Hello from the Grand Canyon. WOW! What an impressive piece of real estate!
Last week at FOSE, I had the opportunity to listen to John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco. Although the audience was predominately IT and IT/HR based, he talked about many of the same issues facing HR executives, namely:
1) Identifying and keeping top talent
2) Aligning the IT department with the business
3) Becoming more strategic to the organization
It would appear that we in HR have the same issues as our counterparts in IT. He also talked a lot about IP as the network and how everything needs to be connected. As an avid supporter of video calls I have to agree with him. This format of communication is so much more personal and productive than emails. Too often we use emails for communication and they are so ineffective, impersonal, and often misinterpreted. But email seems to be the communication method of choice for many, so I would suggest you read our Leadership Analyst Karen Elmhirst´s recently published blog on effective use of email. It melp your organization on how to better promote internal communications.
John Chambers also talked about the matrixed organization, breaking down and integrating the silos of IT/HR/Marketing/Sales. He admits that it took two years of heavy lifting to get to this state, but now this is one of his firm´s competitive advantages. To view his presentation material, please click here.
Does anyone have any information on how companies can create a matrixed organization? If you would like to share it please send it to me at dmcgrath[at]hr.com and we will publish it for our members. The only work I have read is from Patrick Lencioni and his new book, "Silos, Politics, and Turf Wars." Patrick will be speaking about this at our annual conference; if you are interested in participating the early bird rate for HR Executives expires March 31. To register, please click here.
On May 4th at 11:30 a.m. EST, we will be broadcasting Erin Gruwell from the DDI user conference in Florida to several thousand schools (Grade 7 students) across North America. The Learning to Lead with Character Program is designed to motivate and instill characteristics of leadership in today´s youth by effectively using mentorship, key spokespeople (role models) and hands-on workshops to demonstrate and instill leadership qualities. Here is how your organization can help HR.com and Character Education Partnership bring role models and thought leaders to grade 7 students in your area:
1) Sponsor local schools in your area to participate in this program (including scholarships, local workshops and material to instill leadership qualities in our youth).
2) Bring a thought leader to our national network of schools.
3) Drop me an email if you have an interest in this program.
You can find more details on our website.
Competencies are the center of all talent management systems. Without the identification of required competencies, performance management, recruitment, and succession planning all become best guess work. This week two of the top enterprise performance management vendors announced partnership arrangements with leading competency vendors - Halogen with Lominger and Mindsolve with ITG.
I also had the honor of moderating a panel with Plateau CEO Paul Sparta and Yves Lermusiaux of Taleo. Although both vendors deal in the HCM space (Taleo recruitment and Plateau LMS and Performance) they both believe they control all records of the employees´ skills and competencies. This further demonstrates that these profiles do sit in multiple systems throughout your organization. Companies need to decide which system is their system of record and that everything synchronizes to access employees´ profiles.
Last week´s blog talked about the merger of EquaTerra and TPI. This week the merger was terminated. Yikes.