Marseille Conference Report (3): Corporate Best Practice
This theme brought together a number of managers from leading companies who are responsible for managing the development of leaders, high potentials, middle managers and technical staff.
Harald Borner, Director of SAP’s Top Talent described why he was recruited and why he reports directly to the CEO of one of Europe’s most successful hi-tech companies.
The original system for identifying high potentials showed the following characteristics:
With the promotion of Henning Kagelman as CEO, the new system for identifying high potentials became a priority for SAP’s strategy.
After 1 ½ years in as TopTalent Director, Harald Borner and his team are organizing regular events that involve the company’s leaders in developing talent. These include:
- Top Talent Summit meetings in different regions
- Top Talent Fellowship Program
- International breakfasts with the CEO Breakfasts
- Regional gatherings of high potentials in theTop Talent Forum
- Tracking mobility of Top Talent for in an online Marketplace
- Individual one-on-one meetings with senior high potentials.
- Mentoring Program by top management
- Global Leadership Development training program
He also described the issues he is facing in managing a worldwide talent population where focus on performance has improved but has had a negative impact on other criteria, especially work/life balance.
Chris Thompson, Consultant and Former Human Resources Development Manager, Microsoft Europe, Middle East and Africa described a study done on what it takes to be a great leader, defined as one who gets results on all dimensions of the Balanced Scorecard: financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth by fostering human, information and organisational capital.
There was a strong link between performance and the time managers spend with their people, and on people issues. This often takes up half of their working time. He underlined that the leaders he studied know their business really well. This means that they can free up the time to work on developing talent and work on longer-team strategic issues.
Laurent Choain, Director of Top Management, Caisse d’Epargne was recruited for the job when this savings bank, more than a hundred years old and originally set up to help French workers and farmers save money for their future, decided to become an international bank able to manage services at all levels. In only ten years, the top management of the Caisse d’Epargne were able to transform themselves with a new strategy, proving that a collegial management structure can change effectively. Now the challenge is to recruit and develop high potentials with very different career perspectives and personal profiles. Rather than adopting a centralized approach, Choain explained, he invited the managers to freely nominate candidates for their high potential programs. This had the effect of eliminating the most important obstacle to implementing a high potential program – lack of active support from top management. He concluded personal development and management training are two completely different things: personal development starts by becoming a recognized member of a specific, long-term, empowered task force.
Personal development cannot be limited to top managers and high potentials. The semiconductor industry is the fastest growth industry worldwide. To show how Europe’s largest chip manufacturer, STMicroelectronics manages personal development at the plant level, François Suquet, Human Resources Director, and Corinne Demée, Communication & Total Quality Director, described initiatives at the Rousset plant near Marseille. This population of the plant is highly educated with more the 70% of staff having an engineering degree, so encouraging personal expression and involvement is as important as developing skills and competencies. A key challenge at Rousset was how to develop more flexible and motivating career paths and this required managers able to introduce personal development as a dimension of team effectiveness. Average training time was increased from 39 to 46 hours per year between 2002 and 2006. To show that ideas are taken seriously, a key motivation factor, the traditional suggestion box tool was updated to deal with 5,000 suggestions and initiatives per year with feedback for every suggestion and recognition events at the plant but also with colleagues in other ST plants worldwide.