Integration - Key to Effective Succession Planning

Integration - Key to Effective Succession Planning

Whether attempting to crown the next CEO or determine which workers to tap for promotion to the company's managerial ranks, an organization needs a comprehensive view into the workforce's skills and talent in order to make the best talent and business decisions. Integrating learning, performance management, compensation management and career planning can facilitate effective succession planning.

A successful succession plan should answer the following questions for each candidate:

a) Learning: What does the candidate know (knowledge)? What is he or she qualified to do (skills)? What training has the candidate completed?

b) Performance and competency management: How well has the candidate performed in the past? What does past performance indicate about areas of strength and/or weakness? Which competencies have the candidate attained or still need to ascend to the next level? Which positions in the organization map to the competencies demonstrated by this candidate?

c) Compensation management: What is the candidate's compensation history? How does the candidate's compensation map to his or her performance and achievement of corporate goals?

d) Career planning and development: What are the candidate's future career goals? Where does the person see him or herself professionally, one, three, even 10 years down the road? Is the candidate willing to relocate in order to accept a new or existing position? How much is he or she willing to travel?

To answer these questions, organizations must have insight and visibility into organizational talent. By integrating and aggregating information about an employee's learning, performance management, compensation, career-planning activities and history, organizations can generate a comprehensive snapshot of each employee or of an organization's entire workforce.

Further, this integrated approach serves to match employee career goals with organizational staffing needs, allowing companies to more effectively leverage existing talent.

Historically, the enterprise-technology platforms available to manage this employee data have been largely cut off from one another, each confined to its own silo of functionality. Traditional learning management systems (LMS), for example, automate the delivery and management of training and, in some instances, competencies. Traditional employee performance management systems (EPM) automate performance management administration and, in some instances, career planning.

This siloed approach has made it nearly impossible to integrate the information necessary for effective succession planning. But talent managers now are driving the evolution of a new class of enterprise software.

According to a June 2007 research report titled "Learning Management Systems 2008: Facts, Practical Analysis, Trends and Vendor Profiles" from research firm Bersin & Associates, the integration revolution already has begun.

The report said the "convergence of learning and performance management systems is still in its early stages," but LMS features are evolving and "continue to snowball at an incredible rate." Further, in response to customer demand, nearly every major LMS vendor "has developed a new set of capabilities for performance management, succession planning, and competency management."

According to Gartner Inc. the same phenomenon is occurring in the EPM market. When Gartner Research Vice President James Holincheck wrote the update to the research firm's "MarketScope for Employee Performance Management Software" in late 2007, he said EPM systems are no longer being evaluated on their own, and customers are increasingly selecting EPM solutions that are "more integrated with compensation and succession management."

In response, Gartner not only broadened the scope of its research to include all three areas, it expanded the very definition of EPM, from focusing only on performance management to include succession management and compensation management.

With succession planning moving to the forefront of the corporate agenda, the time has come for stakeholders to evaluate their succession planning strategies and solutions in the context of broader talent management capabilities and goals.

References: Shelly Heiden[About the Author: Shelly Heiden is executive vice president for Global Field Operations at Plateau Systems.]

Suggested HR Strategies to Reduce Effects of the Crisis.

Suggested HR Strategies to Reduce Effects of the Crisis.

Communication.

Dedicate time to positive reasoning. Hold town hall meetings involving staff and management on ways to tackle the challenges of the downturn. Hear the staff out. Take time to listen to the employees for confidence building. During such engagement, declare immunity to cover all staff, in which any staff that offers to critique the organization is insulated from witch-hunting sanctions and victimization. This gives room for sincere invectives and inputs, which may turn the organization around for good. Staff should be encouraged to objectively give their assessment of where the organization was, where it is and where they believe the organization should be and what should be done to survive the recession. After listening to the staff, thank them for valued contributions and promise to work with their inputs. Reiterate the vision and mission statements of the organization. Appeal to staff to do everything possible to actualize the goals and objectives of the organization. They should show more personal and collective commitment, loyalty and dedication to the organization for improved productivity. Seek their support for the strategic action plans. At the same time, strengthen the two ways communication process and dedicate time to feed backs.

Positive team culture.

Stress shared vision, strategies and belief in team culture, improved symbiotic team spirit because of the positive value addition of synergy. HR Managers should at this time radiate and give hope and lift their staff from negativity to positivity. A positive team culture stresses collectivism, and symbiosis. Do well to stress the importance of every team member.

Learning.

Learning is the key that opens the individual employee to knowledge beyond his/her immediate reach. It helps to bring a strong barrier against failures and landmines that may bomb the organization out of existence. It assists the worker to open up to new initiatives, ideas and best practices. Design programmes that put the organization on top of the pack and enable the organization have a competitive edge. Staff may not necessarily be moved from their places of work because of the innovations in as e-learning and intranet services are becoming a way of life. Encourage staff to participate in workshops and conferences to enable them compare notes on experiences and learn from others. Where only a few staff can attend, those who attended should be given an opportunity to share their learning experiences with their colleagues at a forum.

Leadership focus during the downturn.

1. Transparency.
2. Accountability.
3. Courage to effect necessary changes.
4. Training.
5. Proactive strategy.
6. Sacrifice.
7. Incremental changes.
8. Address issues of insecurity.
9. Credible leadership.
10. Mentoring.
11. Coaching.
12. Nurturing.
13. Sifting down process between the effective staff.
14. Walk-the-talk.

Performance incentives.

. General Motivation techniques: Positive and negative sanctions
. Performance Incentive Bonus (PIB)

Review of organizational structure and procedures.


1. Reduce complex structure to a simple structure.
2. Increased autonomy to improve decision making process.
3. Concentration on core areas.
4. Elimination of tribal, political and racial considerations in the appointments of chief executives and recruitment processes.
5. Review of recruitment policies. It is a well known fact that in most parastatals of government in Nigeria, there are periods of employment freeze, unfreeze, refreeze and retrenchment at the fiat of the executive arm of government.
6. Review financial management procedures to optimize profitability.
7. Improve cost culture and asset utilization.

Redefinition of business value system.

This is a moment to re-examine the organization’s business value system, goals, roadmaps, strategies and practices to align with the anatomy and physiology of the organization. The vision of the organization should be cascaded down the ladder so that there will be a total buy-in; into the new ways of achieving the vision even at these difficult times. A shared vision sets the tone for the conscious will power to achieve the impossible.

Succession planning.

The chief executives of many parastatals of government are removed and replaced at will. The high turnover of the top management is the bane of poor performance of some organizations. It makes planning difficult, truncates strategic plans processes and kills any organization’s initiatives to achieve a well tailored succession plan, which is a Sequa-non for organizational success. There should be a reversal of this unwholesome process.

Attitudinal change.


. Paradigm shift in work culture and values.
. Stop the attitudes of being busy doing the wrong things. The aim is to change from busyness to effectiveness as being busy does not connote effectiveness. Being busy and working hard without focus does not translate to results the organization needs to be effective.

Job rotation.


Temporary postings to areas of unsaturated staff.
Equal opportunities.
Redeployment.

Pre-retirement seminars.

Pre retirement workshop.
Incentives for early retirement (discourages swearing affidavits to cheat on age).

Personal income management.

Almost all staff are now very heavily indebted to the banks with slimmer income. It is often said that the “take home pay of workers no longer take them home”. Staff of various organizations have found themselves in this conundrum in Abuja because of the need to purchase personal houses in other to avoid the cut throat high rents in the FCT.

Engage external consultants to talk to staff on personal income management and the need to prepare for retirement. HR managers should help enforce the one-third rule of loans over which a staff cannot approach the organization for loans so that staff will be able to maintain and cater for their immediate families at this critical time.

Proactive HRM.


1. Application of emotional intelligence strategies.
2. Fair HR practice in the use of the carrot and stick approach.
3. Assessment of the competencies of employees and productivity level. Do not wait for the end of year.
4. In-plant knowledge sharing forum should be enthroned to encourage staff to share their knowledge in an in plant workshop. This will assist the organization to source for and maintain a knowledge pool in the organization.
5. Change management. Change will be effected in bits and not radically so as not to further stress the staff.
6. Review the organization’s customer management processes.
7. Enthrone an integrated research and development processes.

Performance evaluation.Enthrone an effective performance management system.

Performance evaluation should focus on:

1. The organization.
2. Departments.
3. Customer service.
4. Teams’ performance.
5. Processes.
6. Individuals.

. Solutions to challenges rather than sanctions, condemnation and the blame trade.
. Seek to be understood before seeking others’ understanding.
. Expectations should be mutually agreed using basic standard benchmarks.
. Consider individual strengths, experience, priorities, inner motivation (is he a loner, extrovert) and confidence in assigning tasks.
. Acquire the skills to align the staff skills and competency to align with the organizational objectives.
. Monitor performance (don’t wait until the end of the year).
. Reward top performers and ascertain collateral damage if any.
. Investigate and sanction poor performance.
. Watch out for the aftershocks of performance evaluation.

Any of the following models could be used to address the performance challenges that organizations may face during the periods of financial crisis:

. The Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan and Norton provides the theoretical framework for the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) with four perspectives - financial measures, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth. The BSC helps the organization to strike a balance between short, medium and long-term objectives. The BSC is a tested tool change processes.
. Ulrich model.


Ref: http://louisbrownogbeifun.com/?p=55

Accountability for Talent Management

Accountability for Talent Management

New research finds talent-management processes are in place, but underused. Plans don't translate to reality because too few organizations hold managers or executives accountable or to compensation packages to drive the strategy.

First, the good news from a new study from Hewitt Associates and the Human Capital Institute: Most companies now have a talent-management strategy in place.

The bad news? Very few of those companies are executing that strategy successfully.

So says the newly released research that identified lack of accountability for talent management as a key reason companies have difficulty executing talent-management practices. In short, plans on paper don't translate to reality in the workplace when it comes to developing and retaining talent.

"Most organizations have the fundamentals in place," says Bob Campbell, leader of Hewitt's North American Talent Management practice in the Norwalk, Conn., office. "The question is where do we go from here?

"What we saw emerging as a key issue," he says, "is developing manager capability to carry out the practices in place. Despite the distractions, it has never been more important than in these challenging times that managers have a steady hand on the tiller to coach employees and guide brighter future prospects.

"The research, entitled The State of Talent Management: Today's Challenges, Tomorrow's Opportunities, included input from 700 senior-level talent leaders across a wide spectrum of companies.

Among the findings:

a) 92 percent of business leaders recognize superior talent as providing a vital competitive advantage.

b) Only 7 percent of organizations consistently hold managers accountable for developing their direct reports through performance- management processes.

c) Just 17 percent of respondents indicate their workforce strategy is consistently aligned with their business strategy across the organization.

d) Only 10 percent of companies consistently measure the effectiveness of talent-management programs.

The survey largely confirms the challenges that have long vexed many HR professionals, says Carl Robinson, managing principal of Advanced Leadership Consulting in Seattle.

"Even though many companies say that people are their most important asset, they often don't build in the systems and processes to develop their people," Robinson says. "While the findings here are common sense, I think they are useful. The reality is that talent management is so low on the priority list that surveys like this can remind senior executives to pay attention."

In his work with corporate leaders and companies, Robinson has found several repeating themes as to why talent-management processes are not adhered to and strategies are not executed.

Among them:

a) Not enough time.

b) Compensation systems that do not incent managers to develop people.

c) CEOs rarely model behavior consistent with talent-management strategies.

d) Inadequate funding for talent-management execution.

"The reality is that organizations have to build accountability for talent management into managers' and executives' compensation packages," Robinson said. "It has to be part of the compensation review and people need to dinged for not developing their people effectively.

"The companies Hewitt and HCI, a Washington-based membership organization focuses on talent research and strategies, found that made significant strides in managing talent have effectively institutionalized specific talent-management programs, such as conducting talent reviews, performing succession planning and improving manager ability to further develop employees, according to the researchers.

For HR leaders aiming to beef up execution of talent-management strategies, Campbell of Hewitt suggests focusing on three steps.

1. Determine the most critical areas of the business to support. Ask what aspects of talent management are most closely aligned with the company's top business priorities.

2. Position HR to be the internal experts on talent management. Present the HR department as a professional consulting team, equipped to provide guidance to managers and insights to company leaders.

3. Measure the results. Use predictive analytics and metrics to determine if talent-management initiatives are being implemented and are effective.

Katherine Jones, president of San Mateo, Calif.-based Independent Consulting Services who worked on the research with HCI, said talent-management measurement is essential particularly in "times of belt-tightening."

"In the past, many company had no way to assess where there top talent was," Jones says. "Today, in the current economic environment, it becomes incumbent for a company to look closely at the talent they have now what they will need in a year or two years.
"When dealing with turbulent times you can't have a slash-and-burn mentality," she says. "You have to know who your top talent is and keep those people."

Ref: Scott Westcott

The Rules for Corporate Career Resilience

Rule #1: The company is not in charge of your career—you are. Your people can no longer wait for you to come to them with a new assignment or opportunity; they must seek out such opportunities themselves. Your relationship with them is no longer one of parent-to-child, but adult-to-adult. They share the responsibility for initiating career discussions. Even being designated as a "high potential" or a valued employee may not guarantee they will keep their place in the succession plan, as these plans have become less relevant as the pace of change has picked up. You will meet your employees more than halfway by giving them the tools and counsel they need to take charge of their careers.

Rule #2: Instead of ladders and paths, there are now webs and mazes. Your employees must learn, if they haven't already, to think of a career less as a ladder and more as a web. Webs have a center but no top and a lot of paths that connect. Unlike ladders, webs often dissolve when their purpose is fulfilled. Smart workers will move along the webs, picking up new skills that meet the organization's needs, looking for problems to solve, and working on team projects. And if a web breaks or dissolves, it can always be rewoven in a similar or different pattern.

Rule #3: Every job is now subject to a "make or buy" decision. Because of the flexibility and cost savings involved in using contract employees, vendors, and temporary employees to do the work previously done by downsized employees, your workers must understand that they may now be competing with these outside resources. This means they have to continually prove their value. Their only security lies in their ability to continually retool themselves to remain valuable to their employer. This is why continuous learning is so important to all workers today. All employees should also consider that their next opportunity may lie in becoming an outside resource themselves.

Rule #4: Hidden needs in the organization's internal job market are more promising sources of advancement than the formal job postings. There has always been, and will always be, a "hidden job market" in every company. Only now the inside job market contains more hidden jobs than ever. New needs appear so fast that there is little time to wait for the slow wheels of the formal hiring process to start rolling. These days, about a third of all jobs filled are newly created ones. And, of course, with the loss of rungs on career ladders, there are fewer formal job slots in the first place.

All employees—you included—must be on the lookout for unmet needs, then make proposals to the person who "owns the problem" to help meet the need. Getting your employees to accept this proposition is a part of helping them learn to take more initiative in every aspect of their jobs. Many times, by looking to meet the organization's needs, they will carve out their next career move.

Rule #5. The most "vendor-minded" employees will find or create the most opportunity. The employees who think of themselves as "intrapreneurs" will see the organization as a market for their skills. They will understand the truest, most empowering definition of a job—"a talent that meets a need." With your help, they will come to see themselves as vendors, and they will perceive more opportunity as a result. Vendor-minded employees realize that the purpose of the organization is to provide goods and services that customer value and that, if the organization’s employees do not do that, eventually they may all be out of a job.

Ref: Leigh Branham

Competency-based Career Planning

Career pathing involves making a series of job-person matches, based on the demands of the job system in the organization, that enable the person to grow into greater levels of responsibility, thus providing the organization with the talent that it requires to meet goals. This should involve the careful assignment of an individual to positions that provide her or him with opportunities for deploying the competencies needed for a more challenging position.

Best approaches to career pathing combine an analysis of positions in terms of both the tasks and the organizational behaviors needed for superior performance. The combined approach is essential for each of the jobs in the chain, because there may be marked differences between the characteristics demanded in one job and those needed in another in the same career path.

Steps to Implement the Competency-based Career Path
The major steps in developing a competency-based career pathing system are:
1. Put together a resource panel of experts on the target and feeder jobs who will set direction and specify the expected job performance criteria.
2. Define tasks and characteristics, through the resource panel, and survey job incumbents to obtain their perceptions of which job tasks and personal characteristics contribute to success in the target and feeder jobs.
3. Identify top performers in the target and feeder jobs, using performance criteria specified by the panel.
4. Conduct in-depth interviews with both superior and average incumbents in the target and feeder jobs to find out what they do and how they do it.
5. Based on the outcome of stage 4, develop a competency model of people in the target and feeder jobs by identifying those competencies that make the biggest contribution to outstanding performance as opposed to the competencies that all job holders need.

5. Based on the outcome of stage 4, develop a competency model of people in the target and feeder jobs by identifying those competencies that make the biggest contribution to outstanding performance as opposed to the competencies that all job holders need.
6. Analyze career paths by combining the survey (stage 2) and the interview (stage 3) results for target and feeder jobs.
7. Implement the career pathing system through a number of options: - computer-based tasks and competency inventories - performance and potential assessment linked to new job opportunities;- systematic counseling- career development and related training programs.

Tools of the System

The tools of a competency-based career path system include:
- a description of the tasks required by target and feeder jobs eventually broken down by job families - a competency model for the target and feeder job system - a dictionary of behavioral descriptions of each competency in the model- performance indicators that provide the material for a competency-based evaluation program and a computerized skills bank- a competency profile grid for either internal or external recruiting and selection of candidates- a career map of the organization, identifying which jobs are the key feeders to higher-level positions- a competencies' gap analysis showing main differences required to flow through the job system to reach high-level jobs- recommendations for training in or selecting for each competency in the path.

COMPETENCY-BASED SUCCESSION PLANNING

Competency-based succession planning enables an organization to determine the critical current competencies necessary for success in key jobs and the strategic competencies necessary for future success. Once this has determined the 'best fit' people, specific developmental plans can then be formulated that build upon these competency requirements to allow the individual's abilities to meet the strategic business needs of the organization.

Steps to implement Competency-based Succession Planning
For the competency-based succession planning to be complete, a logical process consisting of a certain number of steps must be followed. These key steps are as follows:

1. Identify critical jobs that the organization needs to fill
2. Develop a competency model from critical jobs, determining the competencies needed at each step of the job family ladder
3. Develop the most appropriate assessment methods (assessment centre, screening, interviewing, etc) and assess people against the competency model of the job
4. Make the decision whether to:- promote from inside - now or after competencies x, y, z have been developed- not promote but consider - possible lateral transfer- keeping in current job deselection - recruit from outside if no one in the organization is ready or can be developed in time
5. Feed the human resource management information system to track:- promotable employees, for future competencies monitoring - competency requirements of target jobs.

Ref: Hay Group, People and Competencies: The Route to Competitive Advantage