Aside from being the title of a great song from one of the greatest rock bands ever -Iron Maiden- Be Quick or Be dead is a great metaphor for today’s business environment. No matter how you look at it speed is picking up and someone will take advantage of it at someone else’s expense. Now more than ever with falling valuation of assets, lack of liquidity, and reduced consumer confidence the notion of “survival of the quickest” is the real deal. Darwin famously stated that it is not the strongest but the most adaptable to change that survives, and this is true as true in the business world as it is in nature.

Actually if you think about it, when is the best opportunity to actually go on the offense and make a change? When the going gets tough or when everything is gently pointing upwards? Companies will either be acquired, stripped of assets, or go on the offense to acquire underpriced assets when markets and demand soften up. The real deal then is obviously to make sure you quickly can get your organization aligned and executing on the new company’s direction, and that you drive the calculated synergies of a merger or acquisition home. With people being by far the biggest expense for any given business (on average 70% of operational cost) how you deal with your joined workforce must logically be the most important factor in any M&A situation.

“In any merger or acquisition, investment banks and equity analysts will provide you with a plethora of figures quantifying the synergistic strategic benefits of the union. Yet what determines whether a merger succeeds or fails is really its people.” – Jean-Pierre Garnier, ex-CEO of GlaxoSmithKline

Logically then, companies with better people processes and a serious focus on people performance should do better in a merger. To test this hypothesis, SuccessFactors research examined the performance of ten of our customers that specifically cited challenges resulting from a merger or acquisition as their business drivers for investing in SuccessFactors. The results were clear – the ten companies that leveraged SuccessFactors to drive the merger home completely outperformed their competition in 12 month revenue growth, 12 month income growth, return on equity and price to book ratio. These mergers were not just successful on paper, they worked in the real world.

Download the SuccessFactors Research Data Sheet: Mergers & Acquisitions to see just how successful our customers are and how they are winning in these uncertain economic times.

Making mistakes can be a good thing if you learn from them. Making the same mistakes again and again is stupid and costly.

The economy goes in cycles. I know it feels like a long time ago, but do you remember that we had a pretty quick and tough downswing that started in March 2000? 2001 and 2002 felt like a nuclear winter to a lot of people and businesses. I’m not saying that the current situation has the same underlying factors and patterns as the last time that we had this tough economic climate, but businesses and people are to a large extent equally as affected by it as before. Smart companies learned from the mistakes we made the last time the economic cycle entered a downswing and avoid repeating them.

So what did we learn from the last downswing? Some companies really lost and others came out of the economic turmoil even stronger, making real gains relative to the competition. Business, like sports, is very competitive and relative. Making a relative gain is easier when everybody is hurt rather than when all are performing well and happily taking orders serving demand. Furthermore, it was clear that those companies that avoided facing the new situation lost. Inaction is never the solution for advancing down the field. So companies that tried to take advantage of the economic downswing with clear actions won.

Here are some mistakes that losers make to learn from:

• Losing companies that get caught up in internal reconfiguring and take on an inward focus also tend to forget about their customers need and the value provided to them
• Losing companies fall for the pressure to cut people across the board when called on to downsize and reduce costs
• Losing companies alienate talent with poor decisions made through an extreme focus on short-term results; alienation which can last years thereafter.

SuccessFactors Research has recently written the paper Winning Through Talent in Uncertain Times, addressing how companies can get ahead when times are tough. Learn from your competitors’ mistakes, smartly align your resources, and turn an economic downswing into an economic opportunity for your company.

At SuccessFactors, it is easy to take virtual teams for granted. We began with a global vision, and from the start worked across geographies in virtual teams. Simply put, we got things done – the actual mechanisms, e-mail, PRDs, webcasts, were not nearly as important as the attitudes of the team members. Not long ago SuccessFactors Research, along with Jim Ware and Charles Grantham from the Future of Work, took a look at how the workforce is changing. One clear result – more people will be working remotely. The days of knocking on the office door, or ducking into a coworker’s cube to ask a question are coming to an end. 

The question arises, as companies expand opportunities to work remotely, how can they ensure that their virtual teams stand up and deliver? How can companies recreate the seamless virtual teams that I have taken for granted at my time with SuccessFactors? The folks over at OnPoint Consulting have done some research on virtual teams and found that successful teams have members that:

• Show Initiative
• Are willing to assume Leadership/Responsibility
• Share Processes
• Have a clear understanding of their contribution to the company
• Provide timely feedback
• Are willing to  expend extra effort
• Work together well
• Help each other

Well, it has been said that man cannot move mountains. Technically, this is true – fortunately  people are more flexible than their geography. In fact, with great human capital management, you most definitely can move mountains, and should. Let’s talk about the mountain facing managers in most companies, the performance Bell curve.

Looking at low, medium, and high performers, it’s obvious that the lion’s share of people in a company will be middle-performers (particularly a company with many employees). They are the mountain.

A lot of companies unintentionally focus on their top and bottom performers – the very worst are let go or disciplined and retrained, while the best performers are recognized and rewarded – but what about everyone in between? More often than not, they are ignored because they are doing “okay” and because fixing performance problems in the middle of the curve requires more effort and greater understanding of the individuals.

Managing the high and low performers is important, but rarely matches the impact of moving the mountain in the middle of the curve. If the bulk of your workforce is in the middle performing, logically the most of your people costs are there, and therein lay your greatest potential for improvement. Think about it numerically, if your company has 35 slackers, 200 middle performers, and 35 rock stars, increasing the performance of those 200 middle performers would have a far greater impact than say, firing or retraining the 35 slackers!

Moving that mountain, shifting that bell curve to the right, increases the performance of everyone, including the heart of most workforces – the middle performers.

Companies should focus on moving the entire curve to the right, elevating the performance of everyone. Pulling that curve to the right takes some effort, but the potential payoff is tremendous. To start, you can lure some of your middle performers to the right with a transparent, and strong pay for performance system. If it is clear that higher performers are getting a lot more than the middle performers, real impetus to perform can be created – in fact an article highlighting our research on the spread of pay was recently published in Talent Management magazine, which clearly shows companies with a larger spread of pay between performance levels do better!

Of course pay for performance is just a start. Giving your middle performers clear career paths, opportunities to advance their skills, and managing their competencies can help you to pull the performance curve at your company to the right. Maybe a person needs training, would fit better in another department, or has an issue with his or her manager, etc. With great HCM, you can get to the heart of the problem and move mountains in your organization.

Last week my colleague Chris blogged about the differences between competencies and skills – over the course of my consulting experience, I developed a simple framework for putting skills and competencies to work.

Think about throwing a spear – the first thing the thrower needs is energy/momentum. The spear will not fly very far unless the thrower invests enough energy in his or her throw. Second, the thrower must have developed the physical coordination to shift his or her weight and pull back the long, weighty spear in preparation to throw. Coordination is a competency that is widely applicable to a number of sports, but critical for throwing the spear. Finally, the thrower must be able to aim the spear. This is a skill specific to throwing the spear, which is markedly different from throwing other objects, such as a ball.

The People Core Assessment© pyramid, illustrates this framework. The base of any successful action in energy and engagement – no task will get done without them. Competencies sit above energy, and tell you whether or not you have the capabilities required to succeed. Finally, the specialized skills required to complete the task form the apex of the pyramid.

From experience in coaching talented cyclists as well, I’ve found support for this same thinking in one of the greatest books: The Cyclists Training Bible by Joe Friel. Mr. Friel suggests similar thinking for building up peak performance through a few selected races over the year. Build core strengths and capacities first, then more specific skills with higher intensity as the race progresses. A common mistake of endurance athletes is to work on the top of the pyramid without having a foundation in place. This is true for our day to day management challenges as well.

When you are confronted with a people management challenge, start at the bottom of the pyramid and figure out if your people are invested in the tasks at hand – do they have the energy and motivation required to carry the project forward? Winners rarely win by accident, people have to want to win. Second, take a good, hard look at the competencies of the people on your team. Do they have the core abilities needed to win? Finally, figure out what specific skills you need to develop in your team and make sure they have those skills, which are the tools you will use to attack the challenges at hand.

Ask anyone which is worse, an unskilled person or an incompetent person and I’d bet money most will answer incompetent. Why? The difference in meaning is subtle, but profound. An unskilled person can be trained. The word incompetent implies that the individual at hand does not have the aptitude to succeed or grow – they lack the basic competencies to get the job done.

I mention this because one of the most common mistakes made in Human Capital Management is confusing skills with competencies. Skills can be learned, certificates can be earned, etc. Competencies take much longer to develop. For example, a skill might be profient in C++ (a programming language), but a competency might be high capacity for problem solving. Problem solving is important for programming in any language, and can be applied to many other challenges in the workplace.

SuccessFactors Research conducted a study of competency management of our own customers, and was able to identify what some winners do in various industries. The implication was pretty clear, companies that effectively manage the competencies of their people have greater potential to do better. But competencies aren’t just about overall company performance – they are highly relevant to individuals. If you can figure out which competencies are the most important for a given position, you can better place and develop people to succeed in that position. Competencies aren’t just leading indicators of success for your company, but also for your people.

Is the rising cost of people threatening your business? The War for Talent has put a crunch on the people supply, driving up the price of talent. In fact people now account for about 70% of operating cost, depending on the industry – and this number is rising! People are the fuel for execution, but managers don’t have to lose sleep over this shortage. They just need to realize that people really are assets, and while they might cost a bit, they have the potential to learn, grow and ultimately contribute more.

It would be great if business could just turn on the tap and have access to great people all the time, but that is just not the environment we are in today. The answer to this problem is pretty clear – develop the resources that you have. The people already in your company probably have a lot of untapped potential. Look around the office, is everyone really engaged and motivated? There are a lot of ways to get more from your people, grow their skills and competencies, align their goals – but it all starts with energy.

If your people are having an energy crisis, you need to deal with it. Without motivation, it won’t matter if people have the best skill set in the industry. Fortunately, manager’s have a lot of tools to increase energy and engagement. The Conference Board did a comprehensive study on engagement and found 8 factors other than pay that motivate and energize people: Personal development opportunities, clear path for advancement, line-of-site between individual contribution and company performance, trust and integrity, nature of the job, pride about the company and relationship with one’s manager. We talk about engagement in detail in our paper Drive Top and Bottom Line Results with People Performance.

It’s okay to have a capitalist view of people performance. Supply and demand are just as important in the realm of talent as they are in the commodities market. In fact, we will be hosting a webinar on August 13^th with best-selling author and venture capitalist, Rich Moran. Erik and Rich will discuss what makes a great hire and how to keep them. The cost of capital is on the rise and we now live in a world where it’s not about hiring across the street. It is paramount to have the right people in the right place to make sure your company is capital efficient.

Companies embrace the idea of Succession Planning and Talent Management with great enthusiasm, but rarely put the mechanisms and tools in place to effectively follow through on their initiatives. SuccessFactors Research recently conducted a survey of Succession and Talent Management capabilities across the U.K. and Ireland, and found that this is indeed the case. Companies have initiatives in place, but do not back them up with effective processes and support.

For example,  76% of all companies in the survey were found to have some kind of succession plan in place, yet 40% of companies lacked any process or capability to identify future talent. You simply cannot identify successors effectively, if you do not have a regular process in place  to identify talent within your company. Talent reviews should be the starting point, not the end point of the talent management process. Managers should have plenty of tools to help identify talent. 360 reviews, performance reviews, and competency assessments can all be used to make reasonable assumptions about the potential of an individual.

Losing your best talent can be disastrous during these tough economic times – making Succession Planning a top priority for organisations wanting to build growth and be successful. Organisations routinely encounter turnover across a variety of key positions which often results in significant disruptions if no replacement is readily available. You need to know what you have, at all levels in the organisation, before you can start to think about successors.

SuccessFactors is presenting a  webinar focused on effective succession planning in the U.K. and EMEA, Effective Succession Planning: It’s not just for your CEO, on Tuesday, July 22nd, register here. You can learn more about the tools available to managers, and bring your own questions to our team. You can also read more about the state of Succession planning and talent management in the U.K. and Ireland in the related SuccessFactors Research Data Brief.

Not long ago SuccessFactors Research and thought leader Amy Lyman hosted the webinar The Business Benefits of Being a Great Place to Work. People who love their jobs work harder and do better. It follows then that creating a “great place to work” should be a top priority for all businesses. Of course, this is easier said than done, or is it? If managers focus on transparency, honesty, diversity and fairness they are on their way to creating a great place to work. Every business is different, so making the leap from a good place to work to a great place to work will involve different factors for each workplace. Ms. Lyman discusses these factors and how they help businesses excel in the webinar she did with us.

Every year the Great Place to Work Institute’s 100 Best Companies to Work for survey is published in Fortune magazine. In fact, SuccessFactors has twice been ranked highly in the small business category. How do we do it? Well, we are very transparent about what drives our success, and have a blog dedicated to employees telling their success stories here at SuccessFactors – the HappyFactors blog.

The response to our joint webinar with Ms. Lyman was electric, and she received many follow up questions from our guests after the conclusion of the webinar. She was kind enough to answer these questions in detail, which are now available for download – SuccessFactors Research Webinar Extra: Amy Lyman . She tackles some tough questions like, how do you start to build trust when employees have lost their trust in upper management, and can you recommend some processes to uncover what’s working in a company in terms of building a strong culture?

Ms. Lyman will be joining us again August 19^th for a webinar focusing on Europe and EMEA. Just as the challenges are different for every business, they are different in various geographies as well. Check our events page for the registration link, which should be available shortly.

The title of this blog entry is taken from a song on one of my favorite David Bowie albums, “Scary Monster & Super Creeps”. If you own this album, there is a good chance you are a member of my generation (X). In my experience, knowledge of pop music and television shows is one of the single greatest differences between generations (at least in the United States). For example, most guys in my older brothers’ generation know the opening guitar riff from the song “Rock n Roll” by Led Zeppelin:

“hey hey momma say the way you move, gonna make you sweat gonna make you groove” – da na na nuh nuh nuh nuh, nuh nuh nuh nuch nuh nuh, da na nuh da na nuh nuh nuch nuh waaaaaaaaaaa!

In contrast, many guys in my younger nephew’s generation know the riff from Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes:

duhn, duh duhn duhn duhnnn duh, duh duhn duhn duhnnn duh duh duh duh!

But once you get past music and TV, generations tend to be far more similar than many “generational experts” would have us believe. By generational expert, I mean anyone who makes money selling books, workshops, or programs based on telling you how to manage different generations. Simply put, I don’t believe the hype that the work goals and expectations of the baby boom generation are somehow qualitatively different from generation X, generation Y, generation Z, millenials, or generation “insert the name of whatever book is next marketed on this topic”. This point was made quite nicely in a research book recently written by Dr. Jennifer Deal:

“Fundamentally people want the same things, no matter what generation they are from. You can work with or manage people from all generations effectively without becoming a contortionist”. From Retiring the generation gap: how employees young & old can find common ground, published by Jossey Bass, 2007.

I would argue that many supposed differences between the employee attitudes of generation Y and those of the baby boom generation can be boiled down to two basic factors.

Supply and demand: There are fewer skilled workers in today’s economy than there were in the 1970’s. If you graduated from college in 1978 you were competing against a lot of other people for fewer jobs so you had to put up with some pretty demanding requests from employers. The tables have turned for people graduating in 2008. Now the demanding requests are flowing the other way. Generation Y employees expect more from employers because they are more likely to get it.

People who are young act differently from people who are old. Here is a newsflash, people in their 20’s who are early in their careers, unmarried, without children, etc. just might be a bit more idealistic and optimistic than their older coworkers who have suffered more of life’s “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”. Talking about generational differences without controlling for how people’s interests and needs change as we grow older is like talking about differences in fashion without taking into account the temperature where people live. Saying younger people have unrealistic expectations about work because they are more idealistic than older people is like saying people in Florida are more risqué because they wear skimpier clothes in the winter than people living in Minnesota. Its not about generational differences, its about differences between being young or old.

When putting together talent management strategies, don’t lump employees into broad generational groups and treat them as though they all want the same things from work based on some book you read. Ask them! You’ll probably learn that what employees want is remarkably similar regardless of their age: a challenging job where they feel appreciated and respected, have a reasonable sense of security and career growth, and believe they are making a difference in the world that they can be proud of. While there are some interesting generational differences in terms of people’s collective experiences, memories, and communication styles, when it comes to the basic things that make a job rewarding employees tend to be more similar than different regardless of the year they were born. But since I’m a member of Generation X you might just chalk my negative attitude toward generational differences as a result of the “fact” that people from my generation have a cynical, mistrusting attitude toward authority.

SuccessFactors Research is pleased to post this guest blog from our friend and Thought Leader Dr. Steven Hunt.