Talent
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Training Salespeople
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Miller Heiman has the ever popular “blue sheet” sales training, and there are many others like it. Teaching sales people how to sell isn’t necessarily the type of training that’s going to bring you higher revenues though. Years about Nabisco did a study on their non-sales skills sales training. They found that for ever $1000…
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Recruiting and Selecting Salespeople
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It would be absurd for me to tell you how to attract salespeople. So I won’t. Sales is so highly specialized based on the target markets, the product mix, the region that very few tactics are universal. However, Gallup has apparently found some common traits that all successful salespeople have some degree of. Gallup interviewed…
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Great HR Podcast Ideas
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I’ve been thinking about how would could both communicate through podcasts. Certainly there are the obvious applications. If you do a corporate meeting, why not record it and make it available for download? If the President of the U.S. gets to speak to the nation weekly in his radio address, why not HR? What about…
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Web 2.0 Networks and HR
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This is an increasingly featured topic on this site. Innovation networks and collaboration networks are of great interest to the business community because it ties together how work and product actually gets done. Sure we have our formal organizational hierarchies, and we have process flow charts that rout our activities to each other, but the…
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Understanding the Millennial – Crisis at the Gate
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It seems that teen unemployment is at an all time high. While they might have all manner of other activities going on, the lack of employment is a critical factor in the millennial ability to join the workforce and be productive. As recently as 1990, nearly 70% of newspaper carriers in the U.S. were teens.…
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Understanding the Millennial – The Incredible Opportunity
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So perhaps you have not encountered this yet, but the millennial generation is different. What’s a millennial? In short, they are the upcoming generation that is currently graduating from high schools and colleges and will be for the next decade. This generation is quite special though. They possess a completely different sensibility around both work…
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Plateauing, Multiple Career Ladders, Engaging Employees
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Knowledge@Wharton wrote a few months ago about a “new” phenomenon within middle manager ranks. A number of men and women in middle management are increasingly reluctant to take the next step in their careers because the corporate ladder is not as appealing as it used to be, and the price to climb it is too…
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Employee Engagement Improves Organizational Agility
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The Mckinsey Quarterly survey of barriers to agility and speed related to behavior and attitude ranked “employees lacking a sense of purpose commitment, motivation” as the number 1 factor inhibiting business speed and agility. ((Miranda, Thiel, 2007. “Improving Organizational Speed and Agility.” McKinsey Quarterly 2007 Number 1. Page 14)) With over 1500 business executives surveyed,…
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Taleo Love Fest (But…)
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Jason wrote about Taleo a few weeks ago, and in a rare moment I completely agree. Actually, I usually do agree with Jason which is a bit disappointing since I like picking fights. My only concerns with Taleo are 1) they are showing up late to the broader talent management party and 2) talent management…
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Quantifying Competency’s Effect on Productivity
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A recent McKinsey survey published in Mckinsey Quarterly ((Reineke, Spiller, Ungerman, 2007. “The Talent Factor in Purchasing.” McKinsey Quarterly 2007 Number 1. Page 6)) highlighted a study on the purchasing organization and the correlation of core competencies to an organization’s bottom line. While the purchasing organization has a clear and direct line to total costs…
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The Evolution of the Workforce
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It seems I make a point of talking about the millennial generation (those emerging into the workforce now), and how there seems to be a perception that they are less motivated than prior generations. It’s probably true that they were given broader opportunities than prior generations while growing up. This simply means that they generally…
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Interviewing’s Best Answers
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There’s a blogspot site out there with the “best” answers to the 64 most common interview questions. I remember each time I ever went looking for a job (or when jobs came looking for me) that before I’d go in for interviews, I always made sure I knew what my personal philosophies were on a…
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Real Lesson From Despair.com: Demotivation
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Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all of the unhappy people. ((Despair.com)) As mean as it sounds, it may be true. We all know the famous method that Jack Welch popularized at GE – remove the bottom 10% of the workforce each year. The idea here is that there almost…
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HR Versus Finance – Influence, Power, and a Seat at the Table Part 2
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Lowell Bryan wrote in the McKinsey Quarterly that there is a new metric around: Times have changed and ROIC is no longer important – the new metric is profit per employee. ((Bryan, Lowell, 2007. “The New Metrics of Corporate Performance: Profit per Employee.” McKinsey Quarterly 2007 Number 1. Page 56)) Again, we look at the…
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HR Versus Finance – Influence, Power, and a Seat at the Table Part 1
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I had an interesting conversation with Jeff Hunter a few weeks ago where he was pondering why HR did not have the executive “power” that the likes of finance does. Well, he was not so much wondering as pointing out that the emphasis was misdirected. I completely agree that with today’s shift to a knowledge…
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Virtual versus Physical Communities
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The advent of virtual communities and their influence on shaping the workforce in undeniable. What started ages ago with people talking over the phone but perhaps never meeting has turned into true communities where people can identify themselves with groups of people based on semi-unique traits. Within our organizations, this can simply mean “I belong…
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Defining Talent Management
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Talent management is a true buzz word around HR these days, has been for a few years now. We all know the components of talent management: performance, compensation process, succession, recruitment, learning, competencies. All of these are major components to an overall talent strategy. Inclusive in this list should also be technology. But what really,…
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Communicating with a Millennial (Part 4: The Transition to Work)
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So what are the right expectations for a millennial just entering toe workforce? Ryan states “I find that managers are not giving me the appropriate guidance necessary for me to grow in the company. They’re too concerned with what’s going on above them to look at what’s going on below.” And “Some of my best…
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Communicating with a Millennial (Part 3: Getting to Know You)
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This wasn’t supposed to be a series. Both the Recruiting Animal and “Ryan” have brought up interesting points that I’d like to comment on. Is it possible that all of this “adjusting” going both ways (to the Millennials and for them to work) is really just workforce entry angst? Recruiting Animal: If that’s true, it…
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Communicating with a Millennial (Part 2: Dubs needs friends)
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There was a fair amount of conversation regarding this “millennial” generation last week, some of it controversial and with minor disagreement. There doesn’t seem to be differences in that we all agree that each generation has it’s own quirks in terms of preferences that can be stereotyped, as well as communication methods that might be…