Talent Pool Management - Focusing on the Development of the Person

Speaker A Don and I have been friends and colleagues on working on major projects at Tembec over many years. He is working with clients, developed talent management software that not only had CIP, but other things included, and it's gone through evolution. So he's made presentations at previous conferences on talent pool, and he's going to bring us up to date now with doing systematic assessments in a major company leading to good talent pool management. And it's one of the companies that you'll be hearing, graham Group, large construction company. So really it's a rather unusual presentation, as I know, consulting activities around because it's an external assessor engaged in a talent pool process and working with the senior management on their talent. So and I think, Michelle, you're going to do some comments as well.

Speaker B Okay. Yes, that's mine. This is the spin I'm going to give this morning, maybe a little different than what Ken has framed, but I want to talk about the aspect of talent management, which focuses on development and which focuses on development of the person, really. And that's the emphasis that I have with my clients. And the roots of the thinking here, if you kind of go back in the ro history, is the work that Elliot did with the US. Army and their issue back in the 80s was, how do we identify the officers that we have that have general officer potential? This was the original research in a way that validated what Elliott had inferred from a lot of other things about developmental. So this is the orientation I tend to have with my clients. Where are your general officers going to come from in the talent pool you got? And by that I mean they're fours and they're fives, and if the company is large enough, they're sixes in the future. So what we're dealing with here really is managing the turns. I'm thinking about the individuals here when I say this. This particular conception is the Dratter book on the leadership pipeline, which is really the same stuff, although my recollection is it doesn't recognize requisite as the source of this. But the thing here is, in terms of development, is helping the individual manage the turns. And in some companies, particularly the technical companies that I tend to be working with, the problem often is that they're professional engineers. They're brought in at level two. They're given technical assignments. Their work is engineering. And then if they're good and successful, they get put into a stratum three role where they've got managerial responsibility and they actually have no man management history. And this is a systemic problem for those kind of companies. The point here is that they get from the managing self past the managing others and into a departmental or functional management role, and they've never learned how to handle their management responsibilities. So this is a kind of backfilling problem in the technical companies, and it's often the case people get to very senior levels, and they're not very good at handling the subordinate relationship. Now, this is Elliot's chart about what happens, and I'm going to give you an illustration here of a special case of the general officer emerging here from four to five. The whole emphasis on this is mode. And we're often so focused on at the managerial level, getting the right person in the job to handle the task at this time that we kind of lose sight of mode. And my suggestion here and we've had some correspondence and discussions with Owen Jacobs, who worked with Elliot back on the original army stuff, and that his whole focus with the army was on looking at mode and managing mode. And if you think about the mor responsibility in an organization, that's what it's really all about, is managing mode and looking at the individual in terms of this chart, what's the envelope that they're on? Most of what we do seems to be focused on these horizontal lines. If you understand this chart and I say that because it's taken me a lot of time working with cases and individuals to really understand what this chart means and what the indicators are of people at these transition points, which is where these mode paths cross the barriers. And you recall Elliot's conception of this, that it's a change of state. It's analogous to going from ice to water, from water to steam. We're not talking here about a gradual evolution of the person, but a shift when they go, in this case, from four to five and stop dealing with trying to put together the complexity of the management situation in a general management function and get to the simplicity of here's the four different things you need to know about running this business unit. And this is, again, another way of looking at the transitions. And what do you have to do to make sure that the individuals have the skilled knowledge and experience to make that transition? I do an hour and a half interview with the managerial people in the companies I work with, and I'm interested in the end in having the managers in the organization have this understanding about their people. But my clients seem to want an outside opinion on it, and I've taken that as an opportunity to have an intervention with the individual that gets them thinking about their future in a different way. So maybe while I don't really emphasize it this way, I'm saying to the individual, let's think about you in terms of your mode, what's your developmental future look like. But I'm picking up things either from their HR system or from the interview on their sort of tombstone stuff. But I take them through an enneagram assessment so that they start to get an understanding of the personality style that they bring to the work that they do. And this particular person is shown here as an Enneagram eight, which would be like Michelle or art to pick out a couple of people in the group that present in this way. This is a management style that they have. This person has which is the leader, assertive, confrontative, enthusiastic and focused on being in charge of themselves in the environment. Very common style in industrial organizations. I also explore with them the management functions that they're comfortable with. This is the Echacodezi's producer, administrator, entrepreneur, integrator, profile. Now, I don't do any testing on this, but we explore the pattern and this person sees himself as a producer and an integrator. Then the horsepower comes out of the assessment of the mode that they're on. And this is a technical description of the place that the person is at this point. And this guy is at high four and he's in the process of transition in the next three years, probably into five. So then the developmental summary is just my thumbnail sketch, communicating back to the individual, how I see them and what needs to happen to them for them to realize their potential. And I send this out to the person in each case and invite them to come back with any material concerns they have about it if it doesn't capture them correctly. Most times they're happy, sometimes there's pushback. Sometimes we go through some other process to try and get the thing right in their eyes. And then, and only then, do I pass it to management. And my clients tend to use it. In this case, this is the Graham Group who you'll hear talking tomorrow. They're using it to assign people to projects. They're saying, okay, this guy is ready to lead whatever this is at a level four, or in this case, to take over a branch management role. So they're using it for immediate assignment. I'm more interested, though, in their ability to communicate this back to the manager once removed, who's looking at the long term here and saying, okay, is that the right assignment for this person at this time? And how do we move him or her to take advantage of their potential and so that we retain them and have them here in the long term doing what they can do? And have we given them opportunity to get the skilled knowledge and experience that they need to do this broader job, this larger job? And so Ken mentions software. This is just a frame from the system that we use in this. But to me this is the key because it focuses on the next steps. This is the key for the organization. I want to see what by when on an action plan of the next steps. That developmental support for this individual, what coursework, what assignments, what has to happen in the next, typically the next two or three years for that individual. And I like to see this signed off by the manager. And I think we're using the phrase mentor here, but it really means manager once removed. I studied management at MIT when at the time, the human side of enterprise was on everybody's lips there. This is the Douglas McGregor stuff and the difference assumptions about people and how they can develop and what the human potential is. And I got to say that over my career I've been interested in the human side of enterprise from that point of view, what is the developmental possibility here? And I tend to be an optimist, and I tend to see people in terms of how good they could be, and I try to help them get there. And so that's kind of the personal bias I come at this work from. And I got to say, personally, it's been very satisfying. So let me just stop there and see if there's any questions.

Speaker A There would be questions if I could start off with one. Could you say something about elliot recommends a calibration process where managers as a group look at this. Could you talk about the interface between what you do helping individuals in their career and then sending the reports up to the management review? And do you ever plot the talent pool as a whole and use the progression curves or how do you interact with the management processes and meeting processes?

Speaker B I've been trying hard with my clients to get gearing sessions, and I got to say I've never been able to make it happen. And it may be the nature of the companies I'm working with that they're either spread so far geographically or they're so busy that they just can't or won't take time out to do that kind of work. And so I got to say it's through the system and it's through the feedback and it's through the information that goes back in this case to the individual because there's a tremendous onus in this whole thing for the individual to take charge of themselves. As a matter of fact, the policies that we usually write say that you're the one that's in charge of your career development. And then I like to see the managers involved with this in the feedback, and I like to see the Mor, and I like to also see these profiles be formally reviewed periodically because I know that my initial reads aren't always right. I've been in error in both ways on that. I've seen people through rose colored glasses that were right, and I've also said, hey, this person is not going to go beyond four or five and you're going to see a CEO tomorrow is one of those ones I made a mistake on. But the interesting thing in that company had never got in the way because they didn't take my word as the last word and they always looked at what the individual was actually doing. Yeah.

Speaker C Can I just clarify that your experience is that the Mor system has not worked in these organizations where the Mor is accountable for the mentoring and the development.

Speaker B I would say it's been a mixed success. And my experience has been some executives have grabbed it and used it very effectively, and others have not felt they were able to do it. And sometimes it's a case of where a senior executive in a very rapidly growing situation looks at the list of 67 sors that he's supposed to be dealing with and just throws up its hands and doesn't do it.

Speaker C So if you had a way of working with the Mor to build their capability so they felt more confident in this process and had a way of doing it quickly, more quickly, that would be valuable for the Mor system?

Speaker B I think it would, yeah. I think any supports we can put into the Mor process, the better off we are.

Speaker C Because I guess the issue there is if you built a relationship with a conversation with the individual and that it goes back into the organization and there may be a different experience or view with the manager, a manager once removed, the employee already has an expectation effect. Do you ever find that situation?

Speaker B You mean there's kind of a halo effect or not? Is that what you're getting out here? I've been concerned about that, but my experience has been that the organizations that I've been working with over the long period of time rely on their own judgment. And so that while it may be true that when I say this is a hot property, he may get a few breaks, but if he can't make it work, they just say, oh, there's another one that Don didn't get right. Art.

Speaker D One of the problems as companies get bigger is and I don't know if studies been done on this, but I would imagine that a higher and higher percentage of people's time is spent on maintaining the organization. In my experience in dealing with larger companies and the managers and trying to talk to them, they're so busy, and you try to find out what they're doing, where they're going to meetings or they're going to training. And I have no idea how much real work they're really doing in terms of promoting the profitability and growth of the company. And I suspect that as companies get bigger, their tendency is to do more and more paperwork and more and more reports. So I'm thinking, aren't we trying to replicate with our managers what we did with our kids? So you're raising your kid and you're monitoring them and you're growing them and you're challenging them and whatever. And I don't remember ever doing any written reports raising my kids, but somehow they got it, and somehow it worked out. And we didn't have formal sit downs and had them sign off on this is what my assessment of you. You lazy, and if you don't do this and that, I want you to sign off. And so I wonder if sometimes all this paperwork and follow up isn't superfluous if you have constant conversations and follow just I wanted to throw that out.

Speaker B There because I think you're onto a really good point. This Graham company that you'll hear from tomorrow, they started small, and they've been caught up in this boom in western Canada, and they're at two and a half billion, and they're looking ahead to where they're going to be a $5 billion building everything out here except houses. It's really what they do now. They tend not to have meetings. They just don't have meetings. They're too busy to have meetings. And when they hire an executive or a senior manager out of Exxon, which they do occasionally, for one thing or another, these guys come in and say, what do I do now? Because I'm expecting them to go to meetings and there aren't any here. So this is partly why I can't get mor meetings. And what they do is they bring 250 managers in from all over their system once a year. They take them to Banff, they bring their wives, they take over the Banff Springs Hotel, and they go over their business laboriously for three days, and then they all go home. And that's the kind of meetings they have. And so this business of the bureaucracies like Exxon, which I think is an extremely well managed company, but in a very bureaucratic way, is just the antithesis of these guys, and they're more like developing their kids. Now, the part of the problem is, I think, that they were caught in the trap of saying, well, we'll get Joe to build this, because he's built 13 schools, and the school is basically a level three project. Well, this is an ethanol plant. There's no way he could do it. And so they were mixing up experience with potential. And just to get them to think in this different way about their people was a breakthrough for them. And you'll hear them talk about it tomorrow, they say, this is the whole thing. The whole problem boils down to whether we've got work that being done at the right level. So how do they select the individuals to go through this? They get me back every year or every couple of years, and they look at their list and they say, well, let's get Don to see the people who we've hired since he was here last at high three or above for how many years? Well, we started the Talent Management in 1999. There's a good story about this. The chairman of the board got the idea that they weren't doing this very well, and he thought General Electric were, and so he thought if we could get some GE kind of thinking in here. So he got me to come. And we did the first round of this, and I had it on Elliot's chart that we had up here a few minutes ago, and it was the top 55 managers in the company at the time. And he and the president, the chairman and I spent the day going over these 55 people and where they fit and what I saw, and at the end of it, the president, who was a bit skeptical. He wasn't the instigator, you see. It was the chairman's idea. This was he was a bit skeptical. So he put this chart behind his door, and then four or five years later, he called me one day and said, come on out here. We're on a roll. We've got to get back at this. And then he said to me, I've had that damn thing behind my door all these years, and every once in a while, I would take it out, and I would look at it, and I would say, well, the bugger isn't right all the time, but he's right more often than he's wrong. And so that was in his mind, the proof statement, you see. And the trick wasn't so much the mechanics of all this or the systems of all this. The trick was getting it embedded in his mind first, and then his problem was, how do I get my executive team thinking like this? And Ken came out, and we did a training for them and for the executive group, and then that didn't take us far enough. So we got Julian Fairfield from Australia up, and he tied their thinking to strategy. He said, the key of what you're trying to do here is raise the level of your key function, which is building stuff. And so he did a detailed analysis of what their job size and so on. I was interested to hear the phrase rats and mice, because that was a phrase that he used for the small projects. And then the key was their shift from level three being their biggest projects to now level five being their biggest projects, and that's a huge change. And so the CEO then said, okay, we'll get everybody up to Banff, and we'll get Julian to come and talk to them, which he did. And gradually this got embedded in their thinking, all of their thinking. And you'll hear this when they talk tomorrow. It's really very interesting. And it hasn't come from the usual kind of bureaucratic meetings, because they don't think that know. I think there was a similarity with tembec, but their reluctance to meet is that their plants are all over the world, and these guys are off pumping paper plants and sawmills and so on in the woods, and to get together. The CEO there brings them in once a year to Huntsville, and they have a three day thing. It's very similar to the way Graham was doing.

Speaker A Just an underline to what you said. Between the work I did and the work that Julian did, you heard Ron talk about avala is focused primarily on the organization and how it works, and that was primarily what my presentation was about. And Julian talked about the strategy and tying that into what they needed to do. And as an action oriented building high growth, that's what captured their imagination. That's when they knew they needed to raise their level of managers and the type of standard requisite organization. Because we gave them primarily an overview, as we were doing with Tembec, where it was a sheep dip type of training where strangers came in and we would take them through how the organization functions. Slightly tied to strategy. Slightly. And this really builds to that. Getting a very high mode person describing strategy and who knows their industry is the way to capture their imagination. That's how you get it going. What is the task? And I think that's what you're doing at Enhancer.