Is success the result of talent or experience? This perennial question received a resurgence of interest recently with the 2012 Olympics delivering up over 60 medals for the United Kingdom and nearly half of those as Gold medals. Article by Graham White, HR Director at Brighton & Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust.
Coffee rooms across the country debated long and hard seeking an answer to the question was our success and sporting prowess because of the natural ability and talent of our competitors or because of incessant practice training and development they undertook. This debate mirrors itself in the business world as we regularly consider the effectiveness or otherwise of career succession planning. Do we make managers or do we find them ready made? Is the future goal for HR leaders to develop talent or just to spot it and nurture it. Debate on how useful and how accurate leadership development and succession planning is has risen up the agenda recently as we see the early signs of economic and business growth in areas like manufacturing. With the economy seeing a turn for the better many organisations are already declaring shortfalls in resources and believe they are likely to find themselves without sufficient 'Prime' candidates ready to replace planned or unplanned departures of key leaders and specialists.
What surprises me most is that many of these organisations are the same ones who for years have been claiming they have CSP effectively in place. Awards have been won and regular articles have been published postulating on the intricacies of their excellent “Fast Track” programs and many thousands of pounds are spent on assessment and development centres yet they now raise concerns about their future need for talent. Hortense Canady once said “. If you don't realise there is always someone who knows how to do something better than you, then you don't give proper respect for others' talents. The reality is CSP as we know it does not work and has become a curse on current development professionals like myself. After many months of assessing, testing and analysing all we appear to be left with is a small hub of individuals who feel patronised into seeded roles with promises of long-term job security as long as they don't “blot their copybook”.
Barack Obama said in 2005: “We need to steer clear of this poverty of ambition, where people want to drive fancy cars and wear nice clothes and live in nice apartments but don't want to work hard to accomplish these things. Everyone should try to realise their full potential. Today's employer is still trying to convince itself that it needs long-term stability and so develops assessment processes that creates leadership development tools that manufactures clones of the current or previous management regimes. This is happening whilst today's future leaders are entering the work environment, desiring job opportunities that ensure their success is directly proportionate to their contribution, effort and outcome of their daily work. Robert Frost summed it up when he said: “The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week”.
Henri Fayol (1841-1925), French pioneer of management history, was among the first to recognise and document the universal organisational need for succession planning however over a hundred years later HR professionals are still desperately seeking to retain the methodology used as if is the holy grail of organisational resourcing. So we find ourselves in the Twenty-First century trying to develop Twentieth0century managers using 19th century techniques. I fear we face a difficult future if we don't wake up and see the reality that we can't keep doing what we are doing now. And why do we do this? Because we actually believe the whole world operates at human speed. We want things to evolve and to change only when we are ready. I stood in the queue in my local post office recently and listened to a conversation between two elderly customers. They were discussing impending changes to the state pension scheme and what it meant for them. One turned to the other and said: “I don't understand why they don't wait until all old people die then they can introduce a new scheme”.
The reality is the dynamic nature of work in the Twenty-first century is already determining that the future leaders for our organisations may not even be working for us yet. Tomorrow's managers are not excited about tenure, so loyalty in no longer something we should try to measure. They are not seeking long-term job security so detailed ten year career plans don't excite them. They are on a mission that is predicated on mutual benefit. They want to gain knowledge and to use that knowledge to improve themselves and their organisation while they are with them. However, they do not see themselves in the same employer forever. The lesson we have not yet fully learned is that we need to invert CSP. Rather than seeing it as a golden key to a narrow pathway upwards given only to a special few it has to become a highway for everyone to experiment and develop. Effectively career succession planning is dead and in its place we must put a new opportunity that should touch the whole workforce. It needs to work at every level ensuring in our organisations that we have people with the skills and experience ready to step up into any new roll in three months, six months or 12 months.
Critics of this idea are already claiming that if we raise expectations people will leave us frustrated, but they are doing that already. By creating a career highway leavers are no longer seen as endangering the organisation future success. Leavers become opportunities they are seen as creating gaps for further talent to develop their skills. By developing career highways for all staff groups we create the opportunity for there always to be another planned career move in the wings waiting to step up into the new role. Many of the CEOs I have worked for have talked about their concerns about the lack of core long-term strength in their companies. They have complained to HR for its lack of long term planning. They don't want patronising lists or favoured candidates. They are talking about future proofing their organisations by ensuring the provision of comprehensive groups of “ready now” candidates to replace planned & unplanned losses of key personnel.
The solution to ensuring HR can deliver on the requirement of a career highway is not free from difficulty but if we follow three simply rules I believe we can produce an effective alternative to outdated Career Succession Planning. Firstly we need to keep it simple. We already have detailed job descriptions and role specifications in place and regular objective setting already triangulates the appraisal process so don't invent something else. Just make sure everyone can see not only their own objectives but also what their manager does and how well they are expected to do their job. This gives staff sight of the goals and capability gaps they know they need to fill.
Secondly, keep it real. In every organisation the structure narrows as you rise up and so consequently the opportunities also reduce. When you develop career highways you need to ensure everyone understands the natural consequence of effort is not automatic upgrading, and thirdly keep it focused on developing the whole workforce. We can all-too quickly fall into the trap of putting more effort and attention into the planning of the process than the development of our staff. We then invest so much in content that we can provide for everyone. Any effective career highway will need some forms, charts, meetings, due dates and checklists but beware they sometimes create a false sense that the planning process is an end in itself There are some who question the concept of career highways believing they set to high an expectation or a scale of ambition that cannot be fulfilled. I don't sign up to any work environment where we would want to suggest that our systems cannot tolerate too many big people with big plans. We have short memories in HR if we have forgotten what HR has already done and already delivered. All we need in HR is the self belief and desire to offer to all work colleagues the opportunity to develop and grow and progress irrespective of gender race of religion. The choice is ours, do we follow a well-beaten path that leads only to more of the same or beat a new path where our workforce sees opportunity as a natural consequence of working here.
Graham White – HR Director
Brighton & Sussex University Hospitals NHS Trust
www.bsuh.nhs.uk
