Talking Talent with the CEO
Strategic Questions CEO’s Have been Asking… for a long time!
Charles H. Bishop, Jr., PhD
CEO’s agendas typically include expansion, innovation and growth ;all require an engaged, highly motivated and productive workforce. In addition to their core agenda CEOs are highly concerned about talent availability required to achieve enterprise success.
The two over-arching questions that CEO’s have been asking:
- Do we have the leadership/talent and organization capabilities to successfully implement our strategic agenda?
This requires a solid methodology to segment the talent and the work to be performed followed by identification of significant, mission-critical gaps plus plan(s) to close the most important gaps.
- Are we making progress in assuring that we have the required talent and capabilities in place to be successful as we implement our strategy throughout the year?
This requires doing the right things to build an engaged workforce in the process of filling the ‘mission-critical’ gaps. Like all process improvement this requires timely information to track and report progress with alerts designed to warn when the process is getting off track.
CEO’s and boards historically have not been pleased with their organizations talent management efforts as evidenced by research and studies. See: https://hbr.org/2013/05/talent-management-boards-give
In talent management, the biggest barrier to elevating performance is a lack of qualitative talent information. Key stakeholders, such as CEO’s and Board members see the lack of information as a serious impediment to organizational growth and sustainability of results.
We have studied the referenced research and publications and over the course of the last five years interviewed the same 20 C-Level executives on at least two occasions. This effort has yielded a solid talent management roadmap, with a focus on the critical early steps. Those critical early steps are the biggest stumbling blocks to success. The resulting roadmap is presented in our full white paper as a Leadership Pipeline S-Curve. Please contact the author to receive a free copy of referenced white paper.
Overall:
It is becoming more apparent Talent Management is seen as a business issue vs an HR issue. Everyone recognizes HR is a key player, but organizations reporting satisfaction with Talent Management are describing talent management as an organizational issue with management being directly accountable for results.
Issues—Recommendations:
Lack of ‘people’ management programs/processes directly aligned with corporate strategy. Creation of a mechanism to more closely align Human Resources and Senior Management is seen as a critical step in the process. A common tern for this body is a Human Capital Committee.
Inept assessment of Talent. Almost universally C-Level executives report an inability to obtain accurate, timely answers to simple inquires around organization capabilities. There is a consensus that the root cause is bad data.
Even excellent analytical processes and superior reporting design cannot make up for:
- Repurposed individual performance data. According to one C-Level executive…trying to ‘repurpose’ performance appraisal data is ‘a tragic mistake that we continue to make’
- The inability to define and source data necessary to feed an analysis and reporting system. W. Edwards Deming said: ‘Don’t automate stupid’, but, commented one CFO, ‘we keep doing that’.
CEOs want to know about organization capability first and individual data secondarily by an 80-20 ratio. Examples of inquiries:
- What does the overall pipeline of talent look like, and are we developing our A-Players?
- Are we consistently deploying A-Talent against our A-Challenges?
- Poor performance is a significant risk. Where do we have performance issues and what is the cost?
- Where in the organization is our under-leveraged A-Talent?
A better way to assess Talent that lead to be able to answer organization capability questions is required: Intuitively, these C-Level executives felt there must be a better, simpler way of gathering assessment data. ‘It seems that a candid conversation is a better way to go’ was agreed to by several CEO’s and CHRO’s. A number of different organizations reported a structured conversation achieved excellent results in assessing talent.
A sharper focused talent Decision Support System is needed: ‘We need something different than what is available today’ was a common concern: Typically, they would like to see a Decision Support System with solid, relevant, accurate, differentiating information that meets the needs of key stakeholders. Key stake holders include, individuals, line managers C-Level team and boards. This is the focus of the second over-arching question…making progress. The idea of ‘once a year mentality’ is counter-productive…’we need to be able to track whether we are making progress as strategy is implemented throughout the year’.
Board members and CEOs; satisfied with their talent management suggest moving from offering an HR focused processes to a process closer aligned / ‘synced’ with two particularly important normal business processes:
- Setting strategy Having qualitive talent information available is critical to the process; and
- Implementation of Strategy Being able to report on progress made during short review and reporting cycles to move from the ‘once a year mentality’ to a continuous improvement ‘mind-set’.
This recipe has proven to yield answers to the two over-arching questions that CEO’s have been asking…for a long period of time!