between individuals, very carefully managed compensation, all of those kinds of things. And like I said, I didn't know it at the time, but when I got into this organization, that's what felt so good about it. It was a high performance work system, and it had been done just on gut and not through prescription. So the reason I bring that up is that when you assess people and you pigeonhole them, one of the reasons that that went relatively well at ###### is that we had at the time a transformational leader who didn't see himself as really any more important than anyone else in the place. There was a lot of value placed on all the jobs in the organization, and we were sort of taught that the organization was upside down, that our frontline people, the estimators and the project managers, that's where we made our money. That's who the clients saw. And the whole organization was to be put in behind those guys to help them. They were the most important people in the place. And so we didn't get into a situation where people saw levels as status. And that's a trap you can fall into, where people think it's a status assignment or an importance assignment. It isn't. You have to remind them it's about a time span of discretion, and it's about giving them something that lends itself to their gifts and their particular point in development. So I think that's a really important little bit of sidebar there. Let me jump ahead. Next little piece was the beyond the individual. And the work was to really take that collective plotting of horsepower in the organization and to try to actually forecast capacity. You see what happens when you take the aggregate effect of plotting the strengths of your individuals, and you turn that into a single line. Depending on what line of business you're in, you'll see the gaps or you'll see the risk develop. You lay your business plan up against that thing, and you have an immediate form of risk assessment. It's not the whole risk assessment, but it's an important piece of risk assessment. And the way you make sure that forecast is valid is by careful attention to an MOR program where you've got more than one opinion about how things are going you've got a very, very sound performance management system, and it enables you to start laying that people piece on the business planning table. We're actually fortunate enough now with the changes that grant is leading in the organization. SAP is actually pulling historical loading of people by capability level from previous projects and laying that up as reality for our managers as they plan. So we can't fool ourselves. And it's an important element of managing risk because you end up business planning with the reality of what kind of horsepower it's taken to do that work in the past, front and center, as you predict what you're going to need to take on even more complicated things. So for us, the learning curve about what constituted complexity was fairly steep. For us, it can be, you know, as was mentioned, it can be schedule, it can be geography, it can be distance from home. We've got projects burning everywhere from Whitehorse, Yukon, to Corpus Christi, Texas. Just distance alone can create a layer of complexity, technical requirements. If you work for some of our big industrial clients, those environments are very, very complex. They're very, very integrated. All those things can add complexity. So as you learn about what constitutes complexity in your work, you can start to do those kinds of things and ensure that the planning process matches what you're up against. Second, last little piece, one of the key things that we're working on here right now, and I'll just get to it in the next slide, but with a strong focus on learning and development, is trying to ensure that we strike the right balance in helping individuals follow their own curve and helping the company meet its capability requirements. And so there's a great thing that happens when you bring people in from outside the organization. They bring with them best practices. They challenge entrenched thinking in your organization. That can be very healthy. You also have to take care to manage your culture, because your culture can be overrun with too strong a feed from outside. And if you value your culture, and that's a big part of who you are, you have to balance those things. So one of the things that you can do with a strong focus on L and D is, again, if you've got a strong performance management system, you can say, I've got the right balance of experience and input on ### ####. We're not promoting him too early. We're not training for the sake of training. We've had given him some useful experience. We're applying the right amount of training and input of this organization to help ensure that he stays moving along his path and where there are gaps. If you go to the previous slide, you forecast your capacity where there are gaps. You're going to have to bring that in from the outside. Again, assessment comes in very strongly because you now are using the same assessment processes to ask yourself what's coming in the door and where that fits in the organization. And that's a key piece of helping to reduce failure and turnover with new hires. It becomes, again, a methodology for getting that right. One of the hugest pieces of learning for me as a young manager at ###### was, like I said, I'm a bit of adrenaline junkie, I guess. And so initially I was kind of given a parachute and a fire hose, and off I went. And one of the most interesting bits of work for me was the difficult work, but the very enjoyable work of trying to help. Part of our strategy at that time was to grow through acquisitions, and we did, and we acquired a lot of smaller companies. We had fit for, you know, front and center. Did these people fit with the organization? Once that was established, then we needed to knit them together with the business. And so I often was parachuted into those kinds of new ventures, trying to help people understand who we were, how we thought, and how they fit into our organization. Having this language in this methodology, I can't even verbalize how much that simplifies things. And before I forget, one of the questions that I'm going to leave off with is that question for those with organizations where ## was implemented in only part of the organization. I'm really curious how that goes with the integration piece. But maybe it's not an issue. Just bring that up a little. Think of it. Let's jump to the next slide now. So the last piece is really just a nod to maybe one of the biggest focuses for me in an HR capacity here at the moment. I think the comment was made about making sure that you tend the garden. One of the things that's happened to us along the way, I should back up a little bit. ## for us has not been a project. It hasn't been. We started it in September and we were trying to implement it by Q two. ## has been a mindset, almost a lifestyle. It's been a way of thinking. It's twelve years old at ###### now, and it's just become how we think and how we talk to one another. It's not a project. It isn't something that we're monitoring month to month and day to day. It's just become a way of running our business and a way that makes sense to us. So as we go forward, you know, we thankfully take the time to look back. So when we went through that, well, when I started in, whatever, 95, 96, I guess we were doing about $115 million, little mom and pop, you know, going like hell. And by the time I got my 15 year service award, we were doing 2 billion in that year. Between when we started ## and today, there's 700% of growth in there for us. So to make a long story short, we just absolutely ran like hell for that whole lead up to the market downturn in zero eight. We just ran. And one. One of the things that happens when you run is everybody's focused on output, everybody's focused on execution, and you forget about the importance of management. When we started working with ###, that was probably one of his biggest hurdles to overcome, was to teach us and to remind us that management is important work. We had in those days a mindset that if you weren't banging nails or pouring concrete, that you weren't doing anything. So he had to help us as a team to understand that management, just peer management and thinking about where things are going is very, very important time spent. So right now, I guess we're a long story short, we got a little ragged in those years and we haven't been paying attention to some of the things that were the foundation of our success. And I think one of the things that grant is bringing the organization is a strong refocus on these principles and a strong refocus on the accountability bit. You talked about embedding expertise and trying to deal with some of those gaps that can occur between groups that end up wandering off in two different directions and just a larger element of accountability. So it feels good to be back at it. It feels good to kind of have a. I guess that's the upside of challenging markets, is that you have a chance to catch your breath and think about not just what you're doing, but how you're doing it. So it's been a healthy process. I think the key final piece is, and this is the piece that we haven't yet solved, is the integration piece. I think that is not easily done. I'm interested in spending a little time talking to ##### to take these principles and to link them to reward strategies and link them to your performance cycle. That's a huge accomplishment if you manage to work through that. So good on you. And I think that sort of constitutes a large part of the next step in our evolution for ##, I think that's all I know.