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.

Over the past few months I've posted a few times on the need to base workforce planning decisions on accurate factual data.

Dr John Sullivan has blogged extensively on this topic over the past few weeks. In his most recent posting to ERE, Dr Sullivan has neatly summarised some techniques for workforce planning that give organisations agility in terms of flexing headcount to meet changing demands.

I particularly liked the idea of what he referred to as the 'Shamrock Strategy' - grouping employees into 4 categories:

1. Those that are contracted on a contingent or temporary basis
2. Those in roles that can be outsourced
3. Those in key roles with the requisite skills and perform at a satifactory level
4. Those under performing individuals that can be substituted by other higher potential colleagues or new hires.

However in order to to implement this strategy organisations need to know which individuals sit in each category before taking action.

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