Harmful HiPo's, competitive intelligence and what business leaders want from HR in this week's Three To See.

My first pick; The Voice of the Business Leader on HR and Talent Needs, comes from Bersin & Associates analyst Stacey Harris.

Harris shares insight from interviews with business and HR leaders conducted as part of recent research into high impact HR organisations, noting that:

"When senior business executives think of their most critical business challenges we found that they were looking at tomorrow, not today. HR Leadership is often (and rightly so) focused on business challenges organizations are facing today."

The table below, which comes from the post, highlights this difference in priorities.

Harris goes on to say that business leaders have expressed a need of four things from their colleagues in HR:

1. Reducing missed Talent opportunities, creating Bench Strength
2. One Stop Shop, Single Point of Contact
3. More Strategic HR
4. Answers and Options, versus data and reports

My next pick came via Chris Young over at the Maximize Possibility blog.  Dan McCarthy made an interesting post to his Great Leadership blog: Managing the "Toxic High Performer" in which he discusses the importance of taking an approach to performance management that values both the results AND behaviours of employees.

My final pick, 15 Competitive Intelligence Tools for Recruiting, was posted to the Talent Buzz blog by Jason Buss and lists resources that can be used in "the systematic gathering of open information and analysis to provide a better understanding of a competitor firm’s structure, culture, behavior, capabilities, and weaknesses."

There are some great tools catalogued in the post that can be used not only to understand competitor organisations, target potential hires and build talent pipeline, but also to inform your organisation's employer brand protection and development programmes.

I spent yesterday at StepStone’s UK leg of its global seminar series ‘HR’s Time to Shine’.  It was a good day with a mix of informal networking, round-table discussion and presentations kicked off by Bettina Pickering of PA Consulting Group who shared some of her experience of organisations putting talent management on the agenda of the Board and at the centre of operations by demonstrating the link between human capital and financial performance.

The session was followed by StepStone’s Scott Morton who presented on the dilemma faced by many organisations going through restructuring at present – to retain and train or make reduce headcount.  “Organisations are facing unprecedented challenges and need to weigh up the financial and reputational cost of making redundancies now and then hiring in the upturn against maintaining headcount and developing people to take on the challenges of the next economic cycle.  In reality many organisations are doing both at the same time – a finding of the EIU’s report, The Cold War Talent says Scott.

Ruth Mundy, HR Director with Mouchel and a long standing customer of StepStone was next up.  Ruth ‘stole the show’ with her frank descriptions of Mouchel’s approach to managing talent, the challenges of implementing policies, processes and tools and how she and her team have overcome them.  In the panel discussion later in the day Ruth provided great insight and shared some of the learning from her experience.

The presentations were finished off by Robert Symons’ passionate speech on the ‘Power of Information’.  Robert, StepStones Sales Director for UK & Ireland, echoed the sentiments of other speakers when he talked about the downturn presenting HR with a golden opportunity to demonstrate it relevance and importance to the Board and other stakeholders he went on to suggest that this could be achieved by providing predictive (not just lagging) indicators to support organisational decision making, repositioning HR practitioners as Critical Resourcing Officers - an exciting term based on the often used phrase that ‘people are our most important resource’.

People and their contributions are increasingly recognised by Chief Executive Officers as the most important factor in determining organisational success.  We’ve all read articles about how its keeping them awake at night and its not surprising given that is has been proposed that having your ‘A team’ rather than ‘B team’ on the field can improve contribution to the bottom line by 40%, if you’re fielding a ‘C team’ that gap increases to 80% a disadvantage that no organisation can afford.

I'm looking forward to hearing more from the other sessions in the series - next stop Moscow!