Building Competencies through Experience Maps

  

Many HR Heads are struggling with the answer to providing career paths to employees. Employees who are hi—pos (sorry for the terminology with which many may disagree) want to see clear direction and something they can look forward to stay in the company. Most of them behave like mercenaries, extremely good in performance and showing a lot of potential but for their wares they demand promotions and nothing less. Promotion for everyone I n corporate world automatically means better designation, bigger car, higher bonus and more money, lastly the respect they get from their colleagues and sub-ordinates. If you do not provide the path or promotions, they are very happy to knock on the next door where a higher designation is available. This round robin continues and puts us in a big dilemma of buying or building talent. Depending on the organization hunger, need and the phase most managers take call suiting the situation. Most of us generally agree that we would like to build our own talent but give opportunities to employees from outside to take on higher positions paying lip service to building Talent.

In case we want to build talent we have to take a slightly organized and longer path, this pays in the long term, we all know that from our own experience. Most of the HR Heads struggle to build a great career path for the employees, we build great presentation(s) on the number of years taken for one to move designations but few would map out the experience we should gain to move to the job role. If we have personal mentors they normally guide through the games of snakes and ladders for us to know the right path to our ultimate destination. It is a known fact now that to build competencies we have to have particular kind of skills, knowledge and behavior but these have not been mapped out for various job roles in a company.

 

Would it not be wonderful if some of those paths are simply put together by the organization and shared with larger audience so that they can know what they can do to get the next job, having gone through particular kind of experiences. Let us take an example of Director – HR, if one was to know that to become Director – HR in a FMCG company, she must have managed IR experiences at the manufacturing location, should have experienced one Long Term Settlement, one full year of experienced manufacturing cycles, been a part of new initiatives of TPM, Lean management or other production techniques, run the welfare and other programs for workmen, experienced participation in Union – Management committees and taken tough decisions of convincing Union Leaders on an item of contention then a lot of resistance from Management Trainees to go to a plant would be overcome . A clear experience map will ensure that management sees the person in various kind of situations to make up their mind on which edges of this diamond need more polishing to decide on the development journey. I am sure we can all draw out similar maps for our functions, it is not a difficult task. Marc from Talent Management Group and self have been talking and working on these for a while. It takes time and thinking through, it is a lot of hard work, alignment and agreements on future capabilities but in the end it is worth it.

The experience maps can make our job a lot easier as managers. We can have easy dialogues around next job and promotions, a clear indicative path with experience map laid out can determine for us the next set of experience our subordinates must take to vie for our job.

Talent Supply Chain – Make or Buy

The toughest decision facing HR Leaders across the country today is in the area of Talent Supply Chain. I have had the fortune of meeting with 18 of them in the past week across the cities of Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore alongwith my partner, Marc Effron. Marc leads the Talent Strategy Group based out of NYC (www.talentstrategygroup.com)

The future of corporate success is clearly dependent on kind of persons you are able to horde within your corporate walls. Like the past era of licenses in India and ability of business houses to garner as many of them form the Govt as possible, the same simile can be applied to hording of Human Capital in a corporate.

Invariably all HR Heads are trying to find the best way around Talent Supply Chain. Critical decisions needs to be taken in light of the organisational cycles. If you are in growth scenario, the requirement of talent is completely different than the downsizing scenario. If industry is facing recession, would you like to build a bench? Is there merit in hiring from the campus or should you go for experienced hands? How much of your organisation’s bandwidth can you spare for building future pipeline? Should you pay 50% more than the market and get the best talent available for your industry?

HR Heads have to become better at this science, they have to learn news ways and tricks to manage this. Till now most of the HR heads have been managing these questions out of guts, experience and helping hand of business. Future will see them becoming more scientific about this.

The problem is not limited to private sector, public sector is going to see a mass retirement of both the top and middle management in the next few years. There is no guarantee that they will be able to fill this experience gap and give efficient service to customers. There is also no guarantee that these institutions will be able to exist if there are no capable employees to manage them profitably in the future.

Marc Effron in his book One Page Talent Management (OPTM) has thrown light on how to build and operate this factory. His approach to talent is like building a product: know the specifications, choose the raw material carefully and churn them through the process. Just like any factory does, you should be able to do this efficiently with each new cycle of production. There is no simpler way to do this.

Strategic decisions for corporates that will determine profitability in the next few years will revolve around managing the talent supply chain. The question of make or buy which happens in any production process will have to be answered by each company separately. The decision will not only include the HR head but the CEO, CFO and the Chief of Strategy.  The question can not be answered by the Head of HR alone, it is too critical for the growth of business.

Fallacy of Corporate Integrity

If you have not heard the ‘heaven and hell’ joke in the context of recruiting and being an employee  the next day, then you have not worked long enough in the corporate.

The sarcasam is seething and it shows the dark underbelly of corporate. The blame can be diverted to a large number pf places from over enthusiastic, under trained recruiter to pushy business managers who want the recruitment to be completely like a sales process and a factory churning out numbers without making sure that the right quality is coming through the gates. It is like the 60s and 70s of America, making loads of cars with the poor quality until the Japanese hit them on their own home ground.

Corporate is fighting its integrity war with the value poster hanging on the wall everyday. The little lies about the numbers, the cut and paste culture, turning out reports which are unchecked or delibrately inflated. Getting the numbers for the week which in all likelihood will disappear next week and the recon will not happen. The untruth of the company culture to a prospective candidate, the false promise of CTC to an unsuspecting candidate who understands it too late. All these small lies are what generates the culture of non-performance, non –productive employees and ‘look the other way’ managers and many times of the senior leaders.

Almost all the companies in corporate will have honesty/integrity as one of their core values. And almost all of them break it the day the poster gets distributed. There are corner talks on how this is not practiced on a day to day basis in the company. Whenever an employee asks an uncomfortable question, he is made to feel guilty and more often than not laughed at by his colleagues. It is difficult to walk the talk. Companies who are serious about such things have serious consequences attached to the violation of the values. Many times they take the extreme and tough action on the defaulting employees for most of the others to get fed on the rumour mill and for things to be set right. It is tough to ask someone to go for violating the values of an organisation but most often than not it works. In my experience as Head of HR for a large organistaion, I had to take these calls. They never made me comfortable but as a corporate leader I had maintain the sanctity of what values we standby.

Tough role for HR but something only they or the CEO can uphold and are the last man standing on such matters. The fallacy has to be lived everyday, if we are serious than HR will have to take tough stances and execute some tough measures, it is not easy but many a times it is not difficult if you come to think of it. Very often when you stand up to the bullly called the world and shake it by its beard, you will be surprised as to the beard comes off in your hand.

Come on, Shake the bully often!!