I’m a Tenzing Norgay, coaching others
on how to navigate the terrain and get
to the top.
A few years later, I’m at MasterCard
as it makes the transition from a private
company that grew out of a nonprofit association of banks to an agile and innovative public firm in the ultracompetitive
financial services sector. As vice president for management and leadership
development, I’m charged with building
a corporate culture in which employees
at all levels of the organization are expected to exercise leadership – solving
persistent problems and spotting new
business opportunities to create competitive advantage for MasterCard.
In business school, I was trained to
lead teams that would reach the summit
of business success. Today, I still aspire
to achieve those heights, but not as a
Sir Edmund Hillary. I’m now a Tenzing
Norgay, Hillary’s Sherpa guide on the
history-making Everest climb, coaching
others on how to craft strategy, navigate
the terrain, and get to the top. Like a
good Sherpa, I’m constantly trying to
“scale” this approach with a range of
techniques to maximize my impact. At
MasterCard, we have designed programs
to address the specific challenges of leadership at every key point along the spectrum–from frontline contributor to
senior executive. By targeting the sweet
spots where corporate strategy and individual development needs meet, we are
building the leadership bench and helping to increase shareholder value.
One program grew out of two important realizations: The vast majority of
learning occurs on the job; and, despite
their best intentions, most managers do
not take advantage of “coachable moments,” when instruction has the greatest impact. So we designed a project
that aims to teach over 1,000 managers
across the company how to coach. The
first pilots were underwhelming. We had
overengineered the approach by giving
managers too many techniques to digest. We simplified the model, focusing
on moments when a manager’s quick
coaching delivers a return on the investment of managerial time that exceeds
that of any other learning method.
One anecdotal sign of our success so
far: At a recent workshop, an initially
skeptical participant scratched his head
and said, “I get it now – if I shift from
director to coach, we’ll get things done
with better results and more-energized
employees.” Exactly.
Defining the New HR
At the four top-tier firms where we
have witnessed innovative approaches
to talent management in action – and
at another half dozen from which our
colleagues and former classmates have
shared their experiences – we’ve identified five characteristics that persist regardless of a company’s size, industry,
location, and culture. Here’s how we
define the New HR that’s emerging at
these firms:
It looks like a business school. Over
the past decade or so, many MBA programs have shifted their focus from technical training to leadership training and
their teaching methods from classroom
lectures to teams of students actively
grappling with real-world business cases.
The same shift is occurring in corporate
learning departments, with their new focus on action learning and on executive-led dialogue about business challenges
facing the organization. The best-known
proponent of this approach is General
Electric, whose renowned Crotonville
leadership center closely resembles a
business school, including a Harvard-style case study classroom dubbed “The
Pit.” (The influence also runs in the other
direction: In 2006, J. Frank Brown, the
former global leader for advisory services at PwC and a cofounder of Genesis
Park, became dean of Insead, Europe’s
largest business school.)
It has a P, not just an L.
Forward-looking companies treat HR as an engine for both savings and revenue, deliberately blurring the lines between
business activity and people development. At Lehman Brothers, for example,
a strategic university-relations function
marries campus recruiting to business
opportunity. Colleges and universities
nationwide are treated as valued clients
with which skilled managers should
carefully cultivate relationships. Providing financial advice for a university’s
endowment fund, partnering with the
institution to bring promising research
efforts to a wider marketplace, and recruiting students for jobs at Lehman are
activities conceived as a single package
rather than as disparate touch points to
be placed in revenue and nonrevenue
categories.
It hatches and harvests ideas. Every
company talks about innovation, but too
few extend it beyond the R&D function.
Ironically, HR, long perceived to lack innovation, can become both catalyst and
facilitator of mechanisms that foster
creativity across organizational boundaries. Like outside consultants’ services,
action-learning projects generate potential solutions to real business problems,
but with the added benefit of a project
team that knows how to get things done
internally. In another approach, Google
promotes innovation by asking its workforce to adhere to its 70/20/10 rule. An
