In the post Headworth discusses the practice of buying-up talent as part of a strategy to "crowd-out" competitors, prompting a number of interesting comments from readers about the ethics and business sense of the doing so.
The approach can help organisations to establish and maintain market dominance in hyper competitive situations. However, as several of the comments allude to, the strategy can only work whilst the talent acquired is engaged in employment that continues to meet their aspirations - in other words, the organisation remains their employer of choice. When aspirations are no longer being met and employees see alternative means of achieving them, then the approach is at risk of crumbling. I find this debate fascinating and am interested to see what others make of it.
Sticking with talent strategy, Kim Lamoureaux posted Tackling Your Blockers to the Bersin & Associates blog in which she contends that:
"There are three common scenarios that companies face with blockers.
He is a high performer, however the role would give a high potential a critical experience.
He is a good performer, but there are other individuals who could do the job better.
He is an underperformer and is blocking others from promotion."
Lamoureaux then goes on to offer useful recommendations for dealing with each of the three scenarios before sharing the following insight:
"There are positions in every company that are either critical to certain career paths or that provide high potentials with a key experience. If you can identify what those roles are, you will be able to treat them as “rotational” assignments and set the expectation accordingly. For example, at ARAMARK, the safety leader role is designed as a 2-year rotational assignment. The role offers employees with the opportunity to develop core leadership competencies and exposes them to senior business leaders. It is also recognized as a career builder for high potentials."
You'll need to zoom in (Ctrl+) to see the details but the colour coding helps to give an at-a-glance overview of 10 of the most well known brands.
My second pick appeared on Malaysia Tomorrow and was authored by Sara LaForest and Tony Kubica. In Succession Planning: How to Meet Future Talent Needs the authors provide 3 reasons "why you need to immediately implement a succession planning strategy":
In this week's Three To See: Productivity, performance and changing expectations.
There is a touch of levity in my first pick which comes via Andy Headworth's blog Sirona Says: Xerox'sInformation Overload Syndrome video raises some serious points on productivity and performance wrapped-up in genuine comedy (although I'm not comfortable with the dart scene at the end).
Holincheck skims the touch points in the employment lifecycle where performance factors (Hiring/Onboarding, Learning/Development, Career Path/Planning, Succession Planning and Compensation) and determines that:
"The answer, to me, is not to get rid of the performance review. It is to do a better job of appraising performance and communicating with employees."
He goes on to share the following options:
Get rid of forced ranking, but keep calibration
Make sure that total compensation alignes with performance, value delivered, and the market
Find other ways to recognize the highest performance other than just compensation
Keep an ongoing performance dialogue going
Before concluding that:
"The bottom line is that I do not think performance reviews will go away because the feedback loop is critical to talent management success. What needs to improve is the performance conversation. Technology can help in some respects, but managers and executives need to step up their game."
Kevin Wheeler's post to ERE: Why Recruiting Good People Will Get Harder and Harder explores the changing attitudes to work of some professionals who are choosing blended careers over full-time work with a single organisation.
This phenomenon, fuelled by recent experiences of the recession, see's some workers engaged in multiple jobs, partial self-employment or other self-sustaining activity that acts as a hedge against economic uncertainty and engenders lifestyle resilience.
Wheeler observes that:
"Individuals are finding new freedoms and exploring their own capacity and taste for change and entrepreneurism. Some organizations are looking for ways to adapt to all of this without endangering their own success, but it may be that these two different needs are not compatible. We will find out over the next 10 years or less. Certainly manufacturing firms and companies where hands-on work is required will not be able to flex to these changes. They will face friction between the workers whose jobs allow them to be virtual or part-time or flex-time and those whose work does not."
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
Brian Chappell of Ignite Social Media shared geographic, demographic and traffic data from the 2009 Social Network Analysis Report's look at more than forty social networks. The data is displayed in a series of easy to understand charts with brief analysis on each of the social networks included in the report - useful information for anyone using 'social' for talent acquisition.
Staying with social, if you are thinking about using social media for pre-employment background checks then Steve Bruce's post to the HR Daily Advisor blog; Background Checks on Myspace - Dangerous or Due Dilligence is worth reading - not least for some of the sensational examples of what employers have found when conducting internet searches.
I hope that you enjoy this weeks Three To Read - if you'd like more, please see what else I've bookmarked at http://delicious.com/craigendicott.
My first pick comes from NBC's comedy The Office: An American Workplace (which I prefer to the British original). 
