Category: Talent Management

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.

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

Motivating and Engaging Team Members

I have recently spoken with former EMEA T&D Director, Kieran Hearty about motivation. This is what he told me: “How NOT to do it?  Give them a dictatorial leader who doesn’t really empower them and they feel the sense of powerlessness.”

The secret to motivation:

1. Purpose – creating a sense of meaning and purpose within the team;
2. Providing the opportunity for professional and personal growth;
3. Providing new challenges and variety of challenges as well; and
4. Working with great people, providing the opportunity to work with great people.

Certainly meaning and purpose, is the starting point, because you’re moving with intent towards something that really gets you up out of bed in the morning. But motivating and engaging is not expensive. It’s not expensive! It doesn’t have to cost any money. There is a consistent theme here. Also, interesting research from MIT shows, that a typical rewards system doesn’t work in this kind of world. This is what does work: growth, challenges, people, purpose – that’s what really counts.What if you don’t have a perfect project team, its only about 50 percent, could we build on that and end up with great?

Yeah! How can we do that?

Proper resource allocation – making sure not just that you’ve got the right people on the bus but that you got enough of them. So proper resource allocation was pretty important.

Providing clarity – clarity, clarity, clarity, resonated with everyone.

Empowerment – not people feeling powerless because that’s de-motivating and not engaging but feeling empowered – somehow there’s goodness there.

Inter-dependent thinking – that means that we work for each other. There’s no silos – if you’re working with a team that is inter-dependent, who supports each other, works for each other, thinks about each other’s needs, then that feels good and wholesome.

The opportunity for creativity and innovation – it’s not just about doing the boring stuff but being creative, especially thinking outside of the box.

Recognition vs reward – recognition is good but doesn’t have to cost anything. That’s what makes you feel good, you go home and say wow I was recognized – somebody said ‘thank you’ to me, I felt great all day. It’s less about reward more about recognition.

European Talent Survey 2012

This year again – similarly to 2011 – we have conducted a pan European Talent Management Survey. The 2012 the report was written by Professor Paul Turner of Birmingham City University.

Executive Summary:

The European Talent Survey was conducted amongst the 3400 members of the European Human Capital Management Excellence Network. Over 100 organisations from Western Europe, the CIS, Baltics and Central and Eastern Europe took part.

European HR professionals and business managers have a range of views about what constitutes talent in their organisations. For some, talent is about high performance and potential of a selected number of people to move up the organization into senior leadership or managerial positions. For others, talent is an inclusive term which refers to all employees. For most, a successful talent strategy is concerned with both ends of the employment spectrum.

The European Talent survey found that 76% of respondents identified talent as a top or growing priority to support the growth of their businesses and 50% of respondents had a defined talent strategy. There was agreement that talented people could drive productivity and business growth; improve customer share and be a differentiator at a time of intense global competition. Talent was seen as a pivotal resource in delivering competitive advantage.
It was felt that talent management programmes could enhance the organisation‟s performance; support the achievement of stretch targets and provide insight to build new business segments. There was a growing recognition of the importance of „outside in‟ thinking, building talent strategy in the context of information from the external environment. The alignment of talent strategy to business strategy was of particular importance to European HR professionals.

The skills identified as priorities for talent were varied. 67% of those responding to the European Talent survey believed that the ability to deal with and manage change was a priority; 31% believed that the ability to think strategically was also important; 22% identified the need to be able to work in virtual teams as a key attribute of talent (approximately the same as 2010) and 50% believed that information systems skills were a priority- up from 25% in 2010.
The way to develop these skills could be achieved by following a „European Talent Loop‟ which linked the requirements of the workforce plan to the development of an attractive employer brand; a rich mixture of development activities, the involvement of line managers and the effective measurement of talent outcomes.

Download Full Report: EuropeanTalentReport_2012


Talent – A Formula for Success, Interview with Dave Ulrich

I spoke to Dr. Dave Ulrich about Talent, a formula for success. There are as many definitions on the word “Talent” as many organizations are out there.

According to Dave there are four ways to define Talent. One; C-suite executives, Talent is about building succession, to make sure you have the next generation of leaders, tailoring development experience for the leaders so they work well as a team.

The second level of talent is the senior leadership group within the company; not the C-suite but the group below that, what it’s called the “leadership cadre”. For them the organization must build a leadership academy where there is a leadership brand they buy into.

The third level of talent are the high potential individuals- those who have the change to lead the company and set the agenda for the future. They are defined with 4 A/s

  • Ambition
  • Agility
  • Ability
  • Achievement

For those individual must be a tailored individual development program in place.

The fourth level of talent filters all the way through the company. They have what we call the “talent formula” – good talent anywhere in the company is who are

  • Competent – able to do the work
  • Committed – willing to work hard
  • Contributing – they find meaning from the work they do

Listen to the entire podcast below, covering additional issues on leadership succession, the role of HR:

Download the related whitepaper: Dave Ulrich – Norm Smallwood – What is Talent

Finding Meaning at Work – interview with Dr. Dave Ulrich

Dr. Dave Ulrich is a Professor of Business, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan is undoubtedly one of the most significant expert in strategic HR. When Ulrich speaks, the profession listens.

His achievements are numerous,

…to name a few.

This interview is discussing what the requirements are to find meaning at work, what the business rational behind building ‘abundant organizations’ that  provides meaning to its employees, creates value for its stakeholders, and offers hope for humanity

Interview excerpts:

Mihaly Nagy: Your recent book the “Why of Work” is based on a simple premise: “Employees who find meaning at work will have a better work experience that will translate into improved performance, more satisfied customers, and more profitable companies.” This notion is probably not a surprise for anyone, however the question is what specific steps can an organization do in order to achieve this? Is there a recipe for success?

Dave Ulrich: We culled the literatures on meaning to identify what specific things leaders could do to instill meaning at work. We identified seven actions leaders could take to become meaning makers, each of which is associated with a question they can answer for themselves and their employees:

  1. Identity: Who am I? Employees have more meaning when the strengths which shape their identity are used to strengthen others.
  2. Purpose: where am I going? Employees have more meaning when they work in a company that has a meaningful purpose that engages them.
  3. Relationships: Who do I travel with? Employees have more meaning when they work with people they admire, respect, and feel connected to.
  4. Work environment: What are the routines or culture of our work? Employees have more meaning when their work setting is positive and affirming.
  5. Work challenges: What work do I do? Employees have more meaning when they are doing work that excites and energizes them.
  6. Learning and Growth: What do I learn from at work? Employees have more meaning when they are able to learn and grow from the work they do.
  7. Civility and Delight: Employees have more meaning when they bring a sense of fun and delight into their work.

These are clearly not exclusive and the only factors that provide meaning, but when people we talk to think about “what makes your work meaningful?’ generally their answers fall into one of these seven dimensions.

Listen to the entire podcast here:

Download the Interview in whitepaper format:

If you are interested in interacting with Professor Ulrich in person join the 8th Annual Human Asset Summit on 13-15 November in Boscolo Budapest. More info: www.humanassetsummit.com

Top Ten Reasons Why Top Talent Leaves

Reblogged from xraydelta:

Click to visit the original post

Back in December 2011 Eric Jackson, a contributor at Forbes, wrote an article on his perspective on why top talent at an organization quits their jobs. Given the competition for talent (not just people to fill jobs) this seems an important issue. Jackson's Top 10 reasons are:

1. Big Company Bureaucracy. This is probably the #1 reason we hear after the fact from disenchanted employees.

Read more… 1,059 more words

Podcast: Result Only Work Environment at GAP Inc.

Recently spoke with Eric Severson, Senior Vice President HR at GAP Inc. who championed the the ROWE (Result Only Work Environment) initiative at GAP four years ago. Now over 2000 people can work whenever they want, whereever they want, so long result is delivered. Result? Significant increase in employee engagement, decrease in voluntarily turnover, improved work life balance – GAP just became a better place to work.

Listen to the podcast here: