What's the X Factor in Culture, Engagement and Talent Management?

Spoiler Alert: It’s managers and leaders. Now let’s talk about how and why – and what that means about your company’s sustainable growth and success.

How Do You Create a Leadership Pipeline?

Who’s responsible for developing the leaders of your organization’s future? Recent research from DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast suggests that 2/3 of organizations have programs in place for identifying and developing high-potential leaders and that in 85% of those organizations senior management is responsible for identifying and developing those individuals. But it’s a tricky needle to thread for a senior management team. Four key questions help. Who? How many? How? Why? 

Great Culture Goes Beyond Coffee and T-shirts

Read any description of “Great Organizations” and you’ll find a laundry list of customs, rituals, perks and slogans touted as elements of their unique cultures.

Beware!

Customs, rituals, perks and slogans become intertwined with an organization’s culture and help clarify it. They become signs and expressions of cultural values. But they can’t stand alone to create culture. Picking them up from one organization and plunking them down into yours is not a great strategy for optimizing your culture. Too often, looking from the outside in, even smart leaders can miss that point and put the cart before the horse in their efforts to drive culture. Here’s a story to illustrate:

Are You Asking the Right Questions About Engagement?

Engagement may be starting to lose ground as a buzzword in the human capital management conversation, but whatever we decide to call it, it will still impact business performance. Articles recently published in Forbes (May 11, 2015) and (April 4, 2015) are just a couple of examples of where that conversation is heading. The crux of the issue is this:

What Can We Learn from Singapore's Investments in Talent Development?

Let’s start with this premise: Without the right talent, all bets are off on sustainable growth and profitability for any organization. 

Singapore buys into that premise and, over the next five years, will be doubling down on talent development as a critical driver for the country’s continued economic growth. As Singapore celebrates 50 years of independence in 2015, the country’s leaders are looking ahead. They plan to provide SkillsFuture Credits for every Singaporean that never expire and to add regularly scheduled “top-ups” to fund periodic development infusions. Individuals can use these credits to pay for the learning and development opportunities of their choice.

Singapore’s investment will be huge. They plan to spend an average of over $1 billion per year over 5 years to implement the full package of SkillsFuture measures. Singapore’s strategy for ensuring continued growth and economic development for the next 50 years is to invest in talent development.

How will they get the best return on that investment? 

How to Fund a Decade of Leadership Development by Avoiding Just One Bad Hire

Forbes recently reported that among the world’s top 2,500 publicly held companies, the cost to shareholder value of an unplanned CEO departure comes in at $1.8 billion more than a planned departure.

That’s a lot of zeroes. Way more zeroes than the average salary of those CEOs.

Most of those unplanned departures result from bad hiring decisions. Based on an average CEO salary of $12 million for Fortune 500 companies, that makes the multiplier on a CEO’s salary greater than 100x if you want to understand just how costly the wrong hiring decision can be for the world’s top companies.

Odds are, your company is not among the world’s top 2,500. Maybe your organization isn’t even publicly held. For you, what is the cost of a poor hiring decision in the highest ranks of your company?

Scouting Leadership Talent

Scouting and developing leadership talent is the holy grail in human capital management. Leadership tops the list of CEOs’ concerns about the future, and they are wise to be concerned about it because building leadership pipelines for the future of their organizations is the only way CEOs, or any leader, can leave a legacy that outlasts their own tenure with the organization.

If you’re going to scout any kind of talent, you have to know what it looks like.

Some kinds of talent are evident early on: Beethoven composed his first symphony when he was seven, Tiger Woods was swinging a golf club before the age of two.

• What are the early signs of leadership talent? 

•  How do you know leadership talent when you see it? 

•  What does it look like? 

Balanced Self-Regulation: The Key to Unlocking Your Leadership Potential

The best leaders know that EQ trumps IQ when it comes to sustaining leadership effectiveness for the long haul. Leaders with higher levels of emotional intelligence can leverage their own emotions (and the emotions of others) to create better outcomes – for their business, their clients, their shareholders and the people they lead.

Daniel Goleman calls self-regulation “a star leader’s secret weapon.” As an aspect of emotional intelligence that allows us to choose how we will respond to emotions, self-regulation is the engine that drives our ability to express emotional intelligence in our interactions with people. If emotions handcuff us (or others) to our impulses, self-regulation is the key to freedom -- but only if it's balanced.

Can You Afford Succession Planning?

Figuring out how much succession planning costs is relatively easy. You can put a price tag on what it costs to staff and implement your ongoing succession planning activities and your associated leadership development efforts. What's harder to figure out is how much it costs your organization not to invest in intentional succession planning and the leadership development that goes along with it. The more important questions might be:

Leadership Turnover Costs More Than You Think

Nobody likes to think about it, but the cost of turnover is a huge hidden cost in your business. Here's a good analogy. A leaky toilet. Did you know a single leaky toilet can waste as much water in one month as the average single-family home uses altogether in one month? The cost of your average leaky toilet? $840 per year. Higher than you thought? So is the cost of turnover in your business.