In Three To See this week contributions on changing behaviours, workforce planning and research into how companies are using social media.
My first pick is Clay Shirky's 2005 Ted Talk: Institutions vs Collaboration. Its a fascinating presentation about value creation that touches on the Pareto Principle (AKA the 80/20 rule), employee engagement, performance management and the cross-over of social and human capital. Is it really five years old?
My second pick, Recruiting Needs to be Part of Something Bigger was posted by Kevin Wheeler to ERE. Wheeler shares his views on the state of Strategic Workforce Planning and offers up four recommendations.
"An effective workforce planning process should focus on the following four areas:
Gaining market awareness in order to better understand emerging trends and to do competitive analysis around skilled talent.
Integration of talent planning with business planning so that business needs can be translated into needed skills and abilities and so that an understanding of available skills can be included in the business plan.
Development of a system-level focus on identifying key positions and integrating employee development, internal mobility, succession planning, and recruiting.
The use of scenario planning and dynamic modeling to help focus activity and justify investments in a variety of approaches"
Social media demographics, managing succession and a common sense approach to Employee Engagement in this week's Three To See.
My first pick is The Age of Social Networks by Brian Solis who shares his analysis of the age demographics of social media users and draws on a number of useful infographics such as the one below:
Solis comments:
"At the moment, we can see that those 35-44 dominate the social web, representing 25% of total participation. For those who have actively monitored adoption of social networks, this next stat might not come as a surprise, but it’s worth highlighting nonetheless. Following at 19% isn’t a younger generation at all, in fact, those 45-54 are the second most active group within social networks, just ahead of the 25-34 segment at 18%. Individuals under 17 rank fourth with 15%."
""Succession planning" is not just a flawed term, it's based on a flawed business paradigm. In fact, thinking of succession in terms of just "planning" is among the top reasons most organizations perform poorly in this area."
Vickers pulls on research conducted by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD) in partnership with i4cp and observes;
"Yes, succession management should have a planning component. After all, the study shows it's a future-looking process in which the top two goals cited by respondents are to "identify and prepare" future leaders and to "assure business continuity." But many companies focus only on the identification part of the process rather than on the preparation part.
That's reflected in the metrics companies use or, rather, fail to use. When we asked what respondents' organizations are measuring, we found two things:
there's a striking and worrisome absence of solid metrics in regard to succession management, and
the metrics that are most commonly used are very basic indeed. Among those with succession planning programs, a meager 36% even track the positions filled by succession candidates to a high or very high extent and just 31% track the number of candidates in the pipeline to that same extent."
I think that these findings are interesting as they suggest that many organisations still have a long way to go in developing their approach to Succession Management.
Dunn shared this gem from Steve Church, Chief Operational Excellence Officer at Avnet:
"If you help employees fix broken process, you'll gain employee engagement"
I road-tested this statement with senior members of the UK HR community at last week's Sunday Times HR Business Network event (which was sponsored by StepStone Solutions) and it appeared to resonate with many of the practitioners participating in the discussion.
This week's Three To See features contributions on employee loyalty, motivation and succession planning.
My first pick comes from NBC's comedy The Office: An American Workplace (which I prefer to the British original). Episode 8 of Season 2 is a classic and deals with Dunder Mifflin's annual performance review day. One of the characters, Dwight Schrute, delivers this stunning line:
"Would I ever leave this company? Look, I'm all about loyalty. In fact, I feel like part of what I'm being paid for here is my loyalty. But if there were somewhere else that valued loyalty more highly, I'm going wherever they value loyalty the most. "
Roesler shares some interesting observations on how Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs model has been mangled by some managers and suggests that:
"1. Physiological and Stability/Safety needs are met through corporate policies: adequate pay, benefits, and safety procedures. These are satisfied when organizations who claim "People Are Our Most Important Asset" back up the statement by ensuring that these needs are met as a matter of policy and philosophy.
2. The higher level needs can only be satisfied by assignments, development, and solid day-to-day management. This means that "Managers are the Mediators of Meaning" for their people. Surveys and research data consistently show that the immediate supervisor has the most impact on one's performance, productivity, and feelings about the workplace."
"There are three reasons to do a succession plan, and identifying a replacement for the CEO and select top executives is only part of one of these reasons. The three reasons are:
Replacement for key employees
To support anticipated growth
To address and deal with talent shortages"
Kubica and LaForest expand upon each of these three points and make several recommendations to managing succession:
Assign responsibility for succession planning to the executive team members (and make its success part of their evaluation process)
Identify needs/key roles currently and in the future that reflect several layers deep
Develop and use methods/tools/techniques for identifying employee competencies and aspirations
Implement a structure for developing potential successors
Implement a structure for transitioning successors to and in new role(s)
Identify and emergency or interim process to fulfill a role if for some reason the potential successor does not work out.
Align your recruitment initiative to succession planning by forecasting key needs and interviewing for growth orientation and adaptability
Evaluate plan effectiveness and update the plan as required, at least annually
In your organisation who is responsible for Succession Planning? Is it owned at C-level, is it owned by individual line managers or is it owned by HR?
OK, OK, this question is a lot like asking who is responsible for Talent Management. But for me, Succession Planning is an interesting topic because its an easy way to introduce the concept of Talent Management to people that are not HR practitioners because Succession Planning is all about managing risk.
Risk Management is something that anybody in the organisation can understand. Risk Management leads to conversations about Business Continuity, resilience and inevitably to scenario planning and at that point Succession Planning becomes a 'hard' topic with none of the 'fluff' of other talent management concepts (eg Recognition, Career Planning and Skills and Leadership Development)perceived by those outside HR. In the context of risk management Succession Planning is vital in keeping the organisation running through periods of forced change.
The traditional HR view of Succession Planning is fairly straight-forward. The short-term emergency is typically about filling a vacated seat, usually of a senior executive and sometimes of key technical staff. This point is well articulated in the clip: Refilling The Pipeline.
The medium-term is about mapping the current workforce to future organisational design and understanding the development needs of a group of 'High Potentials' that may go on to succeed members of the current senior management team. The long-term looks at the capabilities needed by the organisation and the career path from entry level jobs through to C-level.
The traditional approach to Succession Planning takes a linear perspective, based on 'business as usual' conditions, geared to the higher echelons, reinforcing the organisational 'chain of command'. It is biased towards seniority and strata as a framework and on filling vacancies as an outcome rather than replacing talented individuals. Replacing talented individuals is many times more difficult than filling a vacancy and, in organisations with flatter structures, Succession Planning requires more creativity.
My first pick comes from NBC's comedy The Office: An American Workplace (which I prefer to the British original). 
