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?

When rewards and incentives become part of your culture and brand, your organization can fully leverage these tools for optimal talent management. Learn how organizations are re-thinking both the concept and practice of reward and recognition to connect your talent with goals that matter to them and your organization’s business strategies. 

Our Nov 13 webcast  ”Money Can’t Buy Love, But Rewards & Incentives Can” will explore these ideas…we hope you’ll engage in a lively post-webcast dialog with presenter Paula Godar and share your insights, experiences and questions below…

HCI members ask: 

Do rewards and recognition always have to work together?   What are examples of when one might be effective without the other?

How might organizations find out which of the six motivations would work for individuals in their company?   Is a menu a feasible approach to customizing R&R on an individual basis?

In a stressed economy, does cash have more impact than non-cash rewards?

Since the presenter’s research shows that non-cash rewards have an emotional connotation and meaning, might they be better suited to initiatives to encourage creativity and innovation?  And…isn’t that what companies will need most in a stressed economy?

How might organizations connect their investment in rewards and recognition to business results?

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?

Thinking diversity (the different ways people think) creates an environment that realizes “maximum value,” in individuals and teams.   Not surprisingly managers are a catalyst to encourage thinking diversity, often leading to break-through innovation.    If you’re a manager of a team or a member of a team with diverse perspectives, we hope you’ll weigh in on our webcast and participate in this post-webcast blog discussion with our presenter Nick Pothecary.

HCI member asks: What are 2-3 things a manager can do to boost the thinking diversity in their teams?

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?

When I was a kid, my big sister had an autograph book in which a friend wrote: “Pam, Pam sitting on a fence trying to make a dollor oout of 99 cents.”  Well, companies, too, are trying to get more for their money these days, in terms of a smart spend in talent management.  The science of talent management, drawing from sound research, can position your company to be amongst the best in class for total compensation ROI.

What do you see in your organization as the challenges to effective total compensation?  

Is it parity across business units?  Time required to design and keep plans fresh?  System to award bonuses?  Look forward to your postings and related thoughts below…

In learning organizations often a valuable question or insight relies on another question being asked.  Here are three related questions– Is your talent on fire with innovation?  What factors precipitate talent being fired up to learn?   Where (and with whom) does talent development begin?

Immediately post-hire, new talent wants to learn who the “go to” people are for answers, and how to get things done in keeping with the company culture.   Last week I was on a breakfast panel in NYC at a meeting of the Five O’Clock Club to discuss best in class onboarding with 250 people also interested in how to accelerate time-to-productivity and the related learning curve.   HCI’s webcasts on Onboarding have had over 4000 sign ups from a broad spectrum of HCI members in HR, senior leadership, OD, and hiring managers, indicating there is clearly shared responsibility for developing new talent during the onboarding process. At some point post-hire (3-6 months), after the essential ‘know how’s’ to perform on the job are under one’s belt, motivation to learn may become taken for granted.  Who continues to fan the flames of talent development?  Is talent development a shared responsibility and by whom?

Let’s begin with the learner. Looking at blog directories under the heading of “talent development” I found countless blogs devoted to self-development.  To be frank, my first impulse was to skim right past most of them, because as an OD practitioner and baby boomer, my corporate experience began with answering the question, “what competencies does the organization want to develop?”  I’m not ready to throw that baby (boomer idea) out with the bath water, but upon reflection I think it is more important than ever for organizations to attract, recruit, retain and develop talent who are passionate about self-development and to find out what they want to learn.

Sun Hydraulics is known to hire talent who are passionate about learning through collaboration, and their practice with new talent is to NOT provide job descriptions on day one because a preconceived job description might be too constraining to people’s learning.  Rather, new talent is given a time period post-hire to learn about the company and align their individual motivation to learn with company goals.  What a refreshing an avant guard concept!

Peter Senge says that a learning organization comes from people who are excited and passionate about learning and enjoy learning together in pursuit of a shared purpose. This is the fertile ground for team learning and accomplishing the shared mission.

If people are passionate about self-development, it will be much easier

1) for managers (who are increasingly becoming developers of talent) to engage in conversations about learning and find out what motivates their talent,

2) to connect their interests to learning opportunities and strategic business priorities, because

3) it is these individuals who are likely contributors to innovation as they are committed to learning and continual improvement at their very core.

I invite your posts about learning practices in your organization to develop talent, and in particular learning related to innovation…