Talent Round-table dicussion

Attendees:
Peter Crush, Deputy Editor, HR Magazine
David Woods, Online Reporter, HR Magazine
Simon Haben, Head of Leadership and Talent Development, Royal Mail
Tim Walker Jones, Director of Talent, United Biscuits

Chris Roebuck, Former Head of Talent Management, UBS
Tim Jones, HR Director, Aegis Media
Stuart Taylor, Senior Executive, Accenture's Talent and Organisation Performance Practice
Andrew McLellan, SumTotal Systems
Erik Finch from SumTotal Systems


Peter Crush

Once again, welcome.  For those of you that know HR Magazine, we are a monthly business title which writes exclusively on HR issues.  Everything from talent management, which is what we're here today about, to pensions, to training, development, learning and development.  All those sorts of things.

Really, the reason we wanted to do a roundtable today is to talk about the issue of talent management and how we manage talent during a recession.
 
Okay, so I will start now.  In case you don't know, the format of today, actually we are going to be recording it, as you see here today.  Everything that you say will be recorded by our stenographer.  If you want to say something that's off the record, that is perfectly fine for you to do that.  Just say "off the record", but do let us know when you want to come back on again.  We intend to write this up in our next issue as a sort of write up of the way our discussion has gone.  So really, my job is to be a sort of chairman of the discussion.
 
I am not really going to be too prescriptive about how things go.  I quite like the way things develop by themselves.  So if we go off in a particular direction, I am very happy for that to happen, as a sort of signal of the way that people think about this topic.
 
So if we go wildly off course, I will rein you back in again, but I don't think we will.

So the topic is talent management and for us at the magazine, we write a lot about this topic and a lot of commentators are saying that the way that the economic position is at the moment, it has even heightened the way that we should think about talent management.

So really, that is the sort of framework for today, is to discuss how talent should be managed and strategically sort of thought about, in the time of a downturn.  I have brought with me some stats, potentially by way of introduction.  One of the writers on the Harvard Business Review said that ignoring talent management now would be the start of a slippery slope and the tone that you set your business now will be the way that employees will remember you for the next ten years.  So people are saying that this is really important.

But if you look at some of the surveys which are being done on this subject, there are some worrying things, I think.  I am looking at a Talent Q survey that was done recently, and one of the key findings that we found here is that only a third of respondents said that they had adapted their talent management strategies to take account of the economic context.

So I thought we would probably maybe use that as an introduction.  I am quite interested to hear your views about whether this economic context that I have introduced does actually make any difference on what you do with your talent.  You know, should it just be business as normal?  Should the fact that we are in a recession change things?  I don't know what people's views are, so I thought we would kick off with that.  So fire away.
 


Martin Nicolls

I would say that in terms of the basic infrastructure, in terms of what we do, that shouldn't change.  It's about changing the sort of subtleties.  So for instance, at this point in time, what we are doing is focusing more on the road to the recovery and making sure that we know who our really good guys are. 

And that is business as per normal, I guess, but I think this just gives us the sort of chance to make sure that the basic infrastructure is in place, it is tight, we have got the data on it so that we are in a very good place in a year or two years' time.
But in terms of what we would    you know, that range of activities, that hasn't changed.


Peter Crush

Okay.



Tim Walker Jones

I think that's true.  I would say that our strategy, in terms of one of the core things that our talent strategy is going for, has not changed.  But I think you can't ignore the impact of the economic environment on the way you go about delivering some of those things; and some of the pressures that it creates in some areas, but also on the opportunities it creates in others.

And there are certainly some things which have become more difficult.  We were talking about this just before.  Enticing people to leave one organisation where they have a reasonable amount of service and they understand that organisation and the level of security they have in that position, to move to a new organisation where they might have less certainty, there might end up being less input, down to whatever it might be.  That can be a new challenge.  But on the other hand, we are doing our graduate recruitment at the moment and there is a wealth of really good graduate talent out there that you can get because other people are stopping their graduate programmes.

So I think there are certainly impacts and you have to look at how those impacts might change, how you do things and where your focus is on.  I think equally, you have to manage in real time.  As a business, we are probably not impacted as a sector, as much as some other people are, in the food sector and luckily people keep eating.  But on the other side of it, there's uncertainty around what's going to happen, going forward.  If there are 3.5 million consumers unemployed at the end of this year, that's going to affect the market.  You know, the consumer market.

So we have to manage that uncertainty and that means you have to be managing your costs in real time.  You have to keep investing, but you have to look at how you do that and how you maximise the opportunities.  So I think it does not change the strategy, but it certainly means that you should be reviewing what you are doing and how you might do things slightly differently, and also what opportunities are thrown up.  Because there are definitely as many opportunities as there are pressures in the   
 


Chris Roebuck

Yes.  It has certainly been a reality check for every organisation.  In terms of impact, I think that's a factor that is related to the industry, to the impact of the credit crunch on that particular industry.  It is also a factor that is directly related to the CEO and his response to a HR and his understanding of HR and what it can achieve or not achieve.  And it is a factor that is related to the response of the HR function.

And depending on what those are, from my looking at the situation, you can go from anywhere to where an organisation is potentially ramping up elements of its talent, to attract talent in for the upturn; to the other end of the scale where at one particular media company, the entire touting for Europe was made redundant, full stop.  We are not doing anything.  And everyone is somewhere on that spectrum in between.  And wherever you happen to be, I suppose it is a case of making the best that you can, where you happen to be, with who happens to be your CEO and what resources you have got left.  But the message is clearly, in any event, you know, you have basically got to do more with less and do it better.

Now, at one end of the scale, actually I think this is good, because if I look at certain organisations I can think of, they could quite easily take 25 per cent of their development programmes out of the system.  It would not make any difference at all to the effectiveness of the organisation; because it has just ballooned.  And these sort of times are quite useful when, dare I say it, HR functions get slightly out of control and start becoming empires.  Or am I being completely unfair?



Stuart Taylor

I guess my observation on this is through going round and speaking to particularly HR directors.  A common theme that we are hearing in the marketplace is "We can't get hold of the right skills in the right place".  That's a problem.  Some other organisations are saying to us that the shortage of talent is a potential constraint for their ability to grow, as things look forward.  And the shrewdest organisations at the moment are actually trying to talk about this economic environment that we are in at the moment, as something that potentially is a blip in the overall landscape, if you look back at the macro picture, rather than really focusing on their efforts and how they deal with the today issue. 

However, the today issue still has to be dealt with and to your specific question about "How should you change your strategy around dealing with talent?"  I think if we all look at our employee base at the moment, there are a lot of people out there today who are frankly really worried, worried about their jobs, worried about their own potential futures and careers, et cetera.  So that in itself creates a need for us to actually do something.

And I think there is a challenge for organisations at the moment, because the talent approach that some organisations adopt focuses on a top segment of the top talent, and other organisations have a slightly more integrated approach, and have a talent agenda that will actually deal with, let's say, going down to these line managers and all the way down to the individuals themselves. 

And I think also you find, if you take another cross section of that, some organisations do it across the enterprise and some organisations do it in an inconsistent way, but across the lines of business within the overall enterprise.  All of that creates some uncertainty because if you see something happening in a different part of the organisation that you are not yourself experiencing, then again it contributes to the uncertainty of the individual.

So I think those factors need to be taken account of when you are actually thinking about whether you should change your talent strategy at the moment.
 


Simon Haben

I think this is quite an interesting question, because I suppose I look at it in a fairly simple way.  I think that often there are talent processes core to an organisation.  There is a lot of value in maintaining consistency throughout the economic upturns and downturns, and at the same time everything seems to be changed.  So it is not the first time this question has been posed. 

And it is quite interesting to see how, when the question is posed, whether we are in an upturn or whether the economy is coming in the middle.  Actually I think constantly, people who are responsible for talent should be looking at the external environment and the internal environment and see what the match is between the two and how the talent strategy needs to alter, in some respects, to take account of that.  But as I said, I think it will always be a core thing.  I think it would be the other bits that, you know, would be more fluid and would change, depending on the business agenda at that time, and the business agenda might be influenced by a whole variety of things; whether it be economic, political, social or whatever.
 




Tim Jones

You see, we found, and potentially we may be seeing the impact of the recession more acutely than some of the other sectors represented here, which is advertising and media.  It is very visible, the impact, because advertisers typically are spending less.  And to pick up on your point, I think our clients definitely want more for less from our people.  And in reality our product, this is a commonly used phrase, isn't it?  "People are our greatest ..."  We don't have any product.  It is just people that we put in front of our clients.  So if anything for us, our talent agenda is of even more importance because we have to have the prudent steps that, in a lot of the other organisations, are taking place that this downturn presents; such as recruitment challenges.  We are hiring but they are only in key areas.  You know, potentially we are looking at more cost effective ways of retaining people as well.

So the work that we are doing on our high potentials and it isn't just a one brush approach that you were indicating to, for some organisations, we are trying to look at how important those people are for the future.  Because we know if we can get those people in key roles and grow and develop them, we are going to come out of it stronger than our competitors.  So I would say that it is still a massively important strategy, but it is probably for us of an even greater impact; if you get it right or if you get it wrong.
 


Peter Crush

Are you worried about any of these people leaving?  Because, you know, the word on the editorial street, I suppose, is that people aren't leaving, because there is no jobs for them to go to anyway.  So in a sense, you are not feeling challenged by the threat of people leaving?



Tim Jones

In some cases we are.  I mean, the industry typically has a high turnover; normally around 20, 25 per cent.  We've bucked the trend on that and at the moment this year, it is about seven.  So it just shows you that it is not completely disappeared, but it is still there.  It is where you have got very future focused roles, particularly in digital advertising or digital media, often people have been headhunted all the time, because there is a scarcity of resource.  In key strategic positions, they are too.  So it is not the same volume, but competitors have a phenomenal way of seeking out your best talent and I think our skill, on the talent or HR agenda, is actually finding ways that you can grow and retain them too.



Chris Roebuck

Yes.  Consistently, people have kept coming out with this argument that we don't need to worry about talent because there isn't anywhere for them to go.  To be blunt, it is complete garbage.  If you look at talent, be it that group of global talent in major consultancies, investments banks, whatever, they have the ability to still be headhunted and go wherever they want.  Within each national labour market, within each industry sector, whatever, there are a group of people who are known to be the best and they will always be headhunted or poached or approached by people. 

So actually the interesting thing is that this particular environment means that potentially, you have to put more effort into retaining those people because the competition is seeking to get hold of them from you even more.  You know, the example of Lehman Brothers.  People were saying"Lehman Brothers, there is going to be loads of people out there".  I can assure you that the top talent from Lehman Brothers had phone calls from particularly Barclays within hours of the announcement of Lehman Brothers going down.  So that particular comment, I think, is wrong.  Maybe for the mass of the employees it is more difficult to move, but not for the talent.  But that also leads into the thought about how talent leads to leadership, because one of the key things that seems to be happening in organisations now is that at all levels, there is a demand for good leadership from employees because of the period of uncertainty.  Therefore, they are looking to their line managers to give them some element of certainty, to be honest, even if the line managers can't.

As a result of that, I think one of the things that needs to be addressed is the fact that we need to keep developing these even more; because unless you have got the best leaders to motivate and inspire your people in tough times, then you have got a problem.  Because all sorts of things start falling to pieces: engagement, discretionary effort, et cetera, et cetera.  And that is not just about talent; that is about line managers all the way down.



Stuart Taylor

Going back to Tim's point actually, about the talent potential because I actually agree with what you are saying as well.  I think it is really important for us to actually invest in people at the moment.  But it is not just the top talent as well.  I think there is actually piece which is right down into the roots of our organisation.  There is a    well, I think any organisation that is comfortable with the fact that the churn is down at the moment is already deluded if they think that's positive.  Because once the market turns, we all know those figures and the movement will increase very significantly.  So therefore people themselves will remember how they were treated by the organisation when the decision eventually comes round.  I think that is very important for them.


Tim Walker Jones

Yes.  It is in these tough times that you show your true colours and your true values as an employer.  And as you say, people will remember that; and I think it is a mix, isn't it?  The fact is that for the best talent, at whatever level that is, there are always opportunities and so you have to manage that.  We choose to take a very broad definition of talent, not just focus on the top expertise or whatever.  Yes, you have to segment your population and you have to do specific interventions for your high potentials, for your senior leaders et cetera.  But you have to manage talent at all levels

And I think that this is    it is a risk and an opportunity at the moment.  You can always lose good people.  You can always create a memory and a history for the employees you have and how you treat them during these times.

I guess I come back to    I don't think your strategic goals change.  It is still about the identification, the selection, the development and a progression and retention of key performers.  It is still about, for us, the identification and development of, you know, key succession candidates in critical roles.  It is still about segmentation and investing in people based on actual and potential contribution.  Those strategic goals don't change but the things you need to do, and in some ways the importance of those things becomes more acute.

So the ability to segment your population and know who are the people that are most at risk of leaving, the ability to understand where you are going to spend what might now be a reduced budget.  And you have to focus that into particular populations.  Those talent processes that let you do that become more important and more acute in the current climate than maybe they were when there was more money sloshing around the system and you could deal with things in different ways: principally by pushing money towards it.  You have to be better at the basic processes now.







Martin Nicolls

Yes.  I guess that was my point, is that we also take a very broad approach towards this, because we don't just focus obviously on the top 100.  

But if I think forward to 18 months' time.  I mean, at this point in time, it is an easy thing for us to do, to get some really good grads in.  But I am thinking to 18 months' time when they have been through the programme: how can I keep them or do I just see that investment walk out the door?  So it is actually thinking complete differently about what we can do and ask yourself the question: what should we be doing differently in a year or two's time?
   


Chris Roebuck

There is some interesting data that came out from a number of surveys, that suggest that this time round, CEOs get the point just as much as HR get the point.  The Deloitte survey, dare I mention that name over lunch?  The comment was, "Three key things that CEOs are worried about: cutting costs, keeping customers, keeping talent".  Now, that talent thing wouldn't have been in there in the last recession.

So to a degree, the world of HR lives in is slightly easier because now CEOs are starting to get the talent concept and the risks that it contains.  I think CEOs actually sometimes see the talent processes more as a risk management process than they do a process by which people are made to be happier and better and get discretionary effort.  But if it gets the system working from our perspective, so be it.
 


Peter Crush

You almost pre empted what I was going to ask.  I was going to ask you actually, whether you feel you are more visible in your companies now than at any other point?
 


Tim Walker Jones

I think to some extent, that's true.  I guess it depends on    I guess it depends on the company you are in and the level to which there is, if you like, board buy in and engagement with the talent agenda; and that does vary from organisation to organisation.

I think talent management has always been a balance of the short term and the long term.  And maybe the difference now to where we were at the last recession is that there is more of an understanding that you cannot just focus on the short term; you have to keep that eye on the long term and that investment in order to make sure that you come out at the other end in the best possible position.  And CEOs learn, and shareholders and stakeholders learnt last time that those companies that kept focusing on the long term and investing in the right places came out of the recession strongest and did the best.  So we are in a different place now to where we were then, without a doubt.



Chris Roebuck

CEOs have learned that it is slightly embarrassing, in terms of talking to investors when you have senior roles within the organisation, particularly at the board level, that don't have anybody in them because they didn't think about succession planning.  It does not look good for them.  That is why there is a lot of interest in this side of the process.  We need to have people who fulfill roles at senior level.  I am not convinced that CEOs, as yet, really get the point about the development of talent at all levels in the organisation, to improve the performance at all levels.  I still think a lot of them are in this risk management mode.  Sorry, does anyone else think that?



Stuart Taylor

Yes, I think it varies by industry, actually.  Because last week I heard people from the retail industries, from the information management services industry and also from financial services, speaking all on the same platform and they definitely had a very different perspective on these things.  So the retail industry in particular were very much focused on the need to invest in talent, right down to the grassroots.  It's fundamentally important that people had the right culture, the right values and really let    because they have a workforce of, in this particular case, 125,000 people.  So therefore it was essential for the ongoing success of the organisation to really invest in people from top to bottom. 

But there are some organisations who definitely stood up and said, and in financial services ironically, where their focus is very clear.  They have cost constraints and therefore they have to be very focused on how they go about this.  But I think it varies.  That's really the point here.  It does vary by the industry.



Tim Jones

I think it does and I think it is a balance as well.  In most organisations, there's, to be brief, cost management and prudence going on.  But I think it's those CEOs that are actually using this as an opportunity to take a bold step.  So potentially, I think for some organisations and sectors, this recession has presented them with an opportunity of potentially being braver than they may have been before to take a step or a leap on the competitors. 

So I am finding, you know, to come back to the question, almost because talent is so central to the bold steps that we are looking to take, our seat at the table, from a business partner point of view, is probably stronger than it used to be.  That is not to say that it was inferior before but there is almost more of a demand on us, for the future itself stuff, as well as the prudence and cost management stuff at the same time.



Chris Roebuck

There is definitely a group of CEOs and HR guys out there who are looking at the current situation and saying "If we play this right, we are going to be ahead of our competitors"



Tim Walker Jones

Yes, without a doubt and it is the smart businesses that will do that.  And we know by looking at the last recession that is that that is what happened.  So I think there are more people in that smart camp now than used to be.  You can't ignore the pragmatic realism that in a number of sectors, you have to be managing costs and you might have to be doing that very tightly.  You know, we are in a sector and we are in a business where we are still growing, both top and bottom lines.  

So we don't have some of those pressures, but you still have to be continuously aware of the future and the fact that the future is uncertain; that the reality is that nobody at the moment knows exactly when this downturn is going to end.  You know, are we going to have a V shaped curve or it is it going to be a W and we will go back in?  Is there going to be a long stagnation, as happened in Japan?  All of those things are possible and that uncertainty means you have to keep an eye on the very short term and you have to manage in real time.  

But the winners will keep also managing for the long term; and ultimately business value comes from having a long term sustainable business and one of the key drivers of a long term sustainable business is sustainable talent.



Martin Nicolls

And growing your own talent base.



Tim Walker Jones

Growing your own talent is certainly cheaper and more effective than buying it in continuously.



Martin Nicolls

In some sectors.



Stuart Taylor

I think you pick up a really, really strong point.  I have been somewhat overwhelmed, actually, by the number of HR directors recently that have actually stood up and said what a really, really critical agenda item for us within HR now is to develop the talent and grow it from within the organisation.  And the argument that is typically put forward is: where do they put in people externally?  Of course, it creates a disruptive influence within the organisation which is sometimes positive, but those individuals typically then move on and they take a team of people with them; and the impact it makes to the pay and rewards side of things, as well,, it also creates a negative influence.  Whereas if they get people from within the organisation, you get the stewardship and the future growth, and therefore you get people who will understand the breadth of the organisation as well, as it develops.



Martin Nicolls

Yes.



Chris Roebuck

The failure statistics, in terms of senior people brought in, show that actually you are taking a risk by getting somebody in who has not been developed in the organisation.  And to a degree, it should be perceived as either a last resort or there has to be a justification for getting in somebody from outside.


Martin Nicolls

There's a similar point: a survey I saw a couple of years ago which said that out of the CEOs of the top 100 companies, about 60 per cent were home grown, so they knew their business, they knew that company, they knew those markets.  And you know, that's really, really good.  So I guess there is this higher risk factor about bringing others in and there's also   



Peter Crush

I interviewed the HR Director of DHL fairly recently and he is a strong advocate of developing internal talent.  In fact, he has got a target of 85 per cent of all of his top team coming from internal.  He is about 82.  He is doing okay, and he has come from 65 in a matter of two or three years.  And I just wondered: do you have a similar sort of targets in your organisations?



Tim Walker Jones

Yes.  I think for us, it's   



Peter Crush

What is yours?
 


Tim Walker Jones

I will keep it quiet, if that's okay.  But it's about balance, because you don't want 100 per cent internal progression, because it is really important that you bring in fresh ideas and fresh energy and experience from other organisations and other sectors.  You have to do that.

But equally, there's more risk of failure.  Anybody that you recruit externally is unproven in your organisation; whereas if you are moving people on in the right way and developing them in the right way, and promoting people with the potential to do the next job, not just to be good in their last job, then you have a track record.  You have a cultural fit.  And you are also engaging your wider population and giving them reasons to buy into your business and stay in your business, because you are showing them career development.  Ultimately that is one of the key things that are people are looking for in their career now, is to know that they are continuously learning and growing and getting new opportunities.  So it is a huge win in every possible way.  You have to get the balance right and you have to bring in a certain amount of new ideas and fresh energy into the business as well.



Simon Haben

We don't have targets, but I do notice that the more progressive managers and links in the business are the ones who are more keen to develop their talent, basically.  And I think about what kind of potential role they might be able to play in the future. 




Peter Crush

Do you reward your line management for growing their own, rather than    is that a part of their 360 appraisal?



Simon Haben

They do 360, but we don't link their reward to growing their own people, so we don't have that kind of thing.  What we do have is an increasing, I guess, presence through objectives, and so on, for managers to be able to    and encourage them to develop people and identify some of the talent and to really think back on how they can be supported to be in the right place for the future positions. 

So part of that, I think, is the organisation, you know, recognising that there is an awful lot of changes that we need to do; and yes, we can bring some external talent and that can be useful but it has to be placed, as has a lot of internal talent.  We have started to get much more robust about how we understand that talent and identify it, and how we then develop it; so we can make the right judgment calls on the balance between internal and external talents. 

And for us, a target would be a little bit arbitrary because, you know, it would be hard to say: exactly what scenario would you best be able to achieve that target?  So if you look at it from a very macro point of view over a period of two or three years, over one single year it would probably struggle to do that because it would depend on the circumstances that the business found itself in and the kind of talent that we might need to be able to adapt to those challenges.
 


Tim Walker Jones

Soft targets, rather than hard targets, is I think what you're looking at.  When you say a hard target, it becomes arbitrary.





Simon Haben

Which makes the link to the reward very hard.



Chris Roebuck

With certain top levels of high potentials, the achievement of their development objectives was included in the line managers' objectives for that year.  So that the line manager effectively had to commit to making sure that was achieved.  But that also, I think, leads into a number of issues where the current climate has created a risk for a talent; both from talking to the CEOs and also there's some data from actually CAS Business School saying that line managers are tending to go in different directions in terms of their response to the current downturn and how they handle their teams, i.e. and also talent.

Roughly about 30 per cent of them seem to be saying "We need to operate more effectively as a team, therefore I am going to be a better leader and talk to people more".  About another 30 per cent seem to be trying to avoid making a decision on the basis that "if I make a decision, it might go wrong and I will be in trouble".  Another 30 per cent are saying "I am going to make decisions, but I am then going to supervise my staff so closely that nothing can possibly go wrong".  I think there are a number of issues there about: if you have got talent that you want to keep, depending where those talent end up with the different line managers, what their potential response is going to be.  Because we can do whatever we want at a strategic level to tell these people how much we value them but their immediate feeling about how much value they are is related to their line manager, not to what the CEO says.



Peter Crush

Going back to my Talent Q survey.  I have put a big ring around the fact that HR and line managers are the people that implement talent strategies the most within organisations.  So they are important.



Tim Walker Jones

I think it is another great example of how, ultimately, so much comes back down to the line manager and the quality of your line managers; and the ability of line managers to manage people.  And the fact that as HR, what we can really focus on is making sure that they have the right tools and the right knowledge and the right understanding, but we can't and shouldn't be doing it for them.  And it's a great example of how the current climate has created or heightened something that we have been focusing on for a long time, which is the quality of our line managers.  Do they understand that they have the most significant impact on the engagement of their team?  Do they understand the leadership styles they use, the climate that they create and how that impacts the people around them?  All of those things.  Actually, it is no different again from how it was before the downturn, but it is again very acute in the current climate.



Peter Crush

How do you think they are responding to that challenge?



Chris Roebuck

There is a core issue here that I think goes back for years which is the degree to which your average line manager fully understands their responsibilities for the development of people, for the improvement of performance for people.  Because I think in many organisations, the division of responsibility, in terms of not only the development of talent but the development of everybody between the line manager, HR, the CEO and the individual themselves, is extremely blurred and extremely fuzzy.  And everybody tends to think that everybody else is doing it.  And until organisations actually say to line managers "Look, as a line manager we expect you to do this, this, this, this and this.  We will give you the tools to do it and help you to do it, but you will be measured on it."
 
One of the most interesting moments of my time at UBS was when we thought this was an issue and we got the top 500 of the bank together in Montreal in the Jazz Festival and the CEO said to them "I want to make it absolutely clear that it is your responsibility to be the main identifiers, motivators, developers and retainers of talent in this bank.  That is your responsibility you cannot abrogate and HR is only there to facilitate this process."

There were a lot of people who were looking around, thinking to themselves "Hang on, I didn't know I was completely responsible for this".  And there were subsequent discussions that made it absolutely clear that this did not relate to sending people on courses.  This related to developing people on the job.

And that's the issue.  I think a lot of people don't know



Martin Nicolls

It is the issue.  I would guess that we have all found, in either our current or former firms, but I am staggered that after 40 years of HR practices, that we still have this basic fundamental flaw that we don't tell a manager what his job role is. 


Chris Roebuck

I did some research.  In 1999    actually, two things.  In 2000 I was a member of an expert panel reporting to the government, looking at how leadership could be improved in British business, and it issued some recommendations and said that there was clearly a shortfall in basic leadership and management training in a lot of businesses.  I then subsequently did some research via an MBA student and I think she surveyed over 400 line managers in and around the City; not only financial services, but at all levels.  And the question posed was: have you at any point in your career ever had any development work on the following?  And it was time management and prioritisation, delegation, leadership, communicating with your team in terms of setting the objectives, giving feedback on the performance.

And the data came back.  49 per cent had time management and prioritisation.  I think it was about 28 per cent had leadership.  25 per cent had delegation.  18 per cent had performance management and 8 per cent had recognising stress in self or others and dealing with it.

What you are actually saying is: if you ignore the time management data, you are saying that only 25 per cent of line managers have actually got the skills that are required critically to do their job every day.  Now, if that's the case, there's a problem.  No matter what you do in terms putting in best talent strategy in the world, if these people can't understand what they have got to do, they don't have the skills to do it; they can't even get their employees to perform; let alone their high potentials. 



Tim Jones

What a prize, though.  What a prize to go after.  Because if you think that is the reality, we have all experienced it.  I know from my perspective, I had the same problem.  No education.  People were being promoted.

So what we tried to do was educate people.  It wasn't just about the technical skills, but the behaviour, the potential.  And we don't have specific targets on how many are internal.  What we do say is we need massively more talent to be coming in through internal streams, as well as external.  We always need that external element.  But for me, that is the prize that is worth really going for.  If you do get it right and help people understand the consequences of a wrong hire or a wrong appointment or a wrong promotion, versus the benefits of a positive one, it is just phenomenal and it always breeds itself. 
 


Martin Nicolls

I certainly agree.  This is what we should be doing every day, every year, every time, boom or bust.


Tim Walker Jones

Exactly.


Tim Jones

I have been doing that for nearly four years, so "yes" is the answer to that.



Tim Walker

Jones it is not about the current environment.  It is about what needs doing.  And too many businesses and we have all seen them, whether it is working in house, whether it is as a consultant, are still promoting people on the basis of being good in one job, not having the potential to do the next job.

There was a fantastic piece of work done at GE around what they called the "crossroads model" which looked at the crossroads at each of the core stages of someone's career and there's Ram Charan's book "Leadership Pipeline" that talked about it, and looking at the impact if you get some of those key transitions wrong.  And the fundamental first transition is the transition from managing yourself to managing other people.

And that's the point, I think, where so many people fail and it doesn't become apparent that they fail at that point.  It becomes apparent later on that they haven't made that mental switch that says "I am successful by ensuring that other people are successful and by getting things done through other people".  And you can survive as a line manager still pace setting, still leading from the front, still doing things yourself and not delegating and developing others.

But once you become a functional manager or a functional director or a business director, you can't do that.  Your scope is too great.  The natures of the people that you are working with are too great for you to be able to do that and we get failure happening in more senior levels because we don't make those initial first transitions and we don't help people to make those.  I think if we can get better at that and we can understand the mental shifts and the sorts of behaviours and competencies and potential that you need to be a great leader and to deliver success to people, then we can be much more successful in building our senior management population.



Simon Haben

I think that's definitely part of it.  I also think, and what we are increasingly doing and we are not 100 per cent of the way there, but some of the more senior people would agree here.  We are not only looking to fill the vacant role, but we are looking to see what might be a succession for that individual as well, be it external or internal.  So just looking at the role beyond that, that we are actually seeking to resource.  And that kind of messaging starts to really, you know, send a powerful signal to the organisation.  It is about developing people.  It is about the leadership potential.  It is not just about: have I got the right skills for that particular role?  It is an ongoing journey for people and a shift for us.  But an important one.

Chris Roebuck

It is interesting that of all the stuff, we did lots of stuff at UBS and it's part of the business case study on it, and all the rest of it.  One of the last things I did when I was there, we were looking at: why are we not getting all these high potential people doing quite as well as we expected?  And first of all, it was because we didn't think the line managers were fully engaged in the agenda, so we spent a lot of time getting the line managers engaged, by altering the psychological cost benefit analysis of doing talent.  And then    this sounds slightly bizarre.  We actually put in a basic line manager management and leadership course, focused on what you should be doing in terms of helping your people perform better and helping your people develop.  Because over the previous years, in a lot of parts of the organisation, these have been cancelled or taken out, due to them costing money. 

And it was interesting that the number of people who went on to that programme who actually came off saying "I now understand what I am supposed to be doing and I can now do it because I have the skills to do it".  And then subsequent to that, the responses of members of your team they spoke to say "Actually, I can perform better, I actually enjoy coming to work more because this particular person, my line manager, is actually making me perform better; in the sense of giving me the capability".  And it really goes back to just absolute basic common sense stuff, about organisations and training line managers up and that sort of stuff.



Peter Crush

These are the things that are precisely possible in this climate, potentially, is  



Chris Roebuck

I don't think you have to, because I think if you are slick and you can use internal resources.  We all know what the generic content of this stuff is.  It is really common sense, basic stuff.  If you get some really good internal faculty, senior line managers who you can persuade to act as faculty on a short, sharp totally business focussed programme to develop these skills, you can make it happen with virtually no external input whatsoever.
 


Stuart Taylor

You shouldn't actually have to persuade your people to do this.  You should actually be incorporating it as part of the responsibility, because each of us have actually just said: they have to have the responsibility to develop talent and develop people in the organisation.  That is part of the process.

Chris Roebuck

You have to be faculty on a programme or whatever.



Stuart Taylor

It's being able to share your own experiences and your own stories.  Part of the way to do that is spending time with people and it could actually be counseling or mentoring, or it can be through training courses.  I think at this time, I go back to actually what we said earlier, which is: at this point when it is so easy to become very insular and focus on yourself rather than your people, it really is a great time to make a positive impact by going out there and showing, at that sort of level, leadership and stewardship.



Tim Jones

If you talk about the retention piece there, as well, and you're saying "How do you retain talent?"  We found, again because of prudence, we are trying to manage our learning budget sensibly.  We are spending less more, but doing more training, because we are actually using internal people.



Tim Walker Jones

Exactly.



Tim Jones
 
When you can get people that are fantastic on their feet    which we have got quite a lot, because of the kind of roles that they are doing    the people that are outstanding at leadership or development and actually getting them to train our people; that is developmental for them, and actually I think it is more value adding to the people that they are training than rolling in people from outside.



Tim Walker Jones

And you are building capability in your business, not building it in some training consultancy.



Simon Haben

I think what we are doing is absolutely that: trying to increase some of the internal provision of some of our programmes now.  But at the same time, trying to balance that with more focus on the individuals, trying to see some of this internally themselves.  So increasing, I suppose, the focus on mentoring and poaching within the organisation; and really trying to think about how can people in their development plan generally think about not only the skills, but think about exposure and experience and other aspects that will help them develop, which will be over and above a programme covering the basics.  So, you know, it is looking at it more holistically from that perspective; a lot of which can be delivered internally, from a budget perspective, which for us is  



Peter Crush

Can I be slightly controversial?  I interviewed Ruth Spellman a while ago, who is the CEO of the Chartered Management Institute.  She was pretty fed up, actually, because she saw the increasing burden on line managers' shoulders as being something that she wasn't happy about her members experiencing.  And I was wondering: is it too easy to blame ineffectual line management for this?  Or is it part of your jobs, as head of talent, to be thinking about  


Simon Haben

It depends what she means by "burden", I suppose.



Peter Crush

I think she felt that it just wasn't their job to do that, but you seem to think it is.



Chris Roebuck

That is wrong.  That is complete rubbish, I am sorry.  I go back to my    and you can print that I said it is complete rubbish. 

Look, if I go back to the very dim and distant days of my career, I actually went through an organisation called the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst and I wore funny green clothes for five years.  Now, one thing that taught me was that it is down to the leader, the line manager, to keep their team running.  If you look at John Adair's basic leadership model: team need, task need, individual need.  It is a very, very good way for any leader to think.  And if you look at the services and the way they achieve their objectives, you do not see people running round in Afghanistan with a big sign on their back saying "HR".  They don't have personnel officers running round, because the line manager does it.  Until we can get people in business to accept that that is part of the role of me as a line manager, then we are never going to get world class organisations.

Now it is not, as she is implying, dumping responsibility on them without giving the tools to deliver the goods.  That is the key point.  So we can't abrogate responsibility in HR. 

But everyone is involved.  The CEO has got to give an example, because if the CEO is not leading by example and their behaviour is conflicting with the message you are saying, people will do what the CEO does.  The fact that people have to think that this is a business agenda, not a HR agenda.  The fact that they are confident they have the skills and ability and support to do it.  The fact that there is a benefit to them.  You know, you get CEOs saying to people "You should do this because it is good for the organisation".  And yes, okay, it is good for me as a CEO, because if the organisation does well and the bottom line goes up, I will get lots of share options and a bonus.  For your middle manager and your lower first line manager, the CEO saying "Doing this is good for the organisation" does not hit the cost benefit spot at all.  They need to have some other driver.

But I have found that in any number of organisations, from the army through to not for profit through to others, if you get to speak to line managers, they want their people to perform well.  They want to perform well.  It's just that they haven't been told exactly what their responsibilities are, exactly how they can do it, in a simple business focussed way and they haven't been given the tools.  That is our job.



Tim Walker Jones

I think it is about partnership, isn't it?  It is not about us saying "This is all about bad line managers" and equally it is not about us saying "Actually, HR can come in and do this for you".  It is a partnership.  And if the business believes that the interventions will drive performance in those teams, then it is in everybody's interest to do it.  I think that it is about how is HR, and particularly as a talent function or as talent leaders, talent directors, whatever it might be in our organisations, how do we equip our business and have those conversations that help people understand the benefits of doing this so that they see it as important?  And also, how do we make it easy for them to do it? 

And I think one of the things that HR has not been good at in the past is creating a holistic, integrated way that managers can work with their people.  We are a function that tends to be very solid; so reward, talent, L&D, recruitment often all work separately and I think that is an area where we need to get our game much improved so that we make it easy for line managers to be great people managers, so that we have a common language, a common set of processes across all of these things.

So we are not telling them, from a talent side of things, that being collegiate and teamwork is the most important thing and then rewarding them for individual contribution.  We create, in businesses, a lot of inconsistencies and confusion for line managers, but we can get better at that.  But we shouldn't be doing it for them.

And I think what we don't want to see is enormous HR functions that are taking some of the line managers' jobs from them.  I would rather see more people on the front line and smaller HR functions, but with better managers who can delegate the doing, which frees up the time for them to be great leaders and great managers and worry about the development and all the other things.



Peter Crush

Some of the    maybe you can tell us what you offer to your line managers; how you offer it.  What tools you offer them.



Martin Nicolls

To do their job?



Peter Crush

Well, to do what we have been talking about.
 


Martin Nicolls
 
Well, the sector I'm in is mainly blue collar, so it is people that work on the roads and the railways.  And it is very simple; we have a job description which sets out the tasks and the competencies required for that job.  The recruiter creates that.  We have a performance management system.  We track the people who do it.  This is all very, very basic stuff

We have a shared service centre; so in terms of the contact with the line managers, that is fairly streamlined.  We have some talent tracker sort of practices in place where anyone can put their name forward for it.  It is not up to the manager to nominate someone; it is totally free.  And we have, on the back of the appraisal form, there is a needs identification for development needs; and we have a roster of external courses in place to do that.

So that is basic, basic, basic, basic stuff.  And there are some inconsistencies in how that is used, in different parts, and that is no different to any other company.  I think re jigging the chairs on the structure of how your HR area looks does not solve an awful lot.  I think it is on a much more practical, tactical level that things need to be done.  And I think in some cases, that's revisiting those very, very basic things.


Tim Walker Jones

In United Biscuits, we are upping our spend on developing our people; despite the current economic climate.  I mean, I think exactly as Martin said, it's about doing the basics really well.  And there isn't a need to be really clever here.  There is no rocket science.  It is doing the basics really well.  So we look to make sure that everybody absolutely understands what "good" looks like in their role, through competencies, through clarity, through line of sight.  If you don't know what "good" looks like, how can we expect you to deliver it?  I think that is a really important piece

We then look at a group of areas about: okay, if that is what "good" looks like, if that is what we need in terms of capability and talent to deliver the strategy, then how do we go about building that talent?  And we have processes around talent planning, in terms of talent mapping, identification of high potentials, in terms of segmentation of the population, succession planning, et cetera.  So some talent planning work.

And then two other streams.  One around learning and development so: okay, if we now know where the gaps are, how do we build that internally?  And that can be anything from NVQs that we offer across our factory floor population, right through to senior leadership programmes for people who we are expecting to make the jump from a functional leader to a business leader.  So comprehensive L&D.

And then the third piece around building your talent is around recruitment.  So if you cannot build it, you have to buy it in.  So how are you going to do that in a way where you are targeting the skill sets and the competencies and the fit that you need, and you do it in a way that works?

And then we have some processes which are around: how do we deploy that talent?  So if we've built the talent need, how do we deploy it?  That is around performance management, so making sure that everybody is clear on what we expect of them, how that aligns to the strategy; what is expected of the people above and below them; absolute clarity on that and that we are managing performance, because ultimately that is absolutely key.  Pieces around reward and recognition, so that we make sure that we are rewarding people and recognising the things that we need; not some arbitrary other list of things.  And then a piece around leadership.  And if we get those three right, then we are going to deploy the talent in the right place.  If we get all six of those levers right, then we will have an engaged set of employees who are going to deliver the discretionary effort that Chris was mentioning and will execute our strategy for us.

So for me, one of the things that I have been trying to drive in United Biscuits is: how do we bring all of those elements together in a holistic talent management approach?  And of course at the end of that, you have got    you are measuring it.  How do we measure each of those stages from that clarity of line of sight, right down to that level of engagement?  And I think that's the approach we are trying to take.  But at a practical level for line managers, it's the first line management programme.  So if you are going to start managing people in our business, we want you to go through the programme.  We are going to explain to you what being a manager in UB is about and what "good" looks like, so that you can do that.  Because if you don't know and you have never been a manager before, well, just giving you the job title is not going to cut it.

And then the other key intervention along that chain is at the end of the talent pipeline, where we are looking at a senior management programme which is around: how do I make the move from a functional leader to a business leader?  How do I stop making decisions based around technical and professional judgment and start making them around long term profitability?  How do I just stop managing people that do what I do within my area of specialism to dealing with much broader populations, external stakeholders et cetera?

So we are looking at supporting people in that line journey, at each of those key crossroads that people need to develop on.



Peter Crush

Do you think, guys    have you, hand on hearts, spotted new talent that was in your organisations that you wouldn't have done before, had the current economic climate not been here?  So i.e., because you are not recruiting maybe as much, you are actually interrogating your own talent pools, and talent systems harder and unearthing these people that might have passed  



Chris Roebuck

Two issues.  Better systems, but also the current climate.  Don't forget, optimal leadership in this climate may not be the same type of leadership as we had before, particularly if you look at financial services.  When times are good, a certain leadership style, you can get away with it.  But when times start getting bad, then actually it is a different type of leadership you need.  Is that fair?
 



Simon Haben

Yes, I think that's fair.  But if I could come back to the fact, I think we have got better at managing and developing talent per se.  And the economic climate is an influence, but it's not the only influence.  There are lots of other influences.  So all of those things combined, I think over the last year we have identified some talent we didn't know existed within the organisation, and it has been fantastic.  So there are people, more engaged, the executives are more engaged and demonstrably so.  Not just with words, but with actions at the same time; all of which I think is very positive, all of which is having quite a positive effect.  And so the economic climate is just an aspect of that, but it is certainly not the only driver.

And I think your point is absolutely right.  It comes back to, again: what is it that you need from some of your people in the economic climate now; and it is quite different from two or three years ago.  And your talent agenda will inevitably change.



Chris Roebuck

And that is very interesting.  Because, you know, talking to organisations and looking at some of the competency models that are being created, they are based on what was being done by leaders two, three, four years ago that was perceived as being optimum, are potentially actuall