Succession Planning goes to College

If you are a fan of American college football you likely took notice of Saturday's unlikely victory by Purdue University over the highly ranked and heavily favored Ohio State University.

Purdue was a 19 point underdog in the game but still defeated the Ohio State team 26-18.

In reading some accounts of the game I stumbled across this story, about Purdue's fairly innovative (for major American college sports) succession planning strategy for its sports team head coaches. The Purdue Athletic Director Morgan Burke, hired and named the successors for both the Men's Head Football Coach and the Men's Head Basketball Coach, a full year before the prior holders of these positions both longtime Purdue employees, were expected to retire.

For Men's Football Danny Hope was hired in January 2008 to take over the job in the 2009 season, and in Men's Basketball Matt Painter was hired in 2004, and eventually took over the head coach position in 2005.

Both successors effectively served as understudies for a full year, learning the ins and outs of the University, receiving mentoring from the outgoing, veteran coaches, and gaining valuable experience to position themselves for success.

Morgan Burke's approach to succession of high-profile coaches while being copied by a few other large schools is still fairy unique. Some of his key lessons for an effective succession process are:

Have a hard date for the turnover - Other school's have also followed Purdue's lead and hired successors for long time coaches nearing retirement, but have not set a firm date for the hand off, (most notably Florida State).  This can lead to pressure on the incumbent if results on the field start to slip, and frustration and impatience on the part of the next coach.

Tinker not overhaul - Burke feels the 'named successor' strategy really only makes sense of the outgoing coach has a good history of achievement, and that only minor tactical changes, not a major new strategies are needed going forward. Since both programs were in solid shape with the veteran coaches, major house cleaning was not needed. Had major changes been needed, Burke would have likely done more 'traditional' searches for replacements.

Involve the incumbent - Burke made it a point to involve the outgoing coaches in the process, while still supporting them as they completed their contracts.  The key for this 'coach in waiting' arrangement to be most effective is to ensure the more experienced coach could pass on as much of the history, culture, and practical knowledge they had accrued in their careers.  Both outgoing coaches were extremely motivated to do their part to help leave the programs in sound shape and in good hands. 

Challenge the successor - It is important to make sure the coach in waiting is adequately challenged, and not just sitting quietly on the sidelines just waiting.  It makes sense to start transitioning some functions to the successor, particularly ones that they may not have had prior experience with, while the veteran coach is still there, so as to better support and 'coach' the new coach.  The successor has to really start to feel ownership of the position prior to the 'official' transition date.

One more thing, Morgan Burke does not have the typical background of a major college athletic director, which are usually former coaches or long time college administrators. Burke was a VP of Human Resources for 17 years.

Who would have guessed? HR bringing innovative new ideas to a new field.

Google Wave and HR

In 2004 (which in internet time is about 49 years ago), in a Harvard Business Review article titled Can Absence Make a Team Grow Stronger?, the authors studied productivity and the effectiveness of team-based decision making in global, distributed teams.

One of the recommendations that came from the study was obvious, that modern, collaborative technologies must be utilized to support and enhance communication and collaboration for the purposes of problem-solving.  And way back in 2004, one of the specific findings was that e-mail should be used sparingly, if at all, as it has severe limitations as a collaborative technology. Additionally, the 'closed' nature of e-mail does not foster trust in distributed teams, particularly ones where the members are expected to collaborate for the first time and do not have a history or shared experiences to draw from.

So e-mail is generally lambasted as a collaboration tool. But for many project teams and organizations it remains the primary technology that supports team-based work.  Everyone has e-mail, everyone knows how to use it, and the barriers to adoption are at this point zero.

Other tools have emerged in the last few years that can in some form replace and improve upon e-mail, (wikis, group blogs, IM, Twitter, Yammer, among others), and have enjoyed varying levels of success in supporting distributed collaboration. But since the widespead adoption of e-mail as the so-called 'killer app', no single technology for collaboration has come close to supplanting e-mail as the main tool for employees and organizations to work together and share information, and to (gasp) foster innovation. Truly, since e-mail was created over thirty years ago, the corporate world has been waiting for the next 'killer app' for collaboration.

Perhaps that will be the lasting legacy of Google Wave.  Wave has been described as 'e-mail if it were invented today'. Wave, at least at first glance, seems to address and improve upon many of the shortcomings of e-mail, while certainly offering the promise of capability far superior to e-mail.  This video does an excellent job of explaining Wave in the context of e-mail 'replacement'.

Where e-mail tends to be 'private' between sender and receiver, Wave is much more open; anyone can be invited to see and participate in a Wave. Folks invited late to the conversation can use the 'replay' function to see just how the conversation developed and to get more of a flavor for the twists and turns in a problem solving process. The contents of the Wave itself are much more enduring, accessible, and portable than long e-mail message and response chains.  For all those reasons, and probably many more, Wave offers an exciting alternative to traditional e-mail collaboration. There have already been scores of posts explaining the various features of Wave, so I won't try to re-create that again here.

But I think another, perhaps more interesting question for HR and Talent professionals than whether or not Wave is 'better' than e-mail, is this one: What is the role of HR in the assessment and evaluation of tools that can increase employee collaboration, raise productivity, and foster innovation? 

When an interesting and potentially groundbreaking technology is created that has such potential in the workplace should the HR organization, the ones that are meant to be the leaders in helping to find and assess talent and to position that talent to ensure organizational success, be on the front lines of these technology discussions and tests? 

I think the answer is yes.

These evaluations and determinations of what technologies to try and implement in the workplace, particularly ones that may reach deeply in to the organization have to be influenced by HR's unique position as the 'talent' experts.

These decisions are too important to cede to the IT department.

Facebook and Talent Management Technology

Recently Talent and Learning Management vendor SumTotal Systems announced a set of new integrations meant  to present information from the system, "where employees live most, applications like Microsoft Outlook and Facebook". In Facebook, for example, and employee could see updates and alerts from the SumTotal system, and connect with their internal colleagues without leaving the Facebook site.

While most would not argue that corporate workers spend ridiculous amounts of time in Outlook, the idea that enterprise Talent Management systems should be connected with Facebook and LinkedIn is certainly an interesting and new development.

Heck, pretty much every day I see a new article or study on organizations that block access to Facebook and LinkedIn. But that is not really the 'core' issue as I see it.

I think the important message is not really about social networks and their use in the workplace, but rather a signal that the 'enterprise' platform as a required destination for employees and managers will erode in importance. More and more the 'official' home page or portals are going to be supplanted by interactions with the 'enterprise' information and processes via external networks (LinkedIn, Facebook), other internal enterprise tools (Outlook, intranets), and mobile (iPhone, Blackberry). If employees and line managers only have to visit a tool or system to accomplish one specific task, and that task is not somehow incorporated into their 'normal' workflow, the likelihood of adoption and effective utilization is far lower. 

You may have a fantastic system, full of incredible content, but if no one goes there to leverage that content then it may as well be not there at all.

Additionally, as the definitions of work shift, and the relationships that talent maintains with organizations become more fluid, much more versatile and agile tools for talent management will be needed.  Certainly part of the versatility will derive from embedded integration with Facebook and LinkedIn, but the larger work that remains is to convince organizations and vendors that their fancy home pages and dashboards, while interesting and exciting to look at, might not matter one bit to the employee and manager that never wants to visit them. 

For some time it has been fashionable in marketing circles to declare that the corporate web site is 'dead' and that no one really cares what is on there, I wonder if one day enterprise systems home pages will 'die' as well and be replaced with a collection of widgets, add-ons, browser toolbars, and mobile applications.

HR Happy Hour - Episode 14 - Clueless at Love

The latest HR Happy Hour Show, the Clueless at Love show, is in the can.

It was alternatively silly, insightful, informative, and crazy.

The Clueless at Love project is a new venture from Laurie Ruettimann from Punk Rock HR and Sarah White from I'm So Corporate.

The show was meant to be a pilot or beta for the Clueless at Love concept, and certainly from the cluelessness of the host and some of the guests, I think that the project definitely has potential.

So give a listen as Laurie and Sarah set some folks straight and let me know if you think that HR and Talent Management professionals are qualified to give relationship advice.

 What do you think?  Ask your HR pro for advice?  Or save it for your local bartender?

While HR is Waiting for Fusion

Ok, I know Payroll is boring.

Compliance reporting is exceedingly boring.

But chances are a wide cross-section of your employees view your Payroll function as the most important 'people' function you do today.  And it is likely in many shops, compliance reporting, also known as 'we better not get fined this quarter', grabs the bosses attention as much if not more than any other people process.

Today I spent an hour trying to wrestle around new NACHA rules for reporting certain international payments, and some new American Re-investment and Recovery Act reporting requirements. After that fun, it was on to trying to sort out changes to benefit plans and making sure systems were ready to handle changes in deduction schedules for 2010.

None of that stuff is even remotely interesting.

None of it helps to make the 'people' function more 'strategic' or contributes much to the execution of the organization's critical initiatives.

Unless avoiding a riot in the payroll office next Friday is considered 'strategic'.

But the day reminded me yet again that in HR organizations these new issues, new requirements, new laws and regulations, most of which will not help your organization one tiny bit in what we all talk about as being critical in HR Technology are constantly in the way, and in many cases directly in front of and hindering the pursuit of truly breakthrough projects.

Aligning corporate goals with individual work plans, linking performance with training and development plans, or building out portals or new tools to better connect the workforce and increase innovation and collaboration; we did not talk about any of these for one minute today.

And I suspect we won't talk about them tomorrow either, since the wrestling match with changing regulations and new compliance requirements never ends quickly.

Yesterday at Oracle Open World, we got the first meaningful look-see at the long awaited suite of Oracle Fusion next-generation applications.  It was a pretty slick demo, and did much to showcase just how far the Oracle team has come in user interface, integrated intelligence, and dynamic organizational charting.  For several years, Oracle has been developing Fusion, delivered technical components of what will support the Fusion Apps, but mostly just made promises about what might be coming with Fusion. Yesterday we got some more clues, but with so many questions remaining about General Availability (sometime next year?), the upgrade path from Oracle EBS or PeopleSoft, and no clear idea about what if any of Fusion is 'free' (i.e. part of the normal and ongoing maintenance fees that EBS and PSFT customers pay forever).

Lots of questions still.

But tomorrow, and I suspect the next day, and the next week (single payer health care anyone?), the question lots of HR folks will need to answer is not 'When are we getting Fusion?' but rather, questions like when will EBS or PSFT or whatever else we are using support the latest changes in transmission and reporting of foreign deposits.