Live the Brand – Coca Cola’s journey on driving people, passion, happiness and performance

This is exciting. The second day’s opening keynote is Stevens J Saint-Rose, Coca Cola’s International SVP of HR at the Human Asset Summit in Budapest. What is Coca Cola International? Basically every country outside United States – yes, folks in the US still look at the world that there is US and there is the rest of us. Oh well..

Anyway, Stevens is a fantastic guy, full of energy and passion who truly lives what Coke is about, fun and happiness. This amazing attitude and professional humility actually carries a huge – I mean huge – amount of knowledge, skill and dedication – hey, you don’t get such a job if you don’t have true competence in the area. I had the pleasure of chatting with him over 2 hrs last night over a (few) glass(es) of wine I was blown away…

Main challenge: what can HR professionals do differently to meet future demands? For a company with over 700,000 employees across practically all over the world it is not an easy thing to do…

While previously a ‘chess-player’ approach of HR served well, in today’s complex business environment it’s a huge challenge. Coke had a ‘simple’ business vision, achieving in 10 years what company had achieved in the previous 125 years, that is doubling revenue in 10 short years.

How to achieve that? Coke started by looking at Organizational Capability Building and of course via succession and talent management.

However it’s not enough to create a talent focused organization, it is also critical to look at and create the right culture. Hence the company has developed a new approach to Employee Engagement, engaged, enabled,energized – a recipe for the big “E”, that is Breakthrough Engagement.

Worth doing? According to Stevens definitely ‘yes’,  as those organizations who practiced Breakthrough Engagement had significantly better financial performance.

What’s next? How to really achieve high level energy when people already feel they give their maximum and fully engaged. According to Stevens and Coke is all about Happiness in the workplace. Hence they visited Bhutan, the only country in the world that uses a measurement of Gross National Happiness. The are 9 areas to happiness in Bhutan

  • Living Standard
  • Good Governance
  • Education
  • Health
  • Environment
  • Psychological well being
  • Cultural diversity and resilience
  • Community vitality
  • Time

Would it work in Coca Cola or even in your own company? Not necessarily you must look at what are the conditions that drive happiness in your own company.

Stevens warns not to confuse Condition with Dictatorship – it’s not about creating rules, it is rather about creating options where people may choose what’s best and meaningful for them.

6 Trends – external factors impacting the workplace

  • New war for talent

We are moving from of capitalism to a world of talentism. (WOF) – There is a huge talent shortage in developed world despite the huge unemployment rate globally.  Employability shortage is a huge challenge, the skills supplied and available on the labour market is outdated and are not needed, hence the right people to fill do the job are still not available. So the new challenge is not about fighting for the limited number of available talent rather fill the pipeline with more talent. This will require also a  fundamental cultural change, giving opportunities for young people and women to move up.

  • Multi-generations at work

Generation Y – or rather, Y Not? – the new generation accustomed to make decision, grown up in a world of involvement, so they demand involvement in the workplace too. Loyalty in their context is different, while generally they  have more passion towards their organization they are more likely to leave too. And with a new Gen Z on the horizon HR professional must look at how to change organizations to adapt to the new generation of workforce. (Read my previous blogpost on the 2020 workplace here)

  • Women in leadership

What is your organization doing to become more flexible to drive women to leadership? Unfortunately most do not do anything… 62% of companies (Mercer research) don’t do gender diversity training. To create the right avenue for women companies must create executive sponsorship, better work life balance, flexible work environment, networking and socialization for women and lastly build confidence in women.

  • Sustainability

Organizations moving from CSR to Sustainability - creating an ecosystem where everyone wins. More and more young adults are asking what’s the company’s strategy on sustainability. It has become a tool to attract young talent. (Nestle and GE does some great stuff on Shared Values)

  • Globalization

Globalization is making the world smaller. Leaders no longer can just think about their country and market. Leaders must act within their market but think about the world. From the HR perspective: what types of leaders are we building? We must create the right competencies and leadership behaviors, leaders that are agile to be globally competent

  • New ways of working

Technology has enabled us to have new ways of working – organizations has been slow to adapt that work is what you DO and not where you GO. Companies must show organizational flexibility for young adults. Time to wake up, work is not 8 hrs manufacture anymore, rather companies must create an environment that values RESULT DELIVERED and OUTPUT over SHOW UP. (Ricardo Semler has revolutionalized workplace democracy since the eighties, it’s good to see that this also infiltrates mega organizations)

This comes with a lot of additional business benefits – more engaged workforce achieving more output, resulting higher performance. On the cost side smaller office spaces required can drive cost considerable down.

Talent clouding is gaining momentum: virtual agency, a database of skilled people who don’t want to work full time and willing to do certain task.

The closing question for HR professionals: Are we thinking differently? It’s never been a better time to be in HR as more and more organization relies on HR to run the business – It’s Capitalism to Talentism – It’s our time!

What’s next for HR?

  • Marketing

HR must be better marketer and use marketing principles of segmentation to offer more individualized services for people. What marketing does to understand consumers, HR must take on the understand employees – as Stevens put it “Employees our most important consumers”

Brand value proposition = Employee value proposition

  • Collaboration

It’s not about internal collaboration, rather collaboration outside of the company. Be more externally focused, leverage relationship – HR has never been in a more prime place to lead such organizational transformation.

Marshall Goldsmith masterclass at Human Asset Summit

The 2012 Human Asset Summit is kicking off with a fantastic pre-conference masterclass with renown world author on leadership and coaching, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith.

Marshall has explained that it’s not only what you do that matters, but what you STOP doing is also important as a leader. As Peter Drucker said: ” We spend a lot of time helping leaders what to do, we don’t spend enough time helping leaders learn what to stop” .

So, Marshall suggests as a leader one must stop:

  • Winning too much – many leaders being in the position where they are constantly try to prove themselves and aim to win every conversation, not matter whether it’s important or not.
  • Adding too much value – sometime it’s time to let to. Unfortunately more often than not people with power and influence tend to contribute and comment.
  • Telling the world how special they are – High performer leaders who get in a senior position tend to constantly prove themselves, emphasizing on their special skills and abilities.
  • Passing too much judgement – People in leadership position tend to pigeonhole people and pass on too much judgement, prejudice.

While the theory is easy to understand, it is very difficult to get rid of old habits. The biggest challenge in effective communication is not to get in the other’s person shoe, rather to get out of our own.

A brilliant case exercise has demonstrated that even seasoned and experienced professionals fell in the trap of saying destructive comments and repeating the forbidden words in effective communications of “No”, “But”, “However”, “Great, however…”.

The lessons learnt today are equally applicable for business, and even more private life. Marshall’s wisdom will help to create a better life for ourselves, better teams around us and most importantly a great relationship with our loved ones at home.

What three amazing days are ahead!

Phuuu, it’s been a hectic year, however we are in the finish line for the upcoming Human Asset 2012 Summit. What an amazing three-days event is ahead, I am so excited as this is the best event so far we have produced in terms of content and quality.

I can only thank from the bottom of my heart for all speakers, supporters and most importantly our folks at Stamford Global who contributed towards making it a great event.

You guys simply ROCK!

Now what is waiting for the attendees on 13-15 November ?

We shall be again at a fantastic venue, the 5-star Boscolo Hotel -yup, three days of luxurious pampering and finally a place where during the coffee break they serve TRUE Italian cappuccino, latte, or whatever you like.  Small thing but matters :)

An amazing line up of speakers, including first time in Europe Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, #7 most influential business thinker on Thinkers 50 list and Dr.Dave Ulrich (requires no introduction) – the man who shaped the way we think about HR, the #1 most influential international HR Thinker.

Marshall will also hold an exclusive Masterclass for business leaders in Hungary on 12th November at our partner, Telekom Hungary’s Headquarter.

We shall be kicking off on 13th November with a Marshall masterclass on Leadership Development prior the official opening of the Summit.

Then at 1 pm the official opening will happen, straight away sharing 2 global corporate keynotes. Derrick Ahlfeldt, Senior VP for HR at Visa Europe will highlight how building strategy is aligned with structuring the team and eventually delivering performance.

Then a very forward looking, provocative presentation by Ebay’s senior HR director, head of Global Employee Engagement, Annemie Ress who will guide us through the HR (R)Evolution – the evolving role of HR and business management, how we must start thinking differently about people and the drivers of true performance.

Great start, time for a Cocktail Dinner, a glass of champagne and networking. By the way, we shall have fantastic line up of attendees too.  This is probably the only vendor neutral event in Europe, where participants meet people from the profession, VP, Director level of attendees – close to 200 of them – from Switzerland, Germany, Central Europe, Russia, Nordics regions.

After the Day One BIG IDEA day it’s time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. Day Two is all about PRACTITIONERS. The day will start by a mindblowing – and I mean it! – keynote by Stevens J. Sainte-Rose, Group HR Director, Eurasia Africa Group, The Coca Cola Company. Those who saw Stevens at our Talent Summit earlier this year know what I am talking about.

It’s no nonsense, high energy, high on content session.

Time to select a Track which is the most appealing. The Strategic HR Track will be chaired by Stevens, he will introduce Geoffrey Matthews – Vice President, HR Strategy – Merck Group, who will highlight A New Model for Leaders to Engage Their Organizations

After this speech we shall welcome Jonathan Ferrar, VP of HR, Analytics at IBM, all the way from the Big Apple. IBM has done some fascinating stuff on Analytics that resulted pure gold business result, so this is a presentation not to be missed.

Following Jonathan Jozsef Blasko, former WE HR Director at BAT, a true globetrotter will provoke the audience with The (R)Evolution of HR to a strategic Role

Lastly on this Track we shall welcome a business representative, Sunil Halbe who is the General Manager for Group Finance at Arcelor Mittal. Let’s hear Sunil’s story from a CFO point of view on Strategic Innovation and Diversity: Corporate and Local Collaboration Team realignment, Leadership and Motivation

Parallel with this session runs the Talent & Employee Engagement Track chaired by Paul Turner.

We shall start this Track with a really interesting presentation on Talent management , diversity & inclusion at Starwood by Ingrid Eras, VP People Development and Staffing EAME.

Thereafter attendees may get an insight by Paul Turner about Employee Engagement in Europe – an original research done by the HCM Excellence Network – a learning community we operate on LinkedIn.

After Lunch, Neil Edwards , Head of HR , Nestlé will deliver a fascinating case on The business of growth in FMCG – how small changes make a big impact in driving innovation through people.

Then the German pharma giant, Bayer’s VP for HR and Talent Development, Marcello Yoshida, will highlight Global Talent Management –Changes, Challenges and Complexity and what it means for Bayer.

The 3rd Track will be all about Leadership and Talent Development.

Firstly Eva Somorjai, Hungary’s No 1 telecom operator’s CHRO will highlight what Telekom does in order to identify, engage and retain future leaders in a high performance environment.

This will be followed by a very interesting insight of a Scandinavian case study on  ‘Leadership in Action’: Developing leaders where leadership really takes place! by Henrik Kongsbak, Partner, Resonans and Rikke Agerskov, HR Partner, Novo Nordisk.

Then let’s get provocative: our Track chair, Kieran Hearty will challenge the audience whether Gender balance in leadership positions – does diversity drive business performance?

After the elective tracks we shall close the day with a fascinating, M-Prize winner keynote on Statoil’s  radical departure from traditional management – all driven by a passion to be an agile and human place to work by Bjarte Bogsnes - Vice President Performance Management Development.

… and the summit is still not over, Day 3 is ahead!

We shall kick off Day 3, 15th November by a Dave Ulrich keynote. Those of you who saw Dave last year know what to expect, a high energy, superb content presentation – 1 hour will go by like a moment! His question for this year: What it takes for HR to deliver sustained Value?

Day 3 is all about Action Learning, let’s get our hands dirty and roll up the sleeves during peer-led workshop sessions!

There will be Four really cool workshops run by your peers in parallel with Professor Ulrich’s masterclass sessions. Sorry folks, Dave’s masterclasses are separately bookable – yet all seats are sold out by now…

So the peer led masterclass sessions are:

1. Ingrid Eras will deliver a 3 hrs session on Gen Y Attraction, Engagement and Career Management – fashionable topic, however the folks at Starwood have really nailed to subject!

2. Paul Turner will team up with Danny Kallman, Global Talent Management Director at Panasonic, who will fly in all the way from Japan to teach about Talent – a Formula for Success.

3. Join Annemie Ress again from Ebay to dive into some thought provoking ideas about engagement, intrinsic motivation and the true drives of performance.

4. last but not least Kieran Hearty is here again, the former T&D Director at Emea for Intel will deliver a truly high performance workshop on how to eat the Elephant in the Room – investigating the key drivers of team performance. What elephant? Join Kieran’s session to find out more.

After the afternoon coffee break (great latte again!) come back for a fascinating closing keynote by Cranfield lecturer Trish Thurley on the Challenger story - The Shuttle Case – Working at the Limits of Safety. A thought provoking case study of the importance of Leadership derail and communication.

So yes, we have worked very hard to bring a truly amazing three days together for you, I am sure it will be 3 days well spent. See you all at Human Asset 2012 on 13-15 November in Boscolo Budapest

Coaching for Behavioral Change – by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith

” I believe that many leadership coaches are paid for the wrong reasons. Their income is a largely a function of “How much do my clients like me?” and “How much time did I spend in coaching?” Neither of these is a good metric for achieving a positive, long-term change in behavior

In terms of liking the coach – I have never seen a study  that showed that clients’ love of a coach was highly correlated with their change in behavior. In fact, if coaches become too concerned with being loved by their clients – they may not provide honest feedback when it is needed.

In terms of spending clients’ time – my personal coaching clients’ are all executives whose decisions impact billions of dollars – their time is more valuable  than mine. I try to spend as little of their time as necessary to achieve the desired results. The last thing they need is for me to waste their time!

 

Download full article: http://www.stamfordglobal.com/userfiles/File/goldsmith_behavioural_change.pdf

Whitepaper: Reward and Motivation – “Reward designed and targeted effectively drives motivation”

Kumar Kymal, VP Global Rewards at Research in Motion, gave a fantastic presentation at Human Asset on reward and motivation. Here we drill down his presentation into a brief summary of the main take-away points.

“Reward Driving Motivation

Group incentives actually drive greater performance, because if you are in a group, the group is going to hold you accountable to perform better or so you are doing it not for the pay but you are doing it because your group is going to hold you accountable. Pay in combination with other factors drives the best job performance, so that if you have pay and you combine it with good feedback, recognition and goals, that in combination provides the ultimate job performance.

Reward – once everything else is in place, for example if you are in the right position, you’ve got the right manager, you feel like you’re being developed, you’ve got the status – guess what, once you tick those boxes, pay becomes important again. Recognition is very important to drive motivation, and it doesn’t need to be pay it could just be non-financial
recognition. And the managers play a very critical role in recognition because they are the primary conduit in an organization for all kinds of different things. Reward designed and targeted effectively drives motivation. A combination of goal setting, fair pay processes, recognition, management behavior, team and group reward can actually directly drive motivation and, if very carefully integrated, planned and integrated with the culture and development, reward can actually optimize motivation even more.”
Full article: http://stamfordglobal.com/userfiles/File/Reward_and_motivation.pdf

Hard Talk HR Webinar – It’s time to ask the tough questions

Better people performance, better business performance

Join us for Hard Talk HR, where we present in-depth interviews with senior HR professionals from around the globe. With HR experts asking the tough questions to get to the heart of the drivers of people and business performance. Hard Talk HR aims to distinguish the grand ideas from those that actually work, to help people professionals develop the profession around the globe.

In this edition, we take a look at motivation and engagement, with guest speakers Annemie Ress, Head of Global Employee Engagement at EBAY and Joris Luijke, VP Talent &HR at Atlassian, being asked the tough questions by your host, Kieran Hearty, Managing Director of Igiveu.

Webinar details: Thursday 25th October 10-11am GMT

Register: http://bit.ly/QTw0lN

We hope you can join us!

The New HR Analytics – interview with Dr.Jac Fitz-enz

Dr. Jac , as he is known worldwide, is acknowledged as the father of human capital strategic analysis and measurement. During this interview we talked about HR metrics and analytics and why this issue is more important and relevant now than ever before.

As he put it: “We cannot just look at past data and try to extrapolate that into the future because the future is clearly nothing like the past. I recall when I was with you in Vienna in 2008 when everything came down. Certainly we couldn’t look at the market today as it was in 2007. So predictability is absolutely critical today.

Beyond that the reason why it’s such a relevant issue is there’s tremendous pressure to compete. It’s like a tsunami that’s emerging around the world. We have more and more developing countries not only China and India but also now Vietnam, Indonesia and some African countries. So more and more countries are coming into the market, this in turn leads to greater competition.

If you add to that the consistent introduction of new technology, everyday there seems to be something new that gives somebody an edge and this requires someone else to compete. You also have the labor market that is very erratic these days.

If we go back just a couple of years here in America we were concerned about where we were going to get people to fill jobs once the baby boomers had retired. However since 2008, the baby boomers are not retiring and now the question is what are we going to do with the young people coming into the market when the old people haven’t left? So the labor
market is upside down. Also in various countries like Russia for example you have the labor demographic moving in a different direction.

Finally the whole credit problem is still there. I don’t think we are going to see a major increase in credit availability for sometime. I was talking to another board member in a company that I am involved with and he said “The banks at least in the States still have a lot of problems on their balance sheets, so they’re not going to be lending money easily.”
When you put all those together, basically you have a market that is unprecedented and you have to look into the future to be able to determine how you’re going to act, how you’re going to allocate resources and how you’re going to make investments. So predictability now is really the most relevant issue we have.”

Listen to the entire 20 min podcast:

Download Whitepaper