TALENT EDGE WEEKLY - Issue #13

May 02, 2020

Welcome to this week’s issue of Talent Edge Weekly - the weekly newsletter for strategic human resources (HR) practitioners, bringing together talent and HR insights from various sources.

Note: You can also access this and other content I post at my website, www.brianheger.com.

COVID-19

As we continue to support our organizations and workforces during the coronavirus pandemic, I continue to update special issue #6  COVID-19 Resources for HR, of this newsletter. That issue currently has 130+ references that HR colleagues can leverage. I will continue to update that issue until needed, so please bookmark it so that you can check it for frequent updates.

For the current issue, I cover the following topics:

  • PepsiCo's Formula for Leadership Potential | TD Magazine | Allan Church and Sergio Ezama

  • Revealing Leaders' Blind Spots | Strategy + Business

  • Stop Training Managers on Feedback, and Start Training Employees | HRBP Quarterly - Gartner

  • Latest Thinking on Learning Measurement, Analytics and Reporting | Chief Learning Officer

  • Scenario Planning: Drive Strategic Action And Real ROI | Chief Executive

  • Using Employee Recognition Analytics to Help Drive Talent Strategy | HRO Today 

  • Webinar: How Understanding Your Employees Through Data Will Strengthen Your Employment Value Proposition | Mercer

  • Book: What I Am Reading: Data-Driven HR: How to Use Analytics and Metrics to Drive Performance | Bernard Marr | Amazon| published April 1, 2018

If you enjoy content like this, please share this newsletter with at least one of your team members or colleagues and share it on your social media networks. Doing so will help us to continue to advance strategic HR and learn together.

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Have a good weekend everyone and please be safe.

Brian

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Brian Heger leads Strategic Talent, Workforce Planning, and Analytics for a Fortune 150 organization. To connect with Brian on Linkedin, click here.

THIS WEEK'S EDGE

The identification and development of high-potential (HiPos) employees have been a long-standing pursuit of many organizations and talent management professionals. However, this pursuit is an elusive one that presents several challenging questions to answer, such as what is potential, how do we measure it, and how do we develop it? In this article, Allan Church and Sergio Ezama provide insights on this topic based on their work at PepsiCo. Concerning measuring potential, PepsiCo's framework is based on three core dimensions 1) Foundational - includes cognitive skills (e.g., strategic thinking) and personality dimensions (e.g., interpersonal skills). 2) Growth - includes factors that enable an individual's ability to be successful in new roles, situations, and environments, and includes things like learning agility 3) Career - leadership capabilities and functional expertise a person needs to be successful in a given organizational context. (Note: For those interested in this type of framework, you can check out Rob Silzer's and Allan Church's book chapter in Strategy-Driven Talent Management). A multidimensional approach, such as the one used at PepsiCo, to assessing potential is far superior to those that rely heavily or exclusively on one aspect of the construct. Allan and Sergio also provide insights into PepsiCo's GREAT 5, which describes what it takes to go from being a good to great leader. This framework establishes the basis for leadership development programs and talent management practices. Other insights are discussed, such as their approach to developing HiPos as well as the outcomes/metrics that are tracked over time to measure the impact of development efforts. Overall, this article provides several insights for those practitioners who are looking to evolve their approaches to HiPo identification and development.

The effectiveness of a leader has a disproportionate impact on important outcomes in most aspects of life---from business, education, sports, and politics, to name a few. And while it is a good practice for leaders to continuously reflect on their leadership style and determine ways to improve, the speed at which the business environment, workplace, and workforce continue to change makes this type of introspection especially important. In many cases, leaders are increasingly finding that they need to learn new skills and behaviors, hone existing ones, and abandon those that detract from leadership effectiveness in a new world of work. Before this can happen, however, leaders must develop self-awareness in 1) what is important to leadership effectiveness 2) their effectiveness in these areas. However, as indicated in this article, leaders continue to have "blind spots" in what they think they need to improve and the weaknesses identified by those they lead. The research findings from this article indicate the biggest blind spots for leaders are in areas of being visible and accessible, development of teams and upcoming leaders, vision, strategy, and organizational priorities. According to the data, "there is a 96 percent likelihood that leaders do not understand that their organizations perceive them as ivory-tower executives who do not provide adequate clarity on the company’s strategy." Several other insights are provided and can be used as organizations help their leaders develop greater self-awareness of these blind spots and put development efforts in place to address them.

The ability to give, receive, and act on feedback is vital to individual and organizational productivity and performance. With this as the backdrop, many organizations have spent the past few years redesigning their approach to performance management to make it simpler and more continuous, where managers and their employees are better equipped to exchange real-time feedback that enables performance and development. Many organizations have also invested in manager capability training that equips managers with the skills needed to provide meaningful feedback that can be acted on by employees. And while it is important for managers to be skilled at giving feedback, it is also important to build employees capability in asking for feedback. In this Gartner issue of HRBP Quarterly, there are eight articles--each of which is interesting-- but one in which the topic of employee feedback is covered beginning on p.18. On p. 22, a discussion template, by BPX Energy, is provided and can be used by employees to organize their thoughts in preparation for performance check-ins with their manager. It covers conversation elements such as 1) sharing "good news" about things that are going well, 2) a section on MIT's - Most Important Things to Talk About through the lens of team priorities, individual priorities, and other key activities, 3) "hot" items on the horizon, 4) what else is on my mind--both personal and business, 5) then an overall "how I am doing" section. Given that the coronavirus event has likely impacted the cadence and frequency of performance check-ins, it is a good time for employees and managers alike to use a simple framework like this to ensure that that they are having these critical conversations--especially since this is a time at which feedback and coaching may be needed the most.

The nature of work, the workplace, and worker expectations continue to change at an unprecedented speed. These changes continue to call for a transformation in workplace learning --both the WHAT (e.g., reskilling, upskilling) and HOW (delivery methods). As such, learning functions continue to leverage and evolve their learning measurement, analytics, and reporting approaches to guide these efforts. This article highlights six areas in which learning will continue to evolve, ranging from standardization of reporting, artificial intelligence, machine learning, to data-driven management. Figures 1 and 2 describe four levels of maturity for learning measurement and analytics: 1) Inform- answering foundational questions and identifying trends. This level usually focuses on ad-hoc reports or scorecards with just historical data. 2) Monitor - ensuring the learning efforts meet a certain threshold such as a level one measurement score of 90 percent favorable or better, and which is usually presented as a color-coded dashboard. 3) Evaluate and Analyze - traditional program evaluation (5 levels of learning impact) 4) Data-Driven Management - determining the business impact of learning on goals, such as 2 % higher sales due to learning. As organizations continue to prioritize learning efforts that have a disproportionate impact on business outcomes, learning leaders can use this framework to determine the current and aspirational state of their ROI measures and use this information to strengthen this important area. 

In a few of my posts the past six weeks, I covered the topic of scenario planning (SP) and how it is a vital component of strategic workforce planning. And while not limited to strategic workforce planning (SWP), SP enables organizations to envision various-plausible (but uncertain) futures and to determine possible responses. These scenarios are based on a set of assumptions related to how certain factors (that impact business conditions) might play out, such as technological advances, new competitors, changing regulations, and successful product launches-to name a few. If the scenario unfolds, a good SP process will have already outlined how an organization will respond. In essence, this preparation enables an organization to critically determine and evaluate responses before the scenario occurs, allowing it to implement responses with speed and at scale--all of which provide an advantage. Within the context of SWP, it is essential to factor in how different business scenarios will result in differences or similarities in how many workers are needed, type of workers (e.g. contingent, full time, etc.) where, when, at what cost, and with what skills, to name a few. This article provides a few insights into what scenario planning is and how organizations can incorporate it into strategic discussions. As HR leaders and talent strategists, we should understand the different business scenarios of our organizations and be able to articulate the workforce implications of those scenarios.

As organizations continue to find creative ways to drive their talent strategy, one untapped (and sometimes non-obvious) lever for doing so is that of employee recognition programs. Within the context of artificial intelligence and analytics, the data contained within employee recognition platforms can be used to derive important talent insights that inform decision-making and talent strategy. In this issue of HRO today (which includes several articles), one of the articles (p. 37-39) covers tactics for strategically leveraging recognition programs for this purpose. Two tactics mentioned include  1) Use of recognition tools to identify rising talent. Since many organizations use technology for peer-to-peer recognition, analytics can look at patterns in these recognition events to determine "rising talent." This type of data point can be used in conjunction with other talent indicators to identify employees who fall in this category. 2) Predicting Turnover - using  analytics that correlate how likely a person is to leave an organization based on their activity within an employee recognition program. The example given is where such an approach can assign each individual employee a score— red, yellow, or green—that indicates the level of retention risk. For those organizations that enable employee recognition programs through technology, you can ask the question: "what type of data and analytics gathered through this platform could we leverage to gain talent insights that inform better talent decisions? The answers to these questions could provide incremental value that enables an organization to accelerate the delivery of its business strategy via talent strategy.

THE SOUND OF INSIGHT

During this one hour webcast, the Mercer team provides insights into how to leverage workforce data to create an effective total rewards program that drives retention, productivity and performance. Topics include how to 1) use workforce data to more effectively design total reward programs and connect to outcomes like turnover and engagement, 2) create personas for better understanding the needs and desires of unique workforce groups, 3) personalize your value proposition for each employee with engaging communications. Please note that to view the webinar, you will need to provide your name and email address to Mercer and also have Adobe Connect installed on your computer or device- both of which you are prompted to do when you open the link.

WHAT I AM READING

It shouldn't come as a surprise that the use of data and analytics, especially within the context of HR, continues to be a hot topic as organizations look to leverage this capability to make better, faster, and more informed decisions. Despite this fact, HR professionals often report challenges to leveraging data and analytics due to reasons such as " we don't have good data" or "I don't know where to start," to name a few. And while these reasons may have merit, as HR professionals, we can ask ourselves" what steps can I take--even if it is a small one- to evolve my understanding of data and analytics and the various ways in which they can be used to optimize HR strategy, tactics, programs, and processes for the greatest ROI to the business. In this book by Bernard Marr, he nicely covers how HR can begin to take a data-driven approach to recruitment, engagement, safety, wellbeing, development, and performance management. He covers things such as connecting business strategy to HR strategy and using this information as the foundation for determining how data and analytics can accelerate strategy execution. For those looking to expand their knowledge in this area and understand the various ways in which data and analytics can help drive strategic HR, this is an excellent book to pick up.

SHARE YOUR IDEAS

If you have an article, report, or resource that you recommend, please email me. I would love to review it and share it in a future newsletter.

FINAL COMMENTS

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I look forward to sharing more ideas in next week’s Edge!

Have a nice weekend everyone and, again, be safe.

Brian