Talent Management Consulting & Coaching Raleigh, NC
General Norman Schwarzkopf decorated military hero and strategist during the Gulf War has been reported by observers serving on the fields alongside Schwarzkopf as the epitome of leadership. 
One story reminds us of a such a time. While Schwarzkopf was visiting U.S. Troops in Saudi Arabia(1990) he received word that men under his command had encountered a minefield on the notorious Batangan Peninsula. Rushing to the scene by helicopter, he found several soldiers still trapped in the minefield. Schwarzkopf urged them to retrace their steps slowly. One of the men tripped a mine and was severely injured but remained conscious. As the wounded man flailed in agony, the soldiers around him feared that he would set off another mine. Schwarzkopf, also injured by the explosion, crawled across the minefield to the wounded man and held him down so another could care for his leg injury. Infested with landmines, Schwarzkopf’s discernment and resolve eventually, led his surviving men to safety. His act of courage to find freedom for his troops and a nation meant he would have to lay down his own life.
Finding Freedom
For many of us, we may never have to demonstrate that level of bravery and courage like our forefathers, military service men and women have done, but each day management faces a unique set of situations in an uncertain world that can raise the question as to whether freedom remains in our nation and is possible to achieve in workplaces for the future.
The new reality reminds us that the status of our lives personally and professionally has been changed forever. Aside from regulation, trends in global competition, slow workforce population growth rates, impending retirements of baby-boomers, and increasingly flatter organizational structures have contributed.
How do you find freedom in the new workplace amid rapid change? Intuitively, we know that freedom is never free, that it comes with a high price. Therefore, when we honor the gift by accepting personal accountability, we find our freedom. For leaders this means accepting your stewardship role ~ including your success.
How you define success at work has direct impact on the freedom you’ll ultimately experience. Below are several tips leaders can take to renew freedom in the changing world of work:
The road to freedom requires focus and the intrinsic passion to be free. Imagine if you were able to achieve success in one or all of these areas mentioned?
Find support and resources to help you take freedom even further. Become a member of our new community – - by registering here, it’s FREE!
© 2011 All Rights Reserved. The Infusion Group LLC. Judy White, SPHR, GPHR, HCS is the President of The Infusion Group, LLC, a people management consulting and coaching firm located in Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina. Optimizing workplace solutions, www.theinfusiongroupllc.com Follow: @TheInfusionGrpLLC To request reprint permission, please contact the Infusion Group™
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Are you feeling overshadowed by the expanding technologies in the new workplace? Are you feeling as though elements of your management role are becoming less important or even irrelevant now? If you, like many managers, answered yes to those questions, be assured your feelings are normal. They flow with the transition that is under way in many workplaces all across America.
New technologies and collaborative platforms offer employees, customers, clients, candidates, and shareholders with increased access to information. As a result, there is less dependence on managers as information keepers and providers. With enhanced tools such as company intranets and internal career websites, information is readily accessible and employees, clients, and customers have more options at hand as they make business and work life decisions. So you might be asking yourself: “If I’m not the key information provider, what will my role become?”
To help you discover an answer, let’s consider what has evolved in the last 10 years. More routine task-oriented positions moved outside of the U.S., while new technologies and social sites like MySpace, Blogger, Flickr, and Facebook came to the forefront. People began to connect with others from around the globe, and children began to experience the creative tools for drawing, writing, and designing in digital formats while social learning began to accelerate. If you’re a parent, how did your role change with your children during this time period?
We found that our own son’s needs slowly shifted between the middle school years and now high school. Over time, we gradually began to discover and understand his needs. Today, he wants us to mentor him more while supporting him from behind the scenes as he learns to explore new solutions to real-life challenges. By understanding his need for information, we are able to help him make better decisions by coaching him to discern the credibility, context, and application of data.
Over recent meetings, I asked business leaders what value they felt they were contributing to their organizations in today’s workplace. These forward-looking leaders acknowledged the opportunities being presented as their management roles change. Much like parents of today’s connected teens they viewed themselves as trusted stewards, collaborators, and mentors based on their experience and not controllers or “bosses.”
As you move through the transition, how might you begin to add different value in your organization and for your team? It takes courage to acknowledge one’s emotions during changing circumstances, but consider the opportunities that are being presented. As the leaders I recently spoke with discovered, by losing some control and sharing more responsibility with their management teams and employees, they were able to breathe a level of confidence into the workplace and, as a result, are gaining a whole new level of respect from their teams.
Consider the following:
Explore our expanding suite of resources to help you meet the challenge of building sustainable business in the new world of work, click here.
© 2011 All Rights Reserved. The Infusion Group LLC. Judy White, SPHR, GPHR, HCS is the President of The Infusion Group, LLC, a people management consulting and coaching firm located in Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina. Follow: @TheInfusionGrpLLC To request reprint permission, please contact the Infusion Group™.
No one quite understands what happens when desire, preparation and sheer tenacity come together. It creates momentum, builds hope and belief. In 1980, 20 young men came together against all odds to overcome one of the greatest teams in the world of hockey. This unproven U.S. Hockey Team won the 1980 Olympics not only for their county, but for their families and themselves and for anyone who has or will face a great challenge.
Before the game, Coach Herb Brooks inspired his team with these eternal words,
“THIS is your time.”
Take a look outside your office door and give close attention to your employees. Remember when you were one of them with your nose down to the grindstone and dreaming about advancing someday? It was those very dreams that fueled your purpose and motivation; unlocking inner qualities that you didn’t realize were there.
Maybe you have a few low performers out there, but overall you’ve got a wonderful group of people. Everyone contributes pretty good work, and a few others shine brightly while most get along and collaborate well throughout the organization. It would be natural to feel content with your team and your leadership.
But look again. Are they playing with everything in them? Are they tired at the end of the day because of the physical, mental and emotional energy extended toward achieving a higher level of greatness? Or are they leaving the office each evening doing good work but just giving enough to get by?
Does it leave you feeling irritated every time you catch the headlines and see another example of our country coming in under it’s real potential? Or do you aspire to achieve knowing that previous generations, like the Traditionalists, individuals and leaders gave 100% and sacrificed so much to end tyranny, win World War II and rebuild our country? There wasn’t time to sit back and say, “Everything will be okay”. Deep within their souls they knew that great moments could only be achieved by extraordinary effort.
The 1980 Olympic Hockey Team looked beyond the odds, believed and went on to achieve.
Do you believe?
Leaders, this is your (our) moment in time. A time to bring the dreams of your employees and colleagues back to a place of purposeful confidence even when the odds may feel stacked, and press beyond any self-imposed limitations and open the doors to the best that others have to offer and accomplish something worthy that nobody thought could be done.
Consider these three decisions:
1) How strong of an emotional tie are you willing to build with your employees? And
2) How much are you willing to challenge them to set new limits?
3) What are you willing to give up in order to achieve 1) and 2)?
© 2011 All Rights Reserved. The Infusion Group LLC. Judy White, SPHR, GPHR, HCS is the President of The Infusion Group, LLC, a people management consulting and coaching firm located in Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina. Creating new possibilities to help you achieve sustainable workplace success, www.theinfusiongroupllc.com Follow: @TheInfusionGrpLLC
Photo Credit: Values.com
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Effective leaders know both the obvious and hidden consequences of losing top talent and the direct impact on those left behind. But while keeping pace with change and managing the day-to-day, leaders often find themselves falling back on people practices that served well during an era that has passed, when workforce supply and demand represented a more stable economic era.
Today, as organizations are becoming flatter, more diverse, and more mobile in the midst of rapid change, the need to identify tomorrow’s talent has become a key business imperative. Recognizing that even with steady unemployment, critical talent is in high demand and short supply as generational and workforce population shifts begin to take hold, some leaders are finding a few leaks in their talent pipeline. How can you tell if your pipeline has sprung a leak?
Consider this actual scenario:
During a facilitated talent review session for a U.S. company, a room of executives listened intently as each of the senior directors described their division’s critical roles and discussed their identified successors, development progress, and succession readiness. Using established criteria, the talent review session provided key insight into the availability of their internal talent and the additional development decisions needed in order to build the leadership qualities necessary to achieve long-term business objectives.
After lengthy discussion, the talent review began to reveal a few leaks. For example, only a few successors were identified for multiple positions. While on the surface this represented highly adaptable individuals who demonstrated cross-boundary competency and were valuable to the organization, it also revealed that the pipeline was insufficiently growing a pool of likely talent for their pivotal and important roles.
Rather than merely patch the leaks, these executives were determined to understand their root causes. Research into various workforce segments revealed several reasons for the leaks; however one of the key discoveries found that a significant percentage of high performers had different long-term ambitions and non-management career objectives. The false assumptions that high performers are high potentials was eye-opening and helped these executives to revisit high-potential strategies and direct the investments and resources to address the gaps and create the developmental experiences that would build broader pools of future leaders.
Forward-looking organizations that are deliberate in cultivating a talent culture design clear plans that attract, retain, develop, and deploy talent across the organization. As talent stewards, they work collaboratively toward a holistic understanding of their talent portfolio and critical skills and then determine a course of action that will develop and deploy capabilities within the organization.
Generating a talent pipeline requires a strategic approach that demands an investment of focus and resources by talent stewards and executive leadership. Executed well, talent development is an investment that pays huge dividends in business performance, adaptability, and competitive differentiation. The question for savvy leaders is this: Are you building highly effective pools to stop leaks from becoming an organizational gush?
Take-Away Message
Learn how we can help you solve retention issues and optimize workplace solutions by visiting www.theinfusiongroupllc.com or by clicking here.
© 2011 All Rights Reserved. The Infusion Group LLC. Judy White, SPHR, GPHR, HCS is the President of The Infusion Group, LLC, creating new possibilities in people management consulting and coaching located in Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina. To request reprint permission, please contact the Infusion Group™.
Photo Credit: iStockphoto
IFG is honored to be featured in this month’s issue of Women With Know How Magazine. Please see the full article below.
Several key trends in technology, globalization, workforce demographics and societal shifts have caused today’s workplace to undergo massive shifts in the midst of lingering fundamental reform and continued economic uncertainty.
For the first time in our nation’s history women represent nearly half of the U.S. workplace. According to the Center for American Progress, working mothers have become key breadwinners or co-breadwinners in nearly two-thirds of American families1. As CEOs and workplace leaders we must consider how these trends and other fundamental shifts will impact our companies going forward. Have you given thought to the following?
While each warrants our consideration we must not neglect the anticipated impact of other workforce trends; each adding another level of complexity while also presenting new opportunities to increase our respective organization’s future competitiveness.
Your company may currently be benefiting from the explosion of mobile technologies and the expertise that the culmination of four diverse generations brings to your workplace. Yet according to the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Labor the domestic working age population is expected to see slower growth rates of 1% through 2015. The working age population in countries such as France, Russia, Italy, the Netherlands, South Korea and Spain continue to decline. According to the United Nations’ World Population Prospects database Japan and Germany are expected to drop by 14% and 7% respecitvely by 2025.
While some baby boomers are expected to delay retirement, an estimated skills gap shortfall in excess of 30 million U.S. workers will still exist. Competition for highly skilled talent is only going to increase. As CEOs and business leaders we need to adapt to the changing environment and have several scenarios in place. We need to plan ahead and design a talent management blueprint that infuses our business strategies while leveraging adaptable scenarios, all while prioritizing investments and exceeding customer needs. We need to re-evaluate how we define value, how we approach talent.
Rather than focusing on age gaps within our workforces, we need to think through the various strengths and capabilities that each generation has to offer. We must first seek to understand our people and design a workplace culture that encourages people from various generations to work and adapt together, each bringing a unique way of thinking and doing. The result will be fresh ideas and a greater appreciation for the knowledge and talent that each individual brings to the workplace community.
The information era has created new opportunities and forever changed the way in which we view and do work. The new workplace is less about a physical location, and more about the ability to connect with colleagues and leading experts around the globe from virtually anywhere. Face-to-face interaction is not going to fade away. However executives and front-line managers must effectively build and manage teams comprised of various cultures and even native languages.
Companies continue to rely on temporary workers and freelancers for flexibility in managing work volumes and efficiencies in an uncertain economic environment. The USA Today2 released data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting that of the 593,000 jobs added by private employers between September and October 2010, 68% were filled by workers placed by temporary-staffing agencies; this constitutes an increase of 404,000 workers.
With these shifts, loyalty can become a serious concern among existing workers who may view their positions in jeopardy of being outsourced or eliminated. Leaders need to exercise caution and focus on existing workers as well as not to alienate critical staff members who may be keeping their options open with the anticipated improvement of the economy.
We’ve read the statistics. We’ve seen and heard the market trends. What can we do as CEOs, as business leaders, to prepare our companies for the future?
Revisit Your Company Values & Make Any Necessary Adjustments
Create an Integrated Talent Management Roadmap
Conduct a Strategic Talent Inventory and Workforce Plan
A flexible workplace culture that can enable performance potential to execute business objectives goes far beyond flex-arrangements, job sharing and telecommunicating.
Every investment into your business matters. Treating talent and culture with the same rigor as other financial considerations can help you prioritize the necessary investments needed to achieve your business strategy now and in the future.
© 2011 All rights reserved. Judy White, SPHR, GPHR, HCS is the President of The Infusion Group ™ LLC, a next generation strategic people management consulting and executive coaching firm based in the Raleigh/Durham, NC area. Partnering with leaders and organizations in designing the new workplace to have meaningful impact on people, businesses and society. For reprint permissions, please contact The Infusion Group™ LLC.
Notes:
1Center For American Progress, The Shriver Report, A Woman’s Nation Changes Everything,
October 16, 2009.
2 The USA Today, Freelance Workers Reshape Companies Jobs, Paul Davidson,October 13, 2010.
Read Women With Know How August 2011 Issue
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When it comes to having information, many agree that there is often too much of it and not enough knowledge. This is often the case when business leaders try to make important talent decisions that will impact their organization’s future. While companies have amassed significant amounts of workforce information from their enterprise resource planning (ERP) and human resource management information systems (HRIS), leaders are often faced with reviewing reports that lack relevant wisdom.
Harnessing the power of workforce data can enable business leaders to make more effective talent-
related decisions in areas such as talent planning, acquisition, compensation, rewards, development programs, and especially deploying critical talent.
Well-defined, high-quality information can provide richer insights into critical segments of your workforce while increasing the level of transparency in communication and highlighting specific trends that help pinpoint the focus on actionable solutions. Listening to your employees by meeting face-to-face and/or through other organizational feedback methods ensures that you know what’s on their minds; what they want, what they need, and their motivations. When these factors are infused with holistic approaches to your talent portfolio, as leaders you can begin to discover possibilities to enhance dialogue with employees and together tackle marketplace priorities.
The new workplace, with its growing diversity in a global economy, presents opportunities to adopt new solutions. Imagine, for example, leading a successful startup as your workforce quickly expands from eight, to 150, to 1,100. How would you plan to stay connected? Or imagine leading merger and acquisition activities in a mid-size to large organization. How would you gain access to critical experts and rapidly deploy talent?
As you move away from basic reports, which offer limited value, and toward workforce analytics, consider the following:
By gaining a deeper understanding of your workforce, you can enjoy the benefits that actionable insights provide. No more guessing about the capabilities of one division over another or relying on employee surveys that no longer represent the faces of your evolving workplace.
As you look to build a healthy culture and drive growth strategies for the future, one of the greatest joys can be in truly understanding your changing workforce.
Given the importance of talent in today’s environment, it’s time to move beyond making talent decisions based on what’s in traditional reports and rely instead on robust information. Gain a competitive edge and drive your culture and talent decisions further by discovering the joy in understanding your people and the many scalable options that actionable insights can provide.
If you would like to learn more about ways to improve your talent decisions and build long-term value with the data you have available today, please contact and/or visit.
©2011 All rights reserved. Judy White, SPHR, GPHR, HCS is the President of The Infusion Group ™ LLC, a next generation people management consulting and executive coaching firm based in the Raleigh/Durham, NC area. How can you become a community member? Discover Here.
For reprint permissions, please write to: contact@theinfusiongroupllc.com
Photo credit: iStockphoto
In today’s changing environment, many leaders are questioning how they will steer their organizations, customers and teams into the future.
Take a quick scan of any of the major business papers and you’ll find a dozen headlines that all spell uncertainty. Dodd-Frank, IFRS and the Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act (PPACA) are a few of the regulations that stand to fundamentally transform finance, health care and industry as we know it. Given the political landscape, however, some of these provisions continue to be fleshed out, requiring you to maintain a high level of involvement and integration across your company in order to manage new risks and ensure that expertise, processes, controls, capabilities and tools are infused in values that matter.
Finding Solid Ground
Regardless of your industry, regulation has become an increasing part of the operating environment and is sure to remain a dominant player in shaping future business plans. What does this mean to you as a transformational leader? We believe that managing risk requires the involvement and tone of committed leadership both within the C-suite and throughout the ranks that facilitates new levels of collaborative partnerships and agility.
The seismic shifts that are occurring involve collective action and practical management thinking. Are you experiencing some of these shifts in your workplace already? Are you finding that the organizational structures that once served your company well have become shaky? Rather than generating intended efficiencies, are the old structures and traditional career ladders creating obstacles and holding back innovation?
Moving toward a flatter, more adaptable organization is a step that many forward-leading organizations began taking years ago in order to prepare for the future. These companies were listening. By validating their assumptions and acting on their priorities, they continue to take the necessary steps to build a workplace culture that better enables the delivery of sustainable outcomes for the long term.
As a leader, when you press the pause button on your busy life and listen to the future, what do you hear?
While there are many key trends shouting for our attention, one of the more pressing in terms of strategic change is demographics. As the U.S. prepares for generational shifts and the impact of a shrinking workforce population around the globe, savvy leaders need to determine how these demographics, generational factors, consumer demographic and buying power shifts will impact their business objectives, culture and workplace design over the short and long term. For example,
Given these unprecedented trends, there remains a lot to flesh out. We invite you to journey with us here as we explore fresh approaches to your diverse workplace and new choices to enhance your ways of leading, collaborating and building a sustainable business in a constantly changing environment.
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© 2011 All Rights Reserved. The Infusion Group LLC. Judy White, SPHR, GPHR, HCS is the President of The Infusion Group, LLC, a people management consulting and coaching firm located in Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina. Learn more about optimizing your workplace for the future by www.theinfusiongroupllc.com Follow: @TheInfusionGrpLLC
1 Boston Consulting Group Press Release (September 8, 2009)
2 Mediamark Research & Intelligence, “Despite Decades of Gains in the Workforce, Women Still the Predominant Household
Shoppers” (November 12, 2009)
The long awaited announcement from Google is here. Introducing it’s newest addition to social media services, Google+ .
Business Insider, an on-line news channel, recently published this article and provides a “Google+ 101″ view of this new social media enhancement. You can read the article here, http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-google-plus-2011-6
We invite you to join The Infusion Group™ on this additional channel, here,
Rules of Engagement
When was the last time you can recall hearing people excited to be at work? There is something to be said about a positive work environment. You know it the moment you walk into it. The same can be said of the opposite. Which of the two environments best describe your workplace?
Imagine what it would sound like as people arrived to work in the morning powered up and on-fire to take on the challenges of the week. Their energy levels high and their attitudes are at the top of the charts. What are the possible ramifications? Could you expect greater attention to detail, strategic ‘what box?” thinking, and even positive feedback from your internal and external customers and vendors? Wouldn’t it be refreshing to deliver some good news to your company?
So, how do we make this a reality? The answer depends on where you decide to focus your efforts. What is it going to take to help your workplace feel connected, valued and energized to leap over tall buildings and spread explosive effort?
Lead With Conviction
While change fires up most of us, sound leadership principles and discipline ground us. By the time your CEO becomes aware of the extent of dysfunction, the issues have often become so ingrained into the company that it takes extraordinary leadership to turn things around. Demonstrate extraordinary by finding your inner conviction for a positive and healthy work environment and begin to move forward with the first successful key:
1. Determination – Make the vital decision that cultivating a healthy environment really matters. Communicate the rules of engagement and the importance of respecting new behavior expectations by presenting them to the organization. To avoid any misunderstandings of these new behavior expectations, demonstrate first by your sound discipline and leadership.
Lead With Accountability
Learn from the valuable lessons of the past and why practices may have lead to dysfunctional behavior and take the actions necessary today to instill a more positive workplace environment for the future. This means a healthy balance of recognizing positive employee behaviors and actions, while remaining open to receiving feedback that might identify opportunities for organizational improvement. Begin restoring workplace integrity and build trust step-by-step. Consider success key #2:
2. Practice the Discipline of Accountability – Cultural stewards are tenacious not tyrannical in their approach to creating a positive work culture. Focus on the better qualities of people first and move like “your hair is on fire” when the new rules of engagement are broken. Respectfully enforce firm consequences if violations occur and consistently recognize productive behaviors.
Start Today!
Root out any dysfunction that might be chipping away at your culture by ensuring everyone is clear and held to the new rules of engagement, before it takes your customers, employees, and profits to the doors of your competition.
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©2011 All rights reserved. Judy White, SPHR, GPHR, HCS is the President of The Infusion Group ™ LLC, a next generation people management consulting and executive coaching firm based in the Raleigh/Durham, NC area. To receive the latest tips and resources for building thriving workplaces – Infusing Solutions @Work!, sign up here. For reprint permissions, please write to: contact@theinfusiongroupllc.com @InfusionGrpLLC
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