Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
Photo by Corbis
The relative dormancy of the industry generated very little enthusiasm among college graduates and entrylevel employees until very recently. Phyllis Rich, vice president and treasurer of NEI, says the organization is facing serious challenges in succession planning and knowledge retention, and both issues must be addressed to keep the organization effective and relevant. An important first step is defining competencies and improving NEIs forecasting ability to pave the way for more informed succession planning.
You can make forecasting as complicated as you want and can study it until the end of time. But if you make it too hard, people will lose concentration and interest.
Jeff Lesher, chief operating officer of Applied Knowledge Sciences
staff, mid-level managers, and directors. Focus groups are the crucial tool. For each selected role, a group of six people come together to work their way through a series of predetermined questions that are designed to uncover what competencies are necessary for the successful performance of that role. The six people are carefully selected to provide a 360-degree view of the role: two hold the position themselves, two are their direct reports, and two are their supervisors. Incumbents in each position contain and maintain a lot of specialized knowledge, says Rich. We must prepare for continuity. From a forecasting standpoint, the best thing our organization can do is talk about this issue at the management level. I try to keep our executives very engaged and continually bring the subject up.
Photo by Fotolia
needs for the workforce as a whole, not just your business or industry, advises Kevin Oakes, CEO of the Institute for Corporate Productivity in Seattle. One resource Oakes recommends is O*Net Online, the website of the Occupational Information Network. The site includes a database containing information on hundreds of standardized and occupation-specific descriptors. Ask the people who know. Just as Rich is doing at the Nuclear Energy Institute, you must recognize that the employees who are currently doing the job are best prepared to tell you what it requires. Although they may not be able to create a list of competencies, they can provide descriptions that you can interpret. When working with clients on competency forecasting and succession planning projects, Jeff Lesher, chief operating officer of Applied Knowledge Sciences in Boyce, Virginia, a small group asks to describe a successful client engagement. You can make forecasting as complicated as you want and can study it until the end of time, Lesher says. But if you make it too hard, people will lose concentration and interest. The approach I typically take is to talk to the executive team or a small group thats been selected as company arbiters. We engage people in talking about what works and how they want to move the organization forward. Know what you already have. Most companies, while enthusiastically forecasting future competency needs, neglect to take stock of what they already have, says Oakes. Every organization should compile competency inventories. They take time to build and complete, but the process should begin at the recruiting stage. There is so much great information generated through hiring and selection that just goes out the window. That information should be recorded in an online database and
used to facilitate the performancemanagement process and to identify organizational competency gaps. Define competencies carefully. Create detailed competency definitions specific to your organization. Just specifying innovation or creativity isnt enough, says Lesher. Take each desired competency and spell out what that looks like in your organization. Dont rely on vague terms, but insist on specificity. For effective succession planning, you need that clarity. One example he gives involves Wal-Mart. The stores value proposition is, Always low pricesalways. So leadership competencies at Wal-Mart are defined within that context. For example, integrity might be demonstrated by being cost-conscious. You cannot say, Our employees must be this above all else, Lesher explains. Lack of context leads to inconsistent decision making. Think about varying degrees of competency. Two years ago, 80 percent of the leadership positions at Satyam Computer Services in Mumbai, India (a 2007 BEST Award winner), were filled from the outside, says Ed Cohen, senior vice president of the Satyam School of Leadership. The companys goal is to reverse that percentage, eventually recruiting 80 percent of its leaders from within the organization. One of the ways Satyam is working toward that goal is by reducing the number of levels within the organization from 17 to five and by defining the requirements for success at each level. Each position description includes required, desirable, and stretch competencies. Utilize the context of corporate strategy. As Lesher emphasizes, competencies cannot be vague, and they also cannot exist in a vacuum. In each competency description for each role, you must spell out how that competency is linked to strategy and execution, he says.
Cohen agrees. Learning and development must partner with senior leadership to understand changes in how their customersand their customers customersbuy. This leads to the ability to predict the future in a sophisticated way, he says. Organizations need to focus specifically on their strategic plan or longrange vision. Where do they want to be positioned years from now? Then ask themselves what skill sets are required to deliver that vision. This requires bringing HR or whoever is responsible for competencies, succession planning, and so forth into the loop of that visiona common area where communication internally falls down, Oakes says. Educate line managers about competencies and their importance. The degree to which we can make good forecasts depends upon the line people, and our success depends upon how good they are at knowing their industry and formulating a strategy for success. HR plays a consulting role, says Donna McNamara, president of McNamara and Associates in Morristown, New Jersey. The job of workplace learning and performance professionals is to facilitate the process, pulling out important information from line managers, articulating it, and framing the discussion, says McNamara, who served as vice president for global education and training at Colgate-Palmolive. Oakes emphasizes that there are lots of resources available, including the research and publications of the Institute for Corporate Productivity, which partnered with the American Management Association in 2005 to identify the top 12 competencies for leaders. Use the information youve generated for effective succession planning. Once you have competency descriptions and forecasts, use them. Cohen and his colleagues at Satyam maintain what they call a ready now list, which is a list of corporate employees who are ready to move into a more senior
role. This readiness is based on the competencies defined for the role they would move into, not who is in line next, Cohen emphasizes. The list also cites employees who will be ready for more responsibility in six, 12, 18, and 24 months. Be realistic about your forecasting timeframe. The Nuclear Energy Institutes industry has changed dramatically in the past five years as nuclear power has evolved from pariah to a more responsible environmental actor. In formulating the Core Competency Project, Rich adopted a five-year timeframe. We tried to envision our organizational chart five years from now and then backed it out year by year. We are also working to bring in young, less experienced workers from the utility side who will be very experienced and ready in five years, she says. Rich also worked to elevate competency identification and development as a priority for the institutes people managers. She changed the incentive compensation program to include staff development requirements. To be eligible for bonuses, supervisors must report on how they developed the tiers below them. By maintaining an inventory of current competencies, consistently revisiting the conversation with executives, embracing strategic context, and putting some incentive behind competency forecasting, your organization can polish up its crystal ball and generate better information to fuel effective succession planning.T+D
WhaT Do You Think? T+D welcomes your comments. If you would like to respond to this article, or any article that appears in T+D, please send your feedback to mailbox@astd.org. responses sent to the mailbox are considered available for publication and may be edited for length and clarity.