Discuss how a strong alignment between HR and senior leadership should work.?

How a strong alignment between HR and senior leadership should work. They follow this example with an outline of 7 principles which are critical to developing talent and earning HR a “seat at the table.”After reading this story and reflecting on the principles, answer the following questions:How well do these 7 principles, if properly implemented, address the concerns raised in this week’s readings? Cite specific examples to support your position.Rank these 7 principles from 1 (easiest) to 7 (most difficult), based on how easily a company could implement them. Explain the rationale for your rankings.If you had to choose just one of these principles that would have the greatest positive impact on your own organization, which would it be and why?06.13.117 Guiding Principles for Developing Leadership TalentPeople deliver numbers. If you want the numbers, you need the people. As a leader you need to know how to judge raw human talent. In The Talent Masters, Bill Conaty and Ram Charan explain how to do it.To develop talent, you need to become intimate with your people; to know the essence of each individual. Talent masters can identify a person’s talent more precisely than most people simply because they excel at observing and listening. And they institutionalize this skill to create their own supply of good judges. It simply must become part of the culture.Talent development is not an event. It is a process. To make it sustainable it must become part of the culture. And no one needs to understand that more than the CEO. When you have an organization devoted to a person, you have a cult. When you have an organization devoted to a set of principles and values, you have a culture. Developing people simply must be a priority from the top down. That leads us to Conaty and Charan’s first principle of the talent masters:The leadership team understands that the top priority for the future is developing the talent that will get it there. Talent masters spend at least 25% of their time spotting and developing other leaders; at GE and P&G it’s closer to 40%)Meritocracy through differentiation. Fill leadership roles based on measured performance rather than just rough judgments and personal considerations. “Memorize this slogan: Differentiation breeds meritocracy; sameness (the failure to differentiate people) breeds mediocrity.” Reward leaders according to their talents, behaviors, and values.Reinforce working values. These are the values people live by; how work gets done. Talent masters “repeat and repeat and repeat their values, and reinforce them by linking recognition and rewards with them.Insist on a culture of trust and candor. You can only develop your people if you have accurate information about them. You can only get that information is if you talk candidly. Candor gets the truth out. It enables keener observations, greater insight, and better descriptions.” Conaty and Charan say that this is actually the hardest part of becoming a talent master.Create rigorous talent assessments. Your talent assessment/development systems should have as much “rigor and repeatability as systems used for finance and operations.” And you should “review people as thoroughly and regularly as you review operations, business performance, strategy, and budgets.”A business partnership with human resources. The HR function will only be as strong as the CEO wants it to be. Elevate it to the same level as the CFO.Continuous learning and improvement. The ever-changing business environment means that you need to constantly change and update both the leaders’ skill as well as your own leadership criteria to stay in sync with the world around.Our collaboration on this book began with the desire to crystallize into principles the many things we’ve learned working with people and companies we have identified as talent masters. These principles comprise the framework within which talent masters operate, and they provide the way for you to diagnose your company’s talent development capability.1. An enlightened leadership team, starting with the CEO. Ordinary CEOs plan for their companies’ futures in terms of financial and strategic ambitions. The enlightened CEO recognizes that his top priority for the future is building and deploying the talent that will get it there. He is deeply committed to creating a culture of talent mastery, and personally involved in executing it. As a role model, he is crucial to getting everyone on board and shaping the social systems that will make or break the formal processes of leadership development. We find that such leaders invest at least a quarter of their time in spotting and developing other leaders; at GE and P&G, it’s closer to 40 percent.2. Meritocracy through differentiation. This is the mother’s milk of helping talent reach its potential. Memorize this slogan: Differentiation breeds meritocracy; sameness (the failure to differentiate people) breeds mediocrity. The latter happens all too often in companies that automatically equate high performance with achieving or exceeding agreed-upon financial goals. Without exception, talent masters dig into the many causes underlying performance so that they can recognize and reward leaders according to their talents, behaviors, and values.1. Working values. All companies have values, stated or unstated. Some are meaningful, many are boilerplate. What we call working values have a real impact on how well results are delivered, because they govern how people work and behave. They’re the values people live by, because they are absolutely expected of both leaders and employees. For example, one value we see among talent masters is the obligation of leaders to develop other leaders. Values aren’t always labeled as such. Hindustan Unilever distinguishes the what and the how of leadership, the “what” referring to getting things done and the “how” to the values component, “acting in a way others will admire and want to follow.” At Procter and Gamble, says CEO Bob MacDonald, “We talk a lot about character, which I define as putting the needs of the organization above your own needs.” By whatever name, masters repeat and repeat and repeat their values, and reinforce them by linking recognition and rewards with them.2. A culture of trust and candor. A company can develop its people only if it has accurate information about their strengths and development needs, and it can only get that information if people can talk candidly—that is, honestly and openly. Candor gets the truth out. It enables keener observations, greater insight, and better descriptions. It’s easy to cite a leader’s strengths but edgier to pinpoint their development needs and expect them to accept and address them. As we will see throughout this book, creating a culture of candor is the hardest part of becoming a talent master. People can talk candidly only if they trust the system to respect honesty and confidentiality. Talent masters work strenuously to ensure trust by insisting on candor in all of the company’s dialogues, whether one-on-one, in group settings, or in appraisals.3. Rigorous talent assessment. Talent masters have the same goal and results orientation in their people processes as they do in their financial systems. They set explicit time-based people development goals and discuss the why and how of these goals. They review people as thoroughly and regularly as they review operations, business performance, strategy, and budgets. Crucially, they integrate the people reviews with each of the others, gathering and updating the information as the person progresses. Like the financial systems, the people systems have rhythm and rigor, and evolve over time as new needs arise.1. A business partnership with human resources. Talent masters use human resource leaders as active and effective business partners, raising them to the same, if not higher, level as the chief financial officer. The HR function will only be as strong as the CEO wants it to be, and if the CEO doesn’t have high expectations for it, HR will remain second tier. Just as the CFO is the trustee of the financial system, the chief human resources officer is the trustee of the people system.2. Continuous learning and improvement. Talent masters recognize that a fast- changing business environment requires constant change and updating of both their leaders’ skills and their own leadership criteria. They give leaders training on specific topics, and they adjust their talent development plans according to the external changes they see as likely in the years to come.”SUE”PUTTING SUE IN THE RIGHT JOBHere’s an example of how important deep knowledge of an individual is to both the person and the organization. It’s the true story of a disguised up-and-coming star in one global company.Sue’s past performance and experience suggested that she was full of promise when she joined Lindell Pharmaceuticals in 2006. Her business career started at 3M, where she sold technical products to the pharmaceutical industry for three years. She then went off to Wharton to get her MBA, graduating in the top third of her class. After that she joined McKinsey, and over the course of two years successfully consulted mainly in marketing and sales with pharmaceutical makers, a hospital chain, and a health insurance company.After hiring Sue, Lindell made her sales manager of its Pennsylvania and New Jersey territory, overseeing some one hundred salespeople and ten supervisors whose customers include health insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmacy chains. She more than lived up to her promise. After two years she was outperforming all other territory managers in the region and setting new records for revenues and market share.Among other things, Sue installed a software-based program that raised the productivity of her people. Based on records of what drugs doctors prescribed most, it cut the administrative work of the sales force and let them spend more time in the offices of their potential best customers. As other regions started to emulate her, the tool rapidly became a new practice for the company.People were watching. Lindell’s CEO is serious about creating a pipeline of future leaders. Top management identifies high-potential leaders early, and gives them experiences that will develop them to their fullest potential. Sue’s boss Laura, the regional president, met quarterly with Jorge, Lindell’s executive vice president for sales; Bill, the CEO for North America; and Sam, the head of human relations for North America, to review leaders who were ready for promotion or experience elsewhere. The routine included not only discussions of the people but also informal visits with groups of them in their own environments, typically over breakfast. At their spring 2008 meeting, Laura, Bill, and Jorge put Sue on their list of fast-track candidates to be watched especially closely.That was also the year the world changed. Health care reform became a contentious topic, with critics arguing that “big pharma” was wasting too much money on advertising and pushing products onto doctors. Prices came under pressure as the decision-making power shifted from the companies to insurers, hospital chains, and pharmacy benefits managers. Partly as a result, pharmaceutical salespeople were obliged to start practicing what is generally known as value selling. Instead of simply pushing product, they had to demonstrate how their company or product could create more benefits for all stakeholders, including the patients themselves.Sue quickly grasped the new reality. She figured out the procedures and metrics required for the new selling approach: analyzing what customers were buying, cross-referencing usage patterns with patient data to gain insights into efficacy, giving customers ideas about how to bring total costs down while improving patient care, and training their people in using the techniques. Importantly, she designed a proprietary system for tracking patients’ adherence to their prescriptions. Patients who don’t take medications as prescribed are a major and widespread problem for health care providers, since they often end up sicker and requiring more care than they did before. She put her sales force through intensive training exercises, tested them, and sent them out into the field. She also replaced a part of her sales force with people who understood business as well as selling—she had learned that the knowledge could be a valuable selling tool.Her territory’s sales soared. When Laura, Jorge, Bill, and Sam met at the end of the year, they agreed that it was time to take a very close look at this rising star. The four were scheduled to attend a conference at Sue’s offices in Philadelphia, and they arranged to take her out for a dinner where they questioned her at length and in depth about how she was achieving her extraordinary results. Learning that Sue would be calling on one of the company’s five largest customers the next day in Cleveland, Laura invited herself along to observe. After the meeting’s successful conclusion, Sue returned to Philadelphia and Laura settled down on the plane to New York to review and write up what she’d seen. These were her key points:• “Sue met with the customer’s chief buyer, executive vice president, CFO, and chief medical officer, and they were all deeply impressed with her two- hour presentation. They could see that she understood the guts of their business from their viewpoint rather well, including the challenges they faced in the new environment. She showed a mastery of their financial details that few salespeople have, even to understanding key items of their balance sheet.”• “She established a rapport with them and quickly built relationships. She excelled in the give- and- take of two- way dialogue. I could see the customers nod appreciably as she answered their questions. She was to the point. They were superattentive when she showed them how to monitor patients’ use of their prescriptions, and blown away by the financial analysis she had done showing what our company could do to help them improve their performance.”Laura called Jorge, the EVP of sales, the next day to relay her observations. “What other talents has she shown?” he asked. Laura replied that Sue had proved to be a good judge of people, as evidenced by the choices she made when she replaced a third of her sales force. She continually upgrades her organization, Laura added, and had brought in major new ideas. She was ahead of the curve and a successful change agent. They agreed that she had reshaped her job, was now outgrowing it, and was definitely on a fast track for promotion. Jorge said he would put her on the list of high- potential people to discuss at an upcoming full- day meeting with Sam, the head of HR—always a participant in such meetings—and Bill, the North America CEO.The traditional next step at Lindell would be to make Sue regional sales president in the coming twelve months. If she succeeded, she would most likely move up over time to become executive vice president for sales for North America. Everyone agreed that she should be promoted sooner, but that’s where the easy agreement ended. Jorge, convinced that she could do great things for Lindell’s sales organization, wanted to follow the standard route. Sam demurred, saying, “We need to think bigger for her.” Her judgment and major decisions had been uniformly good, he pointed out. “She clearly understands business. She has an affinity for people, builds relationships, and brings in new ideas. I think we should put her onto the general management P&L [profit and loss] track by making her a brand manager.” Laura agreed with Jorge, and talked for a couple of minutes about Sue’s value to the sales organization and questioning whether someone so young could handle a P&L responsibility.Then Bill spoke up. “Tell me more about why this would be a good idea, Sam,” he said. The HR director reiterated her achievements and turned to her career needs and aspirations. “Sue has the capacity to go far in this company,” he said. “I can see her being one of the top ten or fifteen officers someday. And one problem with the sales job is that it would deny her some important opportunities. As a brand manager, she’d not only be getting the P&L experience but also broadening the scope of her people relationships. She’d be interacting with headquarters, and also with other brand managers from around the world. This would make a huge difference in her personal growth.”And there’s another issue. You’re aware that few regional presidents have gone over to brand management. Here’s why. The transition gets tougher the more time you spend in your discipline. The person who crosses over earlier is more flexible and adaptable. Compensation can also be a problem, because it’s a downward move—the sales president will have been making more than she would as a brand manager.”The others were starting to see his point. After a few minutes of debate, Bill said, “Let’s sum up the reasons why she’s ready for a management job. She delivers results and brings in big ideas; upgrades her people and makes good choices in selecting new ones; adjusts quickly to changes in the environment and acts decisively and with impressive speed; understands the customers’ total business, which shows that she has business acumen; is able to build relationships at high levels externally and at all levels internally.”We haven’t seen talents like this in a territory sales manager for a long time,” he concluded.”What if she doesn’t work out?” asked Jorge.”We’d bring her back into sales as the regional president,” said Sam. “It would no doubt be a blow, but I don’t think it would cripple her. She’s shown that she can learn from experience. She would return to sales having learned a lot, broadened her experience, and become better prepared for that job.”Persuaded by now that the move made sense, Laura added a final thought: “If we don’t give her this shot, will we risk losing her to a competitor?” No one felt the need to reply.Bill looked around. “So we’re agreed?” he asked. Everyone nodded in assent. “Laura, give her a call soon. Tell her she’s been doing a great job, should keep doing it, and expect that she’ll be getting a new one within ninety days.”Laura grinned. “I bet she’s going to be surprised,” she said. “I know she wanted to get into general management, but I am sure she didn’t imagine it would come this soon—or even at all in this company.”By now you may be thinking that this is a fairy tale. You can’t recall any instance of people in your organization taking such a thoughtful, painstaking approach to placing a leader in a job. Just the candor and ease that mark their conversations are alien to your culture. It’s unimaginable that people would cooperate like that. But as we will see repeatedly in this book, it’s how people work in a talent master organization.We extract several important lessons from the Steve Jobs and “Sue” stories:• Talent masters understand the subtleties that differentiate people. Two individuals may share the same set of characteristics, but those characteristics will combine differently in them in ways that differentiate their leadership capabilities. (Case in point: Steve Jobs.) Talent masters assess and express what each person is in reality, not against some predetermined checklist. They obtain insights through observing the person’s actions, decisions, and behaviors. They look for the specifics of how various traits combine. And they express all these in complete thoughts that are verifiable, not cryptic single words such as “strategic.”• Sue was one of many territory sales managers at Lindell, but her combination of traits stood out. She had business acumen, cognitive bandwidth, and personality traits such as being able to build relationships and adapt to rapid change. Together these enabled her to make high-leverage decisions that delivered numbers above and beyond those of her colleagues in similar positions.• Lindell’s leaders could see the totality of Sue’s skills and traits only because they had engaged in many candid conversations with and about her and observed her interacting with customers. Talent masters spot, find, and develop people like Sue through predictable, consistent, repetitive processes that develop candor and trust through the give-and-take of vigorous dialogue.This system, based on intimate knowledge through the observations of actions, decisions, and behaviors, grows raw talent to its full potential.• The plan they settled on was centered on increasing not just her capacity—her ability to get more of the same work done. More important, it would raise her capability, which means achieving more through doing a higher level of work. Increasing capability leads to the kind of growth that expands cognitive bandwidth and produces higher levels of leadership. Becoming a brand manager would grow her capability by an order of magnitude.• Nobody knew for sure if Sue was fully ready for the job. But talent masters often place such bets on high-potential leaders for three good reasons. First, people facing a stretch situation aren’t likely to be overconfident and are eager to learn from others. Second, it helps to retain talented people who are itching to advance and may look to greener pastures if they don’t get the chance. Third, successful stretches will attract better candidates in the future because ambitious and capable people will know that they won’t have to wait for slots to open.• Getting to the core of a person’s values, behaviors, beliefs, and talents may seem like a lot of work, but masters understand that the return on time is huge. It’s like analyzing a business problem or opportunity: we drill down to find the causes, understand the context, and assess options. Similarly, when we get to know a person, we are able to develop insights and options to speed his or her growth and development. This is especially important for companies that rely on specialized knowledge and need to quickly develop the leadership potential of their experts. Decisions like the one for Sue build organizational capacity.• Insight into an individual’s talents and foresight into where the leader could go turn traditional succesion planning on its head. Rather than finding people to fill positions, it puts the emphasis on opening paths for leaders to grow their talents and become ever more capable. The ultimate payoff is seamless successions to the CEO job and other high-leverage positions. Rarely if ever do talent masters need to turn outside for a chief executive.INSTITUTIONALIZING GOOD JUDGMENTSJust about any organization will have some great natural judges, but none have enough to build a program around. Those making the judgments have to know the talent well—or better yet, intimately. They have to know all about the job the person is being considered for. They have to know how the person stacks up against other candidates for the job, which means they have to know all about those people, too.The first thing to understand about talent masters is that they can identify a person’s talent more precisely than most people because they excel at observing and listening. They use these abilities to see the whole person—her skills and experience, of course, but also such things as her judgment, personality, and ability to build relationships, not just characteristics defined by buzzwords. They understand the nature of an individual’s shortcomings—the difference between a fatal flaw that will keep him from advancing and a development need that can be fixed.Talent masters have developed their abilities through constant and intense practice. They accumulate observations and connect them into verifiable inferences about people. They can compare different people with the same exactitude as they compare different sets of numbers. Paradoxically, comparing people is both harder and easier than comparing numbers.It’s harder because it takes a lot of practice to overcome the biases and psychic filters that so often cloud good judgment; but it’s easier because in the end there are fewer data points and variables to take into account.Talent masters institutionalize this expertise in their companies. It’s practiced, imitated, tracked, and learned by all leaders until it becomes second nature, part of the established processes and daily routines. And they use it to create their own supply of good judges. They calibrate individuals through myriad dialogues, using information collected through many observations of decisions, actions, and behaviors and refined in group discussions. The dialogue is informal and fact driven. The discipline of pooling leaders’ judgments about other leaders is comprehensive, continuous, and part of the culture. It integrates the development of people with the running of the business, and connects their leadership strengths and weaknesses with the business results. The judgments continue to improve with practice and experience.Masters do this most visibly in formal reviews and processes, often adapted from the ones GE pioneered (which we will show you in the next chapter). But equally important are processes that you can’t see. These are what we call social processes.Any time two or more people work together there’s a social process in which they exchange information and ideas, exercise power, and express their values through what they say and do. Unlike business processes, where the participants’ roles and goals are specified, social processes usually operate in the background. The prescribed outcome of a budget meeting, for example, is efficient allocation of resources. But the actual outcome is often the result of a social process in which the players exercise personal influence and power to jockey for those resources.Participants, as well as the leader in charge of the process, may or may not be aware of how their behaviors and dialogue shape the results.No less than business processes, social processes can be managed and led to improve the outcome. Through the content of the dialogue and the attitudes and values that are conveyed verbally and nonverbally, talent masters use them to identify great leaders and help them grow. No company can achieve talent mastery without embedding talent in the organization’s social processes.