Jim Irvine – SHIFT the way you think about talent management processes

Steve

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. This week we spoke with Jim Irvine, who’s the Manager of Talent Management for Nissan North America, and Jim talked about how Nissan is responding to the really economic challenges their industry is facing, to really engage their employees both emotionally and rationally, and the way they’re doing this, and I think it’s one of the most interesting talent management processes that I have heard, and I’ve talked to a lot of people about talent management, where they have gone to say, how can we take our performance management process from what do you call more of a monolog model where you tell employees things, to a dialog model of ongoing conversations throughout the year, and they’ve actually changed their process from a once year annual event to six different discussions between the manager and the employee on a bunch of different topics, as well as integrating some very interesting tools around upward feedback, and feedback to managers on the feedback they’re providing to employees, just some great ideas in here from a very innovative, forward-thinking company, and actually one of the auto companies that, while they’re certainly struggling, this industry is doing better than most, so these processes are really paying off for them. So let’s listen to Jim Irvine from Nissan North America.

Hi, this is Steve Hunt with People Performance Radio. Today we’re talking with Jim Irvine, who’s the Manager of Talent Management for Nissan North America. Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim

Well thank you for having me.

Steve

So Jim, one of the things that we’ve been doing recently is talking with people from different industries, and finding out what the talent management challenges that are facing their industry. Now Nissan, being in the automotive industry, certainly getting a lot of press – I’m curious, what are the major talent management challenges that are facing Nissan right now?

Jim

Well as you’ve probably heard, the auto industry, the sales are down significantly. We’re really selling vehicles as an industry at the same rate we did 30 years ago. As you’ve probably heard in the news, many companies are down 50%, 45%, so our major challenge is really the current economic times, they’ve really hit the automotive industry, the mortgage industry, and it’s caused a lot of challenges, I mean for example most of our managers are dealing with cancelled projects, everybody has increased workloads, decreased budget, in many cases there’s a hiring freeze, we’re not backfilling positions, no promotions, raises, bonuses, so the economic times are very very challenging. Those challenging times are also causing challenges for our managers and employees alike.

Steve

How do you keep people motivated? I would think especially a real concern would be your top talent, really saying, “Maybe I need to get out of this industry in this concern”, how do you deal with that?

Jim

That is a major concern, one of our major concerns is, although our employees may not be leaving the organization right now, for the simple reason the economy’s in such a state, there’s not really any place to go, we really have to worry about our employees being both emotionally committed and rationally committed, because if we don’t get them engaged, involved, committed to the organization, as soon as that job market opens up, they may leave us, so that is one of our primary challenges – how do we engage our current employees, and how do we protect our top talent from leaving, once the job market opens up quite a bit.

Steve

I like how you’ve broken that down into emotionally and rationally engage – can you talk a little bit about what each of those means, and how do you get into that, how do you create emotional versus rational engagement?

Jim

To us, the rational, being rationally committed is around the logic – am I being paid fairly compared to the market, are my benefits reasonable? – those kinds of things, does it logically make sense for me to work here? The emotional commitment really comes, I think, in two places: one is that employee/manager relationship – do I feel that my manager cares about me? Do I feel like the organization cares about me? Do I believe in what the organization is doing? So it’s not only that, this is a good place to work because of these specific reasons, that’s the rational commitment, but the emotional commitment is what’s really going to hold people to our organization, even when the economic conditions improve and they have many many job opportunities out there.

So we’re taking a two-pronged attack, we’re trying to address both the rational commitment and the emotional commitment in two ways: one is by increasing the quantity and quality of conversations between our managers and employees, and talent management is taking a key role in making that happen, but also we’re implementing a very specific targeted strategy to identify, develop and engage our top talent, and that’s really important right now, because our budgets have been slashed, like most of your listeners, so we have very very little money to engage, to develop, to bring our top talent around so we don’t lose them when that job market does open up.

Steve

Let’s talk a little bit more about the emotional engagement, take out the rational engagement, as you said, to show people that, even that we don’t have money now, there are opportunities for you, but in such a stressful time, as you say, your managers are overworked, they’ve got short budgets, and that’s the time when you probably expect manager/employee relations to get worse, because everyone’s stressed out, they’re more short conversations, “I don’t have time to talk to you right now about your problems”, kind of thing, because everyone’s got so much going on.

What are you doing with your managers to say, this is the time we really do need to connect with people, and what sort of resources or techniques are you using to help managers deal with that sort of stress of being caught of the middle, they have to, being asked to do more by their management, and the same time their employers are being more stressed out – how are you helping managers really deal with that?

Jim

That’s a really difficult issue, because as you just stated, the managers are employees too, so they’re dealing with the same level of stresses and increased workload, again with not backfilling positions, many of our managers are doing two people’s work – that’s a key issue, they’re having to deal with it individually, but they’re also in that leadership role where they’re having to manage, motivate, engage their direct reports.

So what we’re doing is, in the past we’ve taken an HR on talent management, we’ve taken I guess I say a less-involved approach. Our performance appraisal and career development processes were once a year, there was a formal process, a formal structure, but we didn’t pay as much attention, we didn’t invest as many resources. Again, we’re using these normal HR processes with the purpose of increasing the quality and quantity of conversations between manager and employee, because as we look at the research, it’s very clear that the more the manager and employee talk, the more they have discussions, the better off that relationship gets, the assumption being that the manager does at least a basic or reasonable job in that conversation.

So some of the things we’ve done in the last year or so, we’ve taken our performance appraisal process, the formal process, and we’ve split it into two parts. We do one performance appraisal on objectives – what was accomplished, we do a second performance appraisal on what we call contributions, or how did you accomplish those objectives – that’s based on a competency model, so therefore we have two separate conversations between manager and employee on that performance discussion. We’ve supported that with a quick 60 minute, or one hour, training session, to give those managers the skills to give more effective performance feedback, so that’s one thing we’ve done.

The second major thing we’ve done is we’ve really put a lot of focus into our career development process. Before it was sort of informal, it was pretty quick and dirty; now we have a very very tight process that’s driven by technology, obviously SuccessFactors.

We do a couple of things, this would be the third discussion of the year, we talk about career goals, both the short term and long term one is to travel, we’ve incorporated recently a 180 multi-rater assessment on our competency model, so the employee self-assesses, the manager assesses the employee, and there’s a discussion around that, and then this year we introduced upward feedback, where the employees actually rate the manager on how well they gave feedback to the employee.

Again all of this is supported by another one hour training session, skilling up our managers to more effectively give developmental feedback, and then we followed this up with a career development and planning module in SuccessFactors, so that provides a fourth discussion, and then finally we’ve had a fifth discussion that was triggered by the Opel online electronic library, that electronic content that’s been developed by BDI delivered through SuccessFactors, so we’ve turned this performance appraisal career development process, instead of just two discussions, we’re having five complete discussions and with more formal discussions we’re providing just in time training, and we’re providing all sorts of job aids and tools, so it’s easier for the managers to do an excellent job.

Steve

I think that a couple of things that are really striking, one, I love how you’ve reframed the performance management process as really a discussion process, and these are critical conversations that you should be having, regardless of whether or not we have a process for it or not, and the process is just to help people do that, and the sort of thing, you really split them up into, the conversation around goals is a different conversation than the one around, for example, career development, these are different conversations of different topics, and should be approached differently, which I totally agree with.

My question is, how did you get the organisation, everyone’s stressed out, and suddenly talent management is saying, well, we want to go from one annual performance appraisal to now five different conversations, and I have to think people are thinking, one, your just increasing all the administrative bureaucracy, which I don’t think you have done at all, I think these are conversations people should be having anyhow, but I have to think there must have been some resistance when he first said, we shouldn’t be doing just one review a year, we should be doing five different discussions?

Jim

That’s a very good point. At first, everybody again, as you said, is stressed out. Secondly, a lot of managers view HR as sort of this evil bureaucracy that puts these hurdles in their way that just makes their life more difficult, so what we’ve done is, instead of again sort of lecturing, we’ve really created a dialog with their managers, and we’ve talked about what’s going on in your world, and the basic message they’re telling us, well we have more work, less people, less budget, and we say OK, great – how are you going to be successful? And then they finally realise, well I’ve got to get more out of my people, and you say, OK, you have a couple of ways to do that – you can either threaten them, or you can create an environment where they’re engaged, they’re motivated whatever terms you want to use, but they’re investing their discretionary effort in positive productive things, especially during these times when the natural tendency of some people is to be negative, invest their energy in counter-productive things.

We teach our managers, and through dialog, we encourage our managers, you don’t have many choices, one choice is to involve your employees and it’ll make your life easier if you do that. Now, we’ve done that in a couple of ways: one, the old way that we used to do things was pretty time-intensive and awkward, with the SuccessFactors technology, things become very efficient and effective, so every time we add something, they see that it’s very quick and it’s easy, so it doesn’t take a lot of time.

The second thing we’ve done is we used to do training in large half day, one day blocks. We’re starting to create a lot of 30 minute, 60 minute, 90 minute training sessions that are delivered just in time, so if the day we launch a form or a process, we’ll start training that day, we’ll offer i-meetings, virtual meetings, we’ll offer face-to-face, to really fit their style.

The third thing we’ve really done, other than technology and just in time short, condensed training, is we’ve really started to provide them with tools and worksheets that make it very very easy. One of the things that you mentioned earlier, we’ve really switched as an organization from a monolog model, in other words, the manager is just telling the employee about their performance or about their development, to a dialog, and in this dialog, with our worksheets and our job aids and our tools, we’ve put a lot of the work on the employee, so they have to self-diagnose strengths and weaknesses, and then the manager in the feedback session is just creating a dialog, or managing that dialog, leading that dialog, same with career development.

So a lot of the work that the managers used to do is pushed off onto the employee, which creates involvement, which creates a dialog, which increases engagement, commitment, etc, but it takes a lot of work and energy out of the manager, off their plate, and it makes it just so much easier. So we started with one little event, made it successful, started with a second event, made it successful, and each time we made it simpler, more efficient, and they found that it did produce results, so they were more open to that next small event.

Steve

Wow, I think that’s so cool, there’s several things I want to highlight that I heard from you, one, I love this idea of going from a monolog performance-management process to a dialog-based model, and saying, how can we create things, so it sounds like you’ve really thought about, we need to have more interaction between employee and manager, which means, then you said, how can we break it up into short, very intense, very rich conversations, as opposed to those long training sessions where really, you do any training session gets more than two hours, people start to mentally check out, no matter how good the content is, so this idea of how can we do training and dialog, really good intense short dialogs, instead of long processes, and then spread those out, I think this is a really great approach, and very innovative. One other thing that you mentioned, that I’d be curious to get more thoughts on, is the survey you’re doing on feedback on feedback, for the manager, saying this is the employers are rating the managers on the quality of feedback the managers are providing? Can you talk a little bit about the genesis where that came from, how it’s been reacted to, how it’s been used?

Jim

Our organization was not an organization that was big on multi-rater assessments or feedback historically, because a lot of times they didn’t like what they heard, and if you hear it, then you’re responsible for changing something, and they didn’t want to do that, but we’ve really been able to change that mindset.

Year one that we did is, this was specifically the example is career development feedback, so this is the developmental feedback process; we didn’t ask any questions about the quality of the feedback, we very carefully crafted the questions so they didn’t get, “Did you like what they said?”, “Do you agree with it?”, anything like that. What we did is we identified what were the critical elements that had to be there, so our first question was about how much time did they spend? If they didn’t spend any time, or five minutes, obviously it can’t be very effective, so we just asked them, “How much time did your manager spend with you?”. Then we asked them, “Did they do a good job of talking and listening?”, a quick pick list, and again we did this through SuccessFactors, where we talked about, did they talk more than they listen, did they listen more than they talked, did they do a good job of both, again to drive the manager towards a dialog.

Then we asked, did they talk about strengths, weaknesses, did they spend time on the developmental plan, so as binary as we could get it, did they do it or not, based off of we said these elements have to be present for there to even be a chance of an effective dialog or conversation, so the first time we just started that way, then we go into a little bit of qualitative questions, again we communicated up front at the very beginning that the managers were going to be, if we were talking to the managers, training the managers, we said, “We’re going to ask your employees these six questions”, and then our job base were all built around them doing a good job, or being successful in those six areas, so again we tried to take a complex process, make it simple. We didn’t try to do everything, we said, were there four or five or six key things that must happen well, and we spent that 60 minutes training, and we built tools and job aids to facilitate those five or six things.

So maybe what we did is we got back to the basics, we didn’t try to be fancy, we didn’t try to be clever, we just said, what are the critical basic skills and basic elements that must be present, and then how could we make this process as simple and easy for both manager and employee, but have them get some value out of that. Does that help to answer your question?

Steve

Yeah, I think it’s great, I think one of the things that’s really important that you point out that is a lot of management, good management, is doing basic things that managers know they should be doing, and often forget, “Did you talk to your employees?” – I like that first question; how much time did they actually spend. I think if you told any manager, should you spend at least a half an hour or a quarter talking with your employees about their performance and the quality of performance, any manager would say “yes”, but I think if you went out and actually talked to employees, and said, “Does your manager actually spend 30 minutes with you each quarter talking about your performance?”, a lot of employees would say “no”, and if you put that to a manager, and say, “Look, this is obvious you should be doing this, and if you’re not even talking to them, how can you possibly be effectively engaging them?”

Jim

That’s very true, and the other thing that it’s done is, when we create this dialog, it becomes very effective, because both the manager knows what is expected of the employee, and the employee knows clearly what’s expected of the manager, and how that manager’s going to be judged. One of the most effective thing’s that come out of this is, one, a dialog, but during the dialog, some of the most valuable conversations aren’t even around either performance or the development, it’s just clarifying miscommunications from the past, either I didn’t know that was expected of me, or I had a completely different set of priorities than my boss did, so this clarification that’s created by again increasing the quantity and quality of those conversations.

Steve

This is a great example of taking what are historically viewed as very boring administrative HR practices like the performance review, and crafting them into creating really effective dialogs, and saying, the goal here is a really really good dialog around topics that mean something, and we want short dialogs, but we want them more often throughout the year, so that’s why we you’ve gone from one to I think it’s five or six different discussions, and then tools that really encourage that idea around short dialogs around very specific topics; I just think that’s such an innovative and effective approach, it’s one of the things I’ve always wondered, that many organizations struggle to actually use their talent management processes to improve the effectiveness of talent, and I think it’s because they focus on it more as, what’s the information we have to collect so we have it in our permanent records, as opposed to, how can we create a really good conversation?

Jim

And we’ve really done I think a good job in the last two years, maybe three years, of every time we talk about this, we differentiate with the data we need to run the business, ie performance scores etc, and the real purpose of, like a performance discussion is about engaging the employee and improving their performance, identifying strengths to leverage and weaknesses to develop. The other thing that I think we’ve done that’s been very successful is, during the current economic condition, many of our facilities and many organizations around the country don’t have any, they stop promotions, there’s no raises, there’s no merit, there’s no bonus payouts, and they see that as a very negative thing, which obviously, as an employee, when money is reduced, pay is reduced or you’re not getting increases, that is negative.

However, for many of these HR processes or talent management processes, it provides the perfect opportunity to change things, because you’re not impacting promotions, raises, bonuses, so you almost have this little point of time where it’s safe to make changes, because it doesn’t have any immediate impact – does that make sense? – so we’ve really taken that negative economic condition, and used it as a positive, and really communicated that to our employees and our managers, this is the perfect time for you to develop these skills and learn these habits, because there isn’t that immediate economic impact to the individual employee.

Steve

Well, yes, I think so, I think one of the things too is when you can throw money at a problem, if you can, we’ll keep people engaged by giving them huge stock options and big raises and stuff like that, that can hide a lot of bad management practices, they’re saying, look, the key for us to keep these people both rationally and emotionally engaged is going to come from how you actually manage them?

Jim

Exactly.

Steve

You can’t keep them in through, wow, I’ve got these promotional opportunities or stock options or whatever, because those don’t exist, now it’s really about getting really good about management.

Jim, coming towards the end of our conversation, the last question of course, so you know, they say “the proof’s in the profit” – how has this affected Nissan, I mean, how are you guys doing in this current economic climate, relative to the companies you’re competing with? How have these changes that you’ve made to the talent management program, how are they actually impacting the organization?

Jim

Good question, but a difficult question to answer. Again, the economic conditions – I guess we were lucky in some ways, we didn’t know what was coming for probably nine months before anything really showed itself in the auto industry. We were really on top of the hiring issue, some of those issues, so we weren’t hit as hard as maybe the big three manufacturers in the US, or even other Japanese automotive manufacturers in the US. Our market share’s increased, our quality of vehicles according to J D Powers has increased, I think our turnover has been remarkably low, again that’s really hard to evaluate, since the job market has changed dynamically, and at the same time as we’ve been making changes, anecdotally you hear a lot of stuff from employees, that they appreciated that their relationships are developing with their managers in a positive way.

I think the other thing that is, the changes that we’ve been going through have sort of, the cream has risen to the top, both from individual employees and managers, now with all this data collection, this ability to track data, this ability to get upward feedback, we’re really recognizing who are our weak managers, who are those managers that aren’t willing to invest in their employees, and so with that data then we can provide them with developmental opportunities to help them grow and develop too.

So I think I’m talking around your question, probably not a lot of hard metrics, because there hasn’t been the stable enough environment to compare this last six months with the previous six months with 18 months ago, it’s just everything is changing so dynamically, so quickly, there’s so many influences.

Steve

One thing I think I’d say as well, Nissan on balance is doing better than your competitors, I think for the most part in this, and that has got to reflect a lot about the quality of the talent, that’s what really drives a lot of that, and the other thing that’s important, if you look at the scope of changes, I think if you went into most organizations and said, “Hey, we’re going to change your performance management process from a once year event to six different dialogs throughout the year, and we’re going to incorporate this 180 feedback and all that,” I think that a lot of people would say, “My management, my line management will out and out revolt – there’s no way they will do this”, whereas you’re doing it, people are appreciating it, they’re doing it, I think and really a lot of the proof that it’s working is the fact that people are doing it, because if this is such a change, that if it wasn’t working, if it wasn’t having value, I’m quite certain most of the line managers I’ve worked with, they’d simply refuse to do it, and unless you have an amazingly powerful talent management department with in your organization, I’ve usually found there’s a lot of pleading, of “Please fill out our forms in this”, and if people don’t see the value, they just won’t do it, but it sounds like people do see it, and they are doing that – what’s your completion rate on these forms, typically?

Jim

It was pretty low in the past, and I think the technology has helped us immensely, but I think also one, they used to see it as just a bureaucratic HR necessity, and now they’re seeing it as, this is really about me driving the performance of my team, so I think that’s a big piece. The other thing I think is we sort of pulled things apart from this very large, awkward event, to small, quick events or activities. I think the other thing we’ve done is, each time we roll something out and we train on it, we reinforce, as I mentioned earlier, the simple basic skills, and every time we talk, we tie behavior to the organizational outcome, or the performance, the engagement of the individual at that team level.

That message has been very consistent, very repetitively sent out there, so think making things simple, making them not completely different events with no tie to them, it’s just this, here’s an entire year, here’s something you do, instead of doing one big thing that’s painful, that has no point, let’s break it up into small pieces so it’s easier on you throughout the year, and let’s make it meaningful, and again I think any time you make something where, when a manager does something and they get appreciation from their employees, that helps them want to do a better job next time.

Steve

Absolutely. Well Jim, thank you so much for sharing what Nissan has done, and how, within your industry, definitely one that’s getting hit harder than most, even in this recession, you’re finding ways to keep the business moving forward and very creative and innovative ways to take advantage of the resources that you have within the organization.

Any final parting thoughts that you’d give, advice for our audience from your experiences?

Jim

I would say that, a lot of times people think of Nissan as this big giant company, and it’s really a conglomerate of much smaller affiliate companies, and many of those affiliates operate pretty much independently, so when you think about addressing challenges, and really changing your organization, take it in small incremental steps, find your champions within the organizations, make them successful, advertise that success, and don’t give up, just one little small step at a time, and over six months, 12 months, 18 months, you can have wins and you can really make a large impact on your organization with a relatively small staff, so don’t give up, keep plugging, find something that works and then stick with the basics, simple basics.

Steve

Well thank you Jim, you’ve certainly given a bar for people to aspire to, I think it’s very impressive, and I look forward to hopefully having you back on People Performance Radio, because I know there’s a whole area around succession planning that you and I have been talking about too that you’ve done some really cool stuff, so maybe we can talk about that in a future episode, so thank you again, Jim, for appearing on People Performance Radio.

Jim

Well, thanks for having me.

Speaker

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