Sunday, February 27, 2011

Now We Know...Why CHROs Don't Think They Are Effective at Leadership Development


Greetings,

I have discussed on DNA of Human Capital a couple of times (OK...maybe more) about importance of leadership development and various studies that detailed importance and effectiveness considerations for leadership development. The most recent study was the 2010 IBM Global Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO) studies. The CEOs communicated that leadership was important, even going as far to say that creative leadership is what is needed in today's world. The CHROs echoed this, but 2 of every 3 CHROs also indicated that they were not effective at building and developing leaders. That is not a good sign...

So at an event two weeks ago, I was expecting more of the same. At this meeting of Federal government leadership development leaders and practitioners was the Corporate Executive Board's Corporate Leadership Council (CLC) to discuss "Improving Returns on Leadership Development." At the beginning of the presentation were the details that I expected...In the CLC study, many organizations were moving to increase their investment in leadership development...that much was understood. Additionally, I wasn't surprised to find that only 19% of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that their "Programs have delivered the Leader Capabilities Needed by the Organization."

So there I am sitting and thinking...OK...same results from the IBM work, but not anything new. The important questions for me were the following:

- Why do CHRO's think they are not effective?
- What do CHROs do to fix it?

I was pleasantly surprised to hear answers to those questions...

According to the CLC research, root causes for the poor returns on leadership development investments are attributable to three things:

1. Disconnected Strategy: Leadership Strategy is not integrated with business strategy.

2. Misaligned Outcomes: Leadership outcomes and metrics are not connected with business outcomes.

3. Uncoordinated HR Activities: Leadership activities are not integrated with other HR activities.


The rest of the presentation looked at three organizational case studies that were considered best practice. While I would like to discuss the details of the case studies...that goes beyond my agreement with CLC to share these results at a high level with each of you.

The great thing for my organization is that we were already working on developing both a Leadership Strategy and Leadership Capability Measurement Strategy, and aligning our leadership development processes with other Talent Management processes. While there is no magic dust that will help you and your organization in creating great organizational leadership capability, these three basic activities (OK...they are basic...maybe not easy...) these steps are the right things that can start to raise the veil of leadership development and the ability to improve returns on leadership investment.

Cheers,
Keith

J. Keith Dunbar is a Fearless Transformational Global Leader...Creator of Talent, Leadership Capability, and Culture Change…He can be found connecting and sharing knowledge on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Twitter: JKeithDunbar
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jkeithdunbar
DNA of Human Capital: http://dna-of-humancapital.blogspot.com/

The opinions or views expressed here are mine alone and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Why You Want Your Organization On This List

Greetings,

Fortune magazine just released its 2011 “100 Best Companies to Work For in America” list. You will see the list of companies with great perks, great work atmospheres and job satisfaction, yet we still strive to understand the “So What? Factor.” What does it mean to be on the list? Outside of more resumes that will require screening because some people want to take advantage of the wine bars or Botox injections…does it really matter about the list?

First we have to take a look at the underpinnings of how companies make the list…Fortune magazine states the following and you can read it here

“Most of a company's score (two-thirds) is based on the results of the Institute's Trust Index survey, which is sent to a random sample of employees from each company. The survey asks questions related to their attitudes about management's credibility, job satisfaction, and camaraderie.

The other third of the scoring is based on the company's responses to the Institute's Culture Audit, which includes detailed questions about pay and benefit programs, and a series of open-ended questions about hiring practices, internal communication, training, recognition programs, and diversity efforts.”


So it would appear that this revolves around an organization’s leadership, employee engagement, and employee value proposition that drive talent attraction and commitment. To a rational person, these are important factors to consider unless you are Paul Hebert of the blog Incentive Intelligence and the edgy Fistful of Talent posse. He writes in a recent blog titled “You Don’t Need to Measure Employee Engagement” that while we continue to measure elements of employee engagement…we may not need to so. He does reference that there is plenty of research that shows that employee engagement is a probable driver of business performance, but he does raise concerns about causality and correlation.

So back to original question…what is the “So What Factor” of being on the list? Now enter Professor Alex Edmans, a finance professor at Wharton Business School, and his scholarly article titled “Doe the Stock Market Fully Value Intangibles? Employee Satisfaction and Equity Prices.” The Abstract gives the big picture of the paper and why you should read it…

“This paper analyzes the relationship between employee satisfaction and long-run stock returns. A value-weighted portfolio of the 100 Best Companies to Work For in America earned an annual four-factor alpha of 3.5% from 1984-2009, and 2.1% above industry benchmarks. The results are robust to controls for firm characteristics, different weighting methodologies and the removal of outliers. The Best Companies also exhibited significantly more positive earnings surprises and announcement returns. These findings have three main implications. First, consistent with human capital-centered theories of the firm, employee satisfaction is positively correlated with shareholder returns and need not represent managerial slack. Second, the stock market does not fully value intangibles, even when independently verified by a highly public survey on large firms.” (Yes it says three implications…I didn’t find the third relevant to this thought piece though…)

The nature of human capital capabilities on firm performance and stock price is historically difficult to quantify as a tangible aspect of stock price. For this reason, intangibles are historically not considered. But in Professor’s Edmans’ research between stock price and inclusion on the 100 Best Place to Work For…there is reason to want to be included on that list. Proactively seeking to apply and obtain recognition by placement on the list is significant from the stock price valuation and opportunity to quantify intangible areas like employee satisfaction, but it also leads to enhanced attraction and commitment of talent.

Edmans admits that while there is a correlation between employee satisfaction and stock price, he cannot make strong claims of causality because of the number of variables involved (So Paul Hebert’s warnings are valid here as well).

While there has been and continues to be an interest in measuring intangibles like human capital capabilities and their impact on organizational performance…it continues to be difficult, but also a necessity. As Arie de Geus stated…

“The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage.”

If you agree with that…our ability to create organizations that are learning organizations, employee engagement, and great places to work and measure their impact is critical. In a recent blog post on my DNA of Human Capital blog, I discussed the concept of measuring leadership capability on Initial Public Offerings (IPOs). If you are going to invest in a company…wouldn’t you want to know what the intangibles of the human capital are just like the tangibles of the financials?

Cheers,
Keith

J. Keith Dunbar is a Fearless Transformational Global Leader...Creator of Talent, Leadership Capability, and Culture Change…He can be found connecting and sharing knowledge on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Twitter: JKeithDunbar
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jkeithdunbar
DNA of Human Capital: http://dna-of-humancapital.blogspot.com/

The opinions or views expressed here are mine alone and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Asking the Right Questions About Talent


Greetings,

I follow Scott Anthony, a Managing Director at Innosight Ventures, a venture capital and equity firm. Scott is a consistent contributor to the Harvard Business Review blogs focused on innovation and recently discussed his engagement with a company. The gist of the blog post "The Power of the Right Question" was just that reframing or asking a different question can lead to breakthrough innovation. He realizes though that it is not easy...

"Coming up with the right question isn't easy. There may be an "a ha" moment in the shower, but many times the right question comes from conducting substantial market research, combing analogous industries for inspiration, holding structured discussions with experts, and having thoughtful discussions about a company's real strategic constraints and objectives. Sometimes these efforts feel frustratingly disconnected with the charge of creating an innovative growth business, but the right framing can make the right answer self evident."

The same perspective that Scott discusses is extremely applicable to our work as Human Capital Management (HCM) leaders. If we don' ask the right questions...how can we possibly know what talent we have, what the talent is doing and not doing, and what the talent should be doing...

We historically ask questions that we are able to answer because we don't want to appear that we don't know what we are doing in HCM activities. The kinds of questions that we usually ask are things like the following:

- How many people have been trained?
- How many new hires have been made?
- What is our attrition rate?

In many respects, these are good questions that deserve an answer, but do they get to some of the previous questions about talent? Yes...a loaded question that the answer is a resounding NO! We need to ask the really informative and hard questions like Dr. Bradley Hall's questions from his book "The New Human Capital Strategy."

- Are our executive teams more effective this year than last year?
- Are those in key positions outperforming their peers in competitor organizations?
- Has workforce performance improved since last year?
- Are we managing our human capital more effectively than last year?

These type of questions generate a whole different perspective on the organization and talent. These kinds of questions generate a different approach to what we do. These kinds of questions drive a different set of metrics to focus upon...not the easy metrics, but the ones that really determine the impact that our collective efforts have in our organizations.

Asking the easy questions is just that...easy. If you aren't asking the questions that get to the impact of human capital initiatives on talent and the business strategy of the organization...then we aren't doing our job. We are doing what is easy...

Nuff Said!

Cheers,
Keith

Twitter: JKeithDunbar
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jkeithdunbar
DNA of Human Capital: http://dna-of-humancapital.blogspot.com/

The opinions or views expressed here are mine alone and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Core, Common, Critical - Understanding Where to Invest Human Capital Development Resources



Whether you are human capital development resource heavy or light...knowing where to apply resources to have the biggest impact on organizational performance is a critical business skill for Human Capital Management (HCM) leaders. One approach to take is the defining of Core, Common, and Critical skills...

Whether your HCM governance structure for your organization is centralized, decentralized or federated...this approach can enable informed resource decisions and drive closer integration across aspects of the organization that may not have existed before.

To gain the buy-in of all parts of the organization involved...it is recommended that you determine the Core skills needed to achieve current and future business results. This not only gives you the HCM leader understanding of what the organisation is doing and why, you are better positioned to support it as an individual component. A key piece of this effort is to ensure that the findings are validated by the unit's leaders to ensure that the right skills are drawn out for it to succeed.

By conducting this with each individual unit within the organization...you are in a position to aggregate findings across the organization and identify those set of skills that are Common across the entire organization. While this is a great data point...it is not the complete answer.

After identifying these Common skills, you must work with organizational leadership to understand the business strategy and identify the Critical skills that will drive superior organizational performance and business results. By understanding what these Critical skills are, we are better prepared to measure their impact and make the right set of resource decisions.

While this process is not rocket science...it can be easily repeated to enable organizational and business success.

Nuff Said!

Cheers,
Keith

Twitter: JKeithDunbar
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jkeithdunbar
DNA of Human Capital: http://dna-of-humancapital.blogspot.com/

The opinions or views expressed here are mine alone and do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the Defense Intelligence Agency.