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The HR Strategy Forum is the California Affiliate of
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The California Connection for Strategic Change HR VPs and Directors HRSF
September 2006 Quarterly Meeting John Dupre, from Mattel, shared with us what he has learned while working with leadership teams to mobilize them to take action. He discussed the need to first raise awareness to get leaders to own their own issues before you can help solve them. John discussed the need to address both personal (e.g. lack of empowerment) and organizational issues (e.g., not developing products fast enough). John illustrated that change in an organization impacts three interrelated issues:
All three issues are critical and focusing on only one issue creates needs in the other two areas. Breakthroughs can only happen when people are focusing on all three issues simultaneously. When focusing on organization improvement, John suggested we will have more success as we move away from having experts solve isolated problems, to getting a diverse group of individuals across the organization (as well as customers) focusing on the whole system. John stated that he saw a real need for leaders to “let go” and allow others to solve problems for the organization. John shared with us a process he uses at Mattel for facilitating organization change, which incorporates all of the principles outlined above. The process, Fitness Profiling, was initially developed by Michael Beer of the Harvard Business School. Fitness Profiling is a simple, organizational improvement process that involves using a cross-functional team to gather data on a particular issues, diagnose the root causes as a group, and then work with senior leadership to develop an action plan that will create change. In closing John pointed out several key conditions for success:
Leading Business
Systems: Mastering the Hard AND Soft Skills of Leadership Dan Stead of Hewlett Packard (HP), and Chris Pollino of Personnel Decisions Incorporated (PDI) shared with us an innovative process they created to help develop the hard and soft skills of leadership for the top 1000 leaders at HP. Their development process began by researching best practices in leadership development. A few of the best practices they identified and incorporated into their process included:
Their process involved conducting a 360-degree feedback assessment prior to beginning the process, participation in a 4 day business simulation, and feedback and coaching for several months following the simulation. What was unique about their process was they focused not only on building business skills (the “what” of leadership) but also on getting managers to understand and exhibit HP’s Leadership Behaviors (the “how” of being a leader). During the simulation multiple teams participated at the same time. Metrics were pre- established and teams were scored at the end of each day to determine how effective they were (given changing business conditions). Results from the simulation indicated that participants did learn over time and their performance improved. One of the key driving factors for developing this process was to improve leader’s understanding of HP’s new business strategy. Pre and post survey results indicated a strong improvement in understanding of the business strategy across the organization. Hiring and Developing World
Class Talent Larry Norton, Vice President Organization Development, PetSmart, and Rich Trafton, Senior Consultant & General Manager of Personnel Decisions Incorporated (PDI) presented how they worked together to reshape Talent Management at PetSmart. Norton began with an overview of how PetSmart’s business model changed to focus on services and solutions in order to differentiate themselves from both other pet retailers and non-specialty retailers like Wal-Mart and Target. Norton and his OD organization engaged senior leadership to increase the focus on leadership talent and capability and worked to redesign and re-align HR systems to better support this new business vision. He led an offsite with PetSmart’s Senior Executive Team to define what it means to be a PetSmart Leader. Together they created a model for success based on professional and personal capability that reflected the best of PetSmart culture. This high-performance vision became the foundation for the HR systems to select, promote and appraise people. PetSmart worked with PDI to develop selection assessments for executive talent, starting with external candidates and broadening the scope to evaluating internal candidates for executive and director-level positions. To date they have assessed over 80 people and have been able to show direct statistical relationships between performance in success factor dimensions and both on-the-job performance and promotability. The behavior model and testing they developed helped them create a data-based approach to getting the right talent to move to company’s new strategy forward. Norton emphasized how his efforts are focused on creating a high performance organization. To make it work, he sees the following elements as critical: senior level support, vision and a good conceptual strategy, objective data on both internal and external talent, and above all, results – hires and promotions that make a real difference. Key Lessons Learned for Optimal Impact of a Talent Management Program:
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