Tag Archives: Next Practices

Next Practices with “Generation Next”

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The “Millennials” or often referred to as “Generation Next” are not only coming, they are already here. With this new generation 80 million strong (born between 1980 and 1995) and rapidly taking over from the baby boomers who are now pushing 60, we are being forced to look at Talent Management in a completely new way.  We must take a Next Practice approach to managing “Generation Next” or lose the war for talent altogether.  60 Minutes’ MorIey Safer did a report a few years ago entitled “The Millennials are Coming” where he discusses some of the challenges being faced in the workplace as we deal with this new generation of workers.  Safer says, “They were raised by doting parents who told them they are special, played in little leagues with no winners or losers, or all winners. They are laden with trophies just for participating and they think your business-as-usual ethic is for the birds. And if you persist in the belief you can, take your job and shove it”.  Where there are challenges there are also opportunities and Supply Chain leaders have the opportunity to turn these young, multitasking, tech-savvy, “I come first” workers into the most innovative, productive workforce of our time.

I was sitting in a conference yesterday listening to a number of speakers discuss the challenges we will all be facing with “Generation Next” (I have three sons in this category and am quite familiar with both the joys and challenges of this generation).  As I was listening, I was also thinking about all the Next Practices we (The Mpower Group “TMG”) have been trying to drive home to the Supply Chain community.  The thought occurred to me that some of the attributes of “Generation Next” may very well be THE personal attributes of a successful “Next Practice” Supply Chain professional:

  • Well educated
  • Hardworking
  • Self-confident
  • Team players / collaborators
  • Inclusive and diverse
  • Technology / social media savvy
  • Socially responsible
  • Information gatherers
  • Communicators

Would these not be the very attributes that would be required to attack the Supply Chain from a value focus as opposed to the traditional (they are not even familiar with this approach) TCO approach as Dalip Raheja laid out in “Friends, Romans and Countrymen – Lend Me Your Ears!  I Come to Bury TCO . . . . . .”  or tackle the Social Media issues as depicted by Crystal Jones in “Social Media and the Supply Chain”  or  help solve the adoption issues (has this generation not been the faster adopters of new solutions and technology?) as discussed in “Old MacDonald Was Right — It Is About E-I-E-I-O!”

In addition, “Generation Next” has very specific requirements as they are choosing a career. They are looking for the following:

  • Flexibility
  • Work / life balance
  • Direction / roadmap
  • Interesting work
  • Training & development
  • Career advancement
  • Frequent feedback
  • Coaching / mentoring

In other words, they are literally crying out for Competency Based Talent Management (“CBTM”) which is what I was at the conference to present AND TMG has had numerous posts on

In a nutshell, CBTM starts out by defining the demonstrable skills, knowledge and behaviors (competencies) required to be successful within your role to meet and/or exceed the goals and objectives of your organization – direction and roadmap.  It then uses those competencies as the foundation for an integrated talent management program:

  • Recruiting (you must have all the other elements in place or you will be forever recruiting)
  • Performance evaluation (frequent feedback focused on demonstrated competency)
  • Training & development (a MUST – focused on APPLICATION of new competencies)
  • Career Management (coaching / mentoring to advance your career)
  • Succession Planning (identification and movement of high potentials)

Interesting work – I may be a geek but I think Supply Chain is diverse, exciting, challenging and offers a wide range of career opportunities within and across organizations and industries!

As for flexibility, work / life balance and social responsibility – well, maybe we Baby Boomers could learn a few Next Practices from “Generation Next”.

If you don’t have a competency based talent management program in place for your organization you may want to step on the Next Practice bandwagon before “Generation Next” passes you by and goes to the Next company.

Join the conversation . . . . . .

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What Your Parents Were Afraid to Tell You About The Birds and The Bees – Secrets FINALLY Revealed!!

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No, this is not about the Kama Sutra – sorry!  But before I tell you about The Birds and The Bees, let me ask you a serious question.  If you were faced with a life and death situation, what percentage of the time do you think you would make the right decision?  What if the decision criteria were fairly complex?  Would your percentage drop?  What if you had to get a few more people involved in making the decision?  What if I said that your process MUST involve collective fact-finding, vigorous debate, and consensus building?  Would your percentage drop even further?  By the way, this represents the decision making situations in your work everyday -n’est ce pas?  Let’s stretch this a little further – how about those few more people are actually 10,000 people?  What would your percentage be now?  I’m not done yet: what if you had to make that decision every year, year after year?  What kind of success rate would you predict of making the right decision every time?  Would you like to learn about a top secret methodology that will guarantee a success rate of close to 90% given ALL the criteria above?  All you have to do is to forget whatever your parents taught you about birds and the bees and listen to what Professor Thomas Seeley from Cornell has to say about bees in a Harvard Business Review article. I’ll cover the birds some other time.

A beehive has to find a new place to call home every single year because of over population.  And what I described above is the actual situation that they face, every single year, and Seeley’s research documents a success rate of 90% – year after year.  They have very complex criteria that they have to meet because their survival depends on it, and they have developed a process which depends on experts to gather data, ways to consolidate the market research, validate the information, communicate to everyone and build consensus and then most importantly, make the decision and get it Adopted and Implemented.  And then they live happily forever – till next year!  90% success rate!!!!!  Seeley points to the fact that bees have figured out how to achieve a high collective IQ and that organizations would be well served to emulate bees.  I could not agree more, and we at TMG have been preaching similarly.  Here are his 5 keys:

  1. Remind the group’s members of their shared interests and foster mutual respect, so they work together productively.
  2. Explore diverse solutions to the problem, to maximize the group’s likelihood of uncovering an excellent option.
  3. Aggregate the group’s knowledge through a frank debate.
  4. Minimize the leader’s influence on the group’s thinking.
  5. Balance interdependence (information sharing) and independence (absence of peer pressure) among the group’s members.

Raising the collective IQ, High Performance Work Teams, Change Management,   etc. are clearly critical competencies in organizations.  In addition, decision making is the most overlooked competency in organizations today.  People are promoted based on an assumption that they are better decision makers than others.  Group decision making is probably the single biggest bottle neck in corporation today.  Yet, there is very little attention paid to this issue-both at an individual level and at a group level.  If you do find competencies related to Seeley’s list above, my guess is that it will be in the dreaded soft skills category and we all know how those are treated most of the time.

You first must fundamentally believe that those Strategic Competencies (soft skills) are the key to your organization’s success. Defining the right competencies, developing those organizational competencies (CBTM) and then adopting and implementing (AEIOU) can get you a 90% success rate.  With 10,000 stakeholders to boot.

And again, my apologies to those who were expecting something from the Kama Sutra!

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Fighting the War for Talent – Focus on Career Management!

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We’ve been hearing about the “War for Talent” in the Sourcing / Supply Chain space for quite some time and it does not seem to be improving. In our previous posts, we explored how the lack of a holistic approach to Competency Based Talent Management (“CBTM”) is the root cause of the problem. In addition, we have advocated that to be sustainable, CBTM must cover ALL five phases of an employee’s journey through a company — recruiting, performance evaluation, training / development, career management and succession planning.

Let’s focus here on one element – Career management. According to Wikipedia, Career Management is the combination of structured planning and the active management choice of one’s own professional career. While career management should ideally be the responsibility of the individual, it MUST be driven by the organization. To start, employees need to know which skills / competencies are required to be successful today and how those skills /competencies need to grow and develop in order to progress within the company. These can only be defined by the organization and are the foundation for CBTM. A well-defined competency model, which is critical here, can also be used and integrated into the other four phases of CBTM. In addition, individuals need to see the career options (career path) and the expectations associated with moving through the path. How many Sourcing / Supply Chain organizations have actually taken the time to not only define the competencies but also lay out a career path for their employees? Not many. By the way, the first people to leave because of the absence of career management are the people you most want to hold on to — your high potentials. They are off listening to other companies who seem to be able to articulate a career path – can’t all companies do this during the recruiting phase even if it is all smoke and mirrors?

Without a Career Management process in place, you will:

  • lose your best people
  • constantly be recruiting (this is an expensive proposition)
  • never realize the full ROI of your asset (your people) base
  • lose the opportunity to infiltrate (love that word) the rest of the organization with Sourcing / Supply Chain thinking
  • never get beyond tactical contribution (real value comes thru competency growth)

The consequences of ignoring Career Management as part of your talent management program (if you have one) can be devastating to an organization. While the official definition of Career Management places the responsibility with the individual, the organization needs to put the infrastructure (process tools, metrics, mentors, etc.) in place AND drive the adoption and execution of the process. If we look at Career Management as benefiting both the employee and the organization then we MUST ensure that it is happening — tools are of no use unless they are being utilized.

What do you need to do to fix the career management void? Here are a few Next Practice tips:

  • Develop a competency model which allows employees to see their path for success
  • Tie career progression to competency growth
  • Ensure that competency growth is NOT about “what you know” but more about “what you DO with what you know”
  • Link career paths across functions by competency
  • Ensure career management is integrated into ALL phases of CBTM
  • Create a “success culture”, providing organizational mobility and access to new opportunities
  • Provide employees with “stretch” assignments to further competency growth
  • Ensure your organization is the “place to be” to ensure professional growth
  • Provide ongoing feedback and coaching so that employees can grow and take advantage of new opportunities

If you are interested in getting involved or would like to follow this topic further, here are a series of critical activities coming up:

  • Release of the results of the Executive Forum we just facilitated at the IACCM Global Forum for Contracting & Commercial Excellence on Talent Management.
  • A major research project to not identify the problem one more time but to identify Next Practices to solve the problems.
  • A webinar with IACCM on CBTM.
  • A White Paper to focus on Next Practices in CBTM.

Regards,

Crystal

Reposted on Sourcing Innovation.

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Mind the Gap – Training vs Competencies

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In our previous posts we talked about designing your talent management program and implementing a recruiting plan. However, these are only parts of a larger Competency Based Talent Management (CBTM) program. You have hired the people you needed. So what? How can you make sure they are integrated into your organization and are able to hit the ground running, creating the optimum amount of impact? Not only do you need to look at training your existing team, you need to create a training program for new recruits as well.

This sounds well and good (and perhaps a bit easy). However, it is not as easy as it sounds. We have heard from many of our Sourcing / Supply Chain peers, particularly at our last NPX, that they are struggling with their training efforts. Training is completed, but the learning is never adopted. So what can they do to change the results?

Adoption brings us back to our vowels (AEIOU). In the past we have talked about the importance of Adoption, Execution, Implementation, Optimization and Utilization in any organizational effort. However, training is just not about the act of learning (a consonant); it is about adopting and implementing that learning to drive business results. Using the vowels ensures that the people being trained start applying what they learned. Implementing the vowels is the key difference between training people and developing competency.

To effectively turn a training program into competency development, you must have a good understanding of your desired needs. This requires that you start with the strategic direction and objectives of the company and what role your organization will play. This will show you which organizational competencies you need and will give you an understanding of the gaps you have within your organization. Now, the closure of those gaps can be tied directly to the company’s strategic direction and the role your organization will play, adding value not just for individuals, but for the company as a whole. Sending 2-3 people at a time to some public seminar designed for the masses may develop individual competency but it is never going to develop organizational competency.

Your gap closure strategies must follow a multi-faceted approach (coaching / mentoring etc.). Make sure your entire approach is rooted in Adult Learning Theory and has experiential learning as its basic tenet. Making people sit through day long lectures with no ability to actually practice the new behaviors and competencies in a safe learning environment is of little value. In addition, the curriculum must include the strategic competencies found during the initial gap assessment. A program consisting of functional or process skills alone is doomed. The strategic competencies must also be integrated into the core process modules so that people know how to actually deploy the new process.

Your training strategies must look beyond the technical skills and focus on the strategic skills needed to be successful like change management, communication, collaboration, and decision making. Oftentimes these skills are overlooked when training, although they are the most important to organizational success. Anyone can learn to use any process and those are the skills most organizations worry about when hiring and training. However, developing strategic skills can take your team to the next level and have more lasting effects on the group. It takes your group from Best Practices to Next Practices.

Developing the right competencies within your organization is not easy. It takes a lot of thought and energy to train and develop your team. Sometimes closing the gap can make you feel like you are trying to build a bridge across the Grand Canyon. If you start by looking at competency development in terms of AEIOU and strategic alignment, you will no longer need to build a bridge across the gap. You will find that your organization will soar.

In our upcoming posts we will continue to address Next Practices associated with the Competency Based Talent Management lifecycle.

If you are interested in getting involved or would like to follow this topic further, here are a series of critical activities coming up:

  • Release of the results of the Executive Forum we just facilitated at the IACCM Global Forum for Contracting & Commercial Excellence on Talent Management.
  • A major research project to not identify the problem one more time but to identify Next Practices to solve the problems.
  • A webinar with IACCM on CBTM.
  • A White Paper to focus on Next Practices in CBTM.

Regards,

Crystal

Reposted on Sourcing Innovation.

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Help!!! Recruiting Next Practices Needed!

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We are half way there! Welcome to the third of six in our series on Competency Based Talent Management (CBTM). Check back weekly as we discuss the challenges associated with CBTM and explore solutions.

We have been hearing about Sourcing / Supply Chain organizations which are looking for up to 400 people. How does any company find themselves in a situation where they need that many people all at once? I guess one could blame an ill managed recruiting function but I suspect that the entire Talent Management program (if there is one?) is broken. As noted in our last post, Talent Management has five phases, all of which must be integrated and treated individually and collectively as a system in order to be effective. We advocate that a talent management program MUST be competency based (“CBTM”) to be sustainable and must cover ALL phases of an employee’s journey through a company. In addition, each of these phases must be supported by:

  • A clear understanding of the role the Sourcing / Supply Chain organization will play for the company
  • A definition of the Intended Consequences the Sourcing / Supply Chain function is trying to achieve for its customers / internal business partners
  • Clear goals and objectives for the group which are tied back to corporate goals
  • A clearly defined competency model to support the defined role, intended consequences and goals of the organization

Let’s begin with the first phase which is Recruiting. Keep in mind that having a strong recruiting function is absolutely useless unless you can retain and grow the talent you bring in. This is why CBTM MUST be viewed as a system. Any weak link in that system can find your best people returning to the job market out of frustration. Think about a high potential that is told they are an asset of the organization only to find themselves in a position where they are given little to no training or development, no clear goals or metrics, no career development support or no clear path for advancement. Some asset!! How long do you think that “high potential” is going to stick around? Keep in mind, bringing new people into an organization can be a VERY expensive proposition if they end up leaving in a short time. For recruiting to yield a positive return on investment, the other phases of CBTM must be in place to ensure employee retention.

Some organizations are constantly trying to “find” the right people. In many cases this is because:

  • they didn’t define the right requirements (competencies) up front
  • the defined requirements were not tied back to actual needs
  • they did a poor job marketing (selling) the position and / or the company
  • they found the right people but couldn’t keep them
  • the screening process was conducted by individuals that did not have subject matter expertise (HR perhaps)
  • candidates were not a good culture fit for the company

Constantly trying to find the right people is expensive, as is on-boarding and training new hires. Here are a few Next Practice tips to strengthen your recruiting practices:

  • Understand the role you are expecting your Sourcing / Supply Chain organization to play — Tactical executor? Strategic business partner? Change agent? The role (whatever it is) will determine the competencies required and those MUST be defined
  • Clearly defined requirements that are tied to customer needs / intended consequences and are supported by required competencies
  • A marketing plan that allows you to present your company in the best way to attract the best candidates
  • A screening process that ensures the right functional and cultural fit
  • A rotational program for new hires that may be high potentials but who do not yet know where they fit
  • A process that closely matches candidate competencies with the open position — putting a high-powered Sourcing professional in a tactical buying position will do nothing but frustrate everyone involved (and vice versa) and cause the employee to leave
  • An on-boarding process that gets the new hire off to a strong start
  • Ensuring the other phases of CBTM are in place and being utilized

If you are interested in getting involved or would like to follow this topic further, here are a series of critical activities coming up.

  • Major research project geared towards not just identifying the problem but to identifying Next Practices to solve the problems
  • White Paper to focus on Next Practices in Competency Based Talent Management
  • A webinar discussing our findings in detail

Please share your thoughts and challenges regarding Talent Management below. We would love to hear your insights.

Regards,

Anne

Reposted on Sourcing Innovation.

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