Thinking Talent Architecture

The world of work has changed

The world of work has altered radically in the past decade thanks to the globalisation of business, the advance of technology and the change in attitudes of the workforce.

People who joined the workforce in the last 10 years have a widely different agenda.

They are less patient, less tolerant of bureaucracy, excited by working in start ups and find it easier than ever to find another job if they want to

move.Big corporates need to be careful to make sure they are still attractive for

the best talent to work at!

66%

66% will leave by 2020

63%

63% say their leadership skills are

not being developed

54%

54% expect to have up to five employers

in their lifetime

52%

52% say career progression is top

priority

DELOITTE PWC

Many businesses still need to adapt to these changes and operate talent strategies which have relevance to today’s workplace.

What is it?

• Kevin has a job for life• He will work his way up from

post room to boardroom• He puts the job first, even at

weekends• He knows what is next job is

and is willing to wait• No one at his firm is part time• His wife does not work• He works in manufacturing• He manages people and

budgets from an early stage• He certainly does not type• You don’t have to worry about

Kevin

• Sam moves jobs every three years

• He is willing to change career • He sees work life balance as a

right not a luxury• He expects to believe in the

vision and direction of the business

• His girlfriend earns more than he does

• He works in data• He has specialist skills• He types• You have to worry about Sam

SAM KEVIN

What is it?

• Deidre has a job not a career• She does not expect to be

promoted• The job is chosen to fit around

the family• She knows what the next job is,

it is the same one• Earns less than her husband• She works for a man in a

support role• She has support skills• You don’t have to worry about

Deidre

• Sam moves jobs every three years

• She is willing to change career• She is ambitious for

progressions • She sees work life balance as a

right not a luxury• She expects her career to go at

different speeds and to decide this herself

• She earns more than her boyfriend

• She works in data• She has specialist skills• You have to worry about Sam

SAMANTHA DEIDRE

Sam’s progress to the top is halted because they lack the senior management and leadership skills required. Like dozens of others, they have been trained for task excellence, not for organisational leadership.

They are stuck and the business does not have a leadership succession pipeline.

The challenge is that the organisation has developed and paid Sam as a specialist because their skills are in demand in the new workforce. Why get Sam to manage people when they’re so valuable in what they do?This becomes a problem for Sam and the organisation when it comes to filling more senior manager roles. They simply do not have the breadth and track record in leadership to get the job. It’s problem for the boss too because they need a replacement to be able to move on. The classic succession gap

What has happened?

THE BOWTIE BOMBSHELL

graduates

Middle management

Senior executives Most companies are struggling with the bowtie model which demands, and funnels its brightest people into, specialism at the expense of future leadership skills.

In knowledge based businesses specialism is what drives career and salary progression for the first few years.

You don’t fix this by creating a new breed of generalists at the bottom. You fix this by working with the new talent dynamics up and down the business.

Breadth of skills

10

Execs &Top Teams

Specialists

Back office and supportStaff

Individual contributors in front line roles

Contingent labour

MiddleManagers

First linemanager

Senior CommercialRole

Execs &Top Teams

Expert

Back office and supportStaff

Individual contributors in front line roles

Contingent labour

Specialists

Senior specialist

Senior CommercialRole

MiddleManagers

First linemanager

Past Now

The new talent dynamics of specialism means where the value is generated in business has shifted dramatically. This is driven by digital technologies and globalisation

This leaves us three major problems

Talented people like Sam have no where to go but to the exit door

There is a gap and leadership cannot be replaced from within

1

2

Organisations are growing fat middles as they add more specialists3

SENIOR

MIDDLE

JUNIOR

MIDDLE

JUNIOR

SENIOR

SENIOR

Sam will not wait around in middle management for years. They will jump ship to senior management elsewhere or run their own show. They will not end up running your company, but someone else’s.

For the first time there is a real alternative for senior specialists rather than staying inside a big corporate, waiting

YOUR CORP THEIR CORPHIS CORPWhat happens to Sam?

1 million senior managers will leave their jobs to become independent consultants by 2020

MBA&CO

FACT

CEO

MIDDLE

JUNIOR

YOUR CORP

Filled from outside with untried, more expensive external hires

What happens to Sam’s boss?

RETIREMENT

Sam’s career path as a specialist means they have a leadership breadth so are not considered for promotion to the first rungs of senior leadership.

There is a leadership succession gap.

Nearly 9 out of 10 global HR and business leaders (86 percent) cited leadership as a top issue.Yet only 6 percent of organizations believe their leadership pipeline is “very ready”—pointing to a staggering capability gap.

DELOITTE

FACT

The result The Fat MiddleOrganisations are getting blocked up in the middle. People are not progressing and are blocking the progress for people below. It does not matter how much you add below they only rise so far then move out. At the same time the blocked middle does not have the new skills so more and more senior specialists are added. And the middle does not have what the top needs in terms of leadership depth, causing external hires and further cementing the middle in place as they have no where to go

The internal talent response to date has had limited success

“Every year our talent review tells us that we have a massive succession problem, and it is as though that is the end of the talent story. But it’s not, I want to know we are changing it!”

CMO FTSE 100 business

More activity and more talent initiatives than ever, often not integrated, supported by a proliferation of new tools and new solutions often with a strong humanistic and L&D slant

1

2

3

A reliance on process to drive Talent outcomes. But exec teams and line managers are questioning the value of the investment of time and energy as they are not seeing results

An increased ability to identify where the gaps are and why people are not suitable. But less progress on showing how to fill the gap.

What you see and hear when your talent system is not aligned, integrated and calibrated

HiPo programmes that increase peoples expectations of progression when there are no jobs leading to your best people who you have spent money on leaving

Grad schemes that create generalists when the business is crying out for specialists

Leadership frameworks that do not predict leadership success but fit the world view of the last HR director

All the money is spent on the development needs of the top execs

Everyone says line management is not good enough, but nothing is in place to tell line managers what they should be doing or help them transition into the role

It is easier to find a job elsewhere than move internally in the company

LinkedIn knows more about your people than you do

Expensive potential systems which don’t lead to action

Disproportionate investment in sophisticated recruitment tools and processes when most jobs are internally filled with a tap on the shoulder based on who you know

Career paths that can not deliver the experiences that are needed for progression

Continuous urgent, expensive hiring in new skill areas when demand is predictable and development is possible

Using out of date competency frameworks that everyone knows is irrelevant

Performance management systems that everyone knows neither help with performance or management

Too often when Talent is designed and implemented badly it seriously damages the critical element of

Trust

Expectation mismanagement

Sense of fairness

The system is capricious

• HiPos with no where to go• Graduates promised leadership• Potential identification processes then nothing happens

Future prospects taken away

• Senior people and the “chosen ones” getting all the investment• External hires when I think I could do the job• People get jobs because of who they know

• My boss asks me to write my own performance goals and review• There is a clear differencee between what we are taught and what is done• Reliance on some psychometric tool no one can explain

• I can’t see how I am progressing or how I can progress• I am not learning anything useful anymore• Spending 10 years as a good citizen seems to count against me now

How can we help?

We help organisations to see how their Talent and their business strategy is an inter-related system and how the different parts link to each other directly and over time.

Only then can you make the right choices that really add value over time

Understand the flows and the shifts in talent demand in terms of numbers and needs to identify the areas to focus on

Three stage approach to get the system working

1

2 Design the talent strategy that identifies where and how talent activities can add most value to the business strategy

3 Design the coherent talent system that deliver the value through the integrated mix of routines, initiatives and processes

22

Talent teams needs a dynamic model that links the growth of the business the exit rates the external hiring rate the internal promotion the need for potentialby level, region and skill clusters which can be used to forecast demand

We start with a base case using the “as is” numbers. This is useful in its own right.We have not found a business yet that does not have the data to do this

Promotion opportunities

Exits

Intra functional and intra level moves

External hires

End # Roles Vacanciesto fill

Promotion opportunities

Promotion opportunities

Exits

Intra functional and intra level moves

External hires

End # Roles Vacanciesto fill

Promotion in

Exits

Intra functional and intra level moves

External hires

End # Roles Vacanciesto fill

“How many new starters am I going to need to recruit

and induct over the next 3 years”

“What is my demand for Level 4

leaders over the next 3 years”

”How many high potentials do I need at

each level to satisfy my expected demand

for promotions”

Level 4

Level 5

Level 6

“What % of each level can I expect to be promoted each

year”

23

This model has to be driven by not just the underlying numbers, but by carefully interrogating the business about how they see the challenges of delivering the business strategy in terms of skills, critical experiences and critical roles

Leve

l 6Le

vel 4

Leve

l 5Le

vel 2

+3

Exec

“We are expecting attrition rates to

increase at level 4 as there are very few progression

opportunities and lots of that level have been in role

for 3+ years”

“We expect our delivery teams to have fewer but

more senior people”

“We need to bring in new innovation

and service delivery skills which we just don’t have at the

junior level”

Leve

l 6Le

vel 4

Leve

l 5Le

vel 2

+3

Exec

Scenario 1 - Steady state Scenario 2 – Changes in

Level 6 Level 4Level 5 Level 2 +3 Exec

Extrapolation of future business shape by end of 2018

The process of understanding business strategy and the challenges of delivering the strategy is based on a set of

structured interviews we have developed over time which use some clever short cuts to get to the heart of the talent

challenge. The focus is very much on understanding the different functional and team contexts and using this to build an aggregate picture which recognises their differences.

This is supplemented by looking at any relevant external supply factors.

25

Level 6 Level 4Level 5 Level 2 +3 Exec

25%50%

70% 70%

75% 50%

30% 30%

Internal promotions

External hires

17% 12% 10%Exit rate

The combination of this work gets the client to the point where they clearly understand the magnitude of the

different challenges a view of dynamic

relationships between choices

where are the high leverage points which impact the whole system

This insight on where you can have most impact on the system is the foundation of designing a Talent Strategy that will deliver value

over time by linking the dynamics of the system together

Where to build and invest

Where to buy and rent

1

2

Where to cut3

The insight on where you play and how you win then needs to be designed into an aligned, integrated and calibrated Talent System

that defines how talent will deliver

Why aligned?If it is not aligned to the business strategy the outcomes will not add up to more than the sum of their parts

Why integrated?If the components of the systems aren’t designed as an integrated whole then, despite good intentions, the parts compete and either cancel each other out or make things worse

Why calibrated?We need to know if our investment is really adding value. This is measurable as both leading indicators and value outcomes so you can see if the design is delivering the results

Extrapolation of future business shape by end of 2018

You know where to invest across the business to have the biggest impact on getting the right people with the right skills in the right

roles

What happens when you get this right?

Your people understand the value of talent for the business and how they fit into it, from the shop floor to the board

Trust increases, leading to higher engagement and higher productivity

Talent is no longer a process but the strategic tool it should be

Who we areA niche consultancy based in London who help businesses to make sure they have the right early talent strategies and initiatives to deliver their business strategy

Why do we think talent needs a new approach?We believe talent is about more than senior leadership succession. To be successful talent needs to be a conversation around how do we get the right talent at every level, how are we attracting and retaining the new generation of specialists and how are we designing career paths that deliver what our people and the business need to succeed

Where do we come from?We started at the graduate stage of the talent journey, helping companies of all sizes develop and deliver great graduate entry schemes. This also gave us a strong insight into what needed to happen at the levels above, the expectations of people joining business’s today and what career paths look like in the middle of the organisation

Over the last 5 years we have worked with a range of large international players to help them improve their end to end talent approach and to grow more of the Talent that they need to succeed.

THE GREENHOUSE PROJECT

In the last 14 years we have helped over 25 leading companies develop and deliver core components of the Early in Career Talent strategy and

their core Talent strategy

Here are some recent clients we have worked with

We led the design, development and delivery of a new European Graduate

programme and new Digital programme

We analysed, developed and rolled out a new vision & set of

workshops for their global Graduate programme

We analysed and created a new vision for their Supply Chain and

Commercial global Early in Career talent segment

We analysed, developed and created the group Talent vision and strategyfor both Boots UK and their Global

Brands business

We designed and delivered key workshops and personal

learning interactions for the Graduate programme

We analysed and created a new Early in Career talent strategy

for their new Graduate programme

We designed a new and challenging approach to develop

Retail Graduate Talent and supporting measurement

We led the design of the GlobalEarly in Career Talent strategy

William Jodrell ~ Partnerwill@thegreenhouseproject.co.uk+44 7968 439 701

Rupert Angel ~ PartnerRupert@thegreenhouseproject.co.uk+44 7710 344 493