When England last had a good team (2003) there were seven leaders in the team, all of whom had come up through the team at roughly the same time, at the same age, and were World-class.  Then they all retired at the about the same time (along with the head coach) and results seriously deteriorated.  The problem was compounded as those leaders had been the products of a development programme that was designed to be sustained, but was never continued when Clive Woodward left that same year.  It turned out to be a one-off programme and after 2003, England started to take a short-term view as results started to deteriorate.  Instead of developing future leaders they preferred to look to older, iconic individuals (without necessarily the right skills/values) hoping that they might inspire the younger team members to get the right result in that given week, to try to ease the mounting pressure from press and supporters.

The talent development programmes under the RFU are exceptional, but not for leadership and at the 2011 World Cup the England team hit the big brick wall that under-investment in the future had made inevitable.  Under an “iconic” and untrained head coach, the team mistook longevity of service to be the key leadership quality, when in fact longevity just turned out to mean “tired and unambitious”.

Well, perhaps like you, I have observed the growing interest in the ‘happiness agenda’ with some cynicism. However, three years ago when I started learning about (and implementing, at a local level) a strengths based approach to work, I started to see some differences. We started dividing the workload on a team so that it aligned to people’s ‘strengths’, and there seemed to be an increase in engagement, and they did a better job. Logically it makes sense – if you give people work they are energised by then they’re much more likely to do a better job of it. We then took it a step further and started recruiting using strengths and talking to our clients about how they could do it too.

Having dabbled in strengths for the last few years alongside a competency based approach, I am not alone in arguing that strengths can offer something else to recruitment. The purists in positive psychology would argue for the total replacement of competencies with strengths. Personally, for recruitment, I think strengths in it’s purist form is only suited to specific roles and organisational cultures. I see greater value in using strengths to add to a competency based recruitment approach, as for me it’s the missing link in trying to tap into people’s motivations.

So what do you think about strengths? Have you tried to implement strengths in your organisation?

If the concept of strengths is new to you, join me on a webinar hosted with Ochre House on February 23^rd where we’ll discuss strengths in detail.

Perhaps the key organisational product of leadership is context, yet all too often our senior people are reasonably bright, politically adept but act like deer in the headlights when faced with incomplete data, a lack of clarity and an absence of being told what they should do from Board level. Result? Large parts of the organisation either doing nothing because they don’t know what to do, or trying to do everything because nobody has told them what not to do. This isn’t the fault of those further down the organisation – they just want to do their best at work, be rewarded for it and have fun. This is a leadership issue which has arguably been propagated by an approach to talent which fails to adequately distinguish between senior management and business leadership. The assumption is too often that having enough of one means you automatically have the other. But I just don’t buy this, and neither do some other organisations out there.

In today’s corporate world, as in film-making, black and white is a thing of the past. It has been replaced by shades of grey, paradoxes, conflicts, trade-offs, uncertainty and more-for-less. This is an environment where tolerance of ambiguity, judgement, pragmatism and flexibility are the new value differentiators at leadership level. Being able to work with minimal data, make the percentage-play, be directionally tactical, provide decision-making filters and balance complexity with impact, risk and speed are vital. Yet how many organisations really engage with topics like this (and their implications on organisational structure, assessment, development and career pathing) as opposed to more traditional “leadership competences” – many of which, in 2012, I would expect from most managers?

It’s been my experience that this issue lies close to the DNA of business effectiveness, pretty much independent of organisational type or sector. I would argue that focusing on these translation capabilities will bring greater benefit than simply promoting experienced managers with acceptable communication skills. I would go so far as to say that if you don’t consider this, there’s not much point doing all the other stuff since it won’t really make much difference since, as the saying goes, the “problem is the problem”.

But then again, I’m apparently a bit of a maverick!

Community development is, quite simply, the next big thing in HR CRM – the fostering of groups of peers who share information and knowledge for mutual benefit, not just on a one off, but on a career-long basis. But for it to work, it has to be done properly, with a significant application of common sense and with an aim to supply the community with what it wants and needs rather than what you might like to tell it.

Community development is most definitely not about bombarding a group with a constant stream of job vacancies or with thinly disguised corporate propaganda. What it is about is contributing to a discussion, engaging in a supportive way so that your organisation becomes an accepted and trusted member of the collective. Managed sensitively over the medium to long term through Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the like, this will allow you to deliver the online version of a tap on the shoulder and the mention of a possible opening as and when the need arises.

Once you’ve built a decent community the huge benefit is that, if your members are tagged properly (e.g. Sales Manager, Birmingham, Engineering), then finding the right person within your community can become as easy as putting ‘Sales Manager, Birmingham, Engineering’ into your system and pressing enter. And just think how powerful that can be in comparison to the traditional routes to hiring we have all come to rely on for so long.

We hosted a HR Director’s Think Tank in Munich early December to explore this very topic. Nick Kemsley, Co Director of the Henley Business School Centre for HR Excellence highlighted that organisations make the mistake of thinking that a well thought out strategic workforce plan results in a nice neat set of numbers, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. In reality there is confusion between Strategic Workforce Planning and simple Resource Planning. Strategic Workforce Planning should be something which is scenario based, fluid, and which feeds off macro data. We must be able to work with ambiguity, use judgement and assumptions in order to get our operational processes delivering value in the time scales required. This means that the real differentiator is not system tools but individual capability to work in this way.  It’s also not only about headcount planning per-se, but taking into account the wider organisational capabilities, internal and external context and linking the two together. By trying to start with the numbers, we are not asking the right questions, and therefore cannot expect to be laying down the capability required in time for when the business needs it.

Ali Gilani, Global Head of Resourcing at ArcelorMittal went on to explain their approach. In essence strategic workforce planning at ArcelorMittal consists of five steps – define the strategic direction of the business, forecast the supply and the demand, gap analysis and development of the workforce plan. Ali considers Strategic Workforce Planning as “a five year plan which is broken down into annual chunks”.  And the one to three year resource plan will inevitably feed in to this.

The key message seems to be that Strategic Workforce Planning is not just a question of determining headcount, but of working back from an organisation’s strategy and external context to understand what this means for people – placing the acquisition, retention and development of talent at the heart of an organisation’s commercial strategy. And for this to happen it cannot just be the province of traditional HR, but must be owned by the business as a whole. And that appears to be a challenge that few companies have so far dealt with in any meaningful way, but which none can afford to ignore. To share best practice and insight into planning for the future, we are hosting a series of think tanks for HR Directors, Heads of Talent and Heads of Resourcing on Strategic Workforce Planning globally with our partners, Pinstripe, in 2012. If you are interested in joining the discussion I’d be delighted to connect.

You may have made great hires into your team. But so would that rabid chimp tossing his coin. We know what best-practice looks like, why don’t we consistently practice what we preach? Well, I don’t know. You tell me. Why don’t you practice what you preach? Maybe you do, but often we go back to using our intuition for our own hires.

When looking at the ‘predictive validity’ of an interview process (i.e. how well it accurately predicts future job performance), we express the effectiveness with a number called a ‘validity coefficient’. The number 1.0 equals perfect predictability (every hire you make is fantastic), while -1.0 equals the opposite (every hire you make is dreadful). 0.0 is the same as tossing a coin. Making hires using an unstructured interview, where intuition comes into play, has a validity coefficient of 0.19. However, if you use a rigorous assessment process, and remove intuition entirely, the validity coefficient leaps up as high as 0.65 – a dramatic improvement.

Stick to the science and we will make consistently great hires, and we can share our internal success stories with hiring manager communities. Not only that, but these great new hires will then deliver further quality hires themselves, ultimately improving business performance. Everyone wins. What do you think?

From the discussions at our event and subsequent meetings with HR and business leaders, successful branding of the resourcing function appears to boil down to four critical success factors.

1)      You need to be clear about the value proposition internal resourcing offers, beyond just filling jobs. This typically entails a more lofty ambition such as improving the capability of the business through the hiring of better people or enabling the organisation to recruit and retain world class talent. Of course to avoid such aspirational statements becoming rhetoric, evidence of delivery (through metrics, case studies and leadership endorsement) is essential.

2)      Build a talent pipeline and make the organisation aware of the super stars in the market. This, argued a number of business leaders, was the single most important action talent acquisition professionals could take. To be taken seriously, finding ‘game changing’ people who were engaged and wanting to have a conversation with your organisation earned high kudos.

3)      Align with the business rather than the HR function. A little contentious maybe but we all know effective resourcing requires very different skills sets from HR, so aligning to the business rather than HR (whilst maintaining the critical integrations for internal mobility, succession planning and high potential mapping) appeared to earn respect. Those organisations whose Talent Acquisition functions were more aligned to the business also noted that workforce planning was generally easier. Getting the ‘inside track’ enabled a better insight on forthcoming demand.

4)      Behave like a sales and marketing team. When we remove the jargon, recruiting is essentially a sales and marketing process. Organisations need to segment, target and position their offering amongst candidates. Identifying and approaching candidates (prospects in  sales speak) is what recruiters spend all day doing. In many ways, it’s no wonder that, generally, the most successful internal Talent Acquisition teams have a good smattering of ex-agency recruiters amongst them; those who see recruiting as nothing more than a sales and marketing activity.

So there it is; four critical success factors. Agree disagree or others you’d like to add? Please share below.

It became clear that the vast majority of companies cannot confidently identify a credible talent pool of leaders or successors for key positions, despite the fact that this issue has been one of the business priorities since the recession hit.

It is worrying that during the webinar, 76% of delegates involved admitted they were not able to confidently identify the next three leaders or successors for any key positions internally or externally. What this really shows is a need for companies to do much more to align their career management strategies to successful talent development. Business critical roles are seen as the obvious group to focus succession planning initiatives for, but it was widely agreed during the webinar that talent succession across all levels is ideal and organisations ignore ‘future talent’ at their own peril when the ‘War for Talent’ returns.

The solution to this is a strategic talent succession plan which is fully incorporated into all business strategies. Given the dynamic between retaining high performers and the lack of identified talent for business critical roles, this gap needs to be bridged. If organisations use talent mapping tools to build a robust talent succession strategy, they will be able to increase retention levels and reduce risk. Now ask yourself, does your organisation have an effective succession plan? Please post your thoughts and add to the conversation.

Put simply, an organisation needs a balance between people who fit with the organisation in its current state, and ‘maverick’ types who bring a new perspective to the table. Sound easy? No, I didn’t think so either. Recruiting this type of skill is going to prove difficult for two reasons:

1) The natural inclination is always to recruit in your own image, so it will be a steep learning curve to recruit a whole new persona.

2) These mavericks have a tendency to rapidly move on from organisations that have not created an environment where their attitudes and approaches are recognised and valued.

So how can HR go about attracting and retaining these mavericks? Stephenson argued that a more relaxed approach and taking more risks on people who do not obviously fit with the company is the way forward. To do this it will need to be accepted that this approach can lead to a high attrition rate as the value of such people is not in their long term aspirations. Instead it is their role as short-term catalysts for change and development which should be capitalised.

Another method for attracting this talent is a drastic over haul of current systems. Stephenson used the example of Dan Walker, Head of Talent at Apple who purged the incumbent HR function, dispensing with nearly half of its members in order to implement his concept that HR’s role is simply about the acquisition of talent.

Stephenson’s methodology is not something many in the HR profession is likely to feel fully confident in implementing, but it is a necessary alteration in this changing economy. The ability to adapt to shifting markets will be crucial in coming years and simply having good people is no longer enough. They need to be energised and engaged in order to deliver real and lasting value.

I would be interested to hear what you think. Please share your thoughts.

Much has been written (and in some cases, practiced) about the value of leadership competencies. Typically exerting a behavioural element, these seek to understand how someone is likely to react in a given situation. Whilst they have been broadly accepted by organisations, they have one major limitation; they rely on the assessor being able to observe situations that will be relevant in the future; but how do you know what the future will be?

In search of a better solution, organisations have extended their range of assessment tools, seeking to assess values, IQ and EQ (Emotional Intelligence; as popularised in the last decade by authors such as Daniel Goleman) to help explore the myriad of different leadership dimensions. However, whilst this tells us a lot about a leader, how do you find those who can successfully reinvent themselves and continually seek to adapt and remain relevant for the world around them?

Learning agility

Learning agility is a concept increasingly being discussed amongst HR and leadership circles. Whilst it’s not a new concept (academics such as Lombardo and Connolly have highlighted the power of learning agility for over a decade) its acceptance in the mainstream remains slow.

So what’s the fuss with learning agility and why add it to the repertoire of other tools already engulfing your business?

In a recent book published by the Centre for Creative Leadership titled, Lessons of Experience, the authors found learning agility was a good predictor of leadership performance. After interviewing roughly 200 executives, they discovered that the most successful leaders were able to move out of their comfort zone, take risks, learn from mistakes, and begin anew as they encountered new assignments.

In summary, the successful leaders continually learned, bent, and flexed as their work world changed i.e. they were agile learners.

Is learning agility the panacea we’ve all been looking for? We think not. A great leader who doesn’t ‘fit’ in the organisation or lacks the IQ to make well reasoned analysis and decisions will still fail. However, it stands to reason that picking those leaders who can learn from their experiences, be agile and adapt to the world around them stand a better chance of success in the long term.