It takes more than happy staff to create customer loyalty. Matching your customers’ experience to your brand promise takes more than service skills– both organizational systems and your culture need to be customer-driven. If your talent is involved in design and execution of service delivery and customer feedback processes, you can gain and maintain a competitive edge.

From small businesses to large, your talent can build trust, service quality, consistency with brand promise, and organizational ability to identify unmet needs.
Join, download our webcast to hear presenter Patrick Mosher from Accenture, and examples from companies who leverage the talent connection and achieve business growth through referrals and customer loyalty.  We invite you to add your insights, comments and questions below…

HCI members ask:

1. What impact do systems and processes have on the motivation of customer-facing talent?
2. How can talent collect customer experience data (qualitative or quantitative) to help re-examine processes & systems that affect customer loyalty?
3. How can the best customer service talent share their knowledge within the organization?  And how could systems be implemented to support sharing these critical knowledge management practices?

“Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.” –Michael Jordan 

Teambuilding, HCI’s new e-learning track in Talent Development, launches Oct 29 with a great webcast on cross-functional product teams. As talent factors inseparably into business success, the talent that makes up your product teams and the effectivness of your product teams becomes paramount.  Teams that take charge of a product as if they were running their own business is the focus of our first webcast.  Our presenter, Steven Haines, author of  “The Product Managers’ Desk Reference” will share how cross-functional product teams meet the business challenge posed by Jim Collins…combining discipline with entrepreneurship as the alchemy of good performance.

HCI members we look forward to your insights, comments and questions…

What are the challenges product teams face (from HCI members):

“Beasts” (challenges interdisciplinary product teams face)

Question: lack of corporate vision

Question: disaparate experience levels and decision rights among functions

Question: In so many cases, the project/product is just one of many priorities - for the dedicated core team members as well as the associate and extended team members. competing with the other projects for resources is very tough
stion: team members don’t follow through with actions. they dont know how to begin.

Question: Challenges commonly faced are individual agendas and bureaucracy to get things done (too many layers for approval

Question: indecision by executives. constantly changing directions

Question: Commitment of resources - dollars and material resources needed to move at timetable needs.

Question: Resource contraints and scope creep

Question: Motivation towards reaching a common goal

Question: We have a direction but internal issues dealing with accepting new direction.

Question: short term view; lack of a sense of urgency; tunnel vision or lack of a comprehensive view of how the projects fit within the context of the whole

Question: beasts are jealousy, territoriality, inadequate commuications, unresolved conflicts, a culture that works against working in teams and more

Question: Execution on timeline

Question: Poor disemination of information.

Question: We have a lot of them. Top down planning by management that does not want to invest in the business, yet looks to us for revenue growth. People opposed to change, Lack of analytical and problem solving skills. Departmental goals given higher priority than company goals.

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?
    

A children’s rope-skipping rhyme, “Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor,
rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief”

came to mind as I reflected on four recent HCI webcasts and interviews on how EI competencies benefit multiple occupations:

Law enforcement      Retail      Sales    Leadership

Given that EI “enables a person to demonstrate intelligent use of their emotions in managing themselves and working with others to be effective at work” it stands to reason that all of these professions would draw on EI competencies.

What critical competencies did people in these professions learn to be successful? 

If you’re a movie buff or fan of fictional stories based on fact, you may recall the story of “The Great Imposter”   where Ferdinand Waldo Demara  taught himself a number of professions and performed quite well in all of them.  Demara obviously figured out how to continuously learn new competencies.  In today’s knowledge economy, people have more career shifts and changes within their working lifetime than was the case 2-3 decades ago, and tend to change jobs every two years. This statistic referenced in the Boston Globe suggests that “change is good for stoking your passion”.
People who are passionate about self-development and self-directed learning are pre-disposed to make the best use of coaching and company investments in their competency development.   Richard Boyatzis  authored an enlightening article on the EI consortium about “Unleashing the Power of Self-Directed Learning”   He says that most behavioral change is intentional, and that the starting point is the discovery of who you want to be.  

Boyatzis suggests three steps that are critical to a self-directed learning process: 
(1) Experiment and practice to learn more from your experiences
(2) Find settings that feel safe within which to experiment and practice
(3) Develop and use your relationships as part of your change and learning process
Boyatzis reminds us that most of what we become is within our power to create, and offers a thought from the 1835 John Anster translation of Goethe’s Faustus: A Dramatic Mystery. In the Prologue to the Theater :

“What you can do, or dream you can, begin it, Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”
Here are four related questions for your thoughts and comment that I invite you to explore:
1. Where does the passion needed to successfully change jobs come from?
2. How does one learn critical competencies to move into a new job?
3. What does EI have to do with success in any number of occupations?
4. How does EI faciliatate self-directed and other learning?

As integrated talent management advances, the line between performance and a development plan becomes increasingly blurred.   Throwing reward and compensation into the mix adds fuel to talent’s “motivation fire.”   I had a great conversation on skill-based pay and its impact on performance with expert Gerry Ledford recently after he presented at an HCI webcast.  I wanted to know more about how SBP (skill-based pay) can be used in a development plan to develop potential.  Gerry replied, “An easy way to do this: think of an annual bonus or merit increase as having two components - performance and skill/competency development. The latter makes future performance possible. They could be equally weighted or differently weighted. The skills/competencies can be based on concrete goals or ‘learning contracts’, just like bonuses are often based on meeting performance goals.”  I think there is great merit in organizations taking this intentional approach, especially in a knowledge economy. 

Let’s take this approach of “earning for learning” another step…since organizations are more committed than ever to building vs. buying talent, and giving attention to the competencies that will be needed in stretch assignments, I want to know more about
factoring strategic competencies into (development for) succession plans…  if you’ve seen this in practice, please enter your posts…

Recently I read that effective incentive plans run about 60 days; taking this into consideration for skill-based pay, what if it takes longer than 60 days to learn a competency?  This HBR article  recognizes the time it takes to learn a skill, and supports the value of separating out the compensation for performance from compensation for learning a skill.   “Leadership is essential for fostering the mindset, group behaviors, and organizational investments that promote learning now and invest in performance later… start with the general proposition that learning promotes performance.” 

I would suggest that talent managers who wish to promote learning in support of performance improvement can light their “earning for learning” platform on fire.   And, leveraging learning for performance may reasonate particularly with the millennial generation who may not always know what they don’t know (the “unconscious incompetence”). Though by no means does any one generation have a corner on unconscious incompetence…personally as a boomer, I like the idea of ending every week with the question, “what did I learn and how does this fit with my performance goals?”   If you have experience with skill-based pay or ideas on how to communicate and implement it with development plans, I hope you’ll enter your posts to this blog…