Insights About Important Development Assignments

 

Case Includes:

Strategic HRBP Contribution	Development Assignments
70-20-10	Innovative Implementation Ideas

Situation:

Well into a full competency implementation, Global HR Directors remained committed to monitoring how well new practices were going. And beyond insights within their own BU, they would up and schedule a meeting to share observations, to share learning how something could have been done better, ask for help in dealing with a problem they felt to close to, to be objective, etc.

This brief case is the story of one such meeting: an insight by one of these amazing people about giving a tough development assignment to one of their high potentials.

Action:

She drew a diagram of their typical high potential person who would leave comfortable conditions, and find themselves over-whelmed (in many cases) with ambiguity and high-lighted the many question marks the person faced. Although they had previously agreed upon what a helpful ‘on-boarding’ would consist of at such times, she posed the question of “Is this enough for them to hit the floor running?” All around they described similar concerns, and the consensus was “no”. She then shared the insight that she had, and even though it was only a one time a success, she knew it was going to make a great contribution. Her idea was that the receiving manager, who would have the high potential reporting to him for the approximately 2 years, needed a serious orientation in what to expect; best things to do & not do; and the periodic ‘what and how are you learning from this?’

She admitted that she lucked out having an excellent person to work with, in applying the insight—so much so that she shared what HE added to the orientation.

Needless to say this was very well received.

Surprises:

Most of the global directors were amazing in their commitment to steward competency & learning agility into the mind-set of their leaders and employees. One example was that they called meetings as needed (versus waiting until a standard scheduled meeting) to discuss a ‘hot insight’ or problem they wanted to hear colleagues’ thinking.

Another example was that they would bring in high level leaders to these meetings to ‘interview’, to play a part with actual reactions, or to ask the whole ‘panel’ of them questions!

A non-disclosed fact in this implementation, that I describe here, was that one Global HR Director refused to participate in the full competency implementation. Here BU President was baffled since he subscribed to the practices, but he would not compel her to collaborate.

This did cause problems when a high potential was offered work in a different BU but the receiving HR Director did what needed to be done.

Conclusions to Share:

There is no one size fits all instructions manual for bringing a talent mind-set into your organization. You have a wonderful opportunity to think it through and create a change in the organization that will continue beyond your tenure.