With organizations wanting to build their talent benchstrength, more responsibility lies with managers to coach talent and develop potential to have a talent “pool of strong swimmers.” 

In some cases, managers will inevitably face identifying talent for future leadership positions beyond levels that manager ever attained. Is this necessarily a problem?  Think of Olympic coaches who get due credit for preparing the competing athlete. 

What are managers in your organization encouraged to do to develop the talent your organization will need tomorrow?   Is this a more of a challenge in medium-size organizations, or does size make it easier to know your talent?  Our presenters Kim Ellis  and Frank Horvath, and I look forward to your comments and questions in our post-webcast dialog below… 

HCI member JeanAnn asks, How does a company prepare employees, have them “ready” and then have them NOT want to relocate to the region/office that needs the assistance. So many of our employees do not want to relocate to the parts of the country?

When I was a young woman entering the corporate world (decades ago!), I was fortunate to have a mentor, a woman who was CEO of a construction company. The term “glass ceiling” was new,  and having transitioned from the non-profit world to be the first professional woman in a Fortune 500 holding company, the guidance I received from my mentor provided a valuable foundation for my career development plan far into the future.  The male CFO to whom I reported offered me stretch assignments, saying he wished that had been done for his daughter when she entered the workforce years earlier.  So I had the best of both worlds, with an external female mentor and an internal male coach.  I was lucky. Today, mentoring is offered by companies as part of their strategic talent management.   Presenters in our webcast today,    Jennifer Allyn , Managing Director, Office of Diversity , PricewaterhouseCoopers,
Heather Kleis , Human Resources Advisor , ING North America Insurance Corporation , and
Julie Nugent , Director, Research Dept. , Catalyst, Inc.  make the case that effective mentoring is not a “stand-alone” effort, and has the most impact when it is integrated into other talent development processes.

HCI members, we’d love you to weigh in on these questions:

1. What can organizations do to provide formal and targeted mentoring opportunities for women, men, diverse groups?
2. What can organizations do to encourage and train strategic mentoring behaviors?
3. What can organizations do to ensure that mentoring is part of a career development portfolio?

  HCI members want to discuss:

HCI member asks: For those that are federal contractors, advancement of females and visible minorities are important.  What partnering, if any, is done with the EEO/AA and/or Diversity teams to ensure it is being addressed?

HCI member asks: How are mentor strenghts identified and are they catalogued somewhere in a knowledge database?

HCI member asks: How was the formal mentoring for accelerated talent communicated in 2004 and were there any questions/concerns from other employees that were not identified as accelerated talent.

HCI member asks: How do you encourage mentors to apply?

HCI member asks: What evaluation tools are utilized to ensure that the program is working?  How many re-entries from people on family leave re-enter the organization and attribute it to the coaching they received on how to juggle work and family life? 

HCI member asks: I manage a program addressing the aging workforce challenge. We are striving to partner staff that may be retiring soon with entry level staff - have you had any success or experience in addressing a similar challenge in a Mentor Program? What has worked/ some success tips?

HCI member asks: How often do you check in with the mentors/mentees to determine how the pairing is progressing?

As a view from 30,000 feet provides big picture insight, organizations are recognizing that shifting to an enterprise view of executive coaching provides line of sight from individual coaching agendas and the larger talent management plan.  

A press release on research done by DBM and HCI of leading organizations’ executive coaching practices suggests there is more to be gained from common business themes that run across coaching assignments.  Certainly this also helps to adjust the focus from the traditional “remedial” aura coaching once had to a pro-active high impact enterprise-relevant focus. The positive impact on leadership team effectiveness no doubt benefits as well.  I hope you’ll tune in to the related webcast where this new research was recently presented and add your thoughts below…

I’m excited about the July 24 webcast

Title: Cascading Competencies to Create Focus & Results
When: Thu, Jul 24 2008 / 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM ET
 
Presented By: Edie Goldberg Ph.D , President , E.L. Goldberg & Associates
Mary Beth Cozza , VP, OD and Internal Communications , PMI Mortgage Insurance Company

I was impressed by the examples the presenters have that demystify critical competency development at increasing levels of responsibility. For example, how does an individual contributor demonstrate collaboration; what additional collaboration behaviors are essential for  a manager/director in contrast to how an executive demonstrates collaboration?  When the increasing levels of competencies are demystified and clearly communicated, then the development path to excellence can be transparent and visible to all.  

Career paths to success based on competency models can help talent see far ahead to actualize their potential and keep your organization’s pipeline alive.  

HCI’ers hope you’ll weigh in with your thoughts and related questions on our post-webcast discussion below…

An HCI member asks:  How does one motivate an organization to engage on a comprehensive competency model development project as described in this case study? What is the business case?

I’m excited about the July 23 webcast I’m moderating

Managing the Enterprise Impact of Coaching

because of the topics that will be discussed by presenter Peyton Daniel and experienced corporate practitioners:

1. Linking coaching to leadership development strategy
2. Creating an evaluation strategy
3. Maximizing enterprise impact

HCI’ers, how do you establish and maintain a line of sight between your coaching strategy and talent management/business plan?

What has been your experience of the enterprise impact when a leaderhip team has the benefit of coaching?

Coaching for the Leader, for the Team and for the Enterprise is a triple play- everyone wins:-)

Please add your comments below…

In today’s webcast, Mike Gotta from the Burton Group stimulated great ideas on the power of employee/talent networks.

What are your thoughts about how employee networks can develop collaboration as a critical competency?

Please post your comments below and on Mike’s blog too at http://mikeg.typepad.com

Also, please share the internation re-cast times below with your networks so you can discuss these ideas with them as well

Title: Connectivity Powers Talent: Leveraging Employee Social Networks
When: Fri, Jul 18 2008 / 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM ET
 
Presented By: Mike Gotta , Principal Analyst , Burton Group 
 
 
Recast Dates
 
Mon, Jul 21 2008 / 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM ET   
Mon, Jul 21 2008 / 8:00 PM - 9:00 PM ET   
Tue, Jul 22 2008 / 12:00 AM - 1:00 AM ET   
Tue, Jul 22 2008 / 4:00 AM - 5:00 AM ET 

Here are some related areas HCI members would like to explore… please add your posts below…

1. Question: Are there ways to expedite the team development process for flung teams so that people ‘trust’ each other and become productive even when they can’t see each other? videoconf not withstanding.
2. Question: In establishing enterprise social networks, should the information exchange be limited to business content or expanded to additional social content?
3. Question: What will be a good way to introduce and tied these to corporate culture? Is there a clear impact in productivity? any research?
    

Multiple stakeholders want to see the impact of training and learning on business processes and results.  The success story in today’s webcast,

is enlightening because of the guideline applied by Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta:  ”It’s not how good the training is, it’s how good we use the training.”    They used success case evaulation to apply their leadership training and ”learn their way forward” with “evalu-actions” planned from the very start… 

I hope you’ll join the post-webcast discussion to hear more and exchange comments below… 

Here are some related questions from HCI members: 

How do you efficiently and effectively manage follow-up logistics, such as coaching learners post-training; communicating with the learners’ managers; seeking success stories; etc. How many staff are dedicated to making this follow-up process work well? How much time is dedicated to this process?
 

What direct ways do you connect the learning with increased revenues and cost savings?

Peter Capelli suggests that business is changing too fast for 5 year succession planning scenarios (based on what business needs will be) to be meaningful or accurate [insert link].    He also suggests that too many organizations have sought the short cut of buying talent outside, rather than develop in-house talent. These insights lead me to pose two questions on the development “opportunity space” that remains: l) How do organizations identify the right short-term development priorities?  And/or  2) What are the “mission critical” underlying foundational competencies to develop that will be the basis for learning whatever is needed?

Let’s take each question in turn:

1. How do organizations identify the right short-term development priorities?
   In a recent HCI webcast, presenter Mitchell Nash focused on how organizations can identify their “pivotal talent.”  The example he shared was from the airline industry…that pivotal talent was not the obvious pilots who fly the plane, but in these economic times that the pivotal talent may well be the fuel negotiators.  What then are the “mission critical competencies” for this pivotal talent?   Perhaps it’s effective negotiation skills, but whatever the answer, herein lies an opportunity for talent development professionals to partner with the business to just-in-time enhance the competencies that are most critical to the success of the fuel negotiators, or whomever their pivotal talent is.
2. What are the “mission critical” underlying foundational competencies to develop that will be the basis for learning whatever is needed?   In a recent HCI webcast, Susan Foley from Babson Executive Education shared her recent research on 17 critical competencies to the pivotal talent who would grow the business (such as navigating uncertainty, strategic & analytical thinking,  market/customer focused, collaborative, independent thinking, problem solving, tolerance for stress) [insert link], of which a handful were the most critical (including willingness to take on challenge, growth, and change, driven and motivated by the excitement of a challenge, passionate communications).

My question to the world of talent developers is, keeping in mind the shortened learning curves, and near-sighted requirements by necessity, is learning agility the most important competency?  How do you go about developing mission critical competencies in your organization to get ‘the right people, with the right know-how in the right places at the right time?   I look forward to your posts…