Managing Talent

by Marion Devine

  The value of that is so much more powerful as a recruiting tool for talent. Initially we had difficulties attracting the right kind of talent because of our image as an old-fashioned manufacturing company. Now they want to be part of this new innovative energy, producing new products and new services. That has an immense value.

  Making culture-led approaches work

  The experiences of Naukri and Tata Chemicals, as well as Olam International and AT&T, point to a number of characteristics that need to be in place if a culture-led approach is to work.

  Senior management endorsement

  The values that underpin the culture of an organisation must be embraced – and be seen to be embraced – by the chief executive and the senior management team.

  Indra Nooyi, chairman and chief executive of PepsiCo, champions this view. She has taken the lead in “bonding” the senior management team to the company by emphasising that “they are PepsiCo” and treating them as a family. She also aims to get to know the up-and-coming executives in the talent pipeline. As she explains:

  In groups of 10–15 I take them away for two days and I do 5–6 of these sessions every year – just me and these 15 people. We have no agenda. Each of us talks about ourselves. I talk about myself. They are allowed to ask any question they want.

  We go off to some little inn, we sit together for 12–15 hours a day, put our feet up – there is no structure and nobody writes notes – and we intersperse getting to know each other personally with any question that might help about the business.

  What we are making happen in PepsiCo is getting executives to think of this as a company where you don’t work for PepsiCo – you are PepsiCo. You have to represent a piece of the soul of the company.

  A company is about its people. It is not about the bricks, it is not about the plants, it is about the people. The more we can invest in these kinds of emotional exercises to create the bonds, so much the better.

  More idiosyncratically, Nooyi writes to the parents of her top executives thanking them for the “gift” of their son or daughter to PepsiCo. Inspired by the pride that her mother displayed to friends, family and neighbours when her daughter was appointed chief executive of one of the world’s most successful corporations, she realised that enlisting the enthusiasm and support of senior managers’ families was critical in them remaining “bonded” to the company. She even goes further and takes time out from business trips to visit the parents of her top executives who live in the country.

  Nooyi concludes:

  I think going forward all of us need to rewrite the book on talent management. In the past the CEO said emotion has to be divorced from work. I think the new CEO has to bring in an abundance of emotion to the job. Talent is going to be in short supply. If you don’t bring in that emotion equation to work I think your talent is going to abandon you.

  She seeks to engage the rest of the workforce through similarly personal means. As she explains:

  Every two weeks I write to all the employees in PepsiCo: all 285,000 of them. These letters are not about making plans or making sure you sell the products. They talk about me as a CEO. I might write to them and say I am taking my daughter to school today and my daughter is in the senior year and I am heartbroken – what am I going to do after she leaves home? And I will get 2,000 responses about what to do.

  Or I write to them saying all of us have ageing parents. Make sure you call your parents often enough. If you call them once a week, add that extra call. And if your parents tell you on the phone that they have lots of aches and pains, it is not because they have aches and pains. If they tell you they are fine, you will hang up quickly. If they tell you that they have aches and pains, you will spend time talking to them. I talk to my mother twice a day. Most employees told me that their parents thanked me for the letter I sent them because all of them reached out to their parents more.

  I have also invited guest writers among my senior executives so that the organisation understands that real people run PepsiCo: real people with real issues. That is what we are trying to do to bond people to the company.

  Integration into talent development

  A corporation’s commitment to the global community needs to be reflected in the way it develops its top talent.

  Olam International believes that it is good business to look after the interests of its stakeholders. Its chief executive, Sunny Verghese, says:

  It is the responsibility of every 21st century company to be a positive force for sustainable change in the countries and contexts in which it operates.

  Top-tier business graduates, particularly those originating from or keen to work in emerging markets, are in high demand from multinational corporations keen to develop their growth-market operations. To successfully attract and retain these people, Olam tries to appeal to their need for a “higher purpose” in their work; the opportunity to make a difference while also pursuing a successful career.

  Olam encourages its managers to invest in local communities to improve the livelihoods and resources of the people working for local suppliers.

  A similar sense of community consciousness is encouraged by Hays, as James Cullens describes:

  We are spending time trying to create an environment for community-minded people to come into our organisation. There is a difficulty there because you have a lot of older people like me supervising a lot of younger people coming in who have very different needs.

  We’ve gone down a disruptive learning route as well as our traditional management programmes, teaching them finances and strategy stuff and then sending them out to charities for a week so they can, for example, spend a night with homeless people. They then come back and innovate in a very different way because we force them to engage with very different people.

  By doing that, we are trying to create the right kind of environment and the right management and leadership and culture to be able to bring people in who have very different values. If you want to innovate, if you want to co-create, we as organisations have to be much more flexible in the way we try to engage with people.

  Consistency of application

  In an age where generation Y and indeed a much broader spectrum of employees are becoming cynical about being “sold to” (see Chapter 4), the values espoused by companies that adopt a culture-led approach to talent management must be applied consistently.

  Google has learned this lesson the hard way. From its inception, the company was the foremost champion of values-based engagement. Liane Hornsey, vice-president of people operations, argues that the company has turned its back on systems-led HR processes and planning in favour of the benefits gained from making the organisation both exciting and ethical. As she explains:

  Over I don’t know how many years, I have learned one thing. And that one thing is that if you don’t have a fertile soil in which you plant seeds, it doesn’t matter how intellectually robust and how brilliant your processes and your programmes are, they will fail. But if you have a robust soil and a brilliant culture, the processes and the programmes can be pretty weak but they will work – because having the right culture is absolutely the bedrock to making sure you develop talent.

  Google bases its culture on values and tenets summarised in Table 5.1. Hornsey stresses:

  We have 30,000 Googlers in more than 70 offices in over 40 countries. We operate in 112 languages and we have 157 international domains. In other words, we are big, we are global, we are everywhere. Every country knows Google exists. But if you walk into any one of those 70 Google offices, you know you are in Google. Every office might have its local flavour but they feel the same. And that is not by coincidence. We work it and we work it relentlessly and we work it really hard. We want to have one corporate culture. And that corporate culture is an environment in which we believe people thrive and people can develop.

  Google has run into trouble on a number of occasions with regard to living up to its ten tenets. Examples have included its assault on copyright, pr
ivacy issues involving its street photography, the collection of private data, its cave-in to the authorities in China on censorship and, along with many other firms, the amount of tax it pays.

  TABLE 5.1 Google values and tenets

  10 things we have found to be true

  1 Focus on the user and all else will follow

  2 It’s best to do one thing really, really well

  3 Fast is better than slow

  4 Democracy on the web works

  5 You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer

  6 You can make money without doing evil

  7 There is always more information out there

  8 The need for information crosses all borders

  9 You can be serious without a suit

  10 Great just isn’t good enough

  In the UK, the search engine has tumbled in the rankings of brands compiled from a survey of 12,000 consumers by Clear, a brand research and strategy consultancy owned by M&C Saatchi, an international advertising agency. Google was named the fifth most desirable brand by Britons in the same survey in 2012, but new figures published in July 2013 reveal that it has fallen out of the top 20. Furthermore, the Wikipedia entry “Criticisms of Google” now stretches to 25 pages.

  It is too early to assess how much, if at all, this will affect Google’s ability to attract and retain talented staff – but it will certainly put some people off the idea of working for the company.

  The need for transparency

  The most important prerequisite for culture-led approaches is that the organisation should be entirely transparent about its talent management processes. Difficult decisions must always be made about who is designated as talent, and it is better for people to understand why they have been left out rather than suspecting it is because of nepotism or behind-the-scenes politicking, which would undermine any claims by the company to value talent.

  How transparent organisations should be about who they mark out as talented is hotly debated. Most companies do not tell prospective candidates that they are in the talent management system and are viewed as talent. Some are opaque, indicating that an individual is viewed as talented but not saying much about how their career will be managed as a consequence.

  Research by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in 2010 suggests that organisations with a “hidden” system are often worried that:

  their method of selecting talented people and progressing their careers is not robust enough, and thus could be subject to challenge;

  being open about their opinion of an individual’s potential will encourage unrealistic expectations about salary and promotion, and even encourage the individual to recognise their talent and start looking for jobs in competing organisations;

  being open about who is regarded as talented would have a demotivating impact on those not identified.

  Ashridge explored the issue of transparency in a 2007 online survey of 1,500 UK-based managers. Although the results indicated that only 7% of managers believed being identified as talented resulted in resentment among peers, the report posed the same question as the CIPD research:

  Do you tell people they are considered talented in order to be honest, boost their confidence, focus their career and increase their engagement but risk that they become arrogant, feel overpressured and have an inflated sense of self-worth; or do you not tell people they are considered talented, leaving them to guess what the organisation thinks of them and losing the benefits that can be gained from their knowing?

  One solution, suggested the report, is to have a talent management system where there is a constant movement of talent in and out of the talent pool, so that the title of talented is not a permanent label. Organisations would design their system so that people move in and out of the talent pool at different career stages, re-entering it when they are ready for the next stage, major job move or promotion.

  This can help reduce the distinction of talent and non-talent (it is just where you are in your career stage) and take the pressure off someone who is not in a position to benefit from the opportunities of being in the pool (for example, because of family or personal responsibilities). It also makes it easier to deal with those whose “talent” turns into arrogance or fails to live up to expectations. And late or slow developers are more likely to eventually find their place in the pool.

  The view of Marielle de Macker, HR managing director at Randstad, is fairly typical of the managers interviewed for this book. Randstad has a talent pool for the top 1,000 positions in the global company and attempts to identify the top 200 in the pool and actively develop them. De Macker comments:

  We have a structured mechanism in place to calibrate our talent continuously against each other, and have an up to date view on their drive, judgment and influencing skills, which for us are good indicators of their future potential.

  Asked whether the company tells people whether they are in the pool, she replies:

  Not always, but I think we should. In today’s world of openness and transparency people are entitled to know where they are and how they are being viewed and they should be invited to think about any improvement or development actions if needed.

  It is difficult to see how a culture based on openness and transparency can be sustained if an organisation’s opinion of its workers is hidden or at best opaque. Even if companies decide to tell individuals that they are rated highly, it is still likely that their colleagues will notice that they are receiving special attention from senior managers as well as extra development opportunities and work experiences.

  A personal or tailored approach to promotion and career management of the kind described in Chapter 4 would be impossible to sustain. Furthermore, the lack of a frank exchange about an individual’s prospects in the organisation would fail to alert senior managers to those who do not want to be in “the system”, may not aspire to top jobs or whose personal circumstances may make it impossible for them to be (either temporarily or permanently) internationally or regionally mobile.

  Ross Hall, who has been a member of the talent pool at both GlaxoSmithKline, a multinational pharmaceuticals company, and Pearson, a multinational publishing and education company, supports this view. He has some searching questions about whether talent pools can really provide the more personal approach that people like him increasingly want:

  I wonder if the concept of talent pools is redundant and ineffective. What I am not sure of is whether it is the management of talent pools that is at fault or whether it is the concept itself. It would be interesting to know what the typical size of a talent pool is because the reality is that you are restricted in the number of people you can really give opportunity to. What does opportunity look like? Is it what we as a company want or is it what the individual wants?

  The idea that we are trying to find something that suits an individual’s purpose and the organisation’s purpose immediately suggests that it has to be something personal. Otherwise what we want to do with talented people generically is by definition not personal and not what the individual wants to get out of it themselves.

  By definition it must be personal and we are therefore very restricted from a resource perspective in terms of the number of people we can manage in this way. Then you have a real problem because you have to say how many people can be managed and if it is one person that doesn’t constitute a pool. If you have a pool of 100 people but you can only manage two or three people at the end of it, what you need is a very rigorous but very transparent filtering process.

  This is the whole argument for the need for talent management to be personal because those of us running a business have particular things we want to achieve. We have corporate objectives that we want to achieve through the nurturing of talent. What is very, very rarely done in my experience is any substantial conversation with the individual to say what do you want to achieve?

  What I don’t like about it is that I am named as part of a talent pool and that leads to stra
ined relationships with people who aren’t in the talent pool. There is also this idea that if you are in the talent pool, you get to network with other talented people – but who is defining talent? Are you saying that anybody who is left out of the talent pool has no talent?

  It raises a lot of questions, not least of which is shouldn’t companies make a talent pool voluntary and let people put themselves forward for promotion?

  Conclusion

  If companies want to recruit and retain the best-performing employees, they need to espouse cultural values and goals which go beyond merely appealing to these individuals. There needs to be a more fundamental emotional connection where gifted individuals personally identify with the organisation and believe they can make a difference by working there. Senior managers play a vital role in “bonding” talent to the organisation by making time to get to know such individuals and showing how much the company values their contribution. This culturally based engagement can help a company through good and bad times. It can be the key to retaining crucial staff during periods of slow growth, with all the bottlenecks in promotion and unrealisable expectations that occur in such circumstances.

  Failure to live up to the high standards of probity and integrity that an organisation has set itself, and that form the most important contribution to its “employer brand”, can also have a detrimental effect on its talent management strategy.

  A culture-led approach has some dangers, however. Companies can become so obsessed by the idea of achieving a tight cultural “fit” between the organisation and the individual that they become risk adverse in their recruitment and selection decisions. The organisation misses out on individuals who are motivated differently, but who nonetheless have valuable skills to offer, such as highly creative people or entrepreneurs. The next chapter looks at how firms can capitalise on individuals who have opted out of a traditional career or who have been ignored because they worked at the periphery of the organisation in part-time, contract or associate roles.