2 Devising and implementing a talent strategy
Our talent management plan is designed annually by business heads and our HR people. But it is the business heads that drive the talent agenda and keep it alive and customised to each business unit. They hold a quarterly review to assess the progress of the plan and whether it is furthering their strategic goals.
Joydeep Bose, president and global head of human resources, Olam International
IN MATURE AND EMERGING MARKETS alike, the ability to implement strategy depends on having staff with the right experience and knowledge positioned in the right places across the business at the right time.
Having the right people in place for the current and emerging needs of a business is not easy. First, the talent implications of the organisation’s strategy must be understood – and the more thought-provoking and clear the strategy is the easier this will be. Second, there must be effective processes for making sure that enough high-calibre staff are recruited or brought up through the ranks and given appropriate training and experience.
As the previous chapter outlined, many firms are struggling to recruit enough talented people, either because of skills shortages, mismatches between the location of jobs and suitably qualified people, or because of the difficulty of gaining access to hitherto untapped groups of talented workers. It has also become harder for firms to make longer-term predictions about the skills they will need and where these should be deployed across the business.
Staying ahead or playing catch-up?
Research for this book suggests that even firms that have a talent strategy lack confidence in it. Unilever, a multinational consumer-goods company, for one, has doubts about the effectiveness of its talent plans. It developed a new ten-year strategic plan in 2011 in response to the shift of economic power eastwards, the increasing focus on environmental sustainability and other trends. The company aims to double its turnover from €44 billion in 2010 to €80 billion by 2020.
Doug Baillie, president of western Europe and a member of the executive committee, admits that he is daunted by the talent implications of the new strategy, especially the goal of doubling the value of the business, commenting:
This is bold; it is really ambitious. We haven’t managed to grow turnover by 7% a year in our history for ten consecutive years.
The big question about integrating talent into strategy is whether we lay the road ahead of the business or follow behind. We have big goals. How do we go about it? How do I take that ambition and that strategy? How do we put talent right into the middle of that and try to drive it?
As well as needing more skilled leaders and managers, Unilever wants them to come from a wider assortment of nationalities. Almost all the projected growth will come from developing and emerging markets. Some 60% of Unilever’s business today is in these markets, but by 2020 the company estimates that this will be anywhere between 70% and 80%. Baillie explains:
If you think that 60–80% of our business will be in the South and the East of the world, the challenge is where do we find the leaders to lead this business? Our top 100 leaders consist of 22 different nationalities. This sounds not too bad but of those 100 leaders, 60% are British, Dutch or Indian. We have to develop more leaders from other geographies.
HR and business heads now work closely together to formulate a talent plan that will support the new strategy. In simple terms, the talent plan has three components:
Unilever tries to keep talent plans aligned with the business strategy by incorporating the annual talent plans within business units into a three-year strategic review for the whole organisation. In addition, the top management team takes responsibility for the development of the top 100 managers worldwide, including senior vice-presidents, vice-presidents and directors. Baillie comments:
We spend a lot of time on the top 100 leaders. We regularly talk about them at our executive meetings. We spend a whole day every year putting them into a fairly standard nine-box performance grid and ranking them. We talk a lot about getting the right people for the right job and making sure that we have identified where we want them to be in five years’ time. We also ensure these individuals have opportunities to meet the executive team.
Despite joint planning between HR and business heads, a talent plan that directly feeds into strategy planning cycles and the close involvement of the top management team, Baillie still wonders if his talent plan will fuel Unilever’s growth or act as a brake:
The question that keeps me most awake at night is do I have the talent to achieve our goals? Can I get the talent in quickly enough to get ahead of the growth – or am I going to play catch-up over the next couple of years?
It appears that few other companies are taking the matter so seriously, however. A 2010 study of FTSE 100 companies by Heidrick & Struggles, a global executive search firm, found that while some senior managers believed having the right people on board and managing the process of recruiting, developing and getting the best out of them could be a source of competitive advantage, many companies do little more than engage in filling vacancies.
Furthermore, although Baillie is a member of Unilever’s senior management team, has been employed by Unilever for decades and has a previous track record running geographical regions inside the company, the Heidrick & Struggles report found this kind of career profile an exception for those in charge of talent strategies. In the FTSE 100 study, only 17% of those surveyed reported directly to the CEO. Some 90% had spent their whole career in HR. When asked “How well do you think your organisation manages talent?”, they gave an average score of 6 out of 10. Significantly, the average length of time the role of head of talent had existed in the company was only five years and the average time those surveyed had been in the role was three years.
David Smith, managing director of the talent and organisation performance service at Accenture, a multinational management consulting company, confirms the patchy nature of corporate commitment revealed by the survey:
A great many of our clients are putting talent management at the heart of their business strategy and are integrating it into their thinking and decision-making and driving it very strategically. The key point is the integration into business strategy. Talent management is front and centre in their scenario planning and analytics.
At the other end of the spectrum there are some organisations that pay only lip service to talent management. They talk about the importance of it yet when you work with business executives, it is apparent that it is not rated very highly. There is a focus on day-today HR administration but not really talent management.
In the middle there are those who say it is hard to get the right sponsorship from the top and to get senior executives to carve out specific time to deal with recruitment and retention and leadership development issues.
Much of the problem is the difficulty of getting the HR function to operate at a strategic level. McKinsey’s 2012 analysis in “The State of Human Capital” of the ills besetting the HR function showed that many HR staff felt they did not have the necessary status or capability to work effectively with operational heads or the top management team. Responses from the business units of 72 firms confirmed this, giving the lowest ranking to how well the HR function “sourced” and recruited talented staff. Overall, the business units ranked HR functions as more effective at transactional tasks such as payroll administration than at strategic tasks which added value to the business.
Devising a talent strategy
Organisations must devise talent plans that reflect their strategic priorities. The research for this book suggests that the formulation of a plan that has the best chance of being effective involves carrying out strategic and talent reviews and setting up systems for measurement and evaluation, accountability and governance.
Strategic review
The top management team, heads of operations and the talent management team work together to build a shared understanding of the strategic goals for the whole business as well as the priorities for each business unit. This review should
With these priorities clear, senior leaders can identify the capabilities that help achieve the company’s strategic objectives and provide a competitive edge. These capabilities are identified initially at a high level to make sure that they directly underpin the strategic plan and are not just tactical or operational skills, which, although important, do not have as much of an impact on business performance and profits. Operational heads and the talent management team then break down each capability into its constituent parts, such as specific skills, knowledge and expertise. They look at how these skill sets enable each business unit to deliver their part of the strategic plan.
This analysis should reveal the roles where knowledge and expertise are deployed for maximum business value. These are not automatically senior leadership or management roles. They also extend to technical and specialist roles or to previously overlooked roles – for example, positions within the organisation that help make sure that vital expertise from one part of the business flows to another. Part of this review may necessitate a fresh look at knowledge-management processes across the business.
The HR team should also review its own ways of working and thinking to make sure that its processes for recruitment, selection, learning and development, appraisal, reward and recognition, and so on foster the skills, cultural values and behaviours most critical to business performance.
Talent review
The aim of a talent review is to assess how well employees are performing currently in the critical roles, identified by the strategic review, and their potential to move into more demanding roles. Some of the required data will be held centrally by HR, but, almost certainly, the team carrying out the review will need to speak directly to operational and line managers to get feedback about the performance and potential of key individuals.
Managers often struggle to make judgments about potential, and if this is the case, part of the strategic review should include a discussion of it to make sure that the organisation is not working to historical and possibly outdated notions of potential. The top management team is just as likely to be as prone as anyone else to unconscious bias on what potential is and how you spot it. Managers have to leave aside the factors that made them successful in their careers and think objectively about what an outstanding leader, manager or specialist will look like in five years or so. Devising or revising a nine-box grid of performance and potential related to future business plans is helpful in getting to a shared definition (see Figure 1.1).
The review should also look at the talent work that is currently taking place, such as high-potential and leadership development programmes, or diversity initiatives designed to accelerate the development of promising individuals from an underrepresented group of employees. One important question is whether there are any activities that are not badged as talent management but support its agenda, such as staff exchanges, going on between the organisation and a valued supplier or strategic partner.
As part of the review, gap analysis will help identify gaps in skills necessary to carry out the business’s strategy and plans, and whether any critical roles are unfilled. Succession planning is a crucial factor here as it may well be that insufficient numbers of potential successors have been identified for certain critical roles.
A gap analysis is a standard part of workforce planning that looks at current operational needs in the context of short-term plans. A talent-based gap analysis takes a more strategic line in that it:
This analysis determines whether the right talented people are in the right place at the right time. Looking at the intersections between these three factors can highlight where talent planning needs to be improved. For example:
Once the talent review has identified any shortages of talent, an organisation has three options:
These three options are discussed later in this chapter. A fourth option that is rarely pursued by firms but is likely to become more important is broadening talent. This entails building an “ecosystem” of talent by extending talent processes to incorporate previously overlooked groups of individuals within and outside the business; this is the focus of Chapter 6.
Measurement and evaluation, accountability and governance
The talent plan that emerges from the strategic and talent reviews should have the following components:
It is only through some system of measurement and evaluation that the effectiveness (and credibility) of the talent management strategy can be gauged. There are a number of measures that can be used, including:
Jan Hill, a partner at Orion Partners, a consulting firm, says talent management will gain more credibility if measurements are explicitly linked to business results. She explains:
Most organisations measure the health of their talent processes; for example, looking at the number of high-potential employees … HR then struggles to demonstrate the value of its activities.
While these measures are important, relying on them works only if senior stakeholders make the connection between the talent process and achieving business goals.
Foundations of a talent strategy: buy, borrow, build
As outlined earlier, companies have three options when it comes to filling talent gaps: to buy, borrow or build.
Buying talent
An obvious choice when a company needs particular skills or expertise that it does not have the time or ability to develop in existing staff is to buy in that talent. The task is then to source this expertise, and offer the right set of inducements to recruit and retain individuals with the desired skills.
The downside is that buying talent can be costly as the going rate for sought-after specialists is high and they are often in a strong negotiating position. Swift recruitment processes and flexible remuneration packages help in getting such people on board, but just as important will be that the work is satisfyingly stretching and that it enables someone to remain at – or reach – the forefront of their field. Boredom and repetition are likely to send them into the arms of rival firms.
The competition to recruit the top performers in an occupation or industry is most likely to be won by firms that excel in employer “branding”, where they position themselves as an employer “of choice” or a “must have” name on an individual’s job résumé. Firms will pay a lot for IT specialists and a prolific amount of money is spent on buying in talent in the financial sector. But acquiring talent can be the only option for firms that are growing rapidly or where there is intense competition for certain skills so as to capitalise on a new business opportunity, such as business analytics or social-media-based marketing.
Borrowing talent
When there is a temporary need for specialist skills it makes sense to borrow or “rent” what is required by contracting with, for example, freelancers, independent consultants, staff on secondment or firms that will supply staff.
This form of flexible labour has always been important to firms, but in uncertain times such flexibility becomes more attractive. It enables firms to assemble new combinations of skills in swift response to sudden shifts in their environment. It provides firms with access to a wider pool of talent, especially in the case of work that can be performed in any location. And although freelance specialists may charge top-dollar rates, it can make good economic sense – providing temporary workers do not in effect become expensively permanent.
Temporary workers, who are able to carry out their work remotely, can be hired through traditional recruitment processes or through online marketplaces, known as “talent exchanges”. Employers specify what they want done remotely or “virtually”, and interested individuals then bid for the assignment. These talent exchanges, sometimes described as “cloud talent sourcing”, enable firms to access a global pool of talent.
According to The Economist, online marketplaces like ODesk and Elance have grown rapidly. The value of work contracted online exceeded $1 billion in 2012 and is forecast to double to $2 billion by 2014 and to reach $5 billion by 2018. ODesk brokered 35m hours of work in 2012 (over 50% more than in 2011), divided among 1.5m tasks, at a total cost of $360m to its corporate customers. The value of work on Elance rose by 40% in 2012 to more than $200m. Some 69% of Elance’s freelancers have a university degree or equivalent professional qualification and their work assignments often last several months.
According to the Human Capital Institute, the type of work done by temporary workers is changing. The increase of specialised work and the heavy reliance on project work in knowledge-based organisations mean that it now involves those with expertise in such fields as engineering, IT, health care, accounting and finance. In a 2010 survey conducted by Accenture and the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals, just over 40% of respondents indicated that outsourcing at their organisations was increasingly focused on knowledge-based activities.
The role of HR is to act as a “talent broker”, helping achieve a tight fit between a skilled individual employed on a temporary basis and specific tasks and projects across a business. The more a business relies on such temporary talent, the more it needs to consider how to manage such people and whether they should be included in talent management processes, such as learning and development initiatives. This topic is explored in greater depth in Chapter 6.
Building talent
A larger firm will seek to build its own talent by creating a reliable “pipeline” of high-potential and high-performing employees. The aim is to spot rising stars early and to invest in their careers in the expectation that they will progress to senior positions in the business.
Typically, these individuals are placed in a talent pool where their progress is monitored and where they are given extra opportunities for training and development. To keep talented people moving through the pipeline there is an emphasis on performance management, so any weaknesses or developmental needs can be spotted early on. If they live up to expectations, these high-flyers are slotted into succession plans as they rise up the organisation and gain greater experience.
The notion of keeping talent moving around the business is critical. HR and line managers often work together to make sure that promising employees gain experience in different functions and business units. This requires career mapping, where the organisation (probably HR) devises a “road-map” for employees outlining the skills, experiences and qualifications they need to move from one job to another, and longer-term development plans, which might include a combination of coaching, on-the-job learning, management development programmes and further study towards professional qualifications.
This approach is most commonly taken by larger businesses, especially multinationals like Unilever, Mars and Olam International (see below) because they have the resources to provide promising employees with targeted training and development and a wide range of work experiences, especially international assignments.
The biggest challenge is to make sure that every part of an organisation is clear about what it means by talent so that high-flyers are identified, nurtured and developed equally well across the organisation. HR processes need to reflect these definitions (so using a company-wide competency framework helps ensure consistency in decisions about performance, promotion and development, and so on). Fragmented processes can also lead to some individuals getting lost in the system or being held back by a boss who may not want to lose them or who feels sufficiently threatened by them to block their progress.
Performance data on talented staff must be collated so that there is strong evidence for decisions affecting them. And other data should be gathered from across the organisation to demonstrate the link between investing in promising staff and their impact on the business. However, as Chapter 3 argues, this intensive process-based approach can lead to an unwieldy talent “machine” which causes HR staff to spend too much time in transactional activities instead of taking a more strategic role.
The options of buying, borrowing or building talent are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, over time the majority of organisations will do all three to meet different needs in different circumstances.
Olam International is a global integrated supply chain manager and processor of agricultural products and food ingredients. Its talent management strategy is set against the background of the decision taken in 2009 to expand its activities. As well as trading commodities like cotton, palm, rubber, coffee, rice and edible nuts, Olam decided to farm, source, manufacture, package, market and distribute these commodities – what the firm calls going upstream and downstream in the supply chain.
The company embarked on a spending spree (which came to an end in spring 2013 after savage criticism by a prominent American hedge fund, which engaged in some large-scale short-selling of the company’s stock), acquiring 30 agricultural assets such as almond orchards, dairy farms, rubber plantations and processing plants and in the process boosting its workforce by 30%.
The pace and extent of the growth presented a number of HR priorities.
Embed a common culture
The first was embedding a common culture into a disparate set of newly acquired processing facilities and plantations so that all technical specialists and managers signed up to and were motivated by the company’s shared values of entrepreneurship, ownership, integrity, mutual respect, stretch and ambition. Janaky Grant, head of learning and development at Olam, explains:
We have a group of business leaders who form the Culture and Values Standing Committee. When Olam re-looked at its business strategy in 2008–09, the committee played a key role in questioning our existing core values and whether they were going to hold up in a larger and more diversified business.
The result was that we redefined our core values so that they could be applied across the organisation including the newly acquired entities. We organised forums to communicate the shared values.
We also held sessions where people discussed the dilemmas of behaving according to these values in practice. Our people are often spread out working in remote plantations, farms and manufacturing plants so it was useful to debate various dilemmas and achieve a shared understanding of the desired values..
Identify and develop new skills
The second was identifying and developing the new skills the company was going to need. Joydeep Bose, president and global head of human resources at Olam, stresses:
In the past, the role of a manager was managing an enterprise. Leaders were managing large teams, distribution networks and logistics. Now, the organisation has invested in manufacturing assets, investment projects and plantations. The new group of managers who run these businesses require deep expertise in these different parts of the supply chain.
The company focused on drawing up what it terms “domain-specific competencies” – the skills that apply to each part of the business such as sourcing products (requiring, for example, skill in procurement); trading (trading insights, hedging derivatives); packaging and distribution; and marketing products. To help build these capabilities, the company established “communities of practice” to connect plant managers, production and quality managers across businesses based in various African and Asian countries. These committees meet regularly to build a shared knowledge base. “They talk about challenges and share their success stories,” says Grant.
Identify and build global leaders internally
The third was to set in place an accelerated process of identifying and building global leaders internally who could manage capital-intensive businesses and assets and pursue new business opportunities that were emerging as Olam pursued its growth strategy.
Each year on average 30% of the total people hired are recruited through a graduate trainee programme. This is globally co-ordinated across universities and business schools in Asia, Africa, Australia and North and South America. Graduate trainees are typically placed in commercial and operational roles, but they go through 18 months of training before starting to ensure they have a rounded understanding of the company’s businesses, operating processes, culture and values and the various roles across the global organisation.
The graduate trainee programme is linked to a global assignment talent pool (GATP), which consists of 750 managers in critical positions across the 65 countries in which Olam operates. Bose explains:
People are selected to the pool based on roles in the organisation that we consider as having a higher impact – and people who demonstrate a strategic fit in the organisation and its desired values and behaviours. These roles have a global dimension. These individuals need to acquire a wider perspective beyond the boundaries of their countries.
These people will be moved across Olam’s many products, geographies and functional boundaries. However, we want our general managers to acquire more specialised knowledge, so we expect them to be in each position for at least four to five years before they take on another role.
Olam has also headhunted more experienced staff to fill newly created specialist global functions that provide across-the-board support for the various businesses.
Succession to specific roles is reviewed regularly by a committee comprising business heads and HR managers. Any talent management expenditure is discussed by the committee and assessed on the basis of whether it is aligned to the business’s needs. Olam’s goal is that HR practices are led and managed by the business heads themselves.
For example, Steve Driver, head of manufacturing and technical services, a global function that was created from scratch in 2011, sets standards and procedures to ensure consistency across manufacturing. He also works with HR to provide training and development for high-level skills that help manufacturing teams implement growth plans (such as buying a new manufacturing plant), achieve efficiencies and build capability in manufacturing processes.
Driver is responsible for talent processes for the country managers, heads of business units and plant managers who oversee or run manufacturing facilities. He and his leadership team work with the central HR team as a “strategic partner”, as he explains:
We work extremely well together. We meet three times a year to ensure we have the required skills and capabilities within manufacturing. We agree our direction, based on a balanced scorecard analysis of the function. A lot of our work has been around defining model profiles for various roles. We spend a lot of time running workshops in different regions explaining this approach.
Driver believes it is his (not HR’s) responsibility to get buy-in from business heads to sign up to the new capabilities required by the new strategy. He asserts:
Putting in place these processes, structures and disciplines is one thing. The second thing is getting management support. This is how I spend the bulk of my time – explaining to the regional heads why we are doing things differently and getting their buy-in.
These are aggressive alpha-male MBAs who have been driving the business very successfully. It was a question of sitting down with them and telling them – and telling them again – that the last thing anyone wants to do is to stifle growth or entrepreneurialism, but there are certain things that have to be done differently. I emphasise that this is value-creating. These are smart guys. It might not be their natural inclination – but they get it.
With the new standards and competencies in place, the manufacturing and technical services leadership team has recently conducted a talent review for top managers across the globe, based on performance data from the annual appraisal process. This review looks at their strengths and weaknesses as well as judgments about their potential, with the aim of designing longer-term career paths.
Driver emphasises the importance of a “can do” approach to talent management when an organisation is expanding as rapidly as Olam:
In such a dynamic business, it is hard to stay ahead of the curve. You have to be nimble. A gap appears and you plug it.
We don’t have lots of meetings about talent management. We sit down with the HR team, we set out our business priorities and our talent agenda. We don’t make a big deal of it and we don’t analyse it to death, we just get on with it.
Gaining sponsorship from the business
Talent management must be integrated into such activities and processes as budgeting, strategic planning and risk management.
Responsibility for overseeing talent management and making sure that there is an adequate return on investment should ultimately lie with the top management team. Those in charge of the talent management function should report to a committee made up of senior managers from across the whole business, which should meet regularly to make sure that the talent plan stays closely linked to the strategic plan and direction, agree any changes to the talent plan, make decisions about high-level risks and issues and sign off investment decisions.
The role of the CEO
An important factor underpinning Olam’s talent management strategy is the close involvement of the company’s chief executive, Sunny George Verghese. He chairs the committee overseeing key appointments and meets newly recruited members of the company’s talent pool every quarter. Bose explains:
Our chief executive stresses that the key expectation he has of his leadership team is to deepen and propagate the culture that underpins our growth. Any manager who comes into the GATP attends a session that the CEO conducts over four days. The sessions are intense. They start at 8am and end at 7pm. The CEO takes them through the rationale of why we are in business, what are we for, what the future is like, what is the strategy and what are the values and how do we live them.
His example, according to Eric Olsen of Heidrick & Struggles, should be followed by everyone:
We find that often the chief executive intervenes for a short period saying this talent function isn’t working, we need to get smarter, we need to get it more aligned around strategy. I’ll give it to one of the senior HR people by calling him or her head of talent – and then I’ll go off and do the things I do.
This HR-led, process-based approach fails because the chief executive is the missing link. He or she needs to get much more active in the ownership of the outcomes. You wouldn’t see the chief executive abdicate his or her responsibility for finance or marketing – yet it often looks like they simply lob the ball to the head of talent and then walk away from the consequences. They need to stay involved.
The foremost champion of this view is Indra Nooyi, chairman and chief executive of PepsiCo. As she explained in a 2011 presentation to chief executives in Boston:
How much time should we as chief executives spend moving talent management from the art that it has been to real science? I’m going to challenge all of you and say that if you are not spending at least 40% of your time on talent management you might well run into an issue about going forward … It is hard to find the time but tell yourself that this is critical to the company’s future.
At PepsiCo, we are an engine for talent development. We embrace it and it also means that we have to constantly reinvent what we are doing … So it would not come as a surprise to you that the first thing I did when I became chief executive in 2006 was to get started on my senior executive succession planning, not just the succession planning for the chief executive but for the entire senior management team.
The first thing we did as the leadership team was to sit down and ask ourselves this most important question – “Where do we want to take PepsiCo over the next 10–15 years?” From this came PepsiCo 20–25, a blueprint that sets out alternative scenarios for the company to drive sustainable growth and top-tier financial performance.
That blueprint in turn informed the skills that we need in order to move the company forward. Then what we did was to go a step further. For both ambitious goals, we identified 300 critical senior leadership goals that we thought would make or break our success. We then asked, “What are our pipeline needs?” We built in demand ratios and said that we needed to have one emergency successor for each job, and then two people in the one to three year timeframe and another three people in the four to six year timeframe.
Every one of these 300 jobs has six people racked and stacked behind them. This means that we need 1,500 to 1,800 leaders in the pipeline. Not all of them will make it. Some will plateau. Some will fall short. Others will leave. Others will join. But we have to make sure that we always have a full pipeline of 1,500 to 1,800 people to fill these 300 critical positions.
For the last four years, I spent about 30% of my time on this group of potential C-suite successors.
The role of heads of talent
The role of the talent director is to consult and brief the senior management team regularly, with the aim of making sure that the talent strategy stays aligned with the business strategy and is adapted as the strategy changes, and that it is producing the desired results.
Becky Snow is global talent director at Mars, a global chocolate, confectionery and pet-care business. She describes her role as:
Setting a guiding, shaping strategy, then engaging the leadership and business units behind the essence and framework of that strategy so they can find their own way of tapping into it.
She also looks after what she describes as the “infrastructure of talent management”, which is the tools, processes and competency framework used by her team of regional talent directors. As part of her global role, Snow is responsible for succession planning for the top of the organisation, including their career development. However, she stresses:
One of our key roles is talent brokering to ensure there we keep our most promising managers visible and mobile across the business units. This mobility also helps prevent these units from becoming insulated in how they think and operate.
Much of Snow’s time as talent director is spent talking to the company’s business heads to make sure that they take responsibility for decisions made in their domains:
It is about encouraging the leadership to think more long term and this brings us to the most important shift we need to make, which is at all levels of the organisation to hold our associates (ie, staff) accountable to their responsibility to develop talent as a competitive differentiator.
The planners of talent strategies are facing a radically different set of circumstances than those confronted by their predecessors. Marielle de Macker, managing director of group HR at Randstad, observes:
The world is certainly changing and becoming more volatile … It is therefore important to develop enough agility to respond in an appropriate way to this change but also to be able to predict what is coming – to see around corners. The challenge is not for talent managers to learn new tricks, tips and skills but to develop this raw capacity to see change coming and to develop the appropriate judgment about how best to respond.
A number of those interviewed for this book spoke of the need for firms to adopt a more agile approach that balances long-term planning with the ability to change direction quickly.
To be able to “lean into the future”, HR staff need to strengthen their skills in strategic planning and become more adept at identifying the talent implications whenever there is a shift in strategy or the business environment changes. Scenario planning can help them do this, as can other “futuring” techniques used to question current assumptions and explore different models for the business and new ways of organising and performing highly skilled work.
At least once every two years there should be time set aside to anticipate how various new trends could affect the demand and supply of talent and the way skilled work could be organised. For example:
Conclusion
The experiences of Unilever and Olam International illustrate the importance of recruiting and developing the right mix of high-calibre managers, leaders and specialists to support and grow their businesses.
Both companies have placed the highest priority on devising talent plans that reflect the priorities of the business. Talent managers have worked closely with operational managers to identify the capabilities that employees need if they are to deliver the business strategy. Their focus has been on the immediate operational needs of the business and the actions that will help deliver longer-term success.
An effective talent plan is closely tied to the company’s strategic goals and priorities. Talent managers can undertake a rigorous assessment of the company’s talent requirements in the short and medium term. But probably the most important factor contributing to an effective talent plan is the active involvement and support of the top management team, operational heads and other senior managers.
Few firms believe they have formulated agile talent strategies. Part of the problem is that HR managers need greater expertise in strategic workforce planning and other processes such as scenario planning.
However, a major barrier to HR playing a more strategic role is that talent management activities require much time and effort. The operational demands of talent management often leave little room for HR staff to think about wider issues. The greatest risk – and the greatest irony – is that in the effort to embed more rigorous and systematic talent management, firms may well be building systems that are too rigid for today’s turbulent conditions. Chapter 3 looks at this issue in greater detail.