Developing Future Leaders

Zak

Hello, and welcome to People Performance Radio, sponsored by SuccessFactors, the global leader in performance and talent management software solutions. Without further ado, please allow me to introduce Dr Steve and Jim "The Mad Dog" Matheson!

Jim

Welcome back to the show everybody, you're here with your host, Jim Matheson …

Steve

… and Steve Hunt.

Jim

Steve, why don't you tell everybody and our new listeners what this show is all about?

Steve

This show is where Jim and I get together and talk about issues related to talent management, primarily focusing on technology, and really Jim and I just spend a lot of time reading, talking and working about the role of talent management, how it's affected by technology, and comment on things that we find interesting, and interview people that are working in this world.

Jim

That is what we do here at People Performance Radio podcast. Steve, what's the phone number of those who want to leave messages for us, or comments?

Steve

You kill me, every interview you ask me the same question, and in every interview I sort of guess at it. It's 650-425-7474.

Jim

It's 650-425-7474.

Steve

Why do we have the Seattle prefix?

Jim

Because it's a toll-free — I don't know why we do, because it's a free line, that's why. What's the number — you got it?

Steve

206 mafia buddy!

Jim

650-425-7474.

Steve

650-425-7474.

Jim

That's it. The email address? — what is it?

Steve

It is podcast@successfactors.com.

Jim

And if you want to follow us on Twitter? — Twitter.com/ppradio, you're too slow.

Steve

Yeah, PP Radio, that's right.

Jim

Too slow. And if they want to rate us, where are they going to rate us?

Steve

They go to ipod.com, and they search on "People Performance Radio".

Jim

No, no, no — you go into your iTunes music store, and then you search for "People Performance Radio" and right in there you can rate us.

So, let's keep this thing moving, let's keep it at a good clip — what's on your mind, Steve?

Steve

Well, I want to start out with, I've just read an interesting article by Zach Thomas of the Forrester Group talking about corporate social networks will augment strategic HR initiatives, and he talks about the role of things like Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as more specialized social networking tools on HR, and Jim, since you're way, way, way ahead of me in the world of social networking and all things web-based and cool, I thought I'd ask you a question about, do you think social networks really are going to fundamentally change how organizations manage people?

Jim

I don't know if they're going to fundamentally change how people are managed, but I definitely think it's going to become an everyday thing in their cultures over time, over the years, just like when phones were used back in the day to make a quick two-minute call, now everybody does all their business over the phone, I think the same thing's going to happen both in terms of business and in the workplace. I think social networks are here to stay.

Steve

Do you think you can have the same level of a relationship with a social network that you can get through face-to-face meetings or phone calls?

Jim

I think that definitely more so than phone calls, face-to-face is a little bit different, but what it allows you to do is continuously keep in contact with people, and it's going to be in little bursts here and there, but it's going to be a lot more often, and you can really stay in touch, I think; you know more about what's been going on, so when you do meet them, it's not like, "Hey, what have you been up to for the last six months", and you spend all this time reviewing a bunch of things, where as you'd basically already know that, and when you do meet them in person, you can have real conversations.

Steve

That's interesting, it's like a way to stay in constant awareness. Your talking reminded me of a conversation I had with my brother a few years ago, who has teenagers, and we were talking about this idea of relationships, and he was saying, "People say, do you need to have face-to-face contact relationships?", and his comment was, "200 years ago people had these famous romances writing letters that came every three or four months, so the medium that's used to communicate doesn't necessarily constrain the quality of relationship", and that's kind of what I hear you saying about social networks, which I think is very interesting. I still don't know if I'm going to get myself a MySpace page or not though, but we'll see.

Jim

Yeah, MySpace is on the way out, pretty much everybody's flipped over to Facebook, I think.

Steve

Oh, OK, so by the time I get my Facebook page up, something else will have come out and replaced that too?

Jim

Yeah, probably.

Steve

That's the way of technology. So what have we got going on today, Jim?

Jim

Today we have an interview we're going to play today that was done at Succession Connect by Stacey Epstein, and it's with Marilyn Hendrics from PDI.

Steve

But first a word from our sponsors?

Jim

Yes, that's correct, first a word from our sponsors, and we'll be right back.

Young man

I've been using the internet since I was so young, I can't even remember the first time I used it.

Young woman

There's always been technology right at my hands.

Young man

I've been using the internet since I was nine.

Young man

Basically my entire life has been in the digital age.

Young woman

So much of our life is online now.

Young man

We are so familiar with all the resources that are out there already and so we're probably not really bothered by inefficiency.

Young woman

The applications like Facebook or Twitter allow me to know what's going on with my friends, even if we don't talk for weeks at a time, or even months.

Young man

My family keeps in touch with blogs, websites and even with Facebook.

Young woman

I started this new job and I had this huge project coming up, so I reached out to a friend of mine from college who had a similar experience. and she was able to help me out and give me great pointers, and we did it all on Facebook. It would be awesome if I had that same level of collaboration with my co-workers.

Young man

When we take our first job, we're like, "Yeah, I'll probably work there for a year, maybe two". A lot of companies recognize that, and if you can create an environment where you get to interact with smart, capable people, and you feel like you're making a difference, we're not going to want to leave, we're going to want to say there so we need to create environments that foster this sort of collaboration and fufilment.

Zak

Are you ready for tomorrow's workforce? - check out employee profile at www.successfactors.com.

Jim

OK, welcome back to the show everybody, thanks for sticking with us. Steve — what can you tell us about PDI?

Steve

PDI stands for Personnel Decisions International, they're headquartered out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. I used to work for them actually, quite a while back, longer back than I care to remember, and they are really one of the leading companies in applying industrial organizational psychology techniques and methodology, sort of the science of talent management, to helping corporations more effectively maximize the productivity of their workforces. PDI is very near and dear to my heart, and I also really like this interview, a couple of things about it: because they share a lot of observations, one, I like the fact that they talk about the art and science of talent management, which I personally have a bias to, because I wrote a book called "Hiring Success: The Art and Science of Staffing Assessment and Employee Selection", so I like their use of terminology.

But the second thing that's a little more substative, I thought that was really interesting in this interview, was talking about how most talent management decisions, who ultimately makes them? — they're owned by managers, managers make the decisions, although HR is often held accountable when the decisions go wrong, that it's managers, and this comment that Marilyn's talking about, how PDI is really focusing on using SuccessFactors' technology as a way to get this massive amount of expertise to people that PDI have about, why people do what they do in jobs, and what makes a high potential, and how they develop, but it's, get it into the technology, so they can get it out of the hands of the managers, and they can really use it to make real world decisions, and I think that's just a really cool application, the sort of integration of these incredibly smart experts that you have in PDI, leveraging technology as a way to distribute their expertise to a lot of people who frankly probably could never get access to the kind of consultants and world leading experts you have at PDI on their own, but through the technology, it makes it sort of accessible to everyone, which I think is pretty cool.

Jim

Great, well let's jump into the interview that Stacey Epstein did with Marilyn from PDI.

Stacey

Today I have with me Marilyn Hendrics from PDI, going to tell us a little bit about PDI and the partnership with SuccessFactors. Thanks for joining us, Marilyn.

Marilyn

Well, it's a pleasure to be here, Stacey. A little bit about PDI is, we are a global human capital management consulting firm, and all we do is talent management. Our area of expertise is working with companies across the globe to help them make better decisions about talent, and we do that in a variety of ways. One of the reasons why we partnered with SuccessFactors was because we were getting frequent phone calls from our customer base asking, "How does what we're doing with PDI fit with what we would like to do with SuccessFactors?" And so it was really out of the mutual interest of making sure that we could ensure customer success.

So what PDI does is, we are best known for our work in assessment, that's roughly about half of our business, but we also have a very strong leadership development practice, and provide a suite of products and services relating to very specific decision-making throughout the talent management process.

Stacey

OK, great. So tell me, you go into a customer, and you're going to deliver your services — what exactly do you do? What do you do that helps in assessments and in driving these talent processes in organizations?

Marilyn

Well, making decisions about talent is a combination of art and science, right? — there's a judgement call, there's a subjective element, but what we're also trying to do is help organizations reduce the risk in their decision, particularly higher up in the organization, the consequence of putting the wrong person in a role becomes very severe, or can become very severe, so we're going to help an organization reduce risk.

There's also a big push right now on, how do we accelerate the development of our future leaders? So as we look at the demographics of the population leaving the workforce, are the people who are following in their footsteps, are they ready for the challenge?

So those are some of the things that we work with in terms of our customers, and with SuccessFactors it's helping organizations to streamline the business process, and then ultimately together what we're looking to accomplish is having high quality data that is generated through the processes that PDI uses, having it stored and available and analyzed using the SuccessFactors' platform.

Stacey

Got it. So, I'm a manager at one of your customers, and I have a big team of people, and I really want to make sure I'm getting the most out of my people. What would be the steps that I should take with PDI and with SuccessFactors, or even just in general, to make sure that I'm really getting the most out of my talent, and that my talent is engaged and excited about their future careers?

Marilyn

There's many different starting points in talent management, but one of the things is, if you're a line manager, and you're a front line manager, you might be looking at, who is ready for the next stage of development? So we're doing, particularly when we're moving from individual contributors in an organization to their next step, which might be an entry-level leadership position, who has the potential for the next step in their career? And are they ready? And if they're not ready, what do they need to do to get ready? So what we have found, in our work with our mutual customers is that, what they're looking for is a high quality way to again reduce the risk of making those decisions, and really have a laser beam focus on knowing who to promote, who to develop, and where to leverage the investment for those talent pools.

Stacey

OK, and of course we know that SuccessFactors certainly gives you a lot of clues and guidance on who those people are, based on their performance data, based on their career plans and their profiles, based on their past work experience, their future desired direction, et cetera, right?

Marilyn

Yeah, I mean part of it is providing visibility into that, into the hands of the managers. Ultimately, in fact I was having a conversation with a customer a little bit earlier today about, who is responsible for decisions in an organization? Is it HR, or is it managers? And ultimately the talent decisions are made by managers. Who in an organization is accountable for those decisions? — or blamed, more often than not — HR, right? And so what we're looking to do through SuccessFactors is to provide high quality decision-making ability into the hands of the managers at the point which the decisions are made, and so we can take, again reduce the risk, and increase the overall capability of an organization by really giving them the equivalent of a crystal ball — what decisions should I make for the future?

Stacey

OK, last question for you. At SuccessFactors, we've done a lot of research on the actual financial results that can be achieved in using performance and talent management systems, specifically SuccessFactors, and we've shown that SuccessFactors' customers on average are increasing their growth at a much higher rate than the industry on average. Has PDI done any kind of analysis or research into, OK, at the end of the day what this is really about is driving business results, and have you been able to quantify the return on investment for really focusing on your talent like this?

Marilyn

Yeah, and in fact that's probably one of our favorite initiatives to work on is really looking at, what are the metrics that matter in an organization, and the only metrics that matter, it comes down to performance, and what levers do you have available to increase performance? — that's what our management accountability's all about. So, for example, one of our clients that is in the retail space, if you look at the difference between a A versus a C player in terms of store management, and what the impact of the difference in contribution between those two individuals would be to the bottom line, and you multiply that across again a very large retailer, or a convenience store chain, those types of situations provide a very clear and compelling connection to the overall business results, because really at the end of the day, what we want to be able to do is have the talent strategy in organizations be directly connected to the business strategy, and in the past those two things have been really miles apart, and so through streamlining the business process, making sure that the right data is housed and collected inside of SuccessFactors, and in the hands and the fingertips of the managers, is ultimately the direction that we're seeing our mututal customer base moving towards.

Stacey

Yep, we're certainly seeing a lot of similar things with our customer base and our mutual customer base of course. So, thanks for joining us, for the podcast.

Marilyn

Thanks, it's a pleasure to be here, Stacey. Take care.

Speaker

If you would like to be a guest on the show, or sponsor, please drop us a line at podcast@successfactors.com, or you can leave us a message at 650-425-7474. This podcast is copywritten by SuccessFactors. The views expressed are the individual’s own, and do not necessarily represent those of SuccessFactors, SuccessFactors’ partners or customers. See you next week.