Executive summary:
“Go for a long journey to Excellence rather
than short trips to success.” That sentence concludes my view about what
organizations should do to manage their talents after going through this paper.
The first school that believes talent
development is evolutionary as a reaction to environmental changes adopts the
school of “short trips to success” where they depend on current job training
requirements to develop their employee without having a vision for the future.
Moreover, they don’t have a clear career path for their employee. They rather
depend on a replacement planning where they would either promote high
performance candidates without assessing their potential or headhunt new talents
depending of the case of “A buyer’s market of skills”
The other school believes that talents should
be managed and developed in a systematic way represented in a succession
planning and management program. They adopt the school of “long journey to excellence”.
They spend time and effort to prepare talents for future challenges, provides
individual development plans to their talent pools, with a promise of
advancement for each employee in the organization .In that way they ensure
leadership continuity, keeping institutional memory and raising individuals
morale by offering advancement opportunities on a clear basis of advancement
criteria.
I have went through examples to show a contrast between the two schools
listing some activities of talent assessment , development and using software
for succession planning & management program .
I have then concluded my position with the
reasons for which I strongly support succession planning & management
program as the only effective way to ensure organizational excellence for the
present and the future.
1. Introduction:
Having the right people is one of the
fundamentals of any successful business. Although, almost all the organizations
would do much effort to recruit a talent, not all of them believe that a talent
should pass through a developmental process. One school assumes talent development
is a spontaneous reaction to the changing environment .The other believes that
waiting for an action to react would be too late to cope with fast changing
competitive environment of business nowadays. They devote enough time for
talent management & development through a systematic effort of succession
planning & management.
“Succession planning and management is a
systematic effort by an organization to ensure leadership continuity in key
positions, retain and develop intellectual and knowledge capital for the future
& encourage individual advancement.” ( Rothwell, WJ 2010, P41)
It is meant to ensure having the right person,
in the right place, at the right time to get the right results.
I will start by the school of thought that
depends solely on training, performance appraisal & Management. Then I will
define talent management & its integration with succession planning which
represents the body of effort of the planned talent development.
2. Evolutionary,
Environment driven talent development.
Adopters of this school of thought believes
that building a talent in a systematic way wouldn’t have that recognizable
impact on the organization performance. They would rather depend on performance
management, appraisal as a criteria to promote personnel.
2.1 Performance Management
& Appraisal:
Performance management is the
process of creating a work environment in which people want to perform to their
peak abilities & encouraged to develop themselves in the future
Performance appraisal is the
process of determining how well individuals are meeting the work requirements
of their jobs. ( Rothwell, WJ 2010,4th edition, P205)
2.2 Demo AV.
Suppliers
Each organization belonging to this school
will have its own arguments to defend its ideas. I am going to discuss my own
experience in one of those companies who are not willing to implement
systematic succession planning.
My company (Demo AV suppliers), 50 workers
organization ,works in the field of equipment supply for conferences &
exhibitions .board members like the idea of succession planning but they have
never believed we would need to do that effort in our organization . The
business is going well & we won’t need more investment in personnel. They
pay more attention to investing in technology.
Personnel promotion, demotion, or
keep-in-place criteria is done using the following grading system:
A: High performer (Exceeds goals)
B: Standard (Achieved Goals)
C: Low performers (Didn’t achieve goals)
Actions:
A: 5 % increase in annual raise, train & promote
when possible.
B: Standard annual raise.
C: Low performers, train, reconsider in the
next quarter, fire if low performance persist.
You can easily realize many defects in that
way of developing people, as there is no succession planning, you don’t really know
what could happen, That A category
employee could easily leave the place for a company with a better development
planning that would secure him a career plan to match his potential. The B category
is already an achiever, yet you just added an annual raise.
Furthermore, there is no clue about employees’
potential. In other words, High performance at one level doesn’t necessarily
mean a same performance at a higher level which may require other competencies.
During a recent discussion in our monthly
meeting, the idea of not adopting succession planning was defended by the
following factors:
- They
believe that development is self-driven, and the person who is aiming to
have a key position would pay effort to be ready for it.
- A
buyer’s market of skills would allow them to hire a top talent with a
relatively low price.
- Losing
a talent they paid for developing would cost them more than recruiting a
new talent.
Although
those factors may be true at the moment .I have noted that we are at a big risk
of business deterioration due to the following:
- Development
could be influenced, personnel are not always able to assess themselves
and demonstrate what they need exactly.
- The
buyer’s market of skills won’t last forever, it is a matter of time till
we reach a stable economic conditions.
- The
risk of losing a talent would be disastrous, being a technical field we
mainly depend on technical knowledge & intellectual memory which have
created many key positions even at the lowest level of employee.
3. Developing
talent through succession planning & management program.
Succession planning by definition is the
systematic effort done by organization to ensure leadership continuity in key positions,
retain, develop intellectual capital for future & encourage individual
advancement.
According to lester korn, CEO of the search firm
“Boards are beginning to realize that they have the same obligation to protect
human resource asset base for as they do to protect the balance sheet of the
corporation” ( Rothwell, WJ
2010,4th edition, P205)
The case is not only how to find a talent, it is
about how to find, develop, retain a talent in a way that would ensure business
continuity through the present and the future.
3.1 What is talent
management?
It is the process of managing the development
& deployment of employees from recruitment to retirement .Talent management
activities cover processes that attract, develop & reward employees &
includes competency management, learning & development, performance management,
compensation, career & succession planning. (Chief Learning Officer, March 2009,
p54)
The following diagram best describes the
process:
Of course different organizations have unique
requirements in its succession planning according to the field of business,
business strategy, culture differences and other factors. I am going to list
some of those organizations activities to develop talents in a systematic way.
3.2 The Grundfos Group
The Grundfos Group is the world leader in
pumping systems, employing over 18,000 staff internationally.
Potential Assessment: The
process of examining individual possibilities for job change or movement.
Grundfos performance-potential
9-grid system:
In Grundfos”, says Jessica Wang-HR director of
Grundfos china- “we use the nine grid system to evaluate potential versus
performance.” This grid (See table below) helps define definitions of limited,
moderate and high potential, and poor, good and outstanding performance. Once
the roles in an organisation have been agreed upon and benchmarked by all the
relevant parties in the hiring process, this grid system is an effective
assessment tool for HR professionals.
Jessica wang proceeded “development plans for
the individuals can be discussed. When deciding on succession plans, the
important boxes which you should focus on will be 1A, 1B and 2A as this makes
up the ‘potential pool’.”
Grundfos recognised the need for a talent development
process that would allow them to identify and nurture their talent pipeline.
This would allow the company to develop a more dynamic organisational culture
that would help them to provide energy efficient technological solutions for an
ever growing global population. To do so would require a broadening of their
scope led and inspired by its talent of the future.
A&DC (Assessment & development
consultants) worked with Grundfos to design and create an assessment process
that would evaluate nominated high performing/high potential Talents to
determine whether they had the potential to become ‘Global Talents.’ Grundfos
also recognised the need for different types of talent and therefore aimed to
classify all Talents into a ‘Talent pool’ as an innovator, specialist or
leader.
I am going to list some definitions before
discussing the solution Grundfos was offered from the consultant.
Talent pool is a
group of workers who are being prepared for vertical or horizontal advancement.
(Roth well, WJ 2010, 4th edition, P207)
- Talent
pools is one of the characteristics of succession planning and management
that makes it superior to replacement planning by creating many backups
for a position instead of having one or few ones.
Vertical Advancement: Promotion
up the organization chain of command.
- Promotion
up the organization needs to focus development on leadership skills, in
Grundfos case, vertical advancement would be for the “Leader Talent pool”
Horizontal advancement: enhancement
of individual’s competencies so that he or she has a broadened scope of
knowledge, skills & abilities in keeping with the organization’s direction
or worker’s occupation
- In
Grundfos case’, “Innovator & Specialist talent pools” will be
subjected to the development to make them ready for horizontal
advancement.
Double loop learning: training
program designed to prepare an employee for horizontal or vertical advancement
by enhancing both leadership & technical skills.
Assessment centre: A
process of creating a realistic simulation of the work performed by those
target talents, and then run individuals through a process to determine how
well they perform in a higher-level or position.
Individual development plans: The
process of planning activities that will narrow the gap between what
individuals can already do & what they should do to meet future work
requirements in one or more key position. ( Rothwell, WJ 2010,4th
edition, P205).
A&DC solution
for Grundfos talent management:
-
They designed a
talent centre (Assessment centre) for collecting comprehensive data about each
talent that is going to be used in assessment and development. The Talent centre measured not only ability
but also personality and motivation to provide a holistic picture of each
Talent.
-
The Talent centre
itself included a number of challenging scenarios and activities such as a
presentation, group discussion, analysis exercise and a crisis management exercise,
which allowed specific roles to be tested through realistic connected
scenarios.
-
Career Success
Module prepared Talents for an in depth one-to-one behavioural and psychometric
feedback session and the start of a Talent development plan.
As
stated on their website “Once a year Management in the companies, in
co-operation with HR, evaluate talents. Staff with potentials for taking on a
larger amount of responsibility in the course of up to five years, are
appointed talents. Management follow the further development of these talents
in connection with the annual
Job
development interviews.” Those words send a clear message for career aspiration
and hold promises of individual development plans.
3.3 Dole food Company
61,000 Workers Company, operating in more than
ninety countries.
“ We are looking to execute an organized
process where we will identify weaknesses & strengths of our people and
build plans to deal with it, we also want to identify areas where we will need
to bring in some people from outside to fill some gaps” ( Rothwell, WJ 2010,4th
edition, P378).
Those were the words by which George
Horne-Dole’s vice president of administration and support operations- stated
the need for a succession planning before the program was started in 2008. Sue
Hagen –Vice president of HR for North America operations – was assigned as the
responsible for leading the effort to start and implement succession planning.
From the very beginning she was convinced it
can’t be done without a software application that could connect all the
employee in one network for an efficient succession planning & management
program.
How software
solution could maximize the benefit of SP& M program?
- A onetime
task by one HR person, fed the database for the start of succession
planning program after grapping it from payroll system.
- Top
Managers access the program from the web with a password, to fill out a
resume, including career interest, and note any mobility restrictions.
They assess themselves on four core competencies required by dole (
Accountability, business acumen, multifunctionality & vision)
- Assessment
goes automatically to the division head, divisional HR director &
Hagen.
- Hagen
will use the information to create a career development plan for each
individual.
“The
beauty is for the first time we’ll have database that ties together these
talent metrics and can serve as a clearinghouse for people available for
opportunities” says Hagen.
(
Rothwell, WJ 2010,4th edition, P381).
4. Conclusion (My
Position)
I am strongly in favour of using a systematic
process of talent development through applying a succession planning &
management program, which will indeed help any organization to achieve
strategic goals by having the right people in the right position at the right
time to do the right job.
However, defining the right person, is a big
dilemma if you don’t have the right tools to do potential assessment and
performance appraisal. Furthermore, a right person in a current position isn’t
necessarily the right one for a higher position. In other words, you need to
assess and develop employee for the future key position competencies, not just
to train according to changes in current environment.
Having the right people is not only how to
recruit & on board, it is mainly how to retain and keep the talents that
would ensure leadership continuity, keeping the institutional memory in your
organization. You need to show commitment for your employee development, by
creating an individual development plan for the selected talents in a way that
would match their career objectives.
A major difference between the two schools of
thoughts we are discussing is how the performance management is used, the first
-evolutionary school of talent development – use performance management &
appraisal as a tool for getting the right person in the right place, however,
exemplary performance at one level doesn’t mean a person would meet the
expectations at a higher level.
On the other hand, the second school supporting
planned talent development uses performance appraisal and potential assessment
to draw a road map for individual development plans according to his/her individual
competencies, desired competencies for current position and future position he/she
could get. In that way they build talent pools where they can find successors
for key positions, keep the institutional memory & motivate employees by
upward or lateral advancement putting in consideration individual requirements
for each candidate career plan. That would be only achieved with an effective
succession planning and management program.
Other reasons for starting and implementing
succession planning & management program:
- Increasing
Talent pool of promotable employees. There is many instead of one or few
backups.
- Provide
increased opportunities for High-potential workers & improve retention
of talented people.
- Improve
employee morale, opportunity to gain a promotion can serve as an
incentive.
- Making
the employee ready for future changes being proactive and not a reactive
approach of development.
- Cope
with the effects of downsizing, increasing individual competencies to
cover more tasks, Keeping the potentials & discarding the failures.
- Providing
a way of horizontal advancement for those low potentials with high
performance, to keep & manipulate technical talents.
5. References
Text Book:
- Rothwell,
WJ 2010, Effective Succession Planning, 4th edn, AMACOM, New York (ISBN:
9780814414163)
Journals:
- Anderson,
C 2009, ‘Succession Planning Gains Momentum’, Chief Learning Officer,
March, vol.8, iss. 3, pp. 54-56.
- Moskal,
W 2008, ‘Planning for Succession’, Baseline, October, iss. 89, pp. 12-14.
Websites:
- http://www.clarkmorgan.com/performance-or-potential/
- http://www.adc.uk.com/resources/library/case-studies/grundfos-talent-centre/
- http://www.bf.umich.edu/docs/KeyReferenceArticles.pdf
- http://www.grundfos.com/content/dam/Global%20Site/About%20us/PDF_Random/grundfos%20facts-29-04-2014.pdf