The CBS post-Super Bowl show Undercover Boss thrilled or further jaded over 38 million viewers. The Waste Management President and COO Larry O’Donnell spent five days on the ground learning the ropes of the basic operations from the first line employees. Who wouldn’t enjoy watching a corporate big wig scrubbing latrines?
The outcome of the show was that Mr. O’Donnell ordered some changes in the local practices and a task force to look into their productivity policies that seemed to override all other company values. Having worked side by side with five employees, he also ended up promoting three of them. Now, three out of five makes 60%. It took the company President to notice that 60% of the employees he met did not work to their fullest potential.
Waste Management has 45,000 employees. With O’Donnell’s quick sample, 60% of talent being underutilized would make 27,000 missed opportunities. Yikes! Something to talk about with Jay Romans, Senior Vice President, People.
When a company grows past 400-500 employees, the CEO can’t know every employee. The VP of HR can’t know every employee. It is time to put in place talent management mechanisms that ensure that the CEO’s eyes reach all the way to the front lines to recognize and move the right people to the right opportunities.
The selection process should reflect the qualities that make the company culture successful. Sometimes, the culture is not quite there yet, so the management must find the pockets of excellence, and start building the desired culture by replicating the top performers’ attitudes and aptitudes, starting with hiring.
With the talent already in the organization, it is important not to let it go stale. The company loses opportunities, the employees lose motivation. There must be a process in place that frequently checks where the opportunities are, and where opportunities can be created. You also must create visibility into the strengths and talents of your existing employees. How else can you match talent to opportunities? The market provides many options for skill inventory software, or better yet, integrated talent management software.
And even with the fanciest software, keep this age-old rule in mind: garbage in – garbage out. It applies even at Waste Management. If the managers and employees don’t take the talent management process seriously, your software is not worth a byte.
Managers a the key to spotting talent are the managers. If they are only interested in and rewarded for getting today’s tasks done, there will be no talent management. They must have the skills and confidence to have in-depth conversations with their employees about their motivations, strengths and career goals. The company culture must also promote resource development and allocation beyond one’s own turf.
Many employees don’t even realize that they have opportunities beyond their current position. With a supportive company culture and a manager who knows how to develop their skills and coach their careers, they can look beyond the dead-end job, even if the President doesn’t come for a visit.
###
If you enjoyed this post, please consider subscribing to Forte Consulting RSS Feed.
Copyright 2010 Liisa Pursiheimo-Marcks, all rights reserved.
SVPGMGDX8TEC
SVPGMGDX8TEC
But the story behind your numbers proves the problem is deeper. If 60% of the workforce at WM was underutilized, that would be wasteful. But the 5 employees in this “survey” weren’t randomly selected – their managers knew that they would be a good face for the company on TV (it would be a much larger PR facepalm to select poor performing, or even average, workers to demonstrate to everyone watching the Super Bowl what your company is about than this concept already was). This indicates that the local HR department and managers can do a pretty good job of recognizing which of their employees have potential. And yet it still took a farce of a TV show for anything to come out of that recognition.
Puts the performance review sessions everyone just finished into perspective, no?