Building Applications That Help Grow Strong Leaders

Last week I had the opportunity to attend The Business of Talent conference in St. Petersburg, Florida. (Kudos to the team at Bersin & Associates for putting together a great conference.) One theme consistently discussed throughout the conference was the need to make leadership development a core part of your talent management strategy. Leadership development goes beyond just training and is equal in importance to recruiting, succession planning and performance management. Most talent management solutions provide applications that help companies to recruit, train, measure, and compensate their workforce. But few have incorporated leadership development as a core business process within the talent management suite; which is interesting since leadership development is generally considered a mission critical part of most business strategies. So the question is how can our talent management solutions help us achieve this critical objective?

First I think it’s important to understand that no software application by itself will ever find the leaders in your organization, let alone develop them (unless of course you have access to Deep Thought or Professor Farnsworth). This is a task for your managers, directors, and senior executives. I also subscribe to the idea that leadership is not tied to a specific role in the company, like manager, vice president or CEO. I think every employee is a potential leader and in my opinion the hallmark of a truly great company is having more leaders than managers, or better yet, just leaders and no managers! With that said, there are some tools your talent management applications ought to provide to assist your organization in identifying and growing your leadership pipeline.

• First is a configurable profile management application. Profiles tell us everything we need to know about the person and the position. They help us assess whether we have the right people in the right job. Person profiles should include things like risk of loss, impact of loss, personal, professional and developmental goals as well as the skills (competencies) the employee has today. Job profiles include the key competencies, certifications, licenses, education requirements, etc. needed to succeed in the position. A good talent management solution will help you match each employee with the right position.

• Second are integrated performance, learning and compensation management applications. Having performance management without learning management is like constructing a house with a yardstick and no hammer; why measure if you can’t build. Likewise, having a learning management application without performance management means you can train your employees but can’t measure their growth or level of accomplishment. Compensation helps you recognize and reward good performance; without it you have a stick (performance management) but no carrot and good employees won’t hang around for very long under those conditions.

• Finally, the talent management suite should include robust analytic tools that aggregate and integrate your data across applications. These tools should help you calibrate performance and potential across the organization; identify risk of loss candidates; craft talent pools and succession plans; and create customized development objectives tied to the key business drivers for your organization.

Most companies believe the best leaders are grown rather than recruited. Individuals who grow up in the organization have already embraced the company’s culture and core values. They understand the business, the market place and most importantly the customer. All they really need is experience and an opportunity to lead. Mark Sanborn writes in You Don’t Need A Title To Be A Leader, “It doesn’t matter what your position is, or how long you’ve worked at your job, whether you help to run your family, a PTA committee, or a Fortune 1000 company. Anyone at any level can learn to be a leader and help to shape or influence the world around them.” Our job as talent management specialists is to provide every employee with the opportunity to become the leaders who will help our organizations succeed and our companies thrive.

Cloning and the Art of Succession Planning

I caught an episode from season 2 of Futurama last week titled A Clone of My Own, thanks to a recent acquisition (by me, not Oracle), of a DVR player. In this episode Professor Farnsworth, the owner of an interplanetary delivery service and inventor extraordinaire, is celebrating his 150th birthday. During his party the professor laments, “There’s no one to carry on after I’m gone, no one to take care of my work and my research and my fabulous fortune. I’ve got to name a successor. There’s no time to lose. I’m off to my lab to build a successor-naming machine!” A potentially lucrative opportunity, for what pioneering software company worth its salt wouldn’t jump at the chance to acquire such an invention? Alas, after much time and effort the professor completes his machine only to discover that none of his employees are up to the job. So he does what any mad software vendor, er um, I mean scientific genius would do, he clones himself, resulting in much mayhem and hilarity.

Thankfully cloning isn’t an option for us average Joes. Unfortunately most of us don’t have access to a successor-naming machine either; but this does not mean we’re helpless when it comes to succession planning. We can start by identifying each of the key positions in the organization that drive our business and consider how the business would be impacted if someone working in one of these positions were to leave. Next, we can identify the high performers in each of these essential roles and create a profile of the attributes that make them successful. A good profile will include hard skills for job competencies, degrees, and certifications as well as soft skills like enthusiasm, creativity, flexibility, and perseverance. Once we have a strong profile definition we’re ready to find the high potential candidates who already fit the profile as well as those who are a close match and create individual development plans that will help each employee reach the next level.

Succession planning is a critical component for any talent management strategy and requires proactive rather than reactive timing; because looking for a successor after a person leaves puts the business at undue risk. Identifying critical positions in your organization, defining key profiles for these roles, locating high potential employees, and investing in development requires planning and commitment. And even if science could solve the problem of succession for us, I’m guessing it still wouldn’t work out the way we hoped; because as any fan of the sci-fi genre knows something always goes wrong – think Jurassic Park! But growing high potential employees into key roles is a safe and proven methodology for keeping your business strong and your employees happy.

The answer is 42

For those familiar with Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, you may recognize the number 42 as “The Answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything” given by Deep Thought after seven and half million years of computational analysis; and, as I’m sure you will recall, not everyone was happy with the answer. Poor Phouchg (probably the VP of HR) grasped the seriousness of the situation right away, “We’re going to get lynched, aren’t we?” While Loonquawl (I’m guessing he was the CIO) was sure the problem lay with Deep Thought (and by association the software vendor who supplied its programming), “Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and half million years’ work?”  But the problem, as Deep Thought explains, was not with the answer: “I checked it very thoroughly and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quiet honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.”

Like those who were present on the great day of The Answer, many of us look to our software applications to answer the really hard questions around performance, potential, risk-of-loss, and succession. The promise of predictive analytics and the possibilities associated with data mining lead many to the false hope that the answers to these difficult questions lie buried deep within their data warehouses. Many C-level executives believe it is possible to quantify a persons potential or risk-of-loss in the same way a mathematician uses a predefined formula to discover an unknown variable. They long to replace the personal (subjective) aspects of the appraisal process with a dispassionate (objective) analytic tool. But the human experience is anything but objective. Our experiences, relationships, thoughts and feelings are as unique to each of us as our fingerprints; and the practice of measuring qualities like job satisfaction, potential, and performance requires a distinctly human touch.

Now before I get escorted from the building, let me clarify what I’m saying. Well defined competency models, clear organizational goals, and well integrated talent management applications are critical tools, which every manager should utilize, especially those who are new to their role. But managers must not abandon their responsibility in bridging the gap between the objective statistics generated from a data warehouse and the subjective nature of the human experience. As a colleague of mine is fond of saying, “managers need to have some skin in the game.” Calculating and calibrating a person’s performance and potential should be the natural outcome of a manager’s relationship with their employee and not a task to be completed once annually. Manager’s need to provide clear, honest, sincere feedback well before the appraisal period begins. This means meeting regularly with the employee, getting to know them, understanding what they like and dislike about their jobs, and helping them play to their strengths. These are tasks that can only be done by a person. Analytic tools may provide a good starting point for the evaluation, but they cannot replace the relationship between the manager and employee; because it is the manager, and not the application, who will understand that getting the right answer means asking the right question.

Helping happy cows stay happy

I can’t vouch for the science behind the Happy Cow theory but their commercials do make me smile. Over the past couple of weeks there have been some great discussions around the benefits of employee mobility. Amy, Meg and Mark have waxed eloquent on the advantages of allowing an employee to move up via promotion or move on by finding a new role in the organization. Sometimes though, the employee is already in the right job and keeping them engaged and successful (read happy) means helping them grow where they are, to cultivate new skills within their current position.

Over the past year I’ve been struggling with the question of whether I’m still in the right role or even on the right career path. I’ve been working in the software industry for more than ten years now, but this wasn’t actually part of the plan. Life is funny that way. Most of us have a pretty good idea of what we want to do after we finish college, but then we hop on the job train and ten years and a whole lot of miles later we find ourselves in a career we didn’t even consider as undergraduates. That said I really do like the work I’m doing. I just feel like there’s something missing – that I still haven’t reached my full potential. So is it time for me to move on?

As I nearly always do when these sorts of questions creep into my thoughts, I asked my good friend and informal mentor to lunch. (I am so bad in this regard that an invitation to lunch now carries the implied message: “I’m having a career crisis!”) Anyway, we have lunch and, as usual, my friend patiently listens as I explain all of the reasons why I need to quit my job and find my true path in life. When I finished, I was confident she fully understood my problem and was now going to reach into her bag – the one labeled All the Answers – and give me the one that would solve my career crisis. But instead of an answer, she asked me a question: “Rather than quitting your job, have you thought about how you could grow your current role to include what you feel is missing”?

It was a really great question and one that I hadn’t considered. Rather than give up all the things I loved about my job, why not find ways to grow the job into something even more interesting and fulfilling. Too often employees find themselves in great, if imperfect, careers and so go hunting for something new. However, the truth is for most of us the perfect job simply doesn’t exist. But there are a great many jobs that are nearly perfect; so maybe the trick is to find an almost perfect job and see how we can improve it. Strong, effective managers will consistently cultivate a culture of mobility and encourage their employees to develop new skill sets to grow beyond their current roles; but there are times when the job itself needs to be grown to ensure the goals and aspirations of the employee can be fully realized.

Learning to accept a little irrational behavior in our rational enterprise applications

I read this excerpt from Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational that reminded me of our conversations around the impact of web 2.0 technologies on business in general and, more specifically, on enterprise applications. In the excerpt Mr. Ariely writes:

“[We] live in two worlds: one characterized by social exchanges and the other characterized by market exchanges. And we apply different norms to these two kinds of relationships. Moreover, introducing market norms into social exchanges, as we have seen, violates the social norms and hurts the relationships.”

Later in the excerpt he gives the following example:

“Asking your neighbor (who happens to be a lawyer) to bring in your mail while you’re on vacation is fine. But asking him to spend the same amount of time preparing a rental contract for you – free – is not.”

As we imagine how the world of web 2.0 (social networking, tagging, blogging, bookmarking, etc.) might be incorporated into the enterprise space, the key is to consider how mixing social applications with enterprise applications will impact our customers. Applications like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube were designed to connect individuals who either already have a relationship or, as is more commonly the case, people who “have a friend in common”. The enterprise world, on the other hand, is primarily made up of individuals, both internal and external to the organization, whose primary connection is the commodity or service they provide to their customers. Meaning each of us has a job to do and the relationships we maintain at work help us to get that job done.

Happily, our social and ‘enterprise’ lives often get mixed in together which for me means some of my closest friends work here at Oracle. Unfortunately, most of us have also experienced the discomfort of a broken or dysfunctional relationship in the workplace. Not fun! Even so I’m willing to take the risk, because having sincere, meaningful relationships with the people I work with does more to motivate me than the size of my compensation package – just don’t tell that to the guy who signs my paycheck. =)

Which brings me to the point at last (thanks for sticking with me!). Our customers will see the benefits of having web 2.0 technologies embedded in their enterprise applications. Most already understand the importance of networking, real time collaboration, and a personalized user experience. But what is less clear is how they can mitigate the risk of mixing social and enterprise applications. Here’s where we, as an application vendor, can help. By providing secure, configurable applications and the tools required to monitor and manage their organization’s social networks, our customers will understand that we have thought about the potential hazards of mixing social interaction with enterprise solutions and that we have placed their business needs at the core of our application strategy rather than simply embracing the latest internet craze; and that our goal is not simply to build the best and coolest applications in the world but also to build software that makes our customer’s companies the best and coolest places in the world to work. This, in my opinion, is the hallmark of a truly great Talent Management solution.