What’s the difference between Talent Reviews and Succession Planning?

We’ve learned a lot from our customers over the last few years.  One of the key lessons was about Talent Reviews.

Talent Review: what's not to love?

A Talent Review is a critical interaction between a group of business leaders and their HR/Talent business partner.  The group comes together for a day or two to talk about their business priorities, the talent they have, and make decisions about the future (minimizing risk, promotions, organization changes, developmental priorities, future staffing, and succession plans).  The HR department spends week upon week preparing for the meeting and even more time turning the decisions made in the meeting into reality.

For the HR department focused on being a strategic business partner, all the hard work is worth it.  Why? It is the time when business priorities and talent decisions come together.  It is the time that business leaders talk about what really matters about their talent – what is going to bring them a competitive advantage.  And, what’s more?  This is being done today in most leading organizations.  It is a best practice for businesses and HR alike.

What’s not to love?  Very little, actually.  There is a lot of love for Talent Reviews.  The one issue we saw time and again was that there was little support for this highly strategic process from a tools perspective – and in particular, tools that made it possible to make the process more frequent and bring it deeper into the organization.  There were lots of binders, excel spreadsheets, powerpoints, and whiteboards in use.  Quite a few home grown tools were created and some were trying to jerry-rig succession planning software for this purpose.  But succession planning software was not designed for this business process.

Just like development plans, promotion decisions, and risk mitigation plans, succession plans are an outcome of the Talent Review process.  Sometimes, succession plans aren’t even discussed at all!  Even so, the talent review is a rich and worthwhile conversation with many valuable outcomes.

Succession planning – including the creation and tracking of talent pools and pipelines as well as the simulation of what-if replacement scenarios – is a process that most HR organizations are working to implement.  They see the value in getting there, but the rigor and complexity of “getting there” is hard.  Meanwhile, the Talent Review process, in some form or another, is in place in most organizations today.  The Talent Review process can bring immediate value to HR and the business, thereby facilitating the succession planning process.

Ultimately, the leading organizations we work with use both Talent Reviews and Succession Planning to get the best results for their business.

It’s happening …

Our day in the sun

After several (cough) years of smiling and waving at conferences, your friends here at TalentedApps will be speaking about things we care about.  On Monday at Oracle OpenWorld.

Here’s a run-down of where you’ll find us on Monday:

Meg and I, along with colleagues Rob Watson and Colleen Neymeyer, will be presenting Oracle Fusion Talent Management for PeopleSoft Customers at 11am in Moscone West.  Later, at 3:30pm in Moscone West, we will be presenting Oracle Fusion Talent Management for Oracle E-Business Suite Customers, along with colleague Stephen Hughes.

Ariel and Marcie, along with colleagues Hugh Zhang and Gary Look, will be presenting Building Feature-Rich Applications with Oracle Application Development Framework at 11:30am in Hotel Nikko.

Alex, Christine, Ken, Louise, and Klaus, along with many colleagues, will be demoing at pod 97 in the demo grounds.

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In fact, there’s more.  We’ll be there all week!  And, you can’t miss the Oracle Fusion Human Capital Management Applications: Family Overview on Tuesday at 2pm in Moscone West presented by the dynamic duo Gretchen Alarcon and Clive Swan.

Come find us – we look forward to it!

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For more session information, grab a “Focus On” document here.

Don’t forget to share what you don’t know

Those who work with me know that I give a LOT of feedback.

Most of it unsolicited.

Since I have the privilege of working with smart engineers, many [most] of whom are introverts, my feedback is often the same: speak up more.

In most cases, it’s as simple as being more willing to speak and tell people what you know.

but…

In some cases, I find that people also get tripped up wanting to wait until they know to speak.  This is not really a bad idea.  Speaking about stuff you no nothing about, can certainly be problematic for your brand.

So why in the world would I think it’s important to talk about stuff you don’t know?

Here is the difference.  When you are a leader your team often cannot wait for you to know everything.  The absence of communication, leaves them in the lurch.  It creates stress, since they are not sure what to do next.

So what do you do when you need to speak and you don’t know what to say?

Here is where you need to tap into your authentic self and share what you do not know.  Let people know that you are not yet sure, but that you are working it out.  Give them the confidence that you are not unaware of, or ignoring the issue.

Often that extra step of communicating your own process, will help ease the strain and give people the confidence in you.  It also opens the line of communication for them to help.    People do not expect their leaders to have all the answers, but they do expect their leaders to be straight with them.

I challenge you to start sharing what you don’t know with your team and let us know the results.  I think you will be surprised to find out how much help you might have been missing, by trying to do it all on your own.

Did you build a Personal Brand to advance your career goals ?

Going to school on a Sunday morning didn’t sound like a good plan but the seminar on “Personal Branding” as part of Leadership Development series at UC Berkeley was very intriguing so I finally decided to go. I wasn’t disappointed as the speaker William Arruda gave a bunch of good tips on building a personal brand and using it to achieve our career goals.

Recently, the topic of “personal branding” is inviting lot of debate as some are taking a fanatical approach to it and on the other side we have people completely discounting it as another fad. I believe that there is a middle ground that we need to work towards and when rightly used – our personal brand can help us grow in our career as well as open up new opportunities.

I wanted to share the tips (again credit to William) that I gained from this seminar.

Stand out

Peer comparison is something that cannot be avoided in an organization and as we grow up further in our career the competition gets intense so it’s important to distinguish ourselves and show or bring that additional value to our organization. I can give few examples that I am following in my work activity – “proactive in communication rather than reactive”, “build networks outside the organization and leverage the network to get things done“, “speak up more”, “contribute to strategic goals rather than just being in an project execution role”. You need to take a close look at the things that you can do to provide additional value to the organization and then work on it.

Be your own boss

This is taking your career management into your own hands as Meg said in “Are you fully utilizing your potential?”

Forget the ladder

We see the career progression as a ladder where we move up one step at a time and at the moment of taking the next step we get into a frenzy of activity like activating our professional network, brushing up our resume / skills and pulling in recommendations etc. Once we move up to the next step – we kind of settle into ease till we start the process all over again.

So, instead of treating the career progression as a ladder, let’s look it as a “ramp” – so that we are continuously engaged in activities that are geared towards our career progression. The projects we are involved in, the new connections we build – let’s look at them as helping us to move forward in our career and at the same time let’s not forget – we also have to “GIVE” back to our network and help our network achieve their own career goals as well.

Build your brand

This is a 3-step process – Extract, Express and Exude.

1) Extract – this step involves looking at your career goals, values, passions and see if we can align them. We can use Strengths Finder test to know our strengths and then do a 360 Feedback to really know the kind of image we are projecting and whether they are matching with our strengths. If they don’t match – we need to work on addressing them.

2) Express – Evaluate our communication skills and focus on the strengths as well as areas of improvement and communicate them to the people that we interact with. Key thing is that when we are expressing our strengths / values, they  should be CLEAR, CONSISTENT and CONSTANT

3) Exude – this involves creating an environment which represents our brand and this can be your communication, actions, one’s appearance, online profiles, blogs, newsletters and even simple stationary items.

I have definitely started to take the steps towards building my brand and use it for achieving my career goals and blogging is definitely one part of the plan

I will appreciate if you have anything to share on how you are building your personal brand and how that’s contributing to your career !!

The Leadership Development Carnival – Back to Football Edition is Up!

Dan McCarthy, the founder of the Leadership Development Carnival over at Great Leadership, has posted the September Leadership Development Carnival – Back to Football Edition. Dan has assembled over 35 contributed posts on a huge range of Leadership topics and has also written a helpful, brief intro to each, so check it out.

Some notable posts include:

• Erin Schreyer and Mike Henry’s What Really Makes You a Leader?
• Lois Melbourne’s Be an Accountable Leader and Get to Lunch First!
• Sharlyn Lauby’s The Business Case for Managing Ourselves
• Kevin W. Grossman’s Influential Leadership Can Trump Gender Bias
• David Burkus’ My Buffalo Wild Wings Rant

This Leadership Development Carnival offers a terrific opportunity for you to get a great sample of a variety of perspectives, thinking, and just plain good writing. Who knows? Maybe you’ll discover a great blog you never heard of before.

Don’t even think it

This isn’t a post about being mindful or even about how our thoughts control our energy and our energy controls our actions.

Those would be great posts.

This is a post about how people can read your thoughts.

Sadly not the way you need them to.

To get someone over to your way of thinking you still need to master the Jedi mind tricks and no, unless your a moron, they probably didn’t notice you had those thoughts.

What they did notice is what you think about them, as a person.

This is biologically hard-wired stuff.  Humans are exceptional at reading faces and we take in even very subtle data to help us understand each other.  In practical terms, this means that people know when you dislike them and they certainly know when you don’t respect them.

The solution is not really to get better at hiding your annoyance or dislike, but instead, find something to like.  Looking at people as a whole, instead of just in the current context, is a good place to start.

Maybe they have entirely different strengths than you do, maybe they see things differently.  Opening yourself up to understanding different points of view and different sets of strengths, will help a lot, in making you the effective leader you want  to be.

Or, barring that, try to do more conference calls with those who annoy you [while finding your happy place], to avoid having to meet them face to face.  Whatever you need to do to keep the judgment  from your thoughts, is worth the investment.

Let’s just say, that I know how the story ends if you get this wrong, and it’s far from happy.

I wish you all good thoughts for this wonderful long weekend.

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Oh, and to the waitress who handed my 4 year old an extra large glass of strawberry lemonade with no lid, I apologize for not remembering my own advice!

To learn: get a mentor, to get ahead: get a sponsor

As can happen, in reading about women and diversity I manage to find good tips for everyone.

The topic today is the difference between a mentor and a sponsor

To summarize:

A mentor will help you become a better you, a sponsor will help you get ahead.

I first got a clue about this reading an excellent post from Lynn Harris where she nets out this exact point.

A sponsor is more than a mentor. Sponsors make introductions to the right people, facilitate career moves and guide you through the unwritten rules of organizational life.

Today I noticed another juicy article in HBR entitled Why Men Still Get More Promotions Than Women

All mentoring is not created equal, we discovered. There is a special kind of relationship—called sponsorship—in which the mentor goes beyond giving feedback and advice and uses his or her influence with senior executives to advocate for the mentee. Our interviews and surveys alike suggest that high-potential women are over-mentored and under-sponsored relative to their male peers—and that they are not advancing in their organizations. Furthermore, without sponsorship, women not only are less likely than men to be appointed to top roles but may also be more reluctant to go for them.

I don’t know about you, but I’m personally using this information to redefine what kind of help I’m getting for my own career goals.

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The Cornell Bear is intended to make Amy laugh.

Feedback process and the timing

As part of our daily work life – there are many instances where we give compliments / coaching tips to our teams and similarly we receive the same. I see that the “timing” of the feedback plays a key role in the quality of the feedback and the impact it has on the recipient.

In Physics – there is Inverse Square Law which says that the physical quantity or strength is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the source. Similarly, I propose an Inverse Feedback Law which says that the quality of feedback is inversely proportional to the time delay in giving the feedback. In simpler words, the longer we delay in giving the feedback, the smaller the impact on the recipient. Yes – that’s the outcome of my engineering brain mixing up with my managerial role

Looking at the role of a Manager, it’s important for him/her to continuously monitor the performance of their team members. For tasks done individually, it will be good for the Manager to quickly review it with the team member and compliment on the work done. If there is a scope for the task to have been done in a better way, the Manager should share it immediately with the team member. If the task has been done through collaboration, the Manager should collect feedback from the involved team members and share it with their team member. If there are tasks done by the Manager – they also should be open to get feedback from their team. Now you can see where this is heading – the feedback process should be a continuous activity – not something that’s done every 6 months or one year. The employee and manager shouldn’t have to go back into memory and think about all the work being done and similarly the 360 feedback reviewers don’t have to go through the same exercise.

As long as the Employee’s work is being tracked through their Goals, we should be able to collect the feedback instantly – I call this “Real time feedback” and Justin also talks about this in his post on performance reviews. Going into the depths of the feedback process – some individuals are very diligent. They give feedback / collect feedback promptly but some people put it off due to work pressure / time constraints. I see that this is where the Goal Management system should step-in and help Employees / Managers to collect feedback. Let’s say that a Goal has been completed and the system should trigger off notifications to people asking for feedback and make it available for review. We also can show the Activities that the individual engaged or contributed to so that we can get a more qualitative feedback. This way – we are having the continuous feedback activity and by the performance review time – most of the grunt work is already done !!

Welcome your comments.