ORGANISATIONS that give people planning as much airtime as budgets and business planning are more likely to ensure a strong pipeline of talent in the future a management forum heard recently
ORGANISATIONS that give people planning as much airtime as budgets and business planning are more likely to ensure a strong pipeline of talent in the future, a management forum heard recently.
Speaking at the IQPC Human Capital Management Summit in Sydney, Tanya Southey, vice president, human resources for GE Money Australia said executive support for building talent should be in an organisation’s DNA. GE Money started their succession planning process many years ago.
“Jeff Immelt, our current CEO and chairman, has continued to build on the [tradition established by the American CEO Jack Welch].
“He spends 20 days a year formally assessing how robust our talent pipeline is in our six main business groups. This level of commitment is cascaded through the organisation,” she said.
“In these sessions we focus growth of the business and how it is linked to the performance of our leaders. The importance placed on these meetings, means that our leaders take it seriously.”
And taking the attraction, retention and development of talented staff seriously will be increasingly important for all organisations. As the pool of skilled workers gets smaller and smaller competition will be fierce.
“We all know that the talent market is shrinking externally, due to the baby boomers beginning to leave the workforce,” Southey said.
“At the same time, the demand for talent is increasing, which not only has an impact on filling roles, but also from a retention perspective.”
For HR professionals wanting to increase their organisation’s return on people, they need to remember that “building talent is a combination of understanding the business strategy, having a deep knowledge of internal talent and knowing the external market”, she said.
“For instance, at GE, HR is involved in GE’s three year strategic business plan. It is our job to answer the question ‘what does this mean from a people perspective?’
“Once you know what the business strategy is, you need to look at the internal talent and then also factor in what the external market is doing,” Southey said.
Another factor is sharing talent plans across business units. Line managers never want to give up their best talent, but the trick is to ensure that the talent pool is robust enough for the line manager to have an equally good replacement, she said.
