Why do we help each other out

I am always interested in why people help each other out and have used the concept of reciprocal altruism in my talks on knowledge management.
I've been reading over my lunch today an article by Martin Nowak about co-operation. He views co-operation as interesting as it means that you help someone who is a possible competitor and that you reduce your own success in order to increase the success of someone else.

He highlights some types of reciprocity that knowledge managers might find interesting.

1. Direct reciprocity - individuals interact repeatedly - if I help now you may help me later.
2. Reputational (my phrase) Indirect reciprocity which takes place in groups - where people see you interact with another person and reach the conclusion that you are a helpful person.
3. Spatial selection - where neighbours help each other - they survive by being in clusters this could be of interest in communities of practice but also in organisations especially departments which consider themselves in danger.
4. Finally Group selection and he says' it maybe that our group of co-operators is better off than another group of defectors, here selection acts on two levels because in our group there is more co-operation

Recent Findings from the GLOBAL MAKE Awards

Key Findings

Business leaders, analysts and investors constantly ask: "What are the economic and competitive advantages of pursuing a business strategy based on knowledge leadership?" Based on the findings of the 2009 Global MAKE study, the benefits of this approach are tangible and significant.

Successfully managing enterprise knowledge yields big dividends. The 2009 Global MAKE Winners trading on the NYSE/NASDAQ showed a Total Return to Shareholders (TRS) for the ten-year period 1999-2008 of 9.6% - over four times the average Fortune 500 company median.

Other findings include:

- Enterprises with long-term knowledge-driven strategies are continuing to invest in innovation, knowledge sharing and collaboration, and human intellectual capital - especially skills and competencies development - and will emerge from the global recession in stronger positions.

- The global economic downturn is accelerating the consolidation of key business sectors, including airlines, automotives, computers, consulting, defense, energy, information technology, Internet, media and pharmaceuticals. By the year 2012, there will be 3-5 global companies in each of the major business sectors. Those companies with strong knowledge-driven strategies are most likely to survive and prosper.

- Organizations around the world are facing leadership challenges in developing knowledge workers. This MAKE knowledge performance dimension had the lowest average Winners' score. A combination of factors - the retirement of growing numbers of 'baby boomers' and difficulties in recruiting talented new knowledge workers from the small pool of 'Generation Y' individuals, is forcing organizations to devote significant resources to human intellectual capital management.

- A growing number of organizations are taking on 'Global' characteristics - especially consulting and professional services firms, financial services, energy and media companies. These 'Global' organizations tend to operate as 'independent' companies within a Federal structure and without the traditional corporate head office.

- While the number of European organizations adopting knowledge-driven approaches is expanding, the number of European-headquartered Global MAKE Finalists and Winners continues to decline. The top-tier of European companies is falling behind their Asian and North American competitors at the cutting-edge of the Knowledge Economy.

Brad Bird talks on Innovation

One of my favourite movies is the Incredibles - I think the animation and the dialogue are absolutely brilliant and also Pixar is owned by a certain Steve Jobs.

Interestingly there is a McKinsey article out today interviewing the director Brad Bird who has two Oscars - one for the I's and the other for Ratatouille( which wasn't too scruffy either)

He highlights that innovation can come from unexpected places - the Internet came out of the Defence Department originally to set up a communications network that would survive a nuclear attack.

Bird was hired because the owners feared that they were getting complacent after a run of success and hired him to 'shake things up' The owners including Jobs said that he could expect robust discussion but that if he could convince them, they would change the way they did things.

When they were talking about the I's people said that to do this would take ten years and $500 million to do.

He set out to look for the frustrated artists - the people who nobody was listening to because the company was doing well. He listened to these 'black sheep' and gave them the opportunity to run with their ideas and basically slashed the I's production time at a lesser cost.

He was asked whether black sheep make better innovators. Bird says he is looking for involved and engaged people, and they can range from being quiet to very loud and evangelical. A common thread was that they have a restless probing nature and want to get to the problem.

Team dynamic s are also important especially if you have cross functional ones and the managers job is be creative in a harmonious way - imagine a symphony orchestra.

The important thing is to allow people to put their head above the parapet without getting it shot off. If you are the sort of manager who jumps all over people when they disagree then you are not going to get innovation. Once people know that it is OK to challenge their managers thoughts because they have a better idea - then their learning curve in Bird's opinion goes up. Up to a point Lord Copper - at the end of the day, the manager can't abdicate responsibility to the team - he still has to be convinced.

Morale of the team is also important - he reckons that bad morale means that for every $1 you spend then you get 25c of value Vice versa - he thinks it is $1 spent = $3 value. He thinks that companies don't always pay as much attention to morale as they should. He had worked on a number of disaster projects and noted that these were where people didn't feel invested in their work and any efforts to bring up problems were rebuffed.

The interviewers ask him apart from engagement and morale what is important

He says 'The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. Going back to the complacent company scenario at Pixar. He challenged them and said that this company was founded on doing stuff that was too ambitious. He states in the article " You guys have had nothing but success. What do you do with it? You don't play it safe - you do something that scares you, that's at the edge of your capabilities where you might fail. That's what gets you up in the morning.

I particularly liked that quote as it was the thrust of what Frank Dick said at a talk I attended earlier this week. He referred to the fact that we are at our best working in areas of white water turbulence not calm seas.

One area that he mentions is the presence of a creative culture - and I think that the interesting comment is the creation of a big atrium area which is a central meeting area. However Steve Jobs put the cafeteria, post rooms ,meeting rooms and the bathrooms in the centre. Jobs realised what any good knowledge manager would tell him that when people meet with one another either by design or by serendipity then things happen - social networks are formed and you meet people who might help you make an introduction to a person who might help you.

Interestingly they have a Pixar University (which seems like something that Rover did - but was also used at Walt Disney). I've always believed that learning doesn't stop after university and that learning is life long. However as we grow older with additional responsibilities it does get more difficult and we can lose the ability to learn new things or undertake new challenges.

For me I'd like to learn more about how to do a movie and edit and post it on the Internet or even internally. Some people might want to learn about graphics. Like bird I believe that we have to learn things that are outside our own area makes us a more complete person and also gives them the confidence to move to learn in other areas.

He also challenges leaders to be subversives and occasionally to have a person who is not a yes man but challenges your way of thinking.

He also recognises that innovation can be undermined and it was nice to see my old friend the passive aggressive organisation getting a good run out again.

Bird doesn't like people who in public or in a management meeting are supportive but once they get back into the safety of their department peck away at the proposal. He soon gets rid of these people as soon as he spots them.

It is recognised that leaders can inhibit innovation and he goes back to his earlier point on complacency - he strongly believes that you should never be satisfied and that you should have the attitude of a student of your craft and keep working to improve.

The human condition I believe demands that we look to climb mountains instead of climbing into valleys. Only by climbing those mountains can we see new horizons, live on the edge and truly be human.

Occasionally we need to help pick our colleagues up if they have fallen over and coach them to climb this mountain but in time give them the confidence to climb their own mountains and to teach others the same knowledge.

The first owner at Coke once said that the world belongs to the discontented - Brad Bird seems to have picked up the same baton and is running with it.

The mighty Liverpool march on

Even if you were a neutral (which I'm not) that was a great match full of entertainment and skill which was a (nervous) joy to watch. I thought that the gap between the two side was miniscule though Arsenal did outpass us. As in somethings in life it is looking after the small things that make the difference and it was the ability of Torres to turn and deliver a stunning goal and Arsenal having a slightly small man on the post that meant he wasn't able to deal with Hyppia's header was the difference between success and failure.

Anyway I'm going to bed a happy bunny.

Innovation is super fragile. It’s very easy to kill

This is my 150th post in nearly two years of blogging - never thought I'd have so much to put down in this blog - but the world moves and I like to capture peoples ideas and add my own thoughts.

Reading through one of the blogs from Luke Naismith, he has asked people to come up with known innovation killers.

I do recognise that managers are busy people who have time and budgetary constraints to deal with and don’t always have the time to consider the good idea that some one in their team has worked on.

I’m fortunate as a lot of my ideas in my working life have been taken up though not always immediately, though I’ve been though my career all the stages in the cartoon above.

I was reading an interesting article by one of my old professors Michael West at Aston University in Birmingham.

He highlighted what Machiavelli wrote in ‘Il Principe’ that innovators face a perilous journey because they face opposition from those that have a vested interest in the status quo and only lukewarm support until it has been proved by people experiencing the innovation. The danger of being a pioneer sometimes is that you end up like in the Wild west with a lot of arrows in your back.

He also highlights research that there is a large body of research shows’ that individuals alone generate more ideas at least as good as groups working together. The best way rather than having a brainstorm session is 'to have individuals work silently on this for a few moment and then to have everyone share their ideas together – with the leader speaking last’ This avoids the leader framing the issue for the rest of the group especially subordinates.


Marshall McLuhan once said: “In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.”

The usual idea killers that I’ve heard are

• ‘It’s an interesting idea but…… then with 5 compelling and plausible reasons why one should delay in a manner that would make Sir Humphrey of Yes Minister fame purr with pleasure.

• We don’t think that our clients will think this is something our firm should be doing
  

and my personal favourite

• ‘Haven’t you got enough to do in the day’

Perhaps one day we can change the discipline when an innovation is discussed to say Yes and….. and build up the idea so that it is explored and developed before approval or rejection. Another useful technique is to use ‘ How to’ questions.

Ideas are fragile creatures and managers need to work to find ways to allow people to explore either individually (or if they feel the need a team) but also to provide a platform so that that idea can be exploited. People too are fragile and need to feel that if an idea has been rejected they need to know the rationale why, not to give up, and that future ideas are welcome.

Otherwise they tend not to use what you have employed them for – their brains, vision and skill and can become de-motivated individuals.

The talent powered organisation

This is quite a long post to make up for my recent lack of posting

An interesting little hand out by Accenture about the talent powered organisation which highlighted that the key to winning on talent is multiplication and not addition. I have been interested in this area of talent management hence my reading of posts that cover this subject.

Accenture like everyone else has recognised that talent in the future will become an organisations most important competitive asset.. They consider that companies who truly seek to become talent powered organisations will need to build a capability called talent multiplication.

I always love it when consulting firms consider that they have re-invented the wheel and sell an idea to companies at of course reasonable fees. If managers aren’t already doing this talent management and acting as T shaped managers i.e. driving the business forward and meeting their financial targets as well as acting as coaches of growth and learning, then I’d worry about the state of management development.

It highlights 4 specific capabilities

Defining talent

Defining your talent needs based on a clear understanding of key performance jobs and skills to meet the needs of the organisations future goals.

Leaders that articulate how talent creates value for the organisation

Then look to define these in to key competencies to help with either the development or recruitment of the talent needed.

Discovering talent

I do agree that companies need to be more innovative in the ways that they harness talent pools and may have to look outside their traditional local market to bring people in with the skills they have. Some people will look at the developing number of graduates being pumped out of especially India and China – but there has been some articles highlighting that further training is still required locally to bring them up to the required standard.

What is interesting is that HR departments (more on this later) should look at themselves as part of a value chain and look how they can improve their processes so that recruitment is a more speedy process.

Developing talent

Nothing new here – but the usual comment about the need to developing the capabilities of the employee linked in to the firms business needs. The interesting element is the speeding up of the process. I’ve been reading a paper last night by Chatti and Jarke on the future of e-learning and the failures of current learning management tools delivered via the PC or laptop – mainly because of the focus on content and technology. Though they consider that the use of Web 2.0 technologies might be the answer especially with the rise of social software which crucially as I’ve said for some time links people to people and especially through the use of wikis and blogs and the use of RSS allied to intelligent social search engines that build on user recommendations, reviews and filtering to locate quality resources.

I’d also like to see the option some time in the future to capture phone and video conferences so that these can be posted and utilised a la You Tube – basically little nuggets of information in a rich media format (something I was talking about in 1998 – but now a little closer to reality)

From having developed talent we move to

Deploying talent

No surprise here and it mentions the usual words about engaging the workforce to the organisations goals and it recognises as I have previously identified that these need to buy into peoples own personal & professional aspirations. Managers will have to become increasingly smart in the way that they develop systems that support talent markets. Line Managers and Supervisors will need to work harder in the appraisal process to ensure that agreed actions for improvement are followed through and ensuring that challenges that employees want to undertake are realised. I also consider that there will be a global internal organisational talent market where people identify projects they want to work on and will be rated on the skills experience and people management skills that they have bought to the team and receive ratings from the team leader on the spot rather than at an appraisal and even client comment.

Interestingly enough I was reading a post by Seth Godin on changing the name of Human Resources. A bit like Patrick McGoohan in ‘The Prisoner’ I am a man not a number and increasingly professional people will resent being known as a resource and some fungible commodity – I like to be seen as someone who is a professional and looks to add value to the process I’m not a natural resource like a tree.

He makes a suggestion that ties in with my earlier element of this post - i.e. Change the name of the department to Talent – some people might be cynical about this i.e. when this department went from personnel to HR.

However would the change of name to Talent change anything – possibly if you were the head of talent in your office, you understand that talent is becoming hard to find, difficult to manage and to retain. You may then look at the ways that you run your department and look at ways of reducing bureaucracy and liberating life for the talented knowledge workers that you have. As Godin concludes and I concur ‘Great companies want and need talent, but they have to work for it.’

Keeping experience in the organisation

As highlighted on Friday's post

I was reading an article in the FT on how oil groups are scrambling around to retain experience within their organisation. Usually I put a link in to the article but as the FT is still subscription based tere doesn't seem much point.

It highlights work being undertaken at Chevron where it highlights that currently there aren't enough engineers to meet the needs of current work and a shortfall of 10- 15% by 2010.

It highlights that in the Energy industry - but I have from other conversations no doubt that it may affect other industries - that 50% of engineers there average age is 51 will be retiring around 2015. There will be some shortening of the knowledge gap by the influx of 5% of new entrants by 2010.

Firms are going to have to have a look at ways that they can retain these retiring engineers and more pertinently their experience - some firms are hiring them as consultants but other managers are looking at ways to retain these staff though phased retirement or offering flexible working hours or days.

We may be talking today about the credit crunch but as I have highlighted in other posts we ignore the retirement crunch at our peril.

Interestingly Herzbergs motivation theory has proved its efficacy in one quote in the article.

'Pay is not enough.. that alone is not going to get people to stay - employees want challenging jobs and a company that's culture is a large company with a small company feel.

My view is that companies need to be more innovative to distinguish itself from it's other competitors through rapid mentoring or by asking people to undertake work that will stretch them - not to breaking point but will rapidly develop their skills.

If you are an organisation with alumni are they utilised to help mentor people with some of the tricks of the trade. Or even more pertinently are you targeting other firms alumni who might be willing to sell their experience to you on a part time basis. However, the article does not highlight the probable need to ensure that they keep up to date and increase their experience levels with relevant knowledge.

Will your organisation have to look at other disciplines to fill in the jobs that need to be done.

It maybe that you will have to look to disaggregate your work using the new communications technolgy to let certain aspects of your work handled outside your organisation and then reviewed by yourselves as part of quality control. This is being done as most Lawyers know through Lovells innovation of using the 'Mexican Wave' to handle Prudential's property portfolio and this is probably spreading through other industries.

I have had a beleif for a long time that the manager of the future whilst being a strategist also needs to act as a coach of growth and learning - what Hansen calls a T shaped manager.

I conclude with a quote from Ross Dawson who says

' Almost all economic growth will come from talent. As the economy shifts to the intangible, everything that has value – knowledge, ideas, innovation, content, expertise, effective strategic positioning – comes from talented people.'

The Japanese have senseis but also for their top masters they are designated as living national treasures - so who are your people in your organisation who match that moniker.

Some up coming thoughts

It's a bit slow on the blogging front as my wife is in hospital and in between work and visiting her has left me little time to post this week. However beeen reading some interesting articles from Ross Dawson and Sheila McNulty on talent within organisations throughout the generations that I may be able to post over the weekend.

Also been doing some work on wikis that I may post on and it will be interesting to see if the web 2.0 rhetoric matches the reality of wikis within the enterprise.

The War for Talent - an update (long post)

In 1997 McKinseys undertook a study and released the findings called ‘The War for Talent’ Well, ten years later they have revisited the subject and I thought that it might be useful to summarise some of the findings. As in 1997 most of them are ‘unprepared for the challenge of finding, motivating and retaining capable workers as they were a decade ago.’

The problem hasn’t gone away, in fact it has got worse because of demographics and a question mark of the talent in some of the BRIC countries and other emerging markets. In addition globalisation and the rise of the knowledge worker have forced this issue up the managerial agenda.

A recent survey by McKinseys highlighted that for 50% of global business leaders this was likely to be the single most managerial preoccupation for the remainder of this decade.

Although some progress has been made, the article highlights that for too many organisations, ‘talent management is dismissed ‘as a short term tactical problem rather than an integral part of a long term business strategy’

One of the main reasons is that managers aren’t ‘rewarded’ for their efforts in developing this side of their business (just like knowledge management also) In a number of respects, as I have highlighted earlier, it is that sometimes talent management is seen as cultivating the ‘A’ players and not as DeLong et al in a HBR article in 2003 recommended, also looking to set up your B players.

(Interestingly De Long has a section in this months HBR on Leadership and Strategy covering how mentoring employees can also deliver success in developing talent - intriguingly he highlights that the same amount of time given to a B player as an A player goes just as far.) Once I have read the article, then I shall comment on it in more detail.

Top talent in a firm is not restricted to just you’re A players – you need to manage the vital many who can be alienated by an exclusive focus on high flyers. As McKinsey highlights it picks up on how the knowledge management use of internal networks can improve the effectiveness of top talent by being part of a vibrant internal network covering a range of skills and issues. As we have known since Hawthorne in the 1930’s, performance can suffer when social networks either constrict or are absent.

Interestingly HR professionals at multinational companies highlight that candidates for engineering and general management positions exhibit wide variations in suitability. Poor language skills esp in English, and doubts about the validity of educational qualifications were amongst two of the reasons most widely cited. Another concern is the lack of executives willing and able to work abroad but also talented local people with an international mind set but who can understand local ways and local consumers.

So what are the top 7 obstacles to good talent management by % of respondents?

• Senior Managers don’t spend enough high quality of time on talent management 59%
  
  
• Organisation is siloed and does not encourage constructive collaboration sharing of resources 48%
  
  
• Line Managers are not sufficiently committed to development of people’s capabilities and careers. 45%

• Line Managers are unwilling to differentiate their people as top, average and underperformers. 40%
  
  
• CEO’s, senior leaders are not sufficiently involved in shaping talent management strategy. 39%
  
  
• Senior Leaders do not align talent management strategy with business strategy. 37%

• Line Managers do not address underperformance effectively even when chronic 37%

However I think that McKinsey’s biggest criticism is levelled at executives, the declining impact of HR departments leading to talented managers wanting to avoid working in this area of an enterprise; thus restricting the business knowledge in the HR team and that some HR managers are seen as administrators rather than aids in contemplating and producing proposals on this issue.

The biggest gap of 33% points between HR professional and line managers is ‘HR lacks capabilities to develop talent strategies aligned with business objectives. However the more interesting one to my mind is the 28% gap where HR is not held accountable for the success or failure of talent management initiatives.

Executives as mentioned earlier tend to have a short term view and ‘treat talent as a knee jerk manner hiring additional people ‘ say when a new product takes off.

Also from an accountancy view point investment in talent tends to be an expense rather than being capitalised – and therefore when say there is a downturn in the economy companies cut discretionary expenditure on training their people. As the article cites this can lead to a vicious spiral ‘a lack of talent blocks corporate growth, creating additional performance pressures that divert the attention and thinking of executives towards the short term’

So what does the article suggest as a remedy?

• Develop a number of value propositions – currently a lot of companies do utilise a VP however it tends to be one only. Basically the writers recommend that as in marketing so the VP for different segments of the work force is different. As I have pointed out in earlier posts, the lifestyle choices of Gen Y is different from those of Generation X as well as different cultures and the article concludes that a one size fits all proposition won't work especially in global companies.
  

• It also suggests bolstering HR and move it away from being an administrative backwater just developing and implementing standard processes i.e. recruitment, training and compensation. Some heads of HR are perceived as being distant from the shop floor and not knowing where the talent is.

I’m not sure that this is the best approach as I think that this is likely to be an abdication for senior management of one of their core roles. Larry Bossidy who worked at GE – feels that one of the core responsibilities of any manager is to develop the talent around them.

This needs to be a deep conviction amongst managers to avoid the lure of short term pressures and maybe look to spend 20 to 30% of their time developing the capabilities of their team and developing the leaders of the future. HR can help in developing this but at the end of the day managers need to commit to the future of their companies by developing the future.

However they could be supported by an HR team who were held accountable for helping devise and implement the success of talent management initiatives. Perhaps though companies need to consider whether as they do in Japan that a stint in the HR team should be part of a manager’s rotation so that both parties benefit from the input.

It’s a long post and one of my first of the New Year but I do believe that talent and knowledge management are two of the key managerial issues that will help organisations primarily survive but also as an engine of growth for their businesses.

Which company goes there - Friend or Froe

Last week I was reading an article in the FT who were interviewing Martin Sorrell CEO of WPP. He highlighted the potential growth of China - one statistic really stood out. The US produces 56k engineers per year whilst China produces 465k.

As Ive posited in a number of previous posts Sorrell identified a paradox - there is a vast oversupply of products, whilst because of demographics there is a distinct and worsening shortage of talent to provide companies with the brain force that they are likely to need.

Basically companies will be pressuring their governments in my opinion to be encouraging immigration of talented engineers for example from other countries to fill in the gaps in their talent base.

In a post from Bill Taylor from HBR highlights another interesting comment by Sorrell where he talks about the competitive dynamic between marketing firms such as WPP and digital giants like Google.

He has coined the concept of froes and frenemies. Sometimes firms need to be both friends and foes/enemies. Occasionally companies have to be nice to companies one minute in say another part of the world whilst being competitive enemies in another part of the world.

Taylor concludes by asking companies "who is their most valuable froe and who are your most worrisome frenemies. Have you figured out how to co-operate with and compete against the most important players in your field. "

Old certainties are breaking down and the business environment changes in the globalised world. It's a bit like 1984 where Winston Smith rewrites history so that Eastasia are now our friends and Eurasia are now our enemies in the world of friends and froes.

Lessons from Japan and Generation Why

As readers of this column will be aware, I am particularly interested in demographics and it's effect on the workforce of the future. I was browsing the BBC website at lunchtime and noticed a piece about Japan and it's demographic time bomb.

Here is the link to the full article

Effectively the Japanese are not producing enough babies to replace those people who die and this will have increasing economic effects for the population - the rise of grey power, and employers chasing fewer and fewer potential workers.

To show it graphically here is a diagram showing what has happened since 1950 and what is projected to happen by 2050

The problem has also been the same in Europe especially in Germany and Italy though not on the scale of Japan.

In my inbox tonight was an interesting piece from the US from Chris Resto about the rise of Generation Why. As I've highlighted in earlier posts they have a different view of the workplace and are more questioning and less deferential than the Baby Boom generation (1945 - 64 and Generation X (1964 - 1984).

This generation though as the article points out may be a blessing for organisations that require knowledge workers. I consider that organisations need people who question the status quo and increasingly innovative solutions are likely to become competitive differentiators.

In fact, as Resto highlights organisations should |" see questions from young employees as signs that they care about contributing to the organisation, and as opportunities to capitalise on the ambition, energy, and enthusiasm for which they hired young talent in the first place."

One of the areas that I learnt from my studies in KM was that management can learn from the process as they are exposed to new ideas and they consider and make redundant old ways of thinking.

I'm not saying that every thing that a senior manager has learnt should be unlearnt but that that junior who asks questions might provide you with some breakthrough thinking that gives you your next big market. You can also highlight to the junior employee some additional thinking that they might not have considered. At the end of the day knowledge sharing is a two way street.

It also shows that they care about your company and it's future to ask those questions and potentially out of a desire to do a good job (but then again I was always a Theory Y guy and the firm I work for certainly embodies those traits.)

How to fill the talent gap

I was reading last night - couldn't sleep too well about a recent article by Douglas Ready and Jay Conger in the Wall Street Journal about how global companies are finding it harder to fill critical jobs - either by struggling to find recruits or because as the demographic forces work against them and the other pressures haven't developed internally people to step up into these roles. Also I wanted to write a longer article as this is my 102nd blog posting since I started Knowledge and The Cardinal.

The article highlights that organisations aren't looking at these as a whole but as separate issues. They analysed about 40 companies and the conclusion was that companies need to have a unified plan to tackle these issues as a whole rather than individually. They hypothesise that the five problems that I'm going to write down are starting to converge and that "the perfect storm was brewing'

The saw the five problems as follows

1. Emerging Markets
   
   As companies flock into the BRIC countries and other emerging markets the demand for talent is outstripping supply. Also companies external to the local market aren't always fully aware of the cultural sensitivities and what motivate someone in the local market may not in say India.
   
   
2. Narrow Thinking
   
   Because a number of firms are still focused on the business unit and to maximise the opportunities of that unit rather than looking to generate new profits from harnessing mixed products that utilise a number of skills to deliver a new product or service to either existing or new customers. A lot of firms are based on maximising say their billable hour target rather than on their collaboration with other colleagues. Basically we don't have enough managers who look beyond the box.
   
   
3. Demographics
   
   I have talked about this on a fairly regular basis in other posts but effectively the baby boom generation is leaving or will be leaving the work force with all their experiences over the next 15 years. The article says that 30 million managers will be going in the next 5 years. Also because of the delayering and the move towards the lean organisation - reduced the opportunities for people to develop. It is interesting to note (and there may be another reason for this such as staff retention as the ability to reach partner is curtailed) that for example law firms are creating some new tiers in their organisations be it Director or Senior Associate. This neatly brings me on to Point
   
   
4. The Expectations Gap
   
   We know that Generation Y in our workplace does not see that working in one organisation is a lifetime contract - studies have shown that they expect to work in about 6 -8 locations in their working career. As the talent shortages bite home in the next few years expect to see more demand by employees for what they want from work and maybe to the chagrin of IT Departments wanting to use computers other than Dell (Apple Macs anyone)
   
   
5. Revenge of the Clones - or as the writers call it Blind Spots
   
   When I was doing my masters under organisational behaviour one of my professors mentioned studies that stated that managers tend to hire promote and reward people who look, think and behave like them. This leaves people open to some major blind spots in attracting the talent that your organisation needs in the future.

As part of their study at these 40 global companies 97% of respondents said that their company had a formalised succession planning process for senior executives. However 97% said that their company didn't possess a free and flowing talent pipeline.

So what are their proposed solutions

1. Make your talent plan match your business plan.
   
   If you know and can exploit the capabilities that let you as a company provide unique and profitable value to your customers then you should look to build those capabilities amongst the people that you employ. This is for everyone and needs extensive training and goes beyond the pony and trap show that most corporate inductions are.
   
   
2. Talent Management is everyone's job
   
   It's not just HR's job the best firms had deep commitment and accountability amongst senior managers to develop the next managers. Managers need to recognise that they are coaches of growth and learning as well as making the numbers and making sure that their talent pipeline is as full and as flowing as it can be and committing to deliver on this.
   
   
3. Support Matters
   
   I remember talking to one lawyer who had just been made a partner who said to me that the jump was like going from the 1st Division of English football to the Premier Division. The lawyer felt that although the promotion had been based on the ability to hit high billing hours nothing had been really prepared in taking on the challenges to face the new assignments. I'd always felt that people in that position as well as proper managerial training should be assigned a per partner mentor and then for the 1st year as a partner would help them as they stepped on to that ladder by providing coaching and feedback. Well this is what one of the proposed solutions is.
   
   
4. Measure what matters
   
   Ask your HR department what metrics they are using and if they have one for talent development. for instance what is your retention of key employees and high potential ones (if you have identified these people in the first place). Also look at why you have to go outside your organisation to hire someone new - is it because you haven't developed your talent line internally - or is it to meet the needs of a new strategic direction.
   
   How many talent reviews do you hold and is it a real one or do you see it as a bureaucratic form to be filled in and filed away. Also are your managers appraised on how they ensure that peoples training and development aspirations are delivered on an annual basis. I've seen on more than a few questions training aspirations placed on a form and then re said at the next appraisal.

I thought that it was an interesting article as talent as well as knowledge sharing is I believe one of the biggest managerial challenges that faces us over the next 10 - 15 years. I think that professional services need to review the way that they develop their talent - and some are but one wonders how many are just talking the talk......

A light day

I've been chasing a few things up today but did some light reading over the weekend about projects and harnessing the wisdom of expert crowds as well as some old McKinsey articles about 'the war for talent'.

A couple of quotes stuck out from some of the articles and I thought that I'd like to share them with people just for a thought stirrer.

From Mary Cullinane at Microsoft's Partners in Learning.

"Companies are getting worried that they're not going to be able to find enough good employees."

From Scott Allen and David Teten in their book "The Virtual Handshake"

"Your success is driven in large part by your ability to leverage the community you build around you."

And finally - courtesy of  David Gurle quoted in Fast Company.

" A communications tool is only as good as the number of people it can reach."

I thought of these quotes to bear in mind when thinking about knowledge sharing in organisations when we consider the role of new collaborative technology and the human element. I'll be posting in a bit more detail on some of my reading during the week.

Knowledge combinations in work

Not wishing to sound like a blues song, but I woke up this morning to listen to two commentators discussing the use of Facebook in the work place. The discussion seemed to veer between two extremes. 

My experience is that most people are sensible in their use of internet facilities and Facebook is another example of internet usage. Whilst I'm sure that some people may 'goof off' using the Internet, it makes me wonder whether an organisation is providing fulfilling work for people if they feel the need to use Facebook for such long periods of time. 

However not one of the commentators considered the case for internal  facebook style networking which I have discussed in previous posts.

Maybe we need to be intelligent enough  as an organisation to say that if people are using Facebook to access, say, a professional network for IT people, or say as a KM professional,  posting to get peoples views on a issue then it is a justifiable use; as ultimately it is of benefit to an employee and to the organisation, as it is helping to speed up the process of work by helping people tap into other peoples knowledge base. 

Perhaps if organisations treated their staff like professional adults rather than micro managing them and what they do, they will get the professional adult behaviour that their organisation needs.

Interestingly today I read a McKinsey report about connecting employees to create value in investment banks.

One of the problems that investment banks have is to leverage talent across the various business units that they have. However clients just as in other professional service firms are looking for services that are integrated and tap a variety of functions. 

The problem tends to be that organisations have departments that have grown so large and have their own targets to achieve, that they have frozen these departments into silos. By asking people to achieve short term targets or billable hour targets they have frozen out the possibility for people to develop true collaborative and professional networks.

Some organisations have tried to do this by combining parts of the organisation but that of course can be disruptive in terms of merging two cultures say a tax department with a corporate department in a law firm.

Another way that it could be done the article posits is the use of informal networks and utilising what I proposed at Wragges,     with the use of deep dive interviews to not only share knowledge but also to investigate the opportunities for possible collaboration and for creating innovative new services.

Another approach that was not considered in the article was the use of an internal Facebook style approach which, can help organisations to understand internal networks Another approach considered was by analysing the internal flows of e-mails to see who is connecting to who internally. 

All this is very good but I also discovered whilst carrying out my knowledge audit that one of the best approaches in identifying the internal networkers and they key people in them and especially the people who were in more than one group was by talking to people on the 'shop floor' and finding out who the key players are in the organisation. 

To assist the co-operation in terms of encouraging this it needs to ensure that it considers ways of developing initiatives to develop people who undertake horizontal promotions as a way of not only understanding the organisation better but also as a means of developing cross fertilisation. 

Another way is for the management team to look at ways that it can concentrate on themes that cross boundaries say no more than 3 - 5 with real economic benefits not only to the organisation but to the people in the group themselves. 

Organisations are, as I was reminded in this mornings discussion, profit making, not charitable, and knowledge sharing and encouraging these groups do need to have some economic benefit to the organisation or it's not worth undertaking it in work time.

These can have the benefit of not only sharing knowledge but also identifying talent throughout the organisation.

Getting good people to work in a law firm Part 2

Continuing on from Sunday nights post.

Talent Management in accountancy firms is usually left to a mid tier person, whereas from my experience in law firms it is primarily the partner, though I have noticed it increasingly following the accountancy model and for it to be delegated to a lower ranked solicitor. 

From talking to junior solicitors, they do feel that their seniors treat them like 'privates in an army' and expendable if they don't come up to speed. The problem with this is that you are potentially throwing away future assets to your firm. Junior solicitors might just benefit from a quick 5 minute feedback on the way back to a desk after a client meeting.

My view is that like the Japanese we should consider a sensei model where someone gradually attains master status after undergoing a period of training on the job and a variety of roles achieving certain milestones. It is important however, that this training is recognised by any firm incentive system as highlighted last night.

The important thing to remember is that not everyone wants to be a partner. The great footballer Didier Deschamps was- derisively - described by Eric Cantona as "the water-carrier" by which Cantona meant that Deschamps only existed to pass the ball to more talented players. 

This description masked a very valuable player for a number of top teams. The stars in your organisations need these people to enable them to do their jobs more effectively and they should not be lost to any talent management process - just used more widely and in interesting work. 

Some law firms have recognised this by introducing intermediate grades between partner and associate as a means of retaining good workers and rewarding them. 

It is also important to ensure that long serving partners who are retained as consultants which helps partners who have been with the firm a long time to arrange what the Japanese call amakudari or 'descent from heaven' by helping them to adjust to life outside the firm, but also ensuring that they pass on their expertise to the organisation and it's staff.

The other challenge that knowledge based firms face is ensuring that employees have more flexible packages - a recent diversity survey has shown in English law firms that very few ethnic minorities make it to partner level - whilst firms like Lewis Silkin have over 40% of its partners who are women. 

Occasionally we need to look at what Hewlett calls off-ramping for people to undertake not only traditional maternity leave but also more and more likely to occur when dealing with elderly parents and possibly in-laws.

As the war for talent steadily increases and people look for more flexibility from their employer. I think that knowledge based firms of all persuasions need to keep an eye on what other similar firms are doing and see if their good ideas can be borrowed and used in your organisation.

As William Blake aptly put it in The Four Zoas and it seems apt for a knowledge based firm.

"What is the price of Experience? do men buy it for a song?
Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath, his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
And in the wither'd field where the farmer plows for bread in vain."

Getting Good people to work in a knowledge based firm. Part 1

There was a recent article in Legal week on the 19th July 73% highlighted two major findings in a recent Law Society publication on staff retention and quality of life said there were problems with employee retention and 58% identified problems with employee engagement. Interestingly enough, there has been an article in this weeks Economist looking at how Accountancy firms deal with this issue. For us knowledge management practitioners, who are interested in the people aspects of KM, this article should be required reading.

We all know that as a knowledge based organisation, people are our only asset not only for their knowledge but also the network links that they have both internally with other staff, but also externally with clients. Also as the market gets tighter, the problem comes from attracting and retaining the brightest people to work in their organisation.

Perhaps we need as a business to set time aside to set targets not only for retention, but also how our managers are encouraged and rewarded not so much for the time that they bill as much as they can but also how they manage and develop the people under their sway. As lawyers if we are setting time aside in terms of billing hours for our clients, can we also consider using that same system to encourage leaders in the firm to set aside time for that development but also to ensure that they are not disadvantaged in terms of future pay rises and possible promotion.

We also need to consider our staffing levels more closely - because job cuts say at this time might come to haunt us a few years later when we need the staff when the cycle turns upward. We must also remain aware that agents have a vested interest in encouraging people to move. As the article highlights "Recruitment consultants charge as much as 30% of an associate’s salary for their services, so they are keen to promote ‘churn’ in the firms they service.

The loss of expertise to a firm is serious, as are the potential lost clients and the knock-on effect on morale when good people leave. Day-to-day, there is the cost of cover and reassignment of files. When the new associate is hired it will take time for them to settle in and be inducted into the way of the firm, so it is not surprising to read that turnover costs can reach £150k for each £50k worth of salary."

This probably also doesn't include the lost knowledge element, which I would consider might cost another significant sum the person gets up to speed etc etc as well as the loss of innovation, possible costly errors, less efficiency as well as in terms of significant loss the ability to deliver on the firms strategy.

Of course this loss may be offset if you pursue a good alumni strategy as I proposed to another firm both in terms of reducing costs to agents and possibly to act as recruiting agents. Organisations need to encourage that sense of emotional allegiance to a firm - because I believe that people will increasingly job hop but if they are quality people, then firms should keep in touch, so that people with increased skills might want to come back to you.

If you have a trainee lawyer for example, and they are say three years pqe. Then effectively you have a sunk cost of 5 years salries and training time invested in them. So the key is to get people to stay longer so that they don't get seduced in to leaving, which means that talent development needs to start earlier in peoples careers - even while they are trainees.

In my next post probably on Monday I'll be continuing this theme of talent management.