IMD’s “hybrid programmes” include a mix of company-specific programme work aimed at collective capability-building, individual coaching and mentoring, individual action-learning projects and relevant open programmes which emphasise how to make sure that individual learning is successfully applied in the workplace.
Coaching, mentoring and sponsorship
Coaching, mentoring and sponsoring have proved to be effective in helping talented people to develop and feel valued, and they provide a good way for senior managers to take an active role in nurturing gifted people.
Coaching
The theory is simple, but the 2009 Ashridge/ILM research into people from generation Y shows that the practice of coaching is anything but simple. In essence, a coach focuses on helping more junior, less-experienced individuals improve their performance and results. The aim is to help them broaden their skill base, knowledge and understanding of their role rather than solely providing feedback and moral support.
The people interviewed wanted their line managers to act as coaches, but the majority felt they failed to do so. Conversely, managers believed that they performed this role.
The problem lies in the failure to deliver “authentic coaching”, according to Ashridge. Managers need to “adjust the way they think about and practice management”, appreciate the differences between mentoring and coaching, and improve their coaching skills. And their organisations need to work harder to create a culture of coaching.
Mentoring
Mentors provide career advice, feedback on how to improve and also act as role models. The focus is less on current performance and more on an individual’s potential and aspirations. There is a wealth of evidence to show that mentoring especially helps talented people to advance at senior managerial levels.
For example, Catalyst looked at the benefits of mentoring via an online survey conducted in 2008 of more than 4,000 MBA alumni who graduated between 1996 and 2007 from top schools in Asia, Canada, Europe and the United States. The resulting report published in 2010 noted:
We found that mentors have an impact on high potentials’ career advancement from day one and continue to have an impact as careers progress – although men reaped greater salary increases from mentoring than women.
Mentoring – especially from senior-level mentors – enabled both men and women to advance up the corporate ladder. The analysis revealed that high-potential people with current mentoring relationships received significantly more promotions. However, what really counted was the mentor’s level of seniority. For example:
those with mentors at the CEO or senior management level received more promotions;
women who had mentors at the top got promoted at the same rate as men who had such mentors – but more men than women had a mentor at the CEO or senior management level (62% of men versus 52% of women).
Overall, mentoring was critical for the progression of men and women to the highest level, but it was not sufficient to help women catch up with men in terms of salary. The findings of the research prompted Catalyst to introduce the concept of sponsorship as a way of accelerating the careers of women.
Sponsorship
Nancy Carter and Christine Silva of Catalyst define sponsorship as:
The active support by an individual placed in the organisation with sufficient influence on the decision-making process and who is advocating for, protecting and fighting for the career advancement of the individual.
A 2012 Catalyst report explored the concept of sponsorship further by interviewing 93 male and female executives. The findings suggest that sponsorship can have a powerful influence on people’s route to top management. It is especially beneficial to women, providing them with access to the most influential networks within their organisation.
The report cites the example of Deutsche Bank, which created a one-year sponsorship programme in 2009 for high-performing women from its business units globally. The aim is to help these women reach executive leadership positions by pairing them with members of the bank’s group executive committee from a different business line.
Sponsors can also help women to be more confident in their careers. Research in 2012 by the UK-based Centre for Talent Innovation demonstrates that women in the UK with sponsors are 52% more likely to be satisfied with their rate of advancement than those without. With a sponsor’s backing, they are 25% more likely to ask for a pay rise and 58% less likely to consider quitting their job within one year.
Sponsors have a significant influence on the careers of mothers. Unsponsored working mothers are more than twice as likely as their sponsored peers – 14% compared with 6% – to plan on leaving their organisation within a year.
PepsiCo
PepsiCo, a multinational food and beverage corporation, has rethought its approach to career planning in response to talent shortages and because it needs to make sure that the next generation of senior managers have a variety of assignments across the company’s global business. This involves taking a much longer perspective of individuals’ careers and pinpointing when they are most likely to be mobile and when family commitments are likely to ground them in their home country.
Individuals who are earmarked for senior management posts have an in-depth interview, where they are asked what might influence their desire and ability to take up international assignments. This might include their spouse’s career plans, considerations about their children’s education or whether they are the primary carers for ageing parents.
Richard Evans, president, PepsiCo UK, Ireland and South Africa, says these “intelligent profiles” have resulted in a different type of conversation between the company and its high-potential employees:
You have to change the style of the conversation you have with people. We have gone from a very formal conversation to a more informal ‘can do’ career conversation, where you build a level of trust with the people you are talking to.
Conclusion
Increasing numbers of employees, not just women and people from generation Y, are taking an individualistic approach to their careers and may not be willing to sacrifice everything to get to the top. Talented individuals appear much less loyal to their organisations. They are strongly committed to developing their own talent and pursuing their personal goals before those of the organisation.
Organisations need to take on board this new reality and offer the right development opportunities and work experiences – otherwise talented people will leave.
Flexible career planning can help satisfy talented people, but it may not be sufficient to gain their trust and loyalty. Despite the best processes, some talented individuals continue to enter companies, learn what they can and then move on, throwing succession plans into disarray.
The next chapter looks at how companies can connect with their talented people in terms of shared purpose and values and whether it is possible to build a culture where talented people become willing and equal partners in the talent game.
5 Taking a culture-led approach
Something that I do think it is worth emphasising, is corporate responsibility. Time and time again, it has been shown that Gen Y really do care to work for an organisation that really is having a positive impact on the world and society or on a community.
Lucian Tarnowski, founder and chief executive, BraveNewTalent.com
In Chapter 2, Joydeep Bose, Olam International’s president and global head of human resources, described how the company is attempting to bond the disparate businesses and assets it owns through a common culture linked by such attributes as ambition, entrepreneurship and empowerment.
Olam is not the only company exploring this approach. With a new generation of workers who do not see long-term employment and systematic promotion and development over decades as an incentive to stay with a company, and emerging talent who are becoming picky about who they work for (see Chapter 4), stating publicly what a company stands for and developing a culture that shows how its values are “lived” in pra
ctice are being seen increasingly as a way to “bond” talented people.
AT&T, a multinational telecommunications corporation, starts communicating its values and culture well before any formal recruitment process. It has created a “talent network”, which has proved highly successful in “connecting and reaching out” to a large pool of job seekers, according to Carrie Corbin, associate director of talent acquisition. The company must reach 20m job seekers per year and “seriously consider” 250,000–1,000,000 of these to meet its hiring needs.
Job seekers join the talent network and are kept informed of potential job opportunities through, for example, a careers website, a talent network Facebook application, a mobile careers website. They also receive periodic information about jobs and a monthly newsletter. When looking for candidates to fill new vacancies, the company’s recruitment staff go to the talent network first.
When AT&T surveyed 95,000 talent-network members, it was surprised to learn that they placed most value on receiving news of the company and that they felt “more connected” as a result. According to TMP Worldwide, a recruitment advertising agency, by mid-2010 the talent network had 562,178 members, with membership growing by an average of 18% each month; the unsubscribe rate was less than a 1%.
Those interviewed for this book confirm the importance of some form of connection with a company’s values and culture. For example, Sanjar Ibragimov, an IMD MBA graduate, says that one of the deciding factors in choosing to work for DuPont was his identification with its values:
I saw from my experience of being an adviser to many companies that there is often huge discrepancy between the aims and the way they are executed. When I came to DuPont, I realised that their core values were really in the DNA of the company: safety, environmental stewardship, care for people.
I was really touched by this. I have been working here for six months already and I really see that they mean what they say. I find myself in the right place and I am happy that these core values are my core values as well. It was something deeply instilled in me from my very early years.
Ian Pearman, chief executive of Abbott Mead Vickers, joined and stayed with the company for similar reasons:
I was very lucky to find a company which dovetailed with my personal values set. At the time I didn’t think about it in those terms – it is an inevitable post-rationalisation of what happened – but there was a gut feel which was an intuitive part of that decision. As an aspiring graduate coming through the Milk Round, you put yourself out there, you fill in 20 forms and see what comes back. I was very lucky in that one of the agencies that I wanted to work at was this one and I was lucky to be accepted.
Why? Well there were 2–3 things. Firstly, they had policies that I found very unusual for advertising. For example, we have a principled stand against children’s toys advertising. We don’t advertise anything overtly to children because of the “pester power” effect. This is founded on a belief that you should only advertise to people who have the full mental capability to make informed decisions.
At the time it was set up, the company also refused to take smoking advertising. This was 30 years ago when it was very tempting to take tobacco accounts. Principles cost you money and I found it really interesting and distinctive that the company stood by its principles. I thought the company had a philosophy that was coherent and compelling.
And this is even more important now than it was then. In the past ten years, the authenticity of branding in the consumer products arena has been so pronounced that today’s young aspirant graduates are trained in their role as consumers to look for brands and companies that have some kind of mission and vision which is conducive to social good.
Many talent management experts agree that more aspiring high-flyers think in this way. James Cullens, group human resources director at Hays, observes:
I guess there is also a very strong call from candidates in terms of “what is the purpose of the organisation that I am going to work for”. They take the attitude: “I’m going to be much more selective about what I am going to do. I may actually fiddle around with my own business doing my own thing until I find the right opportunity.
“So no longer am I going to do the traditional round of Mars and Unilever and build my CV in the way my father would have done. Actually I am going to take a very different and more piecemeal approach to planning the experiences that I want – because I know that I am going to be working until I am 87 – so I might as well do stuff that I enjoy.”
That’s the difference and so people are looking at their careers in a different way from the way we would have done, certainly when we started off.
Emily Lawson of McKinsey agrees:
The management of culture in organisations has become more important. We are adopting a very different approach to setting and maintaining norms, evaluating people against them and establishing the fabric of the organisation, both in the wake of the financial crisis and also in the wake of the need to manage companies in a more connected world.
Culture-led approaches in practice
A good example of a company that has taken a culture-led approach in its recruitment and retention of talented staff is Naukri.com, an Indian online recruitment company founded in 1997. At that time there were only 14,000 internet users in India; 12 years and an estimated 50m internet users later, it has come a long way. After an initial public offering and expansion into other related businesses under the umbrella of its Info Edge parent company, by 2009 Naukri had become India’s leading online recruitment company.
From the start, Naukri encouraged an organisational culture that valued energy, enthusiasm, youth and experimentation. This contrasted with the more hierarchical structure at many Indian companies and helped it position itself as the hot dotcom business in India for young, bright talent.
One of Naukri’s attractions had been its employee stock option plan (ESOP). But when the Indian stockmarket plunged following the onset of the global financial crisis in late 2008, this lost its appeal as a hiring and retention tool. Senior executives feared that several employees would be tempted by job offers from other technology companies.
Personnel decisions had always been crucial to Naukri’s growth and development. Now the challenge was to adjust the hiring and retention strategy and keep employees motivated. It decided to focus more on providing a compelling rationale for working at Naukri rather than anywhere else.
Knowing that the falling share price had made the ESOP less attractive, Sanjeev Bikhchandani, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, and Hitesh Oberoi, who went on to become the chief operating officer, took two quick steps to address employees’ financial concerns. First, instead of offering new ESOPs at the market price, which had been standard policy, they offered them at a lower price, so employees could see value in them. Second, they introduced monthly financial incentives for the sales team, replacing the previous quarterly scheme that was similar to those at many other Indian companies.
Crucially, however, Bikhchandani and Oberoi also emphasised the company’s culture, portraying Naukri as a business that represented the new, young, vibrant India, offering a fun work environment and the chance to grow within the organisation. They pointed out that working for a large American tech company might seem tempting, but employees would probably have to wait much longer to get to a senior level with the ability to make things happen. At Naukri, by contrast, anyone in the marketing or technical department with an idea for improving the company website could get this implemented immediately and see the impact of their creativity.
As a result, most of the members of the top team from the founding stage have stayed with the company. Personnel turnover is low compared with other companies in the online recruitment sector, and in particular when compared with India’s technology and business-process outsourcing (BPO) industries. Furthermore, several senior managers who left Naukri subsequently returned.
The lessons, according to Bikhchandani and Oberoi, are tha
t companies must have a compelling rationale at all times for people to work for them; and they should be ready to manage talent through the boom and bust cycle, especially in an emerging economy.
Trying to create a culture that is vibrant and innovative has also been a challenge for Tata Chemicals. Budaraju Sudhakar, chief human resources officer, tells the story:
Six years ago we wanted to move from being a commodity company to a speciality chemicals company. We set up an innovation centre. But everything that the innovation centre guys did was regarded as useless by the commodity people because the level of investment and return was too low.
We initially tried to encourage senior people to mentor and support young entrepreneurs and innovators who were working on new products – but it didn’t work out well at all. The patience level of the senior leadership was very limited, working only on the financial timeframes they were used to.
So we brought in independent directors on the board to be the mentors of these people. That worked phenomenally well because the independent directors had a very long-term view of the organisation. They didn’t have a physical stake in terms of a financial return. They were also on the boards of other companies as well. They were able to neutralise the urgency of the business heads and support long-term development of business and product lines that would change the nature of the organisation.
The most important example is the water filter we developed for use in local villages. For many years, it was delayed but the independent directors were so supportive of the whole process that it was fast-tracked.
What it has achieved is to change the whole image of Tata Chemicals. Even if the company sells 1m filters every year, it just makes $20m – a very small contribution to the $300 billion revenue we earn. But the kind of reputation it has given to the company as an innovative company and not just a commodities company has been so powerful.
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