Managing Talent

by Marion Devine

  You will probably meet up with members of both your old and new teams to agree on a timetable and the particulars of your new role. This should take place openly and with your full agreement, so if you feel as though you are being kept in the dark, let your current manager know. There may be practical problems such as space needed and ongoing workload to manage that affect your transfer into the new team, so be prepared to wait.

  It may be that during your time away from your original job, you still keep in touch with your old colleagues, making sure you stay up to speed on their work to ensure that you are able to slip back smoothly into your old job at the end of the secondment period.

  You will struggle in your new job if you do not have the skills to carry it off, so make sure you plan your move carefully. Keep yourself fully informed of what will be expected of you by your new colleagues, otherwise you could have a miserable time and wish you had never bothered moving.

  Equally, do not use secondment as a way to avoid a job you dislike. Even though secondment could open up new opportunities for you, for some period of time you will probably have to move back to your old team and this could be awkward if you are not comfortable returning to them.

  Sabbaticals

  Sabbaticals allow people to take time out to pursue personal interests and are not usually linked to an internal career-development programme.

  Essentially a sabbatical is a system whereby companies allow their employees to take an extended period of leave above their usual holiday allowance, with the guarantee that their job will be held open for them when they return. A sabbatical might be for a year but could equally be for, say, three or six months.

  To qualify for a sabbatical an employee generally needs to have been working for the company for a specified number of years (which varies from company to company). A sabbatical is usually unpaid, but some companies do pay people, either as a reward for long service or because the sabbatical will be used to develop the employee’s career in some way or it involves, say, voluntary work for a cause the company wants to support.

  Traditionally, sabbaticals were a perk that academics enjoyed while the rest of the world looked on enviously. However, in the 1990s, the idea of taking a paid or unpaid break of anything between a month and a year caught on among the overstressed players of Silicon Valley and today the practice is becoming more widespread. Indeed, when IRS, an online research firm, polled 161 UK companies for its 2006 Employment Review, more than half said they would consider offering extended leave to long-serving staff. John Lewis, Tesco and Guardian Media Group are among those who offer this benefit.

  It is a trend that has been driven in part by staff retention concerns, with the sabbatical providing a kind of pressure valve. And in theory at least, sabbaticals can also have a positive impact on business performance as managers return to their posts re-energised, re-enthused and ready to take a fresh look at problems.

  Jonathan Denny, a managing partner at Cripps Harries Hall, a UK law firm, says sabbaticals can indeed have a beneficial effect, not only on the individuals but also on the organisations they work for. His firm is unusual in that it has operated a compulsory sabbatical policy since the 1970s. Once partners have served for ten years, they are required to clear their desks and leave the office for three months. “It’s a way of rewarding partners for working hard,” says Denny, “and the business justification is that it gives them a chance to recharge their batteries.”

  Denny went on his second sabbatical in 2011 and used the time to travel in Australia and South Africa. It was a complete break. Safe in the knowledge that he would not be contacting the office for several months, he was free to soak up the sights and reflect on his role from a healthy distance. It was time well spent, as he says:

  When I returned I was asked to write a new business plan for the firm. One of the things I noticed while I was travelling was that the service ethos in Australia and South Africa was much stronger than in the UK. When I wrote my plan, I put service at the heart of our offering. The result was a new regime that rewarded partners who went the extra mile for clients.

  Aiming for the top

  As this book has stressed, career success has many meanings, according to people’s background, values and personal circumstance. Talent is also a relative term, applying to many people who do not aspire to corporate leadership.

  But if people want a conventional high-flying career with a senior management position as the goal, what personal qualities do they need other than the ones already covered in this chapter?

  Ian Pearman joined Abbott Mead Vickers as a trainee in 1996, and over the years has worked on pretty much every one of the 88 brands that the advertising agency works with. He became managing partner in 2005 then managing director in 2008, and in 2010 was appointed chief executive. He highlights a number of factors that helped him reach his position.

  Regular feedback

  This is the first factor, as Pearman explains:

  If you are lucky, you end up at a place where feedback is consistent and frequent but also informal. Of course most feedback in companies is done formally and infrequently. This place was good at the former rather than the latter. You get a sense of how you are doing fairly quickly in the first 12–24 months and that inevitably builds your confidence – and where the feedback is not so good you get the chance to reflect and recalibrate accordingly.

  So I had a growing sense of confidence over those early years, which further fuelled my ambition. It is a virtuous circle. Good feedback builds confidence. Confidence builds ambition and expectation, which in turn inspire great performance, which creates better feedback. These are the four components of the circle, with feedback being the first component.

  Identifying the cultural capital

  The second factor is the ability to identify and buy into the cultural capital of the organisation. As Pearman says:

  There is what I call the theory of cultural capital. Everybody has a marked exterior. In organisations you can very quickly build cultural capital. There is a key or a code to every organisation, the thing that makes it tick.

  If you can unlock that code early on in your career, then things become a lot easier because you just understand the flow, the kind of behaviours that are appropriate and admired, what you might call the cultural tramlines.

  It is hard for an inexperienced person to do this, which is why I refer to it as an unknown unknown. You don’t even realise that this is important until somebody tells you and that is one of the things we cover in our graduate training sessions.

  When we are telling them how the culture works, what behaviours will be frowned upon and which will be admired, what the tone of the place is, what the smell of the place is, they don’t realise it but that is the greatest thing that we can do for them.

  They will learn all the more functional skill sets on the job and in the course of their training. Trying to build their understanding of the cultural capital is really important. People who “get” that this is important tend to be people with higher EQ [level of emotional intelligence].

  General management theory and practice

  The third factor, as already explored above, is a thorough grounding in general management theory and practice and exposure to the latest business research and ideas. Pearman describes what attending the Advanced Management Programme at Harvard Business School meant for him:

  You feel that you are in the high church of capitalism. Because of the way the course is formatted, it is a boot camp for capitalism and shareholder value. The rationale for doing it for me was exactly the same as the reason for mentoring – I wanted to know what I didn’t know.

  There was a set of theories and a set of practical case-study-bound experience that I wanted to access, so that I could unlock some of the codes of financial strategy. There is a lexicon to some of those concepts which, even in a business in which you are working with 40–50 business clients, you just don’t come across often.

  It was self-ma
naged learning for me. It was all about the content. I wanted to be sure that I understood fully the key tenets of strategic finance.

  Self-confidence, self-management and self-drive

  This is the fourth factor, as Pearman puts it:

  There are hygiene factors of self-management that are of course essential but it is more about the core psychological drive for recognition, for achievement or for dignity.

  I think people assume that star performers just have innate talent, but a lot of the rationale for why they are good derives from quite deep-seated psychological reasons that create a higher level of commitment, emotional and in some cases physical, to the job.

  They will work longer hours, they will be more focused, they will be more intense and they will engage better because they have that core drive and need. I think this is often overlooked.

  Attracting the attention of senior management

  The fifth factor, not stressed by Pearman but important to high-flyers, can be achieved in a number of ways, some of which have been covered in earlier chapters. One is to be given the chance to lead projects that cut across all the boundaries and disciplines of the organisation and are critical to its remit or competitiveness.

  Shiseido’s Hadasui project is a good example. In 1995, Shiseido, a leading Japanese cosmetics producer, launched a highly successful skin lotion called Hadasui (“bare skin”). The campaign was notable because, for the first time in its history, the company based the launch around the person who devised the new product, Norika Shimada, a 31-year-old marketing executive. This was a significant break with the company’s faceless traditions, which reflected the mores of Japanese industry as a whole. In the previous two years the company had launched a series of successful products but at no point had publicly recognised the originator.

  The role Shimada played in the launch is a testament to the internal struggle she underwent to get the product approved. Hadasui’s main ingredient is mineral water from the slopes of Mount Fuji. At the time, there was a boom in sales of mineral water in Japan and Shimada came up with the idea for the product after using mineral water in a number of ways at home.

  The marketing concept behind Hadasui – that skin should have mineral water to “drink” too – did not go down well with Shiseido’s conservative senior management. They felt that the message was too “faddy” and did not fit well with the company’s recent product launches. Shimada had to lobby individual board members with little or no help from colleagues in her own department. At the same time, she had to do her day-to-day work. It took nearly a year of lobbying to get the product accepted and a further two years to get it onto the market.

  Shimada decided to use her own story as the centrepiece for the launch. This too was a departure from tradition. Japanese newspapers and magazines scrambled to get the story, resulting in major publicity and record sales for the product. “The launch vindicated my persistence but it was a gamble,” she says. “If you stick your neck out you have to risk it might get cut off.”

  Shiseido’s directors learnt many lessons from the Hadasui launch, the most important being that individual recognition is crucial in encouraging frontline staff to be more creative. They have since abolished the internal sempai-kohai relationships, where senior managers take precedence in everything and are addressed by their rank by junior staff.

  Another lesson is that good ideas are often inspired outside the workplace through connections with ideas and experiences that are often unrelated to the company’s sector or industry. To broaden their experience, senior managers now attend seminars where speakers discuss topics as diverse as international gymnastics and the work of Japan’s volunteer medical service in developing countries.

  Shimada’s career moved on in leaps and bounds as a result of her leadership of the Hadasui project, but her ambitions, and those of people like her, have been helped by two other characteristics.

  The first is the ability to leverage the benefits of personal sponsorship. Chapter 4 touched on the fact that the chances of women being appointed to senior posts have been boosted by sponsorship schemes, in which individuals are supported in teams or roles by a senior manager who takes personal responsibility for their advancement.

  Neeha Khurana, head of learning and leadership development at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, has been particularly vocal in proclaiming the benefits of these kinds of schemes. As she commented at a talent summit in 2012:

  This kind of scheme is for our top talented women. It pairs them up with the leadership executive committee and the job of the sponsor of the leadership committee is to be an advocate, to give some exposure to these women in the right places to develop them. From my perspective, the success is really around conversations and people being open to being challenged.

  The second characteristic is the personal contact rising stars have with an organisation’s chief executive. Chapter 2 outlined how the chief executives of Unilever, Olam International and PepsiCo regularly met members of their talent pool. In the case of Sunny George Verghese of Olam, it is for the specific task of outlining and getting buy-in for the company’s values and objectives.

  Doug Baillie of Unilever describes how managers earmarked for senior positions regularly meet members of the board and the senior management team to discuss how their careers should progress and learn about the company’s strategy and future direction.

  Conclusion

  The assumption in this chapter is that you equate “talent” with “leadership” or “getting to the top”. But of course this is not the whole story. There are many people who have specialist skills and who, as Patricia Leighton describes in Chapter 6, are happy to trade work–life balance and autonomy against conventional career success by operating as independent self-employed people – a category that labour-market research suggests is growing by over 10% a year.

  There are many more who are happy to let their spouse or partner take the career lead and combine job-sharing, part-time or freelance work with the responsibility of bringing up a family. And there are specialist staff who want to stay specialist and not progress to leadership roles. Some companies are responding to their needs by creating separate talent pools, to make sure that individuals wishing to progress within their own specialism are developed and remunerated as well as those with high-flying aspirations.

  As Marielle de Macker, HR managing director of Randstad, comments:

  I think we need to go in the direction of including specialists in talent planning. Typically, when people talk about talent – myself included – they mean leadership talent. But what will become more and more important will be “expert” talent. Talent with expert knowledge and expertise about their products, markets, technology, processes. The notion of “talent” will expand beyond the generalist leadership talent we all know. This will require an adjustment in our talent development structures and philosophies as well as in our remuneration and reward structures.

  People who take this holistic view of career planning may well exhibit as much “talent” as the high-flying corporate captains or the entrepreneurs but for very different personal ends. For them, being confident, being opportunistic and building the support network to achieve their own personal aspirations is just as important.

  Whether they are aiming for the top, a specialist role or a more semi-detached relationship with their organisation as a consultant, contract worker or part-timer, people need to be frank with their employer about these aspirations.

  As Chapter 4 demonstrated, the best employers are attempting to introduce more transparency in the way they negotiate career plans with their talented employees.

  8 Planning for the future

  Going forward, I think all of us need to rewrite the book on talent management … We have the chance to look at talent in a whole new way because our people, our organisation and our shareholders are going to demand it.

  Indra Nooyi, president and chief executive, PepsiCo

  THE RESEARCH FOR THIS BOOK
involved looking at how organisations currently “manage talent” and whether those approaches are effective and appropriate, given a less predictable business environment. The research also looked at what talented individuals actually want and respond to. The ultimate aim, which this concluding chapter seeks to do, was to come up with insights and guiding principles that can be used to manage talent as successfully as possible.

  Losers and winners in the battle

  This book started with a prediction made 15 years ago by McKinsey of a world where companies would be locked in a constant and costly battle for the best people – those with abilities, intrinsic gifts, skills, knowledge, experience, intelligence, judgment, attitude, character and drive that make them indispensable to their employers.

  McKinsey’s predictions have proved accurate. High unemployment rates among graduates make it no easier for employers to find sufficient numbers of suitably able people they would like to employ.

  As Chapter 1 outlined, part of the reason is increased demand for those who can, for example, keep pace with technology, cope with uncertainty, work more collaboratively (often across national boundaries) and manage diverse teams.

  Demographic trends are likely to cause substantial changes in workforces around the world. Some countries will have ageing workforces, while in others the proportion of young and relatively unskilled workers will increase. Talent planners will have to respond flexibly and imaginatively to these shifts.

  High unemployment rates among young people in Western economies mean that many have got off to a slow start in their careers. Part of the problem is that the education system in many countries is failing to equip them with the right blend of knowledge and practical skills that employers want. At the same time, many of these employers are unwilling to give young adults work experience or training to help them make the transition from education to employment.