A Note from a CHRO to the Executive Team re. Restarting the Company’s Talent Engine in Year 2 of the Pandemic
To: Executive Team (ET) Colleagues
From: Kelly
Subject: Leadership Talent
Happy New Year. 2020 is finally behind us and as we all agreed on last week’s ET Zoom call, it was a year of unprecedented challenges. Everyone in the company — including members of this team — seems to be stressed and exhausted and while our final 2020 results will be better than projected back in June, significant headwinds to the business remain, much of it driven by uncertainty because of the continuing pandemic.
The purpose of this longer-than-I’d-like (apologizing in advance…) email is to build on the brief conversation we had on last week’s call about the state of our company’s leadership and give you my CHRO perspective on some actions we should take. Because by choice, the ET’s strategic focus on identifying and growing talent had to take a back seat this past year.
Our energies were elsewhere. 2020 was all about pivoting the business to accommodate Work From Home; keeping our customers; working with our supply chain partners; keeping our people (and each other) healthy; meeting the payroll. Our focus within the ET was on business sustainability for the next month and the next quarter. The tactical became the strategic.
In this new year, then, we need to re-initiate our efforts at taking stock of the leadership talent in the company. We need to not only review the succession plans for key roles in the company but we also need to revisit our list of high potentials and see what we’ve learned about them in the turbulent year we have just left behind.
In short, we need to resume the quarterly talent reviews we started in 2018 and reengage our talent engine.
As terrible as 2020 was it did provide opportunities for leaders at many levels to perform under adverse conditions and gives us as an ET a window into a better understanding of who was able to perform in that environment of uncertainty and ambiguity. It would be helpful to re-read the article about “VUCA” (Volatility; Uncertainty; Complexity; Ambiguity) I circulated and which we subsequently discussed back in April.
And our focus should not just be about those leaders whom we’ve identified as having high promise or high potential. We also need to take inventory of all of the “hidden talent” that has been uncovered this past year. We’ve all heard and shared some amazing success stories about previously under-the-radar leaders who have stepped up and gotten great results and who at the same time have built great teamwork and collaboration in these challenging times. We need to recognize them, develop them, reward them. And we need to retain them.
Another thing that 2020 taught me (us?) is that we should also revisit our success criteria for leadership. We spent a lot of effort in 2017 identifying leadership competencies as well as criteria for how we define “high potential.” We used those competencies to help us make good hiring and promotion decisions and used the high potential factors for identifying our first cohort of the Leadership Academy program which we had to put on hold this past year.
However, the pandemic has changed the business landscape and some of the assumptions we’ve had about business success. We’ve even had to question elements of our own business model. The world has changed and that has considerable implications for how we define leadership success and what we should look for in future leaders.
Because of 2020, I’ve come to appreciate even more the importance of personal traits and attributes for successful leadership. The ability to be adaptable or agile, both in how leaders learn and in how they execute, is an example. Other personal traits (some of which are not very “trainable”) we should be valuing more explicitly are things like resilience; the ability to navigate ambiguity; leading with a positive mindset; being a creative or “possibilities” thinker.
And while we called out empathy and emotional intelligence in our existing competency model, I think we’ve all been surprised at how valuable those skills were in 2020 for leaders. In many cases, there was a direct connection between the intentional use of those skills by leaders and the results they achieved, including helping team members stay engaged. In some cases, it even meant helping team members cope with the pandemic on a very personal level.
That’s not to say that more “traditional” leadership skills that we have valued, such as planning and organizing; influence; decision making; delegation; communication, etc. are no longer important. They are. And “Urgent Execution” will continue to be one of our company’s values. But 2020 VUCA has convinced me that the DNA for leadership success here and elsewhere is different from just a year ago and will remain different for the foreseeable future. Year 2021 and beyond will not be a return to the “old normal.” Pat, I think you emphasized that point repeatedly in your “Ask the CEO” portion of the last virtual town hall we had.
I read a leadership book long ago which talked about the importance of the “head” (knowledge and wisdom), the “heart” (authentically caring; empathy; passion) and the “hands” (management skills; technical/functional skills). Head-Heart-Hands. I’ve always found that easy to remember and to me, it’s a useful framework for a more holistic view of leadership success. We should find ways to build it into our talent stewardship.
Identifying and developing talent is one of our collective accountabilities as an executive team and I know I’m preaching to the converted on some of this so I’ll mercifully end this note here and suggest that we carve out an hour on the ET’s mid-January Zoom call to flesh this out more and get some markers on our calendars to restart the talent discussions.
About the author: Mike Hoban is a leadership coach and advisor who also writes about business topics. He is actively working at becoming a world-class grandpa to his five young granddaughters. In addition to his 35+ years experience as a leader, consultant and business owner he has also published extensively in Fast Company and wrote a business column for 12 years. Many of his recent commentaries — including several about leading during the COVID crisis — can be found on his LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-hoban-b5756b6/ He can also be reached at mjhoban99@gmail.com.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
