Talent Management - January 2009 - (Page 40)

insight by Kellye Whitney Attract Speciﬁc T alent Groups Harris Corp. blends traditional and nontraditional talent strategies to recruit highly skilled scientists and engineers. Technology companies usually have one thing in common when it comes to talent management: difﬁculty securing employees with the right skill sets. Harris Corp. is no different. The international communications and information technology company serves government and commercial markets in more than 150 countries, and nearly half of its 16,000-plus workforce is engineers and scientists. In addition to efforts to strengthen its talent management capabilities, integrate various processes and emphasize coaching and development, Harris has taken a proactive approach to seed its pipeline with the right talent. Jeff Shuman, Harris’ vice president of human resources and corporate relations, shared some of the ﬁner points of the company’s talent management strategy. can ﬁt into our culture and can perform at exceptional levels? To monitor that, we put performance management in place, and we’ve really changed that process over the past few years. It used to be more of an administrative process managers didn’t care to do and employees didn’t care to receive, and it was cumbersome. Now, we spend much more time on the discussion and dialogue, rather than ﬁlling out forms. We’ve come up with learning and development plans for strengths and development needs, which lead to career-planning capability and how we reward and recognize individuals based on performance and potential. All those pieces come together to form our organization review, where we look at where the organization’s going, what’s succession look like and how do we need to change to meet the needs of our business in the future? Talent management is becoming part of our DNA. It’s an expectation we have for all of our leaders to manage our most valuable resource: our people. There’s a quote, something the CEO of Monsanto said, that I’ve carried around and shared for awhile. It says we have to be clear about what talent management is not: It’s not extracurricular, something we do when the important stuff is done. It is the important stuff, and it’s not just the responsibility of HR. I’ve lived with that theme, and my CEO has clearly set the expectation for our leaders that talent management is critically important. When we speak of it we think about the whole process, integration, planning and the proactive process that ensures we have a supply of highly productive individuals in the right job with the right skills at the right time to support business strategy. TM: Shuman: Describe Harris’ approach to talent management. We’re a company made up of engineers and scientists who are extremely skilled and capable of innovating fabulous technology. How we get that particular skill set to also manage people has been something we’ve really focused on. We’ve been able to manage that. Part of it is change management — setting expectations for our leaders and sitting down with individuals and taking responsibility for their career. Again, because we’re scientists and engineers, we used to do performance planning to the seventh decimal point as far as how we rate somebody and where they stand. We spent endless hours trying to quantify that versus when you ask a basic question: “[When] you have a project, who do you want on the project, who don’t you want on the project?” In a split second, we’ve made a performance or a potential performance and capability assessment, so why aren’t we spending our time having detailed dialogue with our people about what can help them improve and develop? That’s caused us to change our thought process and, more importantly, our working process of evaluating individuals. TM: Shuman: What speciﬁc challenges impact talent management at Harris? TM: mance? What processes and programs have you established to improve workforce perfor- It starts with workforce planning: What are the needs, skills and competencies we need today and tomorrow? How do we recruit for those particular skill sets, or how do we develop that particular skill set inhouse? Then, how do we on-board individuals so they Shuman: TM: How do you develop leadership behaviors that lead to optimal performance? 40 January 2009 talent management magazine www.talentmgt.com http://www.talentmgt.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Talent Management - January 2009

Talent Management - January 2009 Editor’s Letter Contents Human Performance Leading Edge Learning Connections Integrate Web 2.0 Into the On-Boarding Experience Show ’Em the Money: Compensation Trends 2009 Transition at the Top How Hollywood Manages Talent and What You Can Learn Get the Most Bang With Limited Training Bucks Life After Layoffs Attract Specific Talent Groups Performance Management: Its Time Is Now Helping the Helpers Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources Full Potential

Talent Management - January 2009

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