One Page Talent Management: Eliminating Complexity, Adding Value

219 Pages·2010·3.68 MB·English

by  Marc Effron

Eliminating Complexity, Adding
Value
MARC EFFRON + MIRIAM ORT

CONTENTS
Preface vii
1 1 One Page Talent Management 1
2 Performance Management 31
3 360-Degree Feedback 51
4 Talent Reviews and Succession Planning 75
5 Engagement and Engagement Surveys 107
6 Competencies 131
7 Sustaining One Page Talent Management 159
Notes 171
Index 177
About the Authors 183
PREFACE
In early 2006, when we began developing the approach that forms the basis of
this book, setting a framework for talent management design was nowhere on
our agenda. Our focus was completely practical. We had been asked to build and
implement new talent management practices to support the turnaround of a $9
billion consumer products company. The company needed the practices quickly.
It had to demonstrate results in a short time. What we delivered deviated from
the more traditional views of how human resource (HR) and talent management
practices should look and function. We had consciously worked to remove any
extra features and complexity, while simultaneously trying to add value into
each to make the practices more effective.
Although we were confident that these easier, value-adding practices would
deliver superior results, early, reliable measures of our approach were still
months away. However, in May 2007, a brief feature in the New Yorker gave us
a little reassurance that we were onto something. The article described the
problem of "feature creep"-the addition of tens or even hundreds of features to
electronic devices like digital cameras. It said that engineers who were motivated
to create cool, but not necessarily usable, technology were adding these extra
features. At the other end of the product chain were consumers who were
suffering from "feature fatigue," utterly confused about how to operate their
devices due to the numerous options. A study on the topic showed that when
given the choice, consumers most frequently selected the camera with the most
features. However, when asked to use the camera they had selected, they quickly
became frustrated and ultimately settled for a simpler design.' In short, while
complexity was easy to make, market, and sell, complexity did not work.
We read that article and felt it was a perfect analogy for our design approach.
The myriad options available in typical HR practices were the same as in a
complicated camera-cool, but adding marginal value and complicating the
overall experience. Rather than designing the typical camera, we had focused on
making it usable, removing ten features but adding in autofocus so the user could
achieve the core objective of taking better pictures. Complexity eliminated,
value added.
How We Got Here
That design approach and this book describing it results from a culmination of
experiences rather than a blinding flash of inspiration. For Marc, the
foundational experience occurred when he was a young political consultant in
Southern California using a simple approach to help small-town water board,
school board, and city council candidates win elections. The consulting firm he
worked for believed that candidates won elections for two reasons only-high
personal trust and high name recognition. It felt that a candidate should focus
exclusively on maximizing those two factors and had developed a consulting
approach to achieve that.
As a candidates' consultant, Marc would tell them exactly how to increase
personal trust and name recognition, with every instruction focusing on a few,
powerful levers for victory. Among other things, they would learn the size,
color, and copy for their campaign signs (three feet by five feet, blue letters on
white background, name and position only) and get the exact script they were to
use when talking to voters. All this advice was captured in a twenty-page booklet
he gave to candidates.
What activities were the candidates prohibited from? Anything that wasn't
proven to work, including distributing potholders, running radio ads, and hosting
or attending wine and cheese parties. The victory rate for Marc's candidates was
about mid 80 percent. The candidates learned two clear lessons-what is simple
works, and avoid distractions.
After a business school career change, for the next twenty years, Marc had
broad exposure through corporate and consulting experiences to what worked
and did not work in growing talent. As the leadership consulting practice leader
for Hewitt Associates, one of the world's largest HR consultancies, Marc saw
what made talent practices work in hundreds of organizations worldwide. And,
from more than three years of the Top Companies for Leaders Study that he
created in 2001, he was able to extract from the data of more than six hundred
companies, the three key elements that allowed them to consistently grow great
talent.2 One of those elements was that companies that consistently produced
great earnings and great talent did not have the most sophisticated or most
complex talent processes. Instead, they had processes that fit their culture, were
relatively simple, and were flawlessly executed.
Marc started with Avon Products in late 2005, just prior to the launch of its
turnaround effort. He sought an opportunity to approach talent management in a
new way, applying the sum of his experiences, and this was it. Miriam Ort was a
manager on his talent management team and a five-year Avon veteran. In the
years leading up to Avon's turnaround efforts, she had seen an organization flush
with cash and touting double-digit growth that was unable to take advantage of
several appealing acquisitions due to limited bench. At the same time, the
organization had rolled out a number of new talent practices, some even written
up as best practices. Somehow, the beautifully designed and well-benchmarked
processes were not translating into the bottom-line talent depth Avon so
desperately needed. This lesson underscored the need for the usable, outcome-
oriented processes that were later embodied in our approach.
As we worked to redesign Avon's talent practices, our combined experiences
gave us a strong point of view about how talent should be grown. The result was