Value for both the Board and the Executive Team
The Board of a public sector organization asked their CEO to provide them with a clearer, more in-depth review of the top executives in the organization. They needed richer information in order to better understand the depth of the succession bench in the organization.
Handfield Jones was hired by the Senior Vice President of Human Resources to help her establish what should be included in the new talent presentation for the Board. In the past, the presentation covered dozens of people with a small amount of information on each of them. Instead, the new presentation would focus on deep assessments of the top six executives and a few possible successors to those roles.
Helen also worked with the SVP to design a set of criteria to guide the CEO’s evaluation of each of his top executives. Helen worked at length with the CEO to help him articulate his assessments and together they created individual action plans for everyone. Afterward, Helen prepared an executive summary and a more detailed report for the Board.
The Board found the in-depth assessments very helpful. Moreover, because the CEO received so much insight from this exercise, he felt there was a lot to be gained by having his VPs go through the same intense process. Helen then guided each VP through a talent review discussion of every one of their direct reports, with the full participation of the CEO and SVP of HR.
When this round of reviews was complete, summary talent charts of the director talent pool were produced and Helen facilitated a discussion with the senior executive team about the implications of the overall picture. The organization is committed to repeating a similar review of its executive talent every year.
Raising the Talent Acumen Among Senior Executives and HR Managers
Handfield Jones was invited to teach a full-day session on talent management, as part of an extensive leadership development program for the top 300 executives of a major Canadian bank. The top HR executives wanted Helen to cover the fundamental basics of good assessment, feedback and career development.
Helen taught a program that took the executives through sample evaluations, talent discussions, action plans, and feedback letters. She helped them understand how important it is to discuss each individual in depth with other leaders, to get a clear, insightful understanding of each unique person. And she helped stretch their thinking about the types of action plans to consider for low performers, high potential leaders, and everyone else in between.
The seminar had a major impact on the senior executives that participated and prompted them to ask their HR partners to help them raise their game substantially on the talent discussions and assessments they were doing. As a result, the senior HR leaders asked Handfield Jones to advise them on how to make the formal talent review process more effective, and how to strengthen the skills of the many HR managers in the area of talent management. This work eventually included advice on creating a new kind of HR role – talent advisors – and training the HR partners to more effectively lead discussions about the talent in the executive ranks of the organization.
Helping the CEO Reach Deep Into the Organization
The CEO of a large division of a public company wanted to implement a more rigorous process for assessing the leaders in the organization and reached out to Handfield Jones for help.
Helen began the assignment by designing a talent review process and then creating individual talent profiles for the top 10-30 managers in each of several business units. Every profile contained pertinent information about the person’s education and job experience, results against a performance scorecard, leadership competencies, a rating of their performance and potential strengths and weaknesses.
Afterwards, Helen led intense discussions with the various management teams from each unit. Approximately 40 minutes were spent on each person, clarifying their performance, sometimes reworking the scorecard to better reflect the business and always landing on a clear action plan. The CEO was a strong contributor to each of these discussions. The process helped him to better understand what was going on deep within each business unit and it helped the business leaders to be much more deliberate about how each position contributed to business results.
Helen led these talent review discussions with the original business units for the next three years, until the process was well established and the executives developed the talent acumen skills to carry on without the assistance of the outside facilitator. Now, whenever the company makes an acquisition, Helen leads the first talent review process to educate the new participating leaders and ensure they get off to a good start.
