RPO and Talent Management Blog by Ochre House | Ochre Talk

As we approach the 6 Nations can there be any starker example of why a sustained future leader programme is critical, than England’s rugby team?  It has been well documented that the RFU Executive is guilty on many levels, but none more than the lack of investment in leader development over the past eight years.
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Ninety percent of the organisations I work with have a leadership model. Despite this, nearly all continue to have the same issue – a deployment “gap” somewhere around Board-1 or Board-2 level, a kind of leadership version of “The Doldrums”. The symptoms manifest as problems translating strategic intent into functional objectives, difficulties with prioritisation and managing complexity, poor alignment and implementations which don’t fully deliver. Try as they might, it won’t go away. Does this ring any bells?
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In today’s fast moving world, how are approaches to leadership assessment changing? Here are some observations from our recent work with organisations in this space.
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As most of you know Ochre House hosted its annual HR Leaders conference last month, with a focus on re-defining business value through a talent centric approach. And the speakers certainly got me thinking.

It appears that the West is slowly losing its economic power as potential moves to new powerhouses in the BRIC countries and Goldman Sachs’ ‘Next 11’ and one of the effects of this is increasing pressure on HR to deliver new, more effective talent strategies. But according to one of the speakers at the conference, the industry will only succeed if it can learn to master an organisations changing complexity and speak the ‘language of business.’ 

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In the past two days we have seen the leaders of News International send a clear message to the business: There’s you and there’s us.
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This week we have had a very stark reminder that you cannot just allow anyone to represent your brand in the external market, as the News of The World is abandoned one after the other, by most (if not all) of its key advertising customers.
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It has widely been argued that had there been more women in leadership roles, then perhaps the world would not be facing financial meltdown… Received wisdom suggests that female qualities would avoid undue risks and bring more people focus to the business etc. However, is there another way to look at this – What if we replace ‘women with HR?’

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Over the years, the use of a contingent workforce (contractors, consultants, freelancers, interims, temps etc) has grown. In just 20 years, the percentage of work allocated to contingent labour on average has grown from 6% in 1989 to more than 27% in 2009. Read full post

Experienced hire recruiters are a bit like football scouts, except we are constantly in the firing line and we are judged by the efficacy, quality of the next hire. Whereas in football the manager takes the flak for the quality of that hire…. Now I might be exagerating but how important is the manager the in the recruitment and development of talent?…. Let’s look at football – for starters…

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This is a question we discuss when talking with HR and recruitment leaders. Most organisations have an idea, but to get a specific figure usually requires painful analysis of agency invoices, frequently squirreled away in obscure places.

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